Who Says Sex is Not a Natural Act?

      SOL Magazine Issue # 6 Winter 2010.

      By Regina B. Jensen,  Ph.D.

I'd rather not be the one, although I must admit that I have grown more and more offended over the years when I watch what is being promoted as natural sexuality to trusting, unsuspecting people. What is a natural act, anyway, one might wonder in that context? Surely, sex as our media deliver it to us these days is more of a sociocultural construct (and more and more of the commercial advertising world) than a description of our deeper human needs. I have listened, in tens of thousands of sessions, to people's more authentic and private thoughts and feelings. And it is very rare that their needs match what is being promulgated as "the normal, natural way to feel and act sexually".

How would one even know what is and isn't natural? From very little on, we are condition by a society which seems to have completely lost its sanity around sexuality and somewhere in that weird jungle, we are supposed to find our own so-called normalcy. Even our health professionals seem as confused as their patients who look for authoritative advice.

So who says that sex is not a natural act? Dr. Leonore Tiefer, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the New York School of Medicine in New York City. Her book with that provocative title (didn't it get your attention?): Sex is Not a Natural Act & other essays, is now in its second printing. Professor Tiefer has become known internationally as the primary spokesperson "for a movement that challenges the medicalization of women's sexual problems by the pharmaceutical industry," the little biographical paragraph continues. (www.westviewpress.com).

One of the reviews of her first edition by Carol Tavris, author of The Mismeasure of Women, states: "Tiefer goes after every sacred cow and bull including Masters and Johnson, the supremacy of the orgasm, and the quest for magic potions, pills, and prostheses. She not only actually explains what 'deconstruction' and 'phallocentrism' mean, she will make you laugh until your sides hurt. What a swell book this is and an important one." Tiefer is clearly a feminist and an activist, terms which do not describe my own tendencies in life, although I have been deeply engaged with women, having had ongoing women's groups for almost twenty-five years. But I have also had men's groups and have a reputation for being 'soft on men' - meaning, my heart bleeds for them and their predicaments as much as it does for women. I see men as equally victimized by the pressures of, let's say, the phallocentrism of our culture, and as vulnerable to exploitation as women - at least here in the Western world.

So what does Tiefer talk about in her essays that would apply to our interests in human sexual behavior here in our SOL Magazine? For now, I just want to address the important suggestion of our sexuality in modern Western countries as a 'social construct' because that represents one of my own major concerns as a clinician. Since I don't watch TV, when I do come across a TV set busy spreading various types of information (news, advertisements, movies, shows, etc.) I am like a "child from another planet". Namely, I stop, I watch and listen, and then rather quickly, my eyes want to bulge from sheer amazement and then, disgust and horror. The relentless pumping out of social conditioning information is so appalling, that I usually just flee as fast as I can.

So, Tiefer does us a great favor in calling attention to that very fact - how little what we think of as human sexual needs, and what is called sexual normalcy, has actually to do with real people and their deeper needs. What's natural and normal - and she does point out how carefully we look to others for that information, social animals that we are - by now has more to do with a set of very tweaked approaches, beginning with the odd preoccupation of researchers to look at our private parts as we will call them here, namely our very intimate anatomy and physiology and their functions.

Tiefer makes a lovely comparison to the domain of music, understandable because her mother was a professional musician, namely the playing and enjoyment of it. Why, she asks, do textbooks about music not begin with a review of the anatomy and physiology of those body parts necessary for playing certain instruments? Certainly, she says, most textbooks on human sexuality do so nine times out of ten. Why? She, too, finds this narrow focus on biology and our pure physical actions rather unnatural. In these textbooks, we will find information about the physiology of arousal and performance, she writes, but not of pleasure or other aspects, or wider notions, of consciousness. She challenges that sex per se is not the 'biological given', the 'human universal' that our social conditioning hammers into us, even though we are being told otherwise by sophisticated media bombardments. And this includes the advice of so many misled health professionals who can seem as confused as their patients.

But if it is not 'a natural act', what is it, she asks and continues: "I would say it's a concept, first of all - a concept with shifting but deeply felt definitions. Conceptualizing sex is a way of corralling and discussing certain human potentials for consciousness, behavior, and expression that are available to be developed by social forces, that is, to be produced, changed, modified, organized, and defined." (Sex is Not a Natural Act, p.3)

Marnia Robinson, author of Cupid's Poisoned Arrow, is also ever on the forefront of research in the area of human sexuality. While googling for some or other information, I unexpectedly found this very intelligent blog-entry of a woman named Trix on the website for so-called asexual people, where I had somehow landed (www.asexuality.org). Marnia had written about that interesting subject matter quite awhile ago. In that article, she also mentioned something peculiar which I, too, had been observing, namely that our teenagers seem to be changing with regard to sexuality: "It doesn't seem all that surprising to me that there are teenagers out there who are intuitively aware that our cultural demand that we be constantly pleasuring ourselves sexually might not be the best way to go. Teenagers often have a way of seeing things differently than the generations that came before them, which we often associate with delinquency. But if the whole world has gone mad, then the only way left to rebel would be to act sane. Maybe I'm being too optimistic, but this seems promising to me."

So here are some clips from the blog entry of the woman named Trix, which I found online while looking for something completely different. Even though she is talking about the experience of what is called Asexuality and we are here merely talking about the effect of social constructs upon our experience of sexuality in general, her words sound very appropriate to our discussion. She is talking about 'mass mentality' and the difficulties of someone who is different from that consensus reality, as I might call it:

"But my personal take on it is that I opt out of the whole “sexual orientation" model. I abandon the existing preconceived ill-fitting framework and build my own interpretation of the world, based on how I myself actually experience it. There is so much more hue and variety in real life than any model can encompass.... People don’t realize [it] and implicitly believe that humans should conform to the language labels they happen to have inherited from the way their society arbitrarily parses reality. My own feeling is that the concept of “sexual orientation” is due for a rethinking.

Our entire language around relationship matters is dominated by terminology and styles of speaking that accurately reflect the experience of people (males in particular) who are strongly driven by sexual attraction. In addition, sex has been historically associated with virility and power and strength and dominance and all sorts of desirable qualities that leaders in a tribe will possess. And they are the ones who have set the standards for all of us, who have described their experience for all of us, who we have been programmed to emulate and look up to. However, not everyone's reality and internal makeup is that of a specimen who is driven to rise to the top of the clan and mate with many individuals. Enough people in the world do experience sexual attraction that most of society seems to be able to at least relate to that, and view sexual partnership as the be-all and end-all of personal happiness and fulfillment.

But then you see people who are radically unlike that “ideal”, and they are questioning if their experience of themselves and their lack of wanting to mate, is legitimate or is it pathological. Good grief people! Of course it is legitimate. It is just the way you are. Your world has been interpreted for you through the eyes of somebody else. It’s time to acknowledge that, and take back the right to be yourself. Discover for yourself what you actually feel. Invent your own language to accurately reflect your own experience, and know your own needs and desires. Own what you feel. There are so many ways to like people and be connected and intimate and loving with them that have nothing to do with sex. We only think they should, because we have been programmed to believe it." by Trix

(Thank you, www.asexuality.org, for reprint permission and I hope Trix will be glad to see her lovely explanation in print here.)

On a related, but little bit different note, I also want to add some information for your consideration here that Marnia Robinson had shared with me. I thought I would ask the courageous young European man who made the following self-observations whether I might include them here. He talks about the effects of masturbation and really seems to get to the core of the matter at hand: how the way we use our sexual energy can tamper with our perceptions...and therefore with our choices, our ability to socialize, to stay in love, etc. I had to shorten it somewhat but left his own language intact for you as much as possible. He is referring to a statement which Marnia apparently made in her blog:  

Marnia, regarding your theory “Too much sexual stimulation causes habituation between partners (as with the monkeys you mentioned) because less and less dopamine is released... and orgasm triggers lower (and lower) dopamine levels with each copulation.

"I am not fully satisfied with this theory. I have read the research abstracts, but I think they will not really convince people. And they miss the most obvious. It is very simple. In an earlier email you told me that the subtle energy theory was more accurate than the neuro-chemical theory. I will now tell my story why I think the subtle energy is key. I know...you already know very well about this subtle energy yourself and you have probably heard many stories like mine. However I still want to tell it:

"When I restrain myself for a couple of weeks, I can feel a kind of energy building up at the bottom of my spine. When I have an orgasm it seems like this energy is released. When I have orgasms again and again, my worldview becomes different. I have less energy to do things, less confidence; I am less energetic and so forth. This discharge is really a discharge...

...

Ed. note: The full article is available in printed version, SOL magazine, #6.

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