A column today by Bob Herbert, and a blog post by a friend, point to the continuing epidemic of violence against women. Thinking about it today led me to do a little work on an essay that will appear in a book I’m writing about politics and sex, called Civilization and Its Contents. The argument of the essay might help us understand some of the sources of violence against women.
A warning. This essay is mainly not about violence against women. It’s about certain views of sexuality and certain sexual practices that, I believe, are part of a larger set of misogynistic practices and beliefs that encourage violence against women. I’ll say something at the end of the essay about violence against women. But I take a long and meandering path back to the subject.
I initially began this essay because a friendly commentator on the central essay of my book got me thinking about the huge sales of Viagra and related drugs, not so much to men who are older or who are suffering from serious sexual problems, but to younger men who are looking for a little boost to their sexual lives. It quickly became clear to me that this phenomenon was primarily not medical in nature but cultural and that it was a product of the conventional conceptions of sexuality that I want to undermine and replace with another way of thinking about sex and love. So, to do some stage setting for the essay, I have to briefly rehearse the central argument of the book.
The Conventional (Augustinian) View of Sexuality
The central theme of my book is that the common view of the nature of sexual desire—a view that goes back to the ancient Greeks—is wholly wrong.
That view—which I call the conventional or, somewhat unfairly, the Augustinian view of sexuality—holds that sexual desire as an immensely powerful force that comes from within. It arises from a boiling cauldron deep down inside that creates an immense pressure that has to be released now and again. That pressure is so powerful that it is difficult to control. And it leads men (and on some views women, too) to do many things they might not do if not for this relentless and powerful force.
This picture is found among those who contrast our lower irrational self and our higher rational self and who think pf sexual desire as a kind of wild horse that we can barely control or, in Freud’s term, as the “it” that stands outside our ego and makes demands on us. It is in found in those, like St. Augustine and, in some of his moods, Freud, who think that a critical task in life is to lower the temperature in the cauldron or find a path by which to release the pressure in ways that don’t create individual and communal chaos. (That’s the picture presented in The Hulk comics as well, by the way.) And it is also found in those, like Freud in his other moods and many of his twentieth century followers, who think that the build-up of pressure—that is sexual repression—is the source of all that ails us and that the key to a good life is as Gore Vidal once said, to “never miss an opportunity to have sex.”
That is to say, this view of sexual desire is shared by both the right, which is appalled by what they see as the sexual freedom that has, in their view, spread like a disease in America since the 1960s, and by the left which has tended to defend sexual freedom in all respects.
A Platonic Alternative
My view is that this picture of sexuality is entirely wrong and that we should reject both those who say that sexuality has to be repressed and those who take Brecht’s “Do it” as their motto. Sexual desire, by itself, is not an especially powerful desire. It is far less powerful, say, than other bodily desires, such as to eat or avoid physical pain. It is less powerful than some higher desires or desire of the soul. For most of us, our boss telling us that we have done a lousy job or our spouse being angry with us about some trivial matter will ruin our day a lot quicker than waking up horny and not having sex.
Sexual desire does becomes powerful when it is connected to a deeper desire that Plato called Eros. For Plato, Eros is the desire to possess the good forever. But because we are mortal, the closest we come to attaining that goal is what he calls “procreating in beauty.” The desire to procreate in beauty is expressed in love, both personal romantic love, in the love of our children, and in the impersonal love that leads people to try to make the world a better place or to create works of art or knowledge. Procreating in beauty is both an activity that brings us pleasure and that enables us to both externalize our own powers and connect to something larger than ourelves. And it also is the way in which we can leave something here when our lives are over.
Platonic Eros takes many forms and has many elements. In particular it has an active and a receptive element that parallel Freud’s late account of the two basic drives of human beings.
The receptive side of Platonic Eros leads us to seek to be a part of the beauty we see around us, to live surrounded by and in touch with a world that is attractive and fit for us; a world that is understandable, warm and giving; a world for which we are grateful. This side of Platonic Eros parallels Freud’s late notion of Eros in which we seek to merge into the world. In romantic love, the receptive side of Platonic Eros leads us to be loved and taken care by other.
The active side of Platonic Eros leads us to be creative and masterful, to shape the political and social world so that it attains better fits our ideals, to create art and music and landscapes and buildings that express our own vision; and to create knowledge and systems of thought through which we make sense of a world that is sometimes harsh and confusing. This side of Platonic Eros parallels Freud’s late notion of the aggressive drive which leads us to master the world around us. In romantic love, the active side of Platonic Eros leads us to love others and take care of them.
Platonic Eros seeks a balance between activity and receptivity in which our efforts to procreate reflects both our own aspirations and an appreciation of all that we have been given. And Plato points us to an ideal relationship in which two people become equal partners in procreation, in which they take turns being active and receptive and stimulate, encourage and support one another in pursuit of some good they pursue together.
Platonic Eros can go wrong by becoming one-sided. If we choose the first, receptive, path by itself and merge into the world, we lose our selves. We have no independent existence. But that means we are no longer there to respond and appreciate the good things in the world. If we choose the second, active, path, by itself and try to dominate everything around us, we lose the world and all that is beautiful within it. The world has no independent existence. So neither path can fully satisfy the Platonic urge to possess the good forever.
We can neither merge into a saving power beyond us nor gain the power to dominate all that is before us. We can only try to procreate in light of beauty, that is, seek not not to dominate the world but to create something—thereby exercising our power—that responds to the beauty and ideals we find in it—thereby accepting the succor of the world. It is only when our activity, our procreation, is rooted in receptivity, our appreciation of the beauty in the world, that we come as close as humanly possible to possessing the good forever.
So, on the Platonic view, sexual desire gets its power from Eros, and how we express Eros determines the nature of our sexual desires. A long argument and different kinds of evidence support the conclusion that sex is not the independently powerful, uncontrollable desire described by the conventional Augustinian view. I won’t take the space here to present either the arguments or the evdience as a whole. But let me just say point to two things: First, if sexual desire were so powerful, we wouldn’t have a $100 billion worldwide market for pornography which exists mainly to arouse sexual desires. And second, sexual desire is far stronger when we are falling in love then at any other time of our lives. That’s one reason to oppose the Freudian view that love is a sublimation of sexuality and embrace the opposite view, that sex gets its power from love.
Dominator Sexuality
My Platonic reflections on Eros and sexuality helps us understand an important variant of the conventional Augustinian view of sexual desire that, while not found among all who share the conventional view, is important to the rest of this essay. It is what I call the dominator view of sexual desire. It goes back not to the philosophers of the Ancient Greek but to the practices of the male citizens who saw sex as both an expression and privilege of power. Dominator sexuality is the kind of sexual desire one finds when a one-sided active, or better aggressive, expression of Eros is what gives sexual desire its force. (Plato, of course, is a critic of dominator sexuality.)
The implicit vision of sexuality in the practice of dominator sexuality is that the pursuit of sexual pleasure always involves the exercise of power over the body of someone else. Sexual pleasure is, in other words, always taken from someone less powerful than oneself. This understand of sexuality legitimizes powerful men in their exploitation, in sexual and non-sexual ways, of both women and weak men. Among the Greeks—and still among too many of us today—it is a found in practices such as the sexual use of slaves and prostitutes; in the rape of both men and women in both war and peace; in a great deal of, though not all, pornography; and in many other, far more common sexual practices such as the tendency for men to usually be the ones who take the initiative or control the pace and direction of sexual encounters while women are more passive.
This dominator understanding of sexual desire also runs through a strain of feminist thought that is critical and fearful of male lust because it sees it as the urge to objectify and dominate women. It is how, for example, Andrea Dworkin and her followers understand male sexuality. I think that the dominator conception and its practice perverts sexual desire and that the fear of lust can cripples the sexual lives of both women and men. Thus I think that Dworkin and her followers are wrong about the essential nature of sexual desire. But it’s hard not to look at much in our own way of life—in particular the continuing abuse, both sexual and non-sexual, that men deal out to women—without acknowledging that the dominator view of sexual desire does in fact characterize too much that we see.around us.
Viagra
Shortly after I wrote the first draft of the essay at the core of my book–which I just summarized– I presented it at an academic conference in Chicago. Michaele Ferguson gave a positive and insightful commentary on the paper. It was also very funny. Former Senator and Presidential candidate Robert Dole had just started his famous set of ads for Viagra and Michaele pointed out, first that if sexual desire were as powerful as those on the right feared, Viagra would never have become a best-selling drug and second, that if sexual desire were as dangerous as Republicans like Dole feared, they shouldn’t be encouraging people to take Viagra.
To some extent, the first point actually misunderstands what Viagra does. The drug doesn’t actually increase sexual desire but, instead, restores or enhances one of the physical responses to sexual desire. (We willl see below why it is often thought to increase sexual desire.) Yet, there still is something to what Ferguson said, since there is a relationship between the strength of sexual desire and the likelihood of a man becoming erect. Sexual desire—the extent to which we are psychologically aroused—does vary from time to time. And men with a partly diminished capacity to become erect do find that—all other things such as anxiety and exhaustion being equal—the more aroused they are, the more likely they are to have an erection. So, it is plausible to say that, if sexual desire were as powerful as the conventional view holds, fewer men would need to take Viagra.
But the popularity of Viagra shows us more than that sexual desire is not as strong as we commonly think. The extraordinary number of men who have sought prescriptions for it is, I believe, the result, of the conventional view of sexuality I’m trying to undermine. While some men take Viagra because age and / or illness has diminished their physical capacity for sexual intercourse—and I don’t intend to criticize their doing so—many other men take it because they want to restore the kind of sexual capacity they had at, say, nineteen years old. That is, they want to get as hard as quickly as they once did.
Now why would they want to do that? The usual answer—indeed the answer that is so taken for granted that it is rarely discussed—is to enhance the sexual pleasure of the man taking Viagra or his sexual partner(s). We assume, that is, that capacity to give and receive sexual pleasure, is somehow connected to how quickly a man becomes erect and how hard his erection is. And our folk wisdom about sex—that men reach their sexual peak at about nineteen—confirms that claim.
Erections and Sexual Pleasure
I want to quickly call this assumption into question not just because it is untrue but because the sexuality of the typical nineteen year old man—who supposedly spends most of his day in a half-aroused state and becomes fully aroused whenever he is in the presence of a woman —is normative in this culture. It is what we think sexuality is at its peak. But if one stops and recognizes that half of us are never nineteen year old men and the other half of us have the sexual capacities of nineteen year olds for only a brief period of our lives, then it should be clear that there is something amiss with taking the experience of nineteen year old men as normative for the rest of us. So let’s see how wrong this view actually is.
We can start with the obvious: a man need not already have an erection to get sexual pleasure from having someone touch, stroke or fondle his penis let alone all the other parts of his body in which he might receive sexual pleasure. Indeed, it is a distinct pleasure to become aroused from an unaroused state by the hand or mouth of one’s partner. And it is a distinctly different pleasure to be aroused by a hug and a kiss that bypasses the genitals entirely. And while becoming aroused is part of the pleasure of sex, sexual arousal is not the same thing having a rigid penis. It is fundamentally a psychological not a physical state. One does not have to have to all that much of an erection to continue enjoy sexual stimulation—or to have an orgasm, for that matter.
To continue with a another point that may not be obvious to all men but women certainly know: women don’t need their male sexual partners to have an erect penis to receive sexual pleasure. Indeed many women prefer stimulation by hand or mouth to intercourse. Surveys of sexuality have found that about half of all women don’t have orgasms in intercourse to begin with and half of those who do also need manual stimulation as well as a penis inside them to have an orgasm. Some studies conducted by women have shown that women often find manual or oral sex combined with kissing and hugging more pleasing and more intimate than intercourse. (No one to my knowledge has done a study with a good sample that ask women this.)
And, for those partners for whom intercourse is important, a man doesn’t need to be all that hard to have sexual intercourse (assuming, of course, that the woman he is having sex with is herself aroused.) And, while I don’t want to pick on nineteen year olds too much, for all their sexual capacity, they are not known for engaging in intercourse for any length of time. Moreover, men and women often find that there are quite lovely sexual positions that are more difficult to manage if a man is too hard. So some kinds of sexual variety are impeded by strong erections.
And, most obviously, even if an erect penis is important to the sexual life of a particular man and woman, it doesn’t have to happen quickly. Indeed, if we move beyond the more or less obvious and think a bit more about how our bodily responses shape our sexual activity, we might realize that that slower sexual response on the part of men might actually make sex better for all concerned.
Men who become erect more slowly are likely to better appreciate the importance of more slowly eliciting sexual desire and sexual pleasure in their partners. And doing that has a number of benefits. For one thing, since women sometimes take a bit longer to become aroused than men–or at least than young men do–it might actually make sex more mutually satisfying. In addition, it might help us recognize that there great sexual pleasure to be found not just in sexual stimulation in pursuit of orgasm but in the many kinds of sexual stimulation that lead nowhere beyond themselves, and that can be endlessly absorbing and fun for that reason alone.
The Fundamentally Relational Character of Sexuality
Now nothing of what I just reported is esoteric knowledge. All women who sleeps with men know this. Any man who has paid attention to his own sexuality or that of the women with whom he sleeps–and all but the densest men over the age of say forty–know all this as well. But what we know in practice sometimes conflicts with what we are lead to think by some general theory we have embraced. And that, I suggest is why so many men who don’t need it have tried Viagra.
So let’s go a bit further. My aim is not just to diminish the normative status of nineteen year old male sexuality for our culture. It is the theoretical upshot of this discussion of erections and sexual pleasure that is most important. My main goal in taking you on this little tour through the role a hard penis does and does not play in our sexual lives is to make a very important point about sexuality that is totally misunderstood by the conventional view: mutual sexual arousal is an essential element of sexual desire, not something that precedes or leads to sex. The elucidation of sexual arousal, flirting in all its varieties, is not something that comes before sex. It is, in fact, much of what sex is about.
The conventional view holds that sexual desire comes from someplace within us, emerges from us and then is directed one way or the other. But the truth is much more complicated. To be sexual, human beings including both men and women, must be sexually aroused. And becoming sexual aroused for human beings is very different from and far more complex for us than it is for animals, even those nearest to us. Unlike all but a few primates, men and women are capable of becoming sexually aroused at any time. We do not have to wait for estrus to have sex. But, precisely because of that, sexual arousal not in any respect automatic for us, as it is with most animals. Women don’t become receptive to sexuality at a certain point every month which in turn elicits, with little variation or difficulty, a male response. As I argue in more detail elsewhere in this book, because we are self-conscious creatures we have far more complicated like and dislikes when it comes to who we have sex with than any other creatures. This is true even with regard to what we might think of lower preferences: we care what our sexual partners look like: how tall or short, how heavy and thin they are and what color hair they have. We care about how they carry themselves, how they stand and talk, smile and laugh. We care in all sorts of complicated ways about their ethnicity and families. And, of course, we care about their intentions, about what a specific sexual encounters means or does not mean for what we might be doing with one another in the future.
And, of course, most immediately, we care about how we try to engage each other in sex, how we flirt and seek to arouse one another. The critical difference between human and animal sex is that not just that we intentionally seek to arouse one another—to some extent higher animals do that—but that we are aware of those mutual intentions, and even more, that at some point we put those intentions between us in a space that becomes ours. Our mutual intention to arouse one another and have sex becomes, as Charles Taylor puts, something that is entre nous. It is no longer that I know that you know that I am trying to arouse you while you know that I know that you are trying to arouse me. It is that we are now mutually trying to arouse one another. Sex has become something we are doing together.
Much of the initial play of flirtation has to do with the subtle ways in which we implicitly suggest our interest in one another without fully making that interest explicit—without making it entre nous—so as to avoid the pain and embarrassment of expressing sexual interest in someone who does not return that interest. Much of our effort to further arouse one another has to do with the not so subtle ways in which sex becomes something we are doing together and in which we find our (not just your or my) way to express and encourage lust in one another and then satisfy each other. And then there are all the ways in which we conduct a sexual encounter, in which we implicitly and explicitly tell one other what we like, in which we take charge for a moment or longer or allow our partner to do so, in which we move from one sexual position or one set of movements to another, in which we find rhythms and patterns by which to stimulate and stroke one another, and in all else we say and do—or don’t say and do, in the process.
Mutual sexual arousal—both the kind in which we make implicit suggestions and the kind in which we make our intentions something between us—continues from the beginning to the end of each sexual encounter. At any moment, a sexual encounter can go better or worse, can create an intense moment of passion or can totally collapse in a loss of interest or anger or even disgust. And between those alternatives are so many other possibilities. All of them, however, have to do with how we intentionally attempt, as individuals and as a partners in the process, to keep one another aroused and stimulated until we collapse in orgasm or decide that we have had enough and can go on no longer.
That mutual sexual arousal is so critical to human sexuality means that sex is in a fundamental way different for us than it is for other animals. Sex for other animals can be defined in terms of how they rub their bodies together. But that is not the case for human beings. The great confusion Freud created by noticing the incredible range of behavior that he rightfully saw as sexual—our capacity for being what he called polymorphously perverse—is resolved once we understand that what make makes the desire for bodily pleasure a sexual desire is not that it aims for the physical pleasure of rubbing our body against the body of another person, not that it is focused on certain erogenous zones, but rather that it aims to elicit arousal and desire from ourselves and¸ most often, from another person. And, the hope and reality of eliciting arousal and desire from another person is, along with the touch of that person, what stimulates arousal and desire in us. Indeed, it is the desire for mutual arousal that is critical in making a physical act sexual at all. We can be touched in exactly the same physical way and that touch can be deep massage in one instance and deeply sexual in another. The difference is in whether the person touching us intends to arouse us (and himself or herself) or not.
Sex, in other words, is not just a physical event. Rather it is an intrinsically a relational phenomena, one that involves not just the body but the soul of another person and in which one hopes that one’s own desire and arousal is responded to in kind.
And, yes, I know there are some obvious objections to this claim—and elsewhere in this book, I’ve responded to one of them at greater length. Let me just remind you of two points with regard to the claim that masturbation is not relational in nature. First, it is relational in at least this: when we masturbate we are trying to—indeed we sometimes go to some trouble to—arouse ourselves. And just as we can fail to be aroused in partnered sex, we can fail to be aroused when we masturbate. And it is also the case that that we typically fantasize about other people when we masturbate in order to become aroused. Sex is very special in this respect. We don’t fantasize about eating with another person when we eat alone. Eating does have its relational elements in that we eat together as a way of forming and strengthening our relationships with others. But it is not intrinsically relational like sex because, Jewish mothers aside, our own desire to eat is not something that is oriented to encouraging others to eat. Nor is our desire to eat fundamentally shaped by the desires of others to eat. Our own sexual desires, on the other hand, do stimulate and are stimulated by the desires of our partner.
And to those who say that dominator sex is also an objection to my claim that sex is fundamentally relational, let me point out that practice of the dominator sexuality implicitly recognizes the relational character of sexual desire albeit in two perverse forms. First, men (and some women today) who pursue dominator sex are not just seeking physical pleasure from the man or woman with whom they have sex. They want submission from them. Or, more precisely, just as sexual arousal and physical pleasure is enhanced in consensual sex by the sexual arousal of our partner, sexual arousal and physical pleasure in dominator sex is enhanced by dominating one’s partner. And, second, the expectation or hope of those who pursue dominator sex is that the dominator will eventually elicit physical pleasure from the person he dominates sexually. That is often a cruel fantasy. But since submissive women and men can be as much caught up in this kind of sex as dominant men and women, it is sometimes the reality as well. To force another to take pleasure in their own submission is the ultimate form of domination. It is the final way in which the dominator demonstrates his control over the dominated.
Misunderstanding the Relational Character of Sex
Central to all human sexuality, then, is that we, unlike most animals, must make an effort to intentionally arouse ourselves and others. That we take the sexual response of a nineteen year old male as the norm of human sexuality at its peak make it difficult to understand the relational character of sexuality. For nineteen year old men–or, at least the 19 year old men of our fantasies–are the human beings who need the least in the way of mutual arousal in order to have sex. To a far greater extent than human beings at any other time in their life, nineteen year old men are always aroused. We rarely recognize the relational character of sexuality because we take as the norm the relatively brief moment in their lives when men find sexual arousal something that happens easily, frequently, and in response to very little emotional or physical stimuli of any kind.
Since sexism leads us to take the male experience as normative for all human beings, taking the nineteen year old man as definitive of male sexuality confuses us even more about women. Of course folk wisdom does tells us that women care more about relationships and men care more about physical pleasure. But that doesn’t quite get things right. It may be true enough that on average women more than men want sexual activity to be enveloped in some emotional or romantic relationship—although there is absolutely no reason to think that the difference here is a striking as folk wisdom suggests. But, that very claim again makes the mistake of thinking that it is possible to separate sexuality from some connection to another person. And this is what I have disputed in arguing that sexual desires of both men and women are intrinsically connected to the sexual arousal of their partners. If there is a difference between men and women in this regard, I would argue that it is because men are more likely than women to be influenced by the dominator view of sexuality and seek not mutual consensual arousal but arousal through domination. To the extent that men and women have different aims in pursuing sex, the source is not in our genes but in the way that place that the dominator view of sexuality has in our culture.
The Popularity of Viagra
And now, we can understand why sales of Viagra are so high among men who don’t really need it. The power of the conventional understanding of sexuality has lead us to misinterpret our own experience of sexuality.
If we think of sexuality as an all powerful, irrational force that wells up in us, then it is a short step to think that the strength of a man’s sexual desires is closely tied to how quickly he meets the standard of nineteen year olds, that is how quickly he becomes erect with as little stimulation as possible. On the conventional view, in other words, always being ready to go sexually is the standard by which we measure our sexual capacity, and our virility in general. However, with this view of sexuality in our minds, any change in male sexual capacities from that of a nineteen year old male will be seen as a loss, and possibly a terrible loss. And we might easily conclude it is a loss to our partners as well as ourselves. A pill that can restore teenage sexual response is thus enormously attractive.
And the problem may even go deeper than that. In recent years, observers of human behavior have notice that more or more Americans seem to have trouble not having sex but actually having sexual desire. Stressed as we are by the demands of a long educational apprenticeship, by the speed-up and long hours at work generated by the demand for higher profits and new computer technology, by the difficulty singles have in meeting other singles, and by two careers families, both men and women say they desire sex less and less often.
I want to suggest that the lack of sexual desire is likely to be the product of a lack of time to generate that desire. As I’ve pointed out, human sexual desire not something that is regular and automatic. It is something to which we are always open. But because of that, we must generate that desire in our attempts to flirt with and seduce one another. If, however, we have been brought up to think of sexuality as something that does come automatically, as the product of a boiling cauldron within us, we may not take the time—we may not even recognize that we have to take the time, to elicit sexual desire from one another. And, for men who expect or hope that they will become easily aroused at any time, that may well be experienced as an inability to become erect. In other words, men may experience their loss of sexual desire as erectile dysfunction when it is nothing of the kind. And that may lead them to take Viagra just so as to become sexually aroused more quickly. Quickie sex may be exciting at times—it is in fact very arousing when it is part of an ongoing sexual relationship. But as a steady died it is no more good for us than fast food. That men can get an erection quickly does little for the sexual arousal of the women they are with. Nor does it help men and women learn to communicated with one another sexually or enjoy all those sexual moments that come from a continuing attempt to arouse and stimulate one another in bed. Viagra will never be substitute for mutual arousal.
And that leads to a third point: It is not just that men, mislead by the conventional view of sexuality, think that their departure from the nineteen year old norm is a serious loss or are confused between erectile dysfunction and a lack of sexual desire brought on a failure to understand how sexual desire arises. For many men, losing the somewhat mythical prowess of the nineteen year old males may lead them to recognize their dependence on women not only to satisfy him but to arouse him. And for reasons I’m not going to be able to explore in depth here, men are very reluctant to accept—and will go very far to escape from—their dependence on women.
The general fear of dependence on women is, I believe, very deeply rooted in the male psyche. The best account of this fear is found in a marvelous book, The Mermaid and the Minotaur by Dorothy Dinnerstein. Dinnerstein’s theory has been extended and given a broader political and social context by my friend Isaac Balbus in Marxism and Domination. Both Dinnerstein and Balbus argue that it is the exclusive role of mothers in parenting boys to is the ultimate source of the fear of dependence on women.
Fear of dependence on women is one of the deep psychological attractions of the dominator conception of sexuality. And when sexuality is shaped by this conception, the fear of dependence is heightened. It is bad enough if one thinks of sexual desire as something that comes from inside oneself not from one’s relationship with a woman. If, further, one believes that a strong, virile man expresses his sexuality is dominating women, then any drop-off in one’s ability to become hard quickly—and without the ministration of women—will be experienced by men as even more awful blow.
For men caught up in the conventional view of sex and especially the dominator variant of it—and in this culture that unfortunately means many of us at least some of the time—Viagra is a way of reducing one’s dependence on women. It is, in other words, a way to become sexually aroused without much need for a woman’s physical attention let alone desire for us. Pornography is another way of attaining that same end. In objectifying women, men do recognize the sexual power of the opposite sex. But they deny that it is the individual qualities of their sexual partners that elucidates sexual arousal. And by objectifying women they seek to overcome and conquer the sexual power of women (To the extent that some women have also begun to understand their own sexuality in terms of the dominator view, they objectify men in the same way.)
If we were to really break free of the conventional view of sexual desire, and especially the dominator variant of that view, then so many men who are no longer nineteen but remain perfectly capable of sexual intercourse—and so many of the people who sleep with them—would be much less inclined to equate sexual desire with what has charmingly come to be called erectile function. They will be less likely to make Viagra part of their lives.
Can we overturn the Culture of Viagra?
So the culture of Viagra is one in which the most of us hold to a conventional conception of sexuality as a fundamentally strong, insistent desire for physical pleasure and in which someone of us still think of sex as the Greeks did, as something we take from others. And it is those views of sexuality that, I believe have lead to the explosive sales of Viagra and related drugs.
But, despite the power of a misguided conception of sexuality to confuse us, it looks as if our practical experience is capable of trumping the theories on which we have been raised. Given all the hype about the drug it almost astounding to discover that more than half of all refill prescriptions for Viagra go unfilled. And, in most cases, it seems, that is not because the drug doesn’t do what it is supposed to do. Viagra actually is quite effective. A majority of men who really need it find that it helps them attain erections. And it also enables men who don’t really need it to recapture some of the sexual function they had at nineteen.
What accounts for this strange phenomenon? No one knows for sure. But my suggestion is that, as anyone who attended to sexual experience instead of sexual theory would expect, men and women have not found that quicker and stronger erections necessarily make for better sex. What I think is going here, what accounts for men not renewing the Viagra prescriptions, is that the practical experience of our sexual lives is coming head to head with our theoretical expectations. And practical experience is winning out in most cases. In addition, there is some anecdotal evidence that men who don’t really need Viagra most of the time, use it quite selectively, for those moments when they are tired, a little tipsy, or stressed, not for every sexual encounter.
That is encouraging. But it is only a temporary victory that will only be made permanent if come to look at our sexual lives differently. It is long past time to give up sexual theories that were invented two thousand years ago and to look again, with a clear eye, at our experience of sexual life. If we come to understand sexuality as fundamentally relational in nature we will recognize that what makes for good sex is neither repression nor thoughtless sexual expression, neither dominating nor submitting to others but, rather, connecting with others as two people with souls as well as bodies. And if we come to see sexuality as something that gains its greatest power in love and mutual partnership, more of us will be freed from the temptations and obsessions that have plagued humankind for over two millennia and freed as well to embrace our lovers and the broader community of which we are a part.
Epilogue: The Culture of Viagra and Violence Against Women
And perhaps in freeing ourselves from misguided views of sexuality we will also reduce the epidemic of misogyny and violence against women that so afflicts us today.
Can the argument of this essay help us understand violence against women? I think it can in this way: dominator sex is a one critical source of violence against women. The notion that men are not men unless they are exercising power over others runs rampant through our culture and is expressed in our level of violence in general and in that which flows from dominator sexuality in particular.
Moreover—and I should say that this is just speculation right now—the greater independence of women that has come from their greater access to jobs, however unequal that still is, and from a greater sensitivity on the part of all of us to violence against women, may have created a backlash that is expressed in increasing sexual violence. If I’m correct to say that many men in this culture still see dominance over women, in both sexual and non-sexual circumstances, as their birthright, then political and social practices that liberate women will be profoundly threatening to men. As women become more independent, they become more threatening to men. One likely way to respond to that independence is by violence.
And what might make this violence even worse is if men experience the sexual changes that come with age as the product of the independence of women. If dominator sexuality is still as central to the psyche of American men as I believe, and if those men are sexually aroused not by the desires of the women with whom they have sex, but by the attempt to dominate those women, then feminism is likely to be creating serious problems for those men. If feminism has led women to be less submissive to men, that actually may be making it difficult for them to function sexually. One way to respond is for men to take Viagra and other drugs. Another is to up the ante and try to restore their sexual functioning with a greater effort to dominate women. That might be another source of increasing violence against women.
It will take many things to reducing the epidemic of violence against women. First, we have to recognize how prevalent such violence is. Second we have to train police forces and employers to take it far more seriously than they do. Third we have to raise our consciousness about it, and encourage women to stand up for themselves and men to keep each other under control.
And, if the argument of this paper, correct we also have to relentlessly call into question the theoretical accounts of sexuality that lead us to misunderstand our sexual desire and encourage us forms of sexuality that encourage rather than discourage sexual violence against women.