on having sex
“Having sex” suggests we’re in control, but the nature of desire means the opposite is true.
When it comes to sex, we like to think that, compared with the Victorians, we’re far less repressed. We gossip about it, read about it, watch images that hint at it: as if the last taboo had been lifted, sex is all around us. Yet for the late Michel Foucault, a sociologist-cum-historian-cum-philosopher, all this talk of sex is just a more cunning form of repression. We moderns don’t have more, we just discuss it more, to the point that we forget to get down to business, and end up having less.
But assuming we were to shut up and just do it, sex is something that can’t simply be had, despite what the mechanistic phrase ‘having sex’ implies. True, it can always be reduced to a transaction, and, for better or for worse, sex without love is still sex. The fact it usually involves desire, however, means the having is mixed with a wanting: even as you’re having sex, you’ll be wanting more of it, which means the having doesn’t happen until it’s had. Before you’ve arrived at a point of satisfaction, you are still wanting sex, more or less like you wanted it before you started doing it.
In other words, sex provokes the need it promises to quench. In the throes of sexual congress, you’re not so much ‘having’ sex, which implies control, as wanting it, which implies you’re at the mercy of something. That something is desire, and it works at a level beyond your control - you can’t decide to desire x or y, you either do or don’t. Rather than you creating it, desire approaches you, like a call you might choose to ignore, but can’t deny. In this sense, to speak of one partner ‘initiating’ sex is meaningless: what initiated the sex, before the first move was made, was desire itself, and neither party could have got things going unless at least one of them had responded to its penetrating suggestion.
In all our brazen talk, we may or may not be more repressed than the Victorians, but when it comes to having sex, we’re no more in control: sex has us.
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