Abstract: I wrote this essay to explore some of the problematic aspects of sexual pleasure and the ways that it’s been a source of suffering. In it, I start off with a brief introduction to the biology of sexual reproduction, followed by a detailed account of my own experiences with sex, with some anthropology and sociology peppered in. Finally, I sketch out the Buddhist concept of Tilakkhaṇa, often translated as The Three Marks of Existence, which I think is a helpful framework to ameliorate distress.
Part 1: Proterozoic Eroticism
The Dawn of Sex
In the earliest stages of life on Earth, the only game in town was fission, which involved cells creating clone replicas of themselves. When sex came on the scene, organisms would engage in something called conjugation, where they’d meet up, swap DNA, shake hands and wander off continuing with their personal fission business, although with tinkered genes in their trunk. This was a big advantage in some ways, since more genetic variation meant a greater likelihood of adaptation and repair of warped genes, but it also introduced a pesky side effect: programmed cell death, or apoptosis, named after falling leaves. Accidental death, or necrosis, was a problem for the first organisms on Earth as well, but they were theoretically immortal just as bacteria are today. Left to their own devices with enough food and space, bacteria could replicate and match the biomass of all seven-and-a-half billion humans in a couple of days.
That’s not the case with creatures that have sex. Even the single-celled paramecium, which can reproduce asexually, has a senescence clock programmed into it, which instructs its cells to self-destruct if there’s no conjugation. After about 200 cell divisions via fission, the progeny will stop reproducing and die; they gotta make love or die trying. The bits in paramecia that engage in dirty dancing are called micronuclei, and they’re separate from the workaday DNA housed in the macronuclei. Once the shuffle is complete, the paramecium will destroy the macronuclei and build a new one using the recombined genes.
This compartmentalization eventually turned into germ cells and somatic cells in animals. Germ cells are the equivalent of micronuclei since they’re the reproductive cells that are exchanged, whereas somatic cells are the macronucleic workhorses that keep the organism alive just long enough to get freaky. The somatic cells, which in my case include my handsome face and giant brain, are programmed to die just like macronuclei in ciliates, only serving as palanquins for the germ cells which are theoretically immortal if they have their senescence clock reset. You may know these germ cells as sperm or eggs.
Since most of my body is fundamentally secondary to the main goal of sexual reproduction, and has been for something like a billion years, it’s weird how hidden it was as a subject while growing up. Even contemporary psychological literature is sorely lacking in an understanding of how children learn about sex during childhood. It’s not something that gets a ton of funding for obvious reasons. In a nationally representative study conducted in U.S. public schools in 1999, about a third of teachers in grades five and six said they kept their mouth completely zipped about the subject of sex. Indeed; having finished sixth grade in 1998, I learned about my body my own way.
Part 2: Sex Grade
Learning about Sex
In some cultures, sexual contact has a role early on in life. For example, mothers among the Diné people in the Southwestern United States regularly stroke the genitals of the infant that they’re nursing. Among the Abui people living in Indonesia, both siblings and adults use genital stimulation to pacify infants or to play with them. Sometimes the stimulation is reciprocal; there are some cultures where it’s common for infants to play with the mother’s free breast, and some of the mothers report not just erect nipples but even orgasms while breastfeeding.
In the late 1920s, anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski studied the Trobriand Islanders and noticed that rather than being a binary switch, sexual desire and curiosity was a gradual curve that steadily rose, which explained the copious amount of sexual play among children. This has been borne out in 21st century research which has begun to draw a distinction between adrenal puberty and gonadal puberty. Adrenal puberty involves the adrenal gland pumping out androgens which are known to intensify sexual urges, and this starts as early as three years of age, right around the time kids start to engage in sexually themed play-acting in various cultures around the world.
A study done by Kinsey and his colleagues in the 1950s estimated that 50% of boys could have orgasms by the time they’re four years old, although I had to wait about three times as long until gonadal puberty. Given this new pleasure, I planned my whole day around it, excited to find some time where I could be alone in my bedroom. I didn’t think of anything in particular while I was stimulating myself; rather, I chose to focus exclusively on the pleasurable sensation itself. But once the subject was broached with a friend, I was introduced to sex as an interpersonal phenomenon, although not in the way you might think. Jake and his younger brother were raised by a single mom who was often elsewhere, which meant we had many hours of unsupervised time to explore the hidden dimensions of cable TV. During a seminal visit to Jake’s place, I sat in a darkened room in front of a painfully bright screen and was introduced to pornography, although it was veiled by glitched-out waterfalls of encrypted phosphorescent hues and thunderbolts of distortion.
Despite the blocked signal, we could still make out what was happening; a man was penetrating a woman from behind while her tongue was busy between another woman’s thighs. My heart raced, and I felt as if the police might burst in at any moment and send us to jail for our transgression, but the arousal was so fresh and beautiful that it overrode any concerns I had about… well, anything. It seemed to promise a future of greater happiness than I’d ever known, if only I could manage to convince a woman (or two) to get undressed and rehearse what I’d seen.
In cultures around the world that don’t have access to glitchy cable porn, children tend to learn about sex through watching their parents and rehearsing it among themselves in sex play; for example, the Amhara of Africa, the Sherpa of Nepal, and the aforementioned Abui in the South Pacific. Among the Matsë people living on the western edge of Brazil, there’s a lot of impromptu hookups along the forest paths, and adults know to look the other way when passing by. However, young children aren’t so discreet and tend to do a lot of peeking, which results in a surprising amount of knowledge by the time they’re four years old.
Shortly after my own peek into adult sexual behaviour, my parents visited a friend with an internet connection. I jumped on their computer and joined an online chatroom where I learned what LOL meant and forged an intense bond with a fellow sixth grader from Tennessee. I opened a private chat with her and eventually worked up the courage to ask her: “would you… have sex with me?”, the computer screen protecting me from embarrassment. My heart raced in the intervening minute while she pondered her reply: ‘yes’, flashed the chat window.
O, what joy encircled my heart! I was finally on track to reaching the golden land promised by malfunctioning cable TV, so I promptly gave her my home address to stay in touch by snail mail. Sadly, nothing was to come of it, although many years later I learned that she sent letters which my parents promptly confiscated and destroyed.
This bitter flavour was an appropriate start to a dimension of my life that would slowly get worse. In part, this was owing to my grim moral judgment of the body and my questionable intentions surrounding sex; I had the sense that the naked body was fundamentally shameful, and my instrumental goal meant I was more or less using others as a tool to get myself off. These ideas played out in psychic storms as I wrestled with a desperate longing for something that I was also convinced I absolutely shouldn’t have. My furtive attempts at finding pornography already felt like robbing a store, so getting physically intimate was an impossible Ocean’s Eleven-esque heist. The tiniest illustrations of naked women were exceptionally rare artefacts which I treasured; for example, there were bare breasts in the liner notes of the 1998 Rob Zombie album Hellbilly Deluxe, and while the picture was about an inch in size buried in the background, it was more than enough to provide a reminder that greater pleasures lie ahead.
Part 3: Manic Pixel Dream Girl
Sex in the Age of Computers
As in many other domains, the computer was my best friend in offering some virtual approximation of comfort. The new SEGA Dreamcast made me euphoric because of its unrivaled graphic processing power, but there was also a unique perk which I could exploit for erotic ends: a modem. This was a risky venture, since when I was home alone, my mom would call at seemingly random times to make sure that I hadn’t burned down the apartment. If I was connected to the internet while she called and the line was dead, there would be too many questions that I’d be unable to answer, ultimately leading to a future in like, prison, or something.
Another hitch was the painfully slow method of entering text in the Dreamcast browser, which required me to select individual letters with a joystick. Even with the odds against me, I nonetheless triumphed and managed to track down an unobscured photo of a naked woman. Although the woman’s bare breasts were a magnificent delight, I was shocked to learn that the vaginal opening wasn’t directly on the front of the pubic mound. The empty skin and the bulge of the fatty tissue above the pubic bone looked like a strange deformity.
While this was disorienting, it had little effect on the relentless and increasing urge to see more. My prayers were answered at the start of high school when John, a classmate from a broken home, brought an old Playboy magazine he stole from his father. This was by far the most important work of art I’d ever encountered, and I spent countless hours memorizing the pictures which were so captivating that they could only have come from a heavenly realm. Out of a spirit of solidarity, this magazine was carefully passed around a select group of boys, although I ended up being its permanent owner because of how much I coveted it. Yet even that was not nearly enough, so when I had a sleepover at Patrick’s place, I was desperate to take full advantage of his beefy internet connection. Rather than talk about our lives, we stayed up late with our eyes glued to a computer screen trying to find videos of naked women.
The tool we used was Kazaa, a free and completely uncontrolled file-sharing service. If you weren’t computer-savvy you could quickly end up destroying your whole operating system by downloading a virus masquerading as a movie or game. We didn’t end up with viruses since we were decent at spotting them, but we did end up with a lot of videos that I can’t unsee. While a video might have been labeled ‘AMAZEING seXXXi bUsTy bAbE pOuNdEd HARD.avi‘, it could just as well be a snuff film of a random woman getting murdered on camera, which unfortunately was the case. Out of convenience, one could also download a whole folder of videos from a user, which would have some rather undesirable spectacles like a pregnant woman getting fisted.
It was becoming clear that it wasn’t a great idea to explore sexuality via the internet. Indeed, a study in the early 2000s which included 1500 children found some troubling correlations involving internet use, such as a 350% increase in the likelihood of major depression and a 240% increase in reports of a withered emotional bond with their parents. Even so, it became increasingly unthinkable to actually have sex with another person. There were people at school who spoke of sex casually, and I even had a classmate who was pregnant. But these people might as well have lived on another planet. Back in middle school, I had classmates who told me that they would get naked together and explore each-other’s bodies, which to me seemed like courting the highest possible danger, although admittedly an unspecified one.
Not only that, but real bodies were more ambiguous in their erotic potential compared to the stylized and abstract media I was used to. A girl sitting next to me once bent over to reach for something at the other end of the table which raised her t-shirt slightly above her waistline. I could see small blue veins underneath the skin of her back, which are common features of hairless primates that circulate blood, but I thought: that’s the kinda thing I’m supposed to be attracted to? On another occasion I hugged a beautiful classmate only to get a whiff of her body odor, which was a normal scent on creatures with armpits, but it wasn’t the blank neutrality of a screen, and it thoroughly broke the spell.
While I was easily turned off, I was completely devastated when my interest was rebuffed. The longing for sexual contact was so insistent that getting shot down was like having the value of my whole existence called into question, which isn’t completely unreasonable considering the fact that germ cells are kinda running the show. There’s also something about being perceived by someone attractive that made me feel as if they’re a hundred feet taller than me and a thousand times more important, even if I could dismantle the idea intellectually.
It seemed that everywhere I looked, there were numerous women whose naked bodies would be the solution to all my problems. But as Jason Wyman & Brad Petering wrote in Heaven is a Bedroom, “I confess to thinking sex was my salvation / But really they just start with the letter ‘S’. Rather than the promise of happiness in the Jake Era (connection, openness, nakedness, and pleasure) my sexuality turned into a source of fear, confusion, despair and revulsion. I was not only ashamed of my body but my own thoughts about it, ashamed of my anger and my lust, ashamed of my shame. Why was something fundamental to my nature such a constant source of frustration? The only thing that got better was technology.
There was also some small degree of reciprocity introduced. I noticed that girls had a different reaction to me when I was able to talk to them on MSN Messenger. Even though I was still lousy at conversation, they were more interested in the persona mediated by digital text; I even managed to kiss a girl after connecting with her through text although it was an admittedly bad and embarrassing kiss. Looking back at my chat logs, I was painfully stupid and inconsiderate, but that was a step up from mute detachment. In my early 20s, it was on the internet that I met Tanya, a girl about a thousand miles away who was a talented photographer and marvelously cute to boot. She not only tolerated my excessive gushiness and poetic outbursts, but sometimes encouraged it, leading to frequent and intense video chats. The intoxicating buzz of infatuation reminded me of the dawn of my sexuality where good things were possible, and dark clouds of reality weren’t on the horizon waiting to dissolve my fantasy. I flew down to see her, expecting that I would somehow transform into someone for whom sexual connection was a natural breeze, but it turns out that my personality hitched a ride alongside me. I could recite love poems and talk about how amazing she was as a person, but the idea of touching her, much less undressing her, seemed like an obscene gesture, if not simply a bizarre one reserved for other species. The whole experience severely tested my psychological health and reignited the internal battle.
Part 4: The Finish Line
Reaching the Promised Land of Sex
The carrot dangled in front of me by my hormones was, yet again, a tremendous disappointment and source of pain. Not to say I’m alone in this. My favourite story regarding sexual disappointment involves the 13th century theologian Ramon Lull. Before he had his eyes set on theology, Ramon drooled after pretty girls, and he had a particularly huge crush on a woman he saw in Genoa, so one day he decided to ride his horse to the church where she was busy praying. Once he saw her, he began waxing poetic about the beauty of her bosom, which prompted her to remove her clothes and show him a malignant tumor that was eating away at her breast. This scared Ramon straight and he wound up being a man of God.
I had a second shot, however. After an extended period of self-pity and isolation, a female friend began showing some interest in me. Although I was in total disbelief at first, a mutual friend confirmed it, and eventually the fantasies of a bright future began chugging again, my heart ready to burst with a mix of fear and hope. The first night we hung out together, we wound up kissing, which to me felt like I’d unlocked the secrets of the universe. Somehow, the chemical storm made it so that undressing her was not an insult to humanity but rather a simple and beautiful pleasure. To be naked with her felt like coming home to a warm, cozy cabin after years of wandering in a sharp, cold snowstorm. The experience was so overwhelmingly positive that the morning after I began to weep because I knew that it had to come to an end. Of course, it did, although these positive feelings were like a teaser-trailer of how I imagined ‘normal’ people felt about their lives. Plus, in the pre-sex days, I assumed that each lovemaking session would be a great accomplishment that I could tally up, but it turned out that it flowed naturally from attraction.
I hadn’t quite anticipated a couple of things, although I had warnings. For one, just as the heaven-sent Playboy magazine wasn’t enough to satiate me, I noticed that the more sex I had, the more I wanted. My eyes began to wander and my lust began to dream of more women, different women. And just as I wasn’t ready to face the tricky fact that each person is an infinitely complex and unique being, I wasn’t quite ready to find out she had her own clusters of trauma. Rather than confronting these issues, I did the smart thing and ignored them hoping they’d go away, and coupled with my steady detachment and volcanic work stress, the relationship slowly but steadily turned into a source of yet more rarefied forms of anguish.
Part 5: Foiled Again
Tilakkhana and its Role in Framing Sex
This naïve pattern played itself out again a couple of times; a rose-coloured beginning, where I thought things would be totally different and sex wouldn’t transform into a source of sorrow, only to be proven wrong quite decisively and thoroughly. It turns out that having lovely other people around doesn’t immediately fix the fickle nature of pleasure, at least as it interfaces with my personal neurochemistry. I’ve tried to take a more rational approach to sex, to think of it as a technical challenge, choosing to read detailed instructions on how to reliably give pleasure. There was a cloud of anxiety that followed me every time I had sex, thinking that it’s yet another opportunity for disappointment and conflict. I was also frustrated at how my biology was at direct odds with success, because the longer I wanted to last, the more I had to trick my body. Even though technical improvement was important, the dynamic reminded me of my professional life, since a successful performance only meant more work, and high expectations became normalized. Giving pleasure started to turn into a chore that alleviated my anxiety, but I figured that a good performance would guarantee me more security in the relationship.
However, just as performing well at work is never truly a guarantee of job security, I was eventually dumped and reached yet higher peaks of agony that I didn’t know existed. I’m sure that on a material level I’m basking in rarefied glory compared to most people on the planet, so the collective trauma surrounding sex must be especially staggering when material conditions are much more hostile. In this light, the madness of sexual prohibition throughout history and in my own upbringing starts to make some more sense. After all, anything that offers so much pain elicits the desire to lash out against it and beat it into submission as much as possible. But despite this fact, I think approaches leaning towards repression is doomed to failure, and I think that the small strides made in contemporary culture are magnificent accomplishments. These are quite slight however; there’s some research showing that even progressive, liberal parents tend to be extremely stingy about sexual education and discussion with their kids.
I don’t have a detailed plan on how to reorganize society to ameliorate all the malignant currents that poison the experience of sexuality (yet!), but I have found a concept that sometimes helps in framing problems in a healthier way: Tilakkhana, which is a Pali word meaning the three characteristics of existence. Given the range in people’s negative affect and the variability of circumstances, there must be many people for whom this perspective is useless since sex is simply great fun. For those lucky folks, I say keep on truckin’. For those of us who are not so fortunate, I think it’s worth exploring the Tilakkhana. The three characteristics that comprise Tilakkhana are listed as separate elements although they are dimensions of an all-encompassing space like X, Y and Z axes:
- Anatta, or Impersonality
- Anicca, or Impermanence
- Duhkha, or Imperfection
My favourite of The Three Imps is anatta, since it’s starkly counterintuitive to think that our personal lives are impersonal, yet even a casual understanding of biological science makes this unavoidable. For me, scientific inquiry into the nature of sexuality is the most powerful means by which to put muddy intuitive thoughts and emotions into a clearer perspective. The earliest known instance of an organism reproducing sexually involves the titillatingly named Bangiomorpha Pubescens, dated to 1,047 million years ago, resembling modern-day red algae. If our ancestors were geared towards sex when they looked like seaweed, it’s hardly a surprise that it feels like there’s a built-in unavoidable urge for sex which means it has less to do with a personal moral failing and more to do with impersonal conditions.
Anatta is the counterpart to the instinctive tool of judgment, which categorizes behaviour, events, thoughts and emotions as good or bad. On a practical and immediate level, such discernment is necessary, but it can tends towards an absence of curiosity and a hardening of perspective. With a wider and sharper lens, anatta teaches that there are conditions which led to that behaviour, and that through superior understanding tends to come superior action.
In other words, anatta is the concept that bad stuff happens not because the universe is malfunctioning, but rather because there’s an unfathomably complicated web of dynamic conditions which often lie beyond personal agency. There are better and worse choices to be made, to be sure, but these choices emanate from a giant, squishy pink walnut inside our heads that was originally cobbled together by invisible strands of polynucleotides to help shuttle germ cells along. Some patience is required. With an increased understanding as to the conditioned nature of thoughts, emotions, and actions, there is a tendency towards forgiveness and compassion, but this tendency can be tenuous and intermittent. From personal experience, I can testify that these moments of clarity are few and far between; as St. Paul wrote, to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. However, I can also testify that some small measure of progress can be made.
Anicca, or impermanence, is obvious when it comes to sex not just in the most obvious sense that orgasms only last a little while, but also in the fickle feelings of lust and in the onset of gonadal puberty, where it’s almost as if the whole point of life shifts towards the gratification of a single organ. It’s also hard to avoid the observation that sexual repression and liberality is constantly shifting in different directions given different conditions. In a more general sense, anicca is clear in the programmed decay of somatic cells which comprises all of our organs, sexy or otherwise. However, anicca is most spectacularly present in the very nature of reality, since the components which make up everything that exists are constantly changing at an alarming rate. For example, a bottom quark has a lifetime of a picosecond, which is one trillionth of a second (for reference, a trillion seconds is about 30,000 years). This means that if we had the perceptual apparatus, even the most placid Sunday afternoon in the park would look like maddeningly unstable chaos. Anicca is often invoked as a dreary reminder that death and deterioration await us all, but impermanence is just as important for life, improvement and health.
Duhkha, or unsatisfactoriness, stress and imperfection, naturally follows from the fact that everything is constantly changing and often lies outside of our control. The most egregious suffering surrounding sex is in rape and disease, but more subtly in all the little ways in which sex doesn’t ever fully satisfy, like sensual pleasures in general. There is, as yet, no instrument that allows an objective view into the suffering caused by sexual longing, but from an anecdotal observation of others, I sometimes see a thin sheet of contentment plastering over bubbling cauldrons of pain. However, duhkha can also be a source of relief, since it reframes all the suffering that arises as a (theoretically) intelligible function of reality, rather than some sort of fundamental error. It’s a natural event that can be understood and in some rare cases, changed, accepted or even appreciated.
It might be tempting to think of Tilakkhana as a depressing reminder that that our lives are fundamentally out of our control, that nothing truly satisfies and nothing lasts. But in principle, a full view of Tilakkhana would usher in acceptance, understanding and forgiveness. It offers a somewhat unconventional form of hope which I’d like to illustrate with a dream described in mercifully brief detail.
Part 6: Wishful Dreaming
Taking a God’s Eye View of Sex
In this dream I was in a charmingly cozy place, with a naked woman who felt intimately familiar in the dream but isn’t based on anyone I know. In our nakedness and closeness, there was a feeling of mutual love, trust, respect and admiration between us that was so intense, it sparked a feeling of complete peace and happiness, like all I’d ever wanted in life had been manifested. This was so unusually pleasant that I became suspicious, so I said to her: “I feel like I’m living someone else’s life, in someone else’s body.” And she replied: “Don’t worry, you’re not”. Then I woke up.
It’s easy to see how this validates Freud’s claim that dreams are wish fulfillments, since it furnished an impossible circumstance where the entire world was shut away and I could greedily possess ultimate happiness, where the level of connection and trust was amplified such that it broke through the fundamental gap between two conscious beings. But there are two elements which I think are genuine provocations for optimism. The first is the fact that this sense of peace and satisfaction were entirely generated by my own brain in silent darkness, which means that there is a more tenuous connection between external conditions and inner harmony than might be suspected, ironically brightening up the prospect of solitude. The second element is a more Jungian perspective, and ties in to the theme of anatta; there really are lots of happy people on the planet at any given moment. The fact that I can’t feel their happiness directly is a sort of hardware limitation, but it’s abundantly clear on an analytical level that the components which make up the minds of other people are more or less the same as mine. Insofar as I wish happiness for myself and enjoy its presence, it would logically follow that I wish the same happiness for creatures that are pretty much clones of myself, although I will admittedly be physically limited by the demands of my vulnerable mammalian body.
Anatta demonstrates that all living things are part of the same family. While my conscious memories extend only to my infancy in my current body, my germ cells stretch back billions of years into the past and bifurcate trillions of different directions into the present. It might be that my own somatic self has warped to the point where it tends to bear bitter fruit, but shifting outside this somatic myopia, there’s an abundance of love and affection to be witnessed on a daily basis, though it happens outside my particular capsule of organs. Not to put the somatic self down; I think the human cerebral cortex is a stunningly beautiful natural phenomenon which offers vast new territories of freedom that have just barely begun to be explored.
It’s hard enough to treat family like family, let alone a stranger that mugs me or a police state that leaves me destitute. Nonetheless, the potent beauty of this God’s Eye View is beautifully encapsulated by Thich Nhat Hahn in his poem Please Call Me by My True Names. I’ll give him the last word with this snippet:
I am the mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river.
And I am the bird
that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.
I am the frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond.
And I am the grass-snake
that silently feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.
I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.
I am a member of the politburo,
with plenty of power in my hands.
And I am the man who has to pay
his “debt of blood” to my people
dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.
My joy is like Spring, so warm
it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.
My pain is like a river of tears,
so vast it fills the four oceans.
References
Sexuality Education in Fifth and Sixth Grades in U.S. Public Schools, 1999
Precise age of Bangiomorpha pubescens dates the origin of eukaryotic photosynthesis
How Children Learn About Sex: A Cross-Species and Cross-Cultural Analysis
Exposure to internet pornography among children and adolescents: a national survey
#/media/File:Amor_Vincet_Omnia.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
