THE GENERATIVE SYSTEM
Did you ever notice that all those books purporting to be about “the joy of” something or other are really attempts at reducing shame? The first, of course, was Irma S. Rombauer’s now-classic cookbook, The Joy of Cooking. In 1931, when the first edition came out, many women in our culture felt utterly restricted to the kitchen, shackled to a role in life that allowed them to be little more than what some called “baby farmers” and “unpaid chefs.” The very act of cooking was, for some, a symbol of feminine repression and shame. But there is joy in cooking, said Mrs. Rombauer. There is the competence pleasure that comes from knowing how to think out, shop for, and prepare a delicious meal; joy from the knowledge that those who love you are well fed.
In volume 1 of Affect/Imagery/Consciousness Tomkins devoted a whole chapter to the dynamic interplay between individual affects, the way one affect is likely to follow another. He noted that excitement must follow the incomplete resolution of shame, and that we experience joy at the complete relief of shame. The bowed head of the oppressed citizen is whisked upward when the source of shame is removed. Anybody who had the opportunity to watch the television coverage of the long-suffering peoples of Eastern Europe as they celebrated their release from domination by their communist governments could note the shift between the energy of excitement and the relaxation of joy, as well as the tears that well up when we are overwhelmed by the sheer density of emotion. But Mrs. Rombauer understood this dynamism before all of us. She anticipated by a quarter of a century Tomkins’s recognition of the relation between shame and joy, and by half a century my circuit diagram for pride.
Recently I bought a copy of Leo Rosten’s 1968 book The Joys of Yiddish. I remember the fears and terrors of the Second World War, when no one knew whether the Nazi forces would win and turn America, too, into a vast network of concentration camps eradicating Jews with the impersonal and implacable efficiency that characterized Hitler’s Germany. “If the Nazis come,” said my mother in 1944 with the sort of hazy logic we accept in wartime, “go straight to the Unitarian church on the corner.” During the 1950s, when I went through the bulk of my formal higher education, we Jews were vaguely embarrassed to look Jewish or even to be Jewish. Synagogues—little buildings full of strange bearded men with black skullcaps and fringed shawls—were replaced by big, beautiful community centers dominated by squash courts and theaters. Nobody wanted to be labeled as “different.” Nobody spoke Yiddish. We wanted to be Main Street America.
Although written in Hebrew letters, Yiddish as a language is more German than Hebrew. It is the language of assimilation, the patois of a people who have traveled through one country after another since the twelve tribes were dispersed a few thousand years ago. Now it contains lots of words from English.
But the parents and grandparents of my childhood “knew” that we would be marked as “different” if we spoke Yiddish and used it among themselves only as their “secret” language—the one in which they said things we were not meant to understand. We were to bring pride to our parents by looking like, behaving like, learning and (above all) speaking the unaccented language of, our Christian neighbors. No Yiddish for us.
Today those same Jewish community centers teach courses in Yiddish, which is in danger of becoming a lost language; occasionally I hear that some college or other has a formal course in this shameful language of my past. But Leo Rosten has it just right when he flips the axis of shame and pride and offers all of us an opportunity to sample this rich heritage.
Right in the spirit of Irma Rombauer and Leo Rosten, and hard on the heels of the cultural revolution of the 1960s, came Alex Comfort’s 1972 book, The Joy of Sex. It is one of the most popular books ever published, for it treats sex as a normal, healthy, commonplace part of life. No mystery, no big thing. Just the friendly interpersonal activity of sexually active adults. It is a refreshing, homey, sensible, friendly book, beautifully written, marvelously illustrated, and one of the best antidotes to sexual shame ever composed. So much shame was attached to sexuality in the America for which The Joy of Sex was written that the illustrated edition had to be printed in Holland and shipped here in relative obscurity.
Before Comfort was Krafft-Ebing, whose Psychopathia Sexualis was replete with clinical anecdotes that were as likely as not to begin with such statements as, “This 20-year-old confessed masturbator was brought to the clinic complaining of . . .” Alternatives to Krafft-Ebing? “Marriage manuals” by equally Germanic prose stylists whose objective clinical description of “lovemaking” sounded more like the instructions packed with the kit for an outdoor gas barbecue grill purchased from the neighborhood hardware store. Or the neighborhood porn shop with shelf after shelf of poorly written “novels” designed only to allow us to resonate with the scenes depicted, then to masturbate or wander out aimlessly or angrily in search of a partner who would do with us what we had just read.
There was so much shame associated with everything about sex in the 1950s, when I was growing into manhood. We boys were embarrassed to talk about sex with any degree of frankness—wherever possible we even referred to specific acts and techniques by code names. The thought of a partner who both wanted sexual pleasure and took delight in our pleasure seemed not only remote but bizarre. That consenting couples might even use their mouths to bring genital pleasure, each to the other, was called “69” because the shape of the numbers resembled that of people in the act itself. No word, no phrase was more likely to reap gales of embarrassed laughter than “69.” Even to mention such a thing in “mixed” or “polite company” was a guarantee of social disgrace. Surely, I thought ‘way back there in the’50s, so deadly was the shame associated with the number itself that 1969 would be a national year of mortification.
Yet so much was changed by the cultural revolution of the ‘60s that by the time 1969 rolled around nobody noticed or remarked about the sexual reference. Alex Comfort treated the issue with characteristic aplomb, saying that “good hand and mouth work practically guarantee a good partner” (34). During a recent psychotherapy session, a 20-year-old woman mentioned with amusement something that had happened during lovemaking, and I commented about the recent history of that sexual practice. She had never heard of “69” and asked me to explain the history of the term. “We don’t have a name for it,” she said. “We just do it.” Other things about sex might embarrass her, but not that.
The Joy of Sex was not the first book to use drawings to illustrate parts of the body or the positions in which people shared each other. But it was the only book in our culture to show those people with friendly facial expressions. No guilt, no shame, no anger, none of the bored neutrality you see in most of the Persian miniatures and Japanese prints that graced the literature of those cultures. None of the smarmy anatomism of the once ubiquitous turn-of-the-century “French postcards.” Just the facial displays associated with interest, excitement, pleasure, and joy.
Comfort’s book represented one form of breakthrough in the path away from our cultural tendency to see sex within an obligatory system of shame. Only two years earlier we had seen the publication of Masters and Johnson’s landmark work, Human Sexual Response, in which these sober and gifted scientists described the results of their studies on the sexual nature of man. Working with hundreds of volunteers, they were able to observe the sexual response cycle—what actually happens to the sexual organs before, during, and after the act of intercourse. What previously had been only the stuff of locker-room talk, course material of the college of the street, now was transformed into direct observations capable of scientific analysis. What previously had been known only from speculation based on the psychoanalytic exploration of individual adults in treatment for emotional disturbance now could be understood from the open scrutiny of healthy, happy, satisfied men and women. Suddenly we were in an era of change; sex itself moved from the shadows onto its own stage.
There is so much that can be said about sex. Although the word itself makes us think first about the act of sexual intercourse, that particular set of deeds makes up only a tiny portion of what we know to be sexual. Its energy infuses life in every way, influencing everything from fashion to drama, assisting the advertiser or the recruiter, drawing fire from pulpit and pundit. For most of us, it is important to know that we are sexually attractive or sexually competent. There is perhaps no aspect of adult life as securely linked to shame and pride as our relation to sex.
If by now I have convinced you that each of us holds a vastly different personal definition of shame, one determined by our life experience, perhaps it will be somewhat easier for us to arrive at a mutually acceptable understanding of sex. My goal in these next few chapters is merely to indicate some of the linkages between the affect shame, which is the declared subject of this book, and the sexual forces that influence us with such power and intensity. Yet in order to do this we must first figure out what we mean when we use the word sex.
Even the very word brings immediate confusion. Sometimes we use it to refer to matters of gender—masculine, feminine. This takes on even more significance in European languages than in English, for ours is one of the few tongues that legislates no attributes of maleness and femaleness to the various classes of objects. Aristotle claims that it was Pythagoras who (25 centuries ago) brought his sense of geometric precision to language and demanded that all things be classified according to gender. Doubtless this dichotomy was useful then; it is restrictive and perhaps obnoxious in our current era of sexual egalitarianism. What must go on in the minds of the French academician who declares or defends that the words force, cuisine, ville (city), tête (head), lettre (letter), and such are “feminine” and preceded by la or une? Why should village be masculine, especially when ville is feminine? Why are the words for train, tea, voyage, wolf, and lesson all masculine?
These are not trivial questions. That such (any) nouns might be labeled male or female indicates not merely a judgment of the feeling they evoke in the grammarian but also an inherent judgment about the difference between men and women. And I doubt that these perceived or attributed or declared dissimilarities are either kind to women or made by women. Involved here is an inherent system of shame and pride based on qualities attributed to gender. Whatever reason we determine for the relation between sex and shame must take into account the existence of such a system.
Much as we might decry the noxious implications of this artificial attribution of gender, true gender identity forms a major part of our sense of self. We know ourselves first as “baby.” Only later do we state with authority that we are a boy or a girl; once achieved, we retain this new chunk of identity throughout life. Gender identity dictates our mode of dress, our role in society, which locker room and which bathroom we use, and with whom we will form kindred groups.
Despite how alike are men and women, how equal their potential to do so many tasks, they differ in many ways. Often I have joked in lectures that “what are known on this planet as men and women are descendants of two distinct life forms first found on far separated star systems by a race of interstellar explorers who put them together on Earth in an experiment that failed.”
But just as most life forms can be divided into groups by their gender, mature individuals tend to form couples because of these sexual differences. Inherent in the system that causes us to be different on the basis of gender is also the force that creates attraction. Even in our language we search constantly for paired opposites that can be used as metaphors to express the sexual force that tends to unite: north and south poles of a magnet, up and down, yin and yang, fire and ice. Sex refers to the passionate attraction between opposites, to the active process that begins as the coupling of male and female, unites them in sexual intercourse, and results in procreation and the maintenance of the species.
Look, for a moment, at the sheer variety and range of themes attached to sex. Gender itself seems to be genetic, controlled by scripts written in the germ plasm, mechanisms that make the body itself into something male or female. The parts of the body that differ only on the basis of gender, the sexual equipment, seem to be affected or even controlled by programs that need neither conscious awareness nor social training. From earliest infancy, males experience erections during the dreaming phase of sleep; from puberty through the menopause women experience the complex series of events associated with the menstrual cycle. Gender identity (knowing one’s gender) involves awareness of the fact that one has been assigned by biology to one or the other gender. And gender identity also requires awareness of how that gender assignment is viewed in one’s social milieu.
Some of sexuality is body, some is programmed activity, and much is learned; we are dealing once again with hardware, firmware, and software. Over the centuries that our species has paid attention to itself there has been little quarrel about the nature of the hardware. It is undeniable that women provide eggs which are fertilized by sperm provided by men; no one doubts that only women can become pregnant and be delivered of babies. Much debate has raged about the difference between firmware and software. By custom, women in our culture are more likely to rear babies than men; yet both are equally capable of this task. Anyone who says that “women belong in the home” and that “only men can fight” has linked gender to social role—a confusion between what is learned as software and what (like the menstrual cycle) has been carved into the firmware by evolution.
One of the peculiarities of the scientific world is that a lot of people begin to study the same problem at the same time—there are themes and vogues in science just as there are in any other realm of human endeavor. Most of the books that revolutionized our understanding of sexuality came out about the same time as The Joy of Sex and Human Sexual Response. Dr. John Money, a researcher who has devoted his long and enormously fruitful career to the study of gender and gender identity, joined with his colleague Dr. Anke Ehrhardt in 1972 to write Man and Woman, Boy and Girl. Just as it is unlikely that anyone will ever need to repeat all the work done by Masters and Johnson, which allowed us to understand how the various organs of the body are affected during sexual activity, it would be difficult to imagine anyone making a significant improvement on Money and Ehrhardt’s meticulous study of the relation between sexual biology and sexual behavior.
From the standpoint of my own interest in the scripts and programs that influence human emotion, it is fascinating to read their description of the mechanisms that produce human sexuality. Here, for once, is a complex group of scripts known to be stored in one readily studied library, the X and Y chromosomes that make us female or male. Money and Ehrhardt point out that these chromosomes control maleness and femaleness at three levels.
From the moment that egg and sperm unite to initiate the process of fetal development, all body systems unfold toward their eventual mature form. At each stage in development, all embryos are pretty much the same. Only in the area of sexual development are they different—the X and Y chromosomes differentiate human embryos into two quite specific shapes. Money and Ehrhardt refer to this difference as sexual dimorphism, two separate morphologies (body shapes) distinguished only by factors that have to do with sexuality. The library for femaleness is contained in the X chromosome, and the library for maleness is contained in the Y chromosome.
Actually, the basic plan of the human embryo is female. We all started out in life with a urogenital region made up of little buds of tissue that are quite female in appearance. Left to themselves, these embryonic structures would go on to make everybody female. But when a Y chromosome is present, under its command the primitive undifferentiated gonad of the fetus becomes a testicle rather than an ovary. Speedily, other programs are set in motion by the testicle, which produces the male hormone called testosterone. The structures that in the female would become the labia minora (the inner lips of the vagina) now alter their path and grow to enclose the clitoral bud and the urethra (the tube channeling urine from the bladder) to form the penis. The labia majora join at the midline to form the scrotum, and the ligaments that would have held the ovaries within the pelvis now contract to draw the testicles into it. In the male, all of the structures capable of erotic response have been moved outside the pelvis.
In those rare cases when the primitive undifferentiated gonad fails to appear, there can be no testicle; even though the organism may be genetically male it continues to develop as a female. From the standpoint of embryology, the book of Genesis is in error—maleness is created from the basic plan of femaleness.
This effect on our hardware is the first realm of action demonstrated by the scripts contained in the sex chromosomes. The second realm of action is equally important, but much more subtle and difficult to demonstrate. There appears to be a real difference between the brain of the male and of the female, a divergence produced by the presence or absence of testicular secretions.
One portion of this gender difference of neural pathways is easy to understand. Each of the structures made sexually dimorphic by the relative balance of male and female sex hormones, each of the urogenital organs, develops along with its own distinct supply of blood vessels and nerves. The circulatory system evolved much earlier (and remains far simpler and more primitive) than the central nervous system. The heart does not need to know how the vessels are mapped out to enable blood to course through these pipes to and from the center. But each nerve that develops in the periphery must have some exact representation at the center of the nervous system. It must be registered in the brain. As testosterone converts the body of the fetus from its basic female pattern to biological maleness, it forces the brain itself to register this now-masculine pattern.
There is good reason to believe that more is changed during fetal development than the mere representation of peripheral pathways. The balance, the relative amount of male and female sex hormones coursing through the embryonic brain, controls certain patterns of organization. Especially does this seem to affect the hypothalamus, the region of the brain containing much of the firmware that controls gender-related behavior. Examples of this sort of firmware include the programs that make little boys so much more avid for rough-and-tumble play than girls and that cause erections during dreams. Often (but not always) it can be proven that some little girls who are quite masculine in their energy level and preference for rough-and-tumble play, but otherwise very normally feminine, have been exposed to an unusual amount of testosterone during fetal development.
Of course I know that some women are stronger than some men and that some women can fight better than some men. But by and large, the urge to fight and the need to fight seem to be part of maleness. No matter how we try to limit professional boxing, the heavyweight championship fight remains the essence of one aspect of masculine sexuality. Our culture has recently become enamored of the Asian martial arts; thus the fight scenes which enliven our feature films now utilize karate and kung fu as well as traditional fisticuffs. Yet men have since time immemorial jousted, wrestled, and boxed; they pummel each other in rugby, football, and other sports. Boys and men can be trained to be gentle, but this is an outgrowth of our growing interest in empathic relatedness rather than any alteration in sexual dimorphism.
Girls can (and should) be encouraged to participate in sports, even rough-and-tumble sports; their exclusion from such activity has been a noxious social aspect of sexual dimorphism grafted onto femininity by a culture that needed to suppress certain realms of feminine potential. But part of the system of innate preference for certain forms of activity is scripted by the X and Y chromosomes.
So the sex chromosomes contain maps for the mechanisms that later produce the firmware for some portion of gender-related activity. Money and Ehrhardt comment that there is a third realm of characteristics orchestrated by these script libraries, an effect on the social milieu into which the infant is born. All over the world, people pay attention to pregnant women, wondering whether the baby hidden within will be a boy or a girl. From the instant the baby emerges from the birth canal, how it is treated by the world into which it has arrived will largely be determined by that society’s reaction to the baby’s externally visible genitals. Babies with penis and scrotum will be treated as boys with whom people will tussle, and babies with vaginas will be treated as girls to cuddle.
Boys learn to identify with the men around them, just as girls learn to identify with the women in their surround. But men and women understand the difference between boys and girls and treat them quite differently. Men react to girls in line with their understanding of femininity, women react to boys in line with their understanding of masculinity. Thus, by the process Money and Ehrhardt call complementarity, each gender tends to perpetuate its cultural understanding of both sexual roles. From the moment of birth, children are taught that they are either boys or girls and encouraged to behave accordingly.
Whereas it is no doubt better for a child to be reared with both parents available, women in general do not raise boys to be feminine and men do not raise girls to be masculine. Even when children are raised from infancy by a pair of homosexual men or a pair of lesbian women, there is only a slight increase in the likelihood that their gender identity will be disturbed. (Lesbian women and homosexual men still see themselves as women and men. The alteration is in sexual object choice, not gender identity.) The growing child draws a blueprint of what it means to “be” a member of either sex from data provided by everybody in his or her milieu.
Sexual dimorphism is much more than the superficial difference between boys and girls, than even the secondary sexual characteristics of men and women. The two genders differ in many more ways, all characteristic of a system that has evolved to guarantee the maintenance of the species through sexual reproduction. Easily observed in pet dogs is the characteristic prowling behavior of the male, whose nose is ever attentive for signs of femaleness; more likely than not a female dog will accept patiently the male’s need to inspect her before he is available for other forms of play. Men, too, are generally more preoccupied with mating behavior than women, while they have far less involvement with pregnancy and early child-rearing. The basic differences dictated by the scripts stored in the X and Y chromosomes affect behavior throughout life.
It is possible to study the development of gender identity, the nature of courtship, sexual intercourse, the sequences involved in pregnancy and delivery, or any one of the many other processes linked to human reproduction, without recognizing how they are linked. I prefer to view each of these important and complex systems of behavior as subroutines of a far more complex overarching program that I call the generative system. In this regard I suggest that it functions in a manner analogous to the affect system, with sites of action located all over the body, structural effectors running from the central nervous system throughout the body, chemical mediators manufactured at locations such as the endocrine glands and within the brain itself, and organizers of innate programs that are responsible for conduct known to us as specifically sexual, which are stored in the hypothalamus.
Thus, the menstrual cycle would be seen as a specific form of organized innate program, the script for which is stored within the hypothalamus, utilizing hormonal messengers manufactured there and in the ovaries, causing effects at such widely separated sites of action as the lining of the uterus, the breasts, and the gastrointestinal system. The cyclic process by which, from infancy through senescence, erections are triggered during the cerebral activity associated with dreams is the result of another innate program. Further examples of such subroutines include the processes of pregnancy and nursing, in which specific bodily sites are transformed from their normal state of quiet preparedness into the active loci of the work for which they have evolved.
The affect system evolved much more recently than the generative system and differs from it in several aspects. The nine innate affects are each triggered by a specific stimulus, and each affect is an analogue of that stimulus. An affect is an analogue that acts to amplify this stimulus and bring it into consciousness with what becomes a characteristic sort of urgency. In contrast to the affect system, the subroutines of the generative system appear to be set in motion not by analogic triggers but by built-in biological clocks. All of the functions associated with sexual reproduction seem to be derived from mechanisms that have an inherent time constant. Unless intentionally initiated, all the generative programs start and stop under the control of their own timekeepers.
The menstrual cycle provides for the female a regular routine by which the system is guaranteed one fresh egg every month and provides for that egg a freshly made bed of uterine lining. Thus, a biological clock makes women fertile for a couple of days each month. But the generative system also makes sure that the male is always ready with a supply of freshly made sperm. Soon after puberty, when the male reproductive system moves into high gear, innate programs organize the manufacture of sperm, seminal fluid, and all the other components that eventually will be needed to guarantee male fertility. These fluids and cellular components are produced at such a pace that they must be expelled at a frequency determined by that rate of production. Initially this tidal flow of male sexual elements appears as a nocturnal emission, an ejaculation that, like the erection cycle, occurs during the dreaming phase of sleep.
Each woman will release no more than 3 to 400 eggs during her three decades or so of fertility; each ejaculate contains millions of sperm. That these two processes are different is clear. They are similar in that both are run by biological firmware activated and maintained by internal clock mechanisms. Money and Ehrhardt refer to such innately programmed cycles of activity as the “rehearsals” of the sexual system.
There are other examples of this rehearsal process clearly visible and available for study both in humans and in other life forms. Anyone who has ever owned a dog knows a lot about the process of rehearsal. Male dogs who have never seen their elders in the act of sexual intercourse will practice some sexual behaviors very much as if they are living out a script. When approximately two years old, our Gordon Setter began to mount any visiting dog (and even the occasional placid and confused small child) who happened into his territory. Each time, he would reach with his forepaws over the back of his playmate and initiate a series of powerful pelvic thrusts into the space between them. This is precisely the sort of behavior that must be called into play when needed for the purpose of procreation.
That this behavior was scripted seemed clear, for the humping movements he made occurred at no other time and bore no relation to behavior otherwise normal for him; the power with which he grasped his partner was uncharacteristic of this otherwise gentle animal. But it was also clear that he had no idea of its purpose, for he grabbed at and humped the front, side, and rear of these “sexual objects” with equal frequency.
His regular playmate is our other dog, a neutered female Border Collie of extraordinary intelligence and energy. One of her characteristic modes of play involves a game in which she bends forward on her right shoulder, ducks her head under her chest, and presents her rump. A female in heat is scripted by mechanisms that encourage her to offer a male the part of her body that makes his motions more useful. Our Border Collie has never been in heat. We have never observed any coordination of these scripts; at no time has the mounting behavior of the Gordon Setter occurred when his playmate has experimented with “presenting” behavior.
Money and Ehrhardt note that juvenile male animals of many species—including man—will rehearse mounting behavior long before they are capable of producing sperm, even though they have never seen their elders in the act of intercourse. And juvenile female animals of many species—including man—will rehearse presenting behavior long before they are capable of maintaining a pregnancy, even though they have never seen their elders in the act of intercourse.
So the generative system ensures that we humans are divided into two groups on the basis of our body shape or form, that the organs which make us different are under the control of firmware programs capable of making them work in specifically sexual modes, and that these programs operate under the control of clocks that guarantee optimal function. Wherever these mechanisms utilize systems that are also capable of being used under conscious control, we can learn or decide to use them for our own purposes.
In this way the generative system resembles many other intrinsic systems. The organism will be prompted to eat by the hunger drive when certain physiological conditions are fulfilled, but it can decide to eat when it is not hungry. Without intending to do so, we experience the innate affects when they are triggered by stimuli for which we are prepared by firmware programs. But we are capable of having or imitating any emotion any time that we want.
So it is for sex. We learn to make use of the innate programs, to place under our conscious control the sexual behaviors that can also be run by firmware programs. Basic to adult sexual practice is some sort of interplay between the intrinsically scripted and the intentionally scripted forms of bodily activity; it is necessary to appreciate both to explain human sexuality.
Notice another realm of resemblance to the affect system: Tomkins has pointed out that the first observable intentional acts performed by the infant involve the autosimulation of behavior initially triggered by the drives and the affects. Just as soon as the infant begins to suck at breast or bottle, it is capable of making sucking motions on purpose—even when it is not hungry. Just as soon as the infant experiences its body being taken over by the affect programs, it begins to experiment with the intentional production of those same behaviors.
Here, in the generative system, are a series of behavioral patterns initially scripted by firmware programs under the control of internal clocks. Unlike the affect programs, which are available to the organism from birth, the subroutines of the generative system do not come on line until much later in development. Some of these subroutines utilize muscles that are normally under voluntary control, so it is easy for the organism to simulate intentionally any series of actions that had previously been only “automatic.” Even though mounting and presenting behavior can be set in motion and run by innately scripted programs, we humans take pride in the fact that we can perform these actions under our own control, at the time and place of our choosing, and with the partner we prefer above others. Even though ejaculation can be set in motion and run by innately scripted programs, we tend to take it over and make it intentional.
Already we have a great deal of information suggesting why sexuality is so profoundly linked to matters of shame and pride. Since the genetically determined characteristic of sexual dimorphism divides humans into two distinct shapes, and since our genital appearance determines so much of how we are seen and treated by those around us, a significant part of our identity is associated with gender. Shame and pride, the two most self-related emotions, must become involved with that part of self-definition that results from gender assignment. Furthermore, any pattern of activity that can be performed intentionally is capable of becoming associated with either pride or shame. This understanding must figure in any attempt to determine how shame and pride have become so deeply involved in sexual life.
True and important as this may be, it still falls far short of the mark. There is much more about sexuality and sexual arousal that connects them to the emotional life of humans. And this will be the subject of the next chapter.