A NEW THEORY OF SEXUALITY
Pause, for a moment, and consider again why it is so important that sexual reproduction be assisted by firmware programs and not left merely to the wish and whim of adult organisms. The generative system exists in its present, highly intrusive form in order that it handle one specific part of the evolutionary process. What we call the sex drive is a response to the increasing mobility of life forms.
No rooted organism has a sex drive. When pollen can be wafted from stamen to pistil by a breath of wind, or carried from one flower to another by bees, there is no need for the organism to force into consciousness the process of reproduction. The sex drive evolved to solve the problems created for life forms that are both sexually dimorphic and capable of leaving their moorings, as well as advanced enough to analyze their world or achieve conscious control of their behavior. The more advanced organism is able to pay attention to whatever garners its interest. Life forms with the greatest powers of cognition are the most likely to remain involved with whatever is the subject of their current interest. Only because man is the most conscious of organisms is it necessary that the sex drive evolve to intrude so powerfully into consciousness. With the evolution of consciousness came the need for the generative process to take it over.
Tomkins has suggested that consciousness itself evolved in tandem with our increasing mobility. Whereas it is possible for the homeostatic mechanisms of the body to be programmed for a great many possibilities, as life forms became more mobile they grew to encounter situations that could not be predicted. Thus, consciousness evolved as a way of allowing the organism to use its newly developed cognitive skills toward the solution of novel problems in living. With the appearance of these cognitive skills came an increase in the organism’s capacity to store and retrieve both the conditions for the once-novel problem and the solution achieved.
The pheromone secreted by the female gypsy moth will call to her any male gypsy moth of the same species. I have read that only one lone molecule of this marvelous substance is needed to affect all moths in a space measuring 50,000 cubic yards! For organisms as primitive as the gypsy moth, only the pheromone is needed to draw male to female for the purpose of sexual reproduction. The generative system is merely one of the many homeostatic systems when there is no need to access consciousness.
Whereas in the stickleback fish it is the male who initiates the dance that attracts to him the female, in the gypsy moth it is the female who must attract the male. Wherever the male and female elements can be separated by physical distance, they must be drawn together by the generative system. Only to the extent that it is difficult to distract the organism from its other pursuits will the generative system be required to use “nonsexual” bodily functions to help it take over behavior.
Thus, a bitch in heat will, by her pheromonal broadcast, cause the wailing and howling of male dogs over a radius of many blocks. The moth merely flies in the direction of the pheromone; the moth is unlikely either to “know” or to “care” that it is now on the path toward a sexual meeting. The more advanced central nervous system of the dog makes it far more capable of knowing or caring about its actions. It is the greater independence and freedom of the dog, the degree to which the dog is more free than the moth to choose its course of action, that makes it necessary for the pheromone to activate so many more systems. Yes, the pheromone does create a path along which the male travels toward the female; and yes, the pheromone “gets the attention” of the dog, distracts him from whatever he had been doing only a moment ago. But other systems cooperate to serve the generative function. Merely to resist the power of the pheromone activates the affect of distress, which brings into consciousness the constant pressure created by the sexual stimulus and makes it urgent, lending the urgency of distress affect to the urgency normally associated with the sexual drive.
I have defined the generative system as that which provides for the maintenance of the species through reproduction and suggested that the generative system has become increasingly intrusive as life forms have evolved into highly conscious beings capable of living as they intend rather than as they are urged by homeostatic mechanisms. It remains to demonstrate how the generative system enters into consciousness and by what means sexuality achieves the degree of urgency by which we know it.
All of the subroutines of the generative system mentioned so far have but scant influence on consciousness. Men have little awareness of the erections that take place during sleep, and, unless ovulation is accompanied by pain, women are normally unaware that an egg has left the ovary to begin its passage through the Fallopian tubes to the uterus. What does garner our attention is the complex group of waking experiences called sexual arousal. Like the affects and the other drives, it involves devices that can be run on “automatic pilot” when taken over by innate programs, but that can be controlled, modulated, or otherwise altered by training and skill.
One of the fallacies of adult life is the belief that sexual arousal exists primarily in the organs of intercourse, the penis and vagina. Prior to the work of Masters and Johnson there was only anecdotal evidence that arousal involved sites of action throughout the body. A novelist, like Andre Malraux, might describe a lover’s hope that “the pleasure of the senses would imprint [passion] on Valérie’s face,” and Valérie herself might note that “a familiar warmth seized her, mounted along her body to the tips of her breasts, to her lips, which she guessed by [his] look were imperceptibly swelling” (126). But we lacked a scientific explanation of these observations until the publication of Human Sexual Response.
Like the affect system, much of sexual arousal involves the circulatory system. First noticed and earliest studied was the penis, which contains three cylindrical bodies of erectile tissue—the paired corpora cavernosa, which flank the urethra, and the corpus spongiosum, which lies beneath it. Under the control of nerve impulses sent along the parasympathetic trunks, microscopic valves in the arterioles and veins of the penis alter blood flow so that these normally empty structures fill with blood and become rigid pontoons.
Here, as elsewhere in the body, the action of the parasympathetic nerves is opposed by the sympathetic group; nerve impulses sent along sympathetic trunks will cause rapid subsidence of the penile erection. Both, of course, are controlled by higher brain centers. (How interesting, how convenient for evolution that the sites of action for fear-terror involve the sympathetic nerves; fear is an intrinsic off-switch for sexual arousal.) Autonomic nerve flow affects other structures—some of what the male experiences as sexual tension is due to the contraction of specialized groups of muscles located throughout the urogenital system.
For the male, then, the local effect of sexual arousal involves vasocongestion and muscular tension. The penis, scrotum, and rectum are thus made infinitely more sensitive to touch. Sexual arousal does not create local sexual sensitivity—it merely amplifies it.
In the female, parasympathetic nerve flow also produces alterations of the microcirculation, but the effect is quite different. Here there are no pontoons to create their dramatic alteration in surface anatomy, but rather a vaginal area that, when suffused with blood under pressure higher than usual, begins to allow the transudation of a glistening, mucoid material that acts as a lubricant. Just as the penis may spring rapidly into full erection, the vagina is capable of responding to sexual excitement by becoming fully lubricated in a matter of seconds. Other pelvic structures are affected by sexual arousal, all of them involving a combination of muscular tension and vasocongestion.
Yet it is in the study of female sexuality that we become aware that these circulatory changes occur at sites of action all over the body. As noted by the novelist in the quotation above, female arousal also involves the skin of the entire upper part of the body—especially the breasts and face. For a man, it is the penis that calls to attention or confirms the degree of lust being experienced. For a woman, the changes in the vagina are noticed well after she has come to appreciate the sensual transformation of her lips and breasts, bodily structures made infinitely more sensitive when engorged with blood. Kissing is sexual, perhaps somewhat more so for women then for men, because it involves the receptors for this transformation.
All this, of course, is part of sexual dimorphism. Men and women are built differently and experience sexual arousal differently. Each of the organs or regions affected by sexual arousal has its own group of receptors that must be represented within the higher centers of the brain. To the extent that men and women differ in their anatomy, they will differ in their experience of sexual arousal. And, within any group of men and women, one will find a wide range of patterns of arousal. Our experience of sexual arousal involves such varied parts of our makeup as the sexual anatomy, the neocortical structures responsible for awareness, memory, and fantasy, and the affect system. It also seems likely that some portion of our emotional experience of this arousal is independent of the affect system, involving brain centers that evolved much earlier.
Any attempt to analyze the nature of sexual arousal brings one back to the question of the relation between firmware and software. I think that psychotherapists know more about this than anyone else, for, since the days when Freud first blazed the trail we follow, we have been trained to listen impartially to the world of adult sexuality. So intensely are humans affected by sexual excitement that, throughout life, we attempt to control and modulate the power of the sexual drive by a host of maneuvers that become an important part of both our individual personalities and our culture. The range of what we must consider normal is extraordinary.
I have interviewed women who began to masturbate to orgasm when five years old and who (when involved in a relationship they felt appropriate) enjoy intercourse several times a day. I have spoken at length with women who felt no urge to masturbate or to participate in intercourse until their early twenties, after which they entered a phase of adult sexuality indistinguishable from that of women whose sexual history had been quite different. All of these patterns of sexual activity are “normal.” On the other hand, I have worked in therapy with many women whose ability to enjoy their sexual nature had been impaired by early emotional experiences, but who assumed full control of their engines when therapy had been successful.
Similarly, I have spoken with men who evinced no interest in sexual activity until late adolescence, and others who felt they were deeply involved in sexual fantasy accompanied by masturbation from earliest childhood. One 30-year-old man of my acquaintance is happily capable of intercourse or masturbation to ejaculation three times a day, but, after a recent psychotherapy session which stimulated a group of intense erotic fantasies, saw his level of interest double. Other men his age tell me they find intercourse or masturbation similarly pleasurable, but at a frequency approaching once or twice in a month. And for men, just as for women, sexual function can be distorted by emotional illness.
Without citing the host of references that support my opinion, I suspect that each of us differs somewhat in our sexual makeup, that the sexual drive demands attention over a wide range of activity. Just as each of us must learn how to make do with the physical equipment given us by our genetic makeup (just as we vary, for instance, in our muscularity and our avidity for athletic play), we learn to accommodate to the type of sexual drive pattern given us by a similar set of biological scripts. As mature adults, we are capable of adjusting to the sexual needs of our partners, despite the fact that each of us has our own individual sexual rhythm set by some internal biological clock system.
It is pretty easy to identify the workings of the generative system and its sexual drive when you look at adults, just as it is rather easy to discuss adult emotion. Things change when you know about the innate affects and begin to trace the pathways along which these physiological mechanisms travel as we grow from infancy into adulthood. It is important that we find the earliest manifestations of the sexual drive so that we can figure out how it comes to be assembled with so many psychological matters.
Before Freud, it was taken for granted that humans did not become sexual until adolescence. Using the archaeologic model, digging backward into the past history of each patient who came to him, he found that most four- to six-year-old children go through a phase of sexual ideation that seemed to dominate that era of their development. There were three phenomena in need of explanation: (1) Why was there no evidence of sexual fantasy before this period? (2) Why, shortly after this critical period, was there a clear decrease in the importance of sexual ideation, at least until the beginning of adolescence? (3) Where did it come from? Why, suddenly, at age four, did a child become involved with its sexual nature?
Although now known to be incorrect, his answer has become a part of our culture itself, one of the building blocks of our current world-view. He suggested that we differ from other life forms in that our machine is infused with libido, a special force that makes us uniquely human. At birth, said Freud, libido guarantees that we explore with our mouths the world into which we have emerged; a year later the realm of our interest will be the region of the rectum; still later we become interested in our genitals as libido alters in focus. At four, the libido coalesces into a purely sexual force and makes us lust for a parent of the opposite gender. Over the next two years we go through a highly complex sequence of interpersonal interactions through which we decide that it is not yet time to be fully sexual and that we had better go about the job of being children before we try to be adults. At adolescence, when we are much better able to handle sexuality, libido gains in force and pushes us into adulthood. All this is libido theory.
Libido theory works only in terms of the three questions noted above. If we can find evidence that children have sexual ideation long before the oedipal phase of development, and that not all children renounce their sexuality immediately after it, the significance of the theory is reduced. Such evidence exists in profusion, and is quite important to our understanding of the entire generative system. None of it was available to Freud.
In a remarkable book published in 1985, the psychoanalytic psychologist Johanna Krout Tabin summarized her life work with patients who had come to her for help with the eating disorders called bulimia and anorexia nervosa. In her analytic treatment of these patients Tabin noted something perplexing: Significant parts of their inner life, the style and substance of their fantasies, could only be explained by the experience of sexual fantasy at an age well before that accepted in the theoretical system of her training. Indeed, her own archaeologic study suggested that they had been occupied by truly sexual feelings and ideas when only 18 or 24 months old!
Tabin was stuck with the kind of problem that afflicts only the honest and sober clinician. People with eating disorders, often declared nearly untreatable by other practitioners, seemed to get well when she worked with them. And central to her treatment was Tabin’s acceptance of infantile sexuality at an age that could not fit into the classical Freudian theory that was the core of her professional life. One does not take such matters lightly.
Her solution was highly individual. Had she decided to publish her own few cases, most of us would have ignored her work, saying that she simply misunderstood her patients and that she certainly did not understand libido theory. Instead, Tabin went to the library, where she found hundreds of case descriptions indicating the existence of sexual fantasy at the age important in her own patients. Some of these cases, like her own, involved work with adults. But the overwhelming majority of the published studies she reviewed were from child therapists—competent observers who reported exactly what these toddlers did, what they said, and how their parents responded to these clearly sexual interactions.
It now appears that toddlers can indeed feel sexual, and that they attempt to explain these sexual feelings in terms of the logic available to them at that age. Tabin suggests, with great good sense, that children try to explain everything that happens to them. When a toddler becomes sexually excited, that little person must try to explain these pesky feelings. It is during the toddler era that children stop identifying themselves as “a baby,” and begin to add gender to their identity. A two-year-old says, “I’m not a baby! I’m a boy!” or “I’m a girl!” Such a realization, says Tabin, may be the result of a process of discovery initiated to explain sexual arousal. Certainly much of our gender identity is formed as the result of identification and complementarity, of how babies are treated by the adults in their milieu. But we do not suddenly, in the toddler era, start telling our offspring that they are boys or girls. From the moment of their birth we have made this distinction in their presence.
It was only after I read Tabin’s work and began to correspond with her that I recognized how often I had ignored certain information confided by my patients. Often I had heard mothers describe what sounds like clearly sexual behavior on the part of their infants and toddlers and had not known how to understand it. Three mothers have described scenes in which a six- or seven-month-old boy, lying naked on the changing table, looked directly at her, grinned, and then developed an erection. Prior to this current interest in the nature of the sexual drive and its relation to the generative system, most of us would have assumed that the report was faulty, or that the mother was guilty of sexual stimulation of an infant, or that the infant’s erection bore no relation to the events she described.
My own conclusion is quite different. I believe that the sexual drive, like all the other drive functions, is operative from birth. Unlike the other drives, which are fully formed when the infant emerges from the birth canal, sexuality cannot take its adult form until the organism has reached full biological maturity. The sexual drive affects us in different ways at different times in development. Looking at the individual over time, one might say that the drive itself emerges in waves.
From the moment of birth every human is sexual. The erection that occurs during the excitement phase of dreaming sleep is but one subroutine of the program. Boys will have erections any time they are excited—all day long they go through periods of penile tumescence and relaxation, covered from birth by diapers. I suspect little girls go through an analogous process kept invisible by their anatomy. In each era of development, each child must try to explain the part of the sexual drive that is unfolding at that time; the explanation will be entirely dependent on that child’s understanding of itself and of its world.
We humans are the only life form that attempts to have sexual intercourse while facing each other. In all other organisms that are fitted up with a sexual drive, this powerful mechanism ensures that the fertile female will present her vagina to the aroused male as efficiently as possible. Sexual intercourse is accomplished rapidly, rear to front, and repeated as often as the male is able to perform. In the female, sexual arousal produces the need to be touched, to be entered; in the male, sexual arousal produces the need to be propulsive. I know of no life form other than the human that attempts to use procreation as a form of recreation.
Such might be the case for the human species had not we evolved both an affect system and the group of brain mechanisms allowing the formation of empathic relatedness. Recall (as we discussed in Chapter 18) the Greek division of love into the three categories of eros, filios, and agape. Mature erotic love involves both the circuitry for love as sketched earlier and the circuitry for sexuality being developed here. One of the peculiarities of homo sapiens is our attempt to merge the twin themes of a sexual drive system that pushes us together for the purpose of procreation and the affect-based system of empathic relatedness that pushes us together for the purpose of mutual nurturance. At every stage in child development we can see evidence of the process through which these themes are linked.
The oedipal phase of development is nothing more than a child’s attempt to explain its experience of lust in terms of what it has already learned about human relatedness. The lust is created by a drive program that has evolved to guarantee attention, to take over the consciousness of a mobile organism. Lust is experienced as the desire to touch and to be touched in special places, to find a partner with whom this touching can be accomplished. It produces a powerful need to make a special form of contact with others. The oedipal-era child must decide how to explain its sexual feelings, and it does this through the creation of a script or story designed to handle all aspects of its sexual experience.
This is yet another example of the interaction between hardware, firmware, and software. Earlier I mentioned that an adult who has taken too much of the nasal decongestant pseudoephedrine will complain of anxiety. The experience created by the presence of a chemical substance introduced from outside the body can only be explained as if it had been produced by an affect program. This is why such people say that they are anxious “about” something, or that they have been made nervous “by” some event or situation in their lives.
Any novel idea or experience will trigger the affect interest–excitement; I believe that the reason manic patients are so full of ideas is that a distortion of the normal balance of neurotransmitters has suffused the individual with what it defines as an affect—one that can only be explained as if it had been produced by a flow of ideas. And it is the experience of this excitement that leads a manic person to search with excitement for ideas and to behave as if it had been the ideas that had triggered the excitement.
Similarly, I believe that the only way we humans, whether infant, toddler, child, adolescent, or adult, can come to understand the effect on us of the sexual drive is to explain it within a system of fantasized and actual human relationships. The biological drive produces feelings that must be explained; we attempt to explain it as conscious intent rather than the effect of a prewritten firmware program. That these fantasized relationships will have been based on our life history of affective interaction is self-evident. Each wave of increase in the sexual drive comes to be understood in terms of our relational history. Each wave of sexual increase produces turmoil until it has been integrated into the self of the individual, after which we go on about the business of living with this new, upgraded self system.
I don’t know how the six-month-old boy understands the sort of sexual interaction described above. Each of the three mothers who described to me this scene reacted with mild amazement and embarrassment (“Why that little scamp!” “My son the sex maniac!” “OH! I was soooo embarrassed! I told him, ‘Hey! You cut that out!’ ”). Recently I discussed some of this material at a scholarly conference, where a Puerto Rican psychiatrist told me how such a scene would be handled in his culture: “Either the mother or father, whoever saw the erection, would smile and laugh, point right back at it with the index finger, even touch it, and say something happy like ‘Look at the little man!’ ” Where one culture reacts with shame to infantile sexuality, another responds with pride. At how many levels might we be able to trace such examples of cultural divergence in the modulation of sexual drive function?
Most likely Tabin is correct when she asks us to understand that toddlers must find explanations for their own experience of sexual arousal. The classical oedipal phase of development is, as Money and Ehrhardt have commented, only one of the rehearsals provided by what I now call the generative system. If neonatal arousal is the first wave of sexual drive function, toddler sexuality is the second, oedipal phase sexuality the third, and adolescence a fourth.
Recently a man reported that he had been called from his weekly poker game by the housekeeper, who had been alarmed by something that had happened to his 10-year-old son. While bathing, the boy had experienced profound swelling of the penis, which prevented him from urinating and frightened him enough to ask her help. Physicians were called. The domestic worker was African-American, and the doctor unaware that the child in her charge was Caucasian. The presumptive diagnosis of sickle cell crisis was relinquished only as more data came to the fore. Eventually it was determined that this was the young man’s first “real” erection—the moment that the fourth wave of sexual drive increase had chosen to assert its action.
There are lots of other such waves of increase, each with its own amplitude and frequency. It is not unusual for women in our culture to note a surge in sexual interest and sexual pleasure in their early thirties. Many women describe two periods of increased sexual arousal paralleling the menstrual cycle—one when they are most fertile and another immediately before menstruation. Money and Ehrhardt (1972) describe a number of studies that suggest specific dream and waking imagery accompanying each of these peaks of arousal—a wish to be pleasured passively during mid-cycle and an urge to be aggressively sexual in the premenstrual phase. Each of these recurring sequences of drive-mediated personal experience must be integrated into one’s self-concept.
It is characteristic of the sexual drive itself to increase in surges. Each surge, of course, provides a new form of self-experience, a new way the individual must come to understand himself or herself. For a while, this increase in sexuality is a disturbing alteration in the self we have known to date. Eventually, when we get used to each new level of sexuality, we enter into a period of relative calm. It is not that the sexual drive system calms down—it will remain relatively constant at the new level now achieved—but that we are no longer troubled by the alteration in self-experience and no longer disturbed by the scenarios we create to explain it.
Just as we now know that the drive causes arousal in children long before the classical oedipal period, we can understand that there is no such thing as a period of sexual latency following it. All that has happened is that the child has come to an acceptance of its sexual nature—one appropriate for its age and stage of development—and no longer experiences turmoil. Most children are full of sexual ideas and fantasies throughout the period Freud called “latency.” Such thoughts disturb the child much less then they did during the beginning of the oedipal phase. This is because they have been explained satisfactorily, placed within a relational scheme, and modulated by techniques analogous to those through which we learn to handle innate affect.
The big surge, of course, the one so huge that it often places human life at risk, is the wave of increase in sexual drive function that takes place during adolescence. For both sexes, the hormonal explosion of puberty brings with it a radical amplification of all activity, one that may be considered an analogue of the earlier-appearing sexually dimorphic rough-and-tumble behavior. Whoever one has become, whatever the self that has developed from the combination of factors operating until the moment of puberty, that “package” is what will now be turned on to its maximum.
Sexual arousal produces a need for the tissues involved to be touched. Male arousal focuses attention on the organs of intercourse; male imagery explains this arousal on the basis of fantasized experiences in which those organs figure prominently. Given the geometry of the male genital organs, which form a peninsula, the greatest percentage of stimulated tissue can be touched when the penis is entirely contained. This containment can be offered by a hand, a wish that can be achieved without the cooperation of another person. Insertion in the mouth, vagina, or rectum of a sexual partner will also produce the desired effect.
In boys, drive-based arousal is experienced as visual imagery, explicitly sexual scenes peopled by a cast of characters drawn from every realm of their experience. With the increasing sophistication born of exposure to the sexual scenes depicted in the literature, anecdotes, and visual aids available to him, a boy will grow into manhood with a library of sexual ideas and fantasies that he will try to live out with real partners.
His urge to do this derives not from any active seduction or suggestion planted by the women in his milieu, but from the physiological arousal produced by sexual drive programs operating out of awareness. Later in his experience, of course, he will be exposed to women in varying states of arousal, and their arousal will trigger, augment, or amplify his own. But initially, the theater of his imagination plays only the drama of his drives. Men learn to gratify through masturbation the needs created by arousal, to initiate and complete this process with a sense of urgency and dispatch. Male sexual theater tends toward fantasies of brief encounters in which the partner accepts his arousal with ease and offers speedy gratification.
In women, the vasocongestion and muscular tension associated with sexual arousal are experienced at sites scattered throughout the body. Female imagery must explain and satisfy the needs created by this pattern of arousal. Thus, women are likely to fantasize about men who kiss them on the lips and neck, who are unhurried in their approach, and whose arousal increases at a pace matching their own—in other words, men who understand, or behave in accordance with, the nature of female arousal. This pattern of arousal favors the emergence of romantic fantasy that differs in many respects from that created by men.
When this arousal has spread to the genital region, it produces a need to be touched there. In the absence of interfering negative affect, every region of aroused (engorged) tissue that it is touched will contribute to the pleasurable feeling we call gratification. It is, of course, true that an educated and sensitive sexual partner may, by hand and mouth work, touch an aroused woman in ways that are more precisely attuned to her moment-to-moment needs than can be achieved with any penis. Such sexual attention is the result of extensive training involving neocortical cognition and in no way programmed by firmware mechanisms. The geometry of the female sexual apparatus does, however, provide that a great surface area of tissue will be touched or stretched by vaginal penetration and penile excursion. Obedience to firmware, to drive-based instructions, leads to sexual intercourse.
Yet we humans do not grow up in the sort of “state of nature” that might predispose adults to obey such firmware programs with impunity. The decision to accept actual penetration is quite complex, involving recognition of a fully sexual self that may place a woman in emotional conflict for a variety of reasons.
One way for a woman to short-circuit the process of analysis necessary for full acceptance of intercourse is to fantasize about rape, which (in this specific form of imagery) involves penetration without the affects that accompany decision. The fantasy of rape is an excuse to permit intercourse in the context of massive sexual arousal that is complicated by a host of emotional issues; actual rape involves the penetration of a woman who is not only unaroused but who is in a state of terror precluding arousal.
This vast difference between male and female rape imagery serves to illustrate a gentler point: Sexual dimorphism produces two patterns of arousal that become widely divergent blueprints for the architecture of sexual relationships. No part of his own sexual growth and development prepares a boy for the sexual fantasy life of women, who are equally ignorant of the nature of male arousal and the fantasy life it encourages. Men and women must teach each other how to understand and accept the nature of their sexual systems. Our ability to develop healthy and fulfilling sexual relationships will depend largely on the history of our attempts at empathic relatedness. The tensions of this struggle produce the energy that powers much of the drama that infuses our lives; painters, writers, poets, dancers, and all the other creative people of each era translate these tensions into art.
THE RESONANCE OF AROUSAL
There is more that must be said about sexual arousal. It is peculiarly, marvelously capable of transmission from one person to another. Partly this is because of the affects with which it comes to be associated, but arousal can communicate without any accompanying affect. It is not unusual for a man to be informed by his penis that the woman with whom he is conversing is in a state of mild arousal. It is not unusual for a woman to feel in her breasts and face the mild stirrings of arousal when she is in the presence of an aroused male companion or to react with surprise when she recognizes an unexpected degree of vaginal wetness.
How, and why, does this occur? The questions are those I raised for the affect system. What is the mechanism through which we let others know about our arousal—the mode of data transmission—and what is the mechanism for its reception?
Most of the evidence points to three factors, all inherent to the biological nature of sexual arousal. For many of the less complicated life forms we can isolate a pheromone and show that it is responsible for the transmission and reception of information about arousal and availability. In the human, the tufts of pubic and axillary hair, known as “secondary sexual characteristics,” are thought to be involved in this process. The armpit and the genital region are covered by relatively small areas of skin known to contain scent glands; but the area available for the evaporation of pheromones is multiplied greatly when one takes into account the surface of the hairs themselves. Pheromonal transmission may be involved in human sexuality.
If pheromones are a significant part of the system through which others become involved in our own, personal arousal, it is interesting to speculate about the timing of pheromonal release. Are these scent-borne messenger molecules wafted into the air about us during the early phases of arousal, when we may have made no decision about availability? Or might this occur only late in the process, when we are deeply committed to our arousal and thus driven to need a partner? My intuition favors the latter view. Couples dancing in public seem involved only with each other, despite how easy it is for us as bystanders to see the degree of their sexual arousal. Although it is true that powerful social rules may be in force, rarely do others in their vicinity seem equally aroused. If mildly aroused humans were powerful sources of pheromones I would expect us to be a species in which group sex was common (either historically or in the present), rather than the rarity it seems to be.
The second factor, of course, and the one to which I have devoted the most attention so far, is local vasocongestion and muscular activity. Through most of our cultural history this particular set of bodily reactions was held as what Schneider called one of the “central privacies” of human life. Yet today, the half-lowered lids, slackened jaw, puffed-out lips, and thickened speech of arousal are the sexual icons of our civilization. We are bombarded by the information available in still photographs, from the tiny but mobile representations of people seen on television, from the data to be studied on the 30-foot-high images projected on our motion picture screens. Today, the display of sexual arousal is ubiquitous. Like the display of innate affect, the display of sexual arousal can be simulated either for the purpose of initiating the feeling in ourselves or in order to produce in the unwary other the contagious effect of true arousal.
And, just as for innate affect, there are two possible circuits for this contagion: On the one hand, we might imitate the facial display of the aroused other, thus triggering our own arousal by mechanisms similar to one of the circuits for empathy. It is my belief, however, that there is a supplemental path for this resonance that has evolved as part of the sexual drive system itself. The existence of such a built-in pathway for resonance would conform exactly to my basic theory for the sexual drive—something that provides a way for sexual arousal to guarantee communication. An optimally effective sexual drive would garner the attention (enter into the consciousness) of both the organism to be driven and of a host of possible partners. Facial display (and the other alterations in normal function produced by vasocongestion and muscular contraction) might suit some of these requirements.
But facial display is more a factor in female arousal than in male. More easily observed in men, but equally present in women, is a peculiar sort of agitation that I see as the third mode of biologically based sexual signaling. This agitation is one of the special qualities of the sexual drive mechanism.
Intrinsic to the concept of a drive system is the idea that each drive produces its own form of discontent, a discomfort that can be satisfied only at specific bodily sites. Think again of the intrinsic system that makes us hungry: We experience the annoyance called hunger as a desire to put food in the mouth. Should the body need specific foodstuffs, the drive mechanism is so complex, variable, and adaptable that it can make us crave whatever might satisfy that particular need. Other parts of the innate program for the drive guarantee that the ingestion of food will not only reduce the specific discomfort that triggered hunger, but also produce the sort of pleasure specific for that drive. This pleasure is independent of the affects with which the drive may be joined. Although it is affect that lends urgency to the drive, and affect that amplifies the pleasure that accompanies the reduction in the drive-based need, the particular form of pleasure experienced in that situation is specific to the drive.
The sexual drive, too, is a source of discomfort. It produces the specific sort of discomfort that is often likened to “an itch that wants to be scratched,” a need for the touch that relieves but then continues to stimulate toward further pleasure. Sexuality differs from other drive mechanisms in that the discomfort associated with it does not decrease in intensity during the process of satisfaction. Thirst is slaked long before imbibed water has been distributed to the tissues responsible for the message that triggered it. Even one who had been famished before beginning to eat will feel the beginnings of satiation long before the needed nutrients have arrived at the tissues in need of them. But sexual arousal makes us long for the touch that both relieves the need to be touched, gives pleasure specific for that need, and also produces an increase in the need to be touched. This is a very annoying drive.
When all the conditions for its satisfaction have been met, the annoyance subsides after the explosion we call an orgasm, which, as Tomkins has suggested, can best be understood as a powerfully amplified analogue of the pleasurable discomfort itself. Here, too, the difference between the sexual drive system of men and women becomes evident. Male arousal occurs rapidly and is focused in the genitals; stimulation of the affected tissues produces rapid relief of the discomfort in the form of an ejaculation. Female arousal occurs slowly, spreading over large sections of the body, and is increased at a rate so slow relative to that found in men that it is often almost inconceivable to men. Sexual dimorphism requires men and women to teach each other a great deal—the software of adult sexuality necessitates long periods of mutual training.
But it is the firmware of sexuality that produces sexual arousal, even though we learn to trigger the system for reasons unrelated to the biological need for procreation. I think that the annoyance of sexual arousal produces its own form of agitation, one that men and women recognize and learn to accept as a form of sexual signaling. And it seems likely that this agitation is as capable of achieving resonance as any other part of sexual display.
Were sexual arousal only a matter of annoyance and discomfort, there is little likelihood it would achieve such prominence in human experience. We come to know our sexual nature not just from the annoyance of the drive and the pleasure of its gratification, but also from the affects it triggers. From our own life experience we know that “normal” sexual arousal involves excitement and that orgasm is followed by the calm and contentment associated with the affect enjoyment–joy. Wherever there is intense positive affect we may be sure to find shame as its auxiliary; there is shame aplenty in normal sexuality.
Interest, enjoyment, and shame are but three of the nine innate affects. Their link to sexuality has been honored for centuries. Yet there is a tendency to overlook the fact that sexual arousal can be assembled with fear, distress, anger, surprise, dissmell, and disgust. Sex claims no affect as its specific domain.
I have defined the generative system as the hardware, firmware, and software responsible for the maintenance of the species through reproduction. It is a system that has evolved to arouse us, to engage us with each other for the purposes of procreation, to provide a womb for the fetus that develops as the result of the union of generative elements, and to nurture the infant after it emerges from the birth canal. In the next chapter we will discuss some of the ways the generative system becomes intertwined with affect, concentrating on the worlds of shame and pride.