Shy Thoughts

I've been feeling private about my private life lately, which seems reasonable. Thus, what follows concerns sex mostly in the abstract. Even that feels like a lot.

What I have to say is that there are things we don't understand. The world is built the way it's built, regardless of our delusions around being able to master it, if only conceptually.

Now I will leave you to read it, and go to yoga.

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I remember vividly the brief exchange that gave me the first clue about the power of sex.

I was six years old, and the kids at school were giving me the idea that “sex” was very important and naughty. I lived on a sheep farm where we recorded the gender of baby lambs on file cards: where it said “sex” you wrote either M for male or F for female. That was hardly worthy of fuss.

So I asked my mother what sex was. Silence fell. Her face looked a little funny.

“There are two sexes, male and female,” she said. No surprise, but I sensed I was onto something. Over the months that followed, I kept asking the question, mostly to see her squirm. Eventually, she confessed that sex had to do with animals breeding. But where was the juice in that? And why would my classmates care what our ram was up to?

Of course, other answers came in time: sex is what mommies and daddies do; sex is how babies are made; sex is something you must avoid at all costs. The anxiety became more explicit as the years passed, and the funny look remained. For years I imagined this was a kind of bashfulness, some desire to avoid sullying the innocence of a little child whose naiveté was already slipping away by slow increments.

Only recently did it strike me: Nobody has a good answer to that question. What is sex? It may be what mommies and daddies do, but do they understand what they do? Can they say why?

The experience of sexuality, of life as a sexual being, can drive our entire life. The urge to couple, to reproduce, to have someone, to just get off now, careens a stable life into chaos; it throws us off course into dark territory. Chasing the thrill of sex, the mighty are laid low; finding the thrill, the humble imagine themselves to be king or queen; hoping for love we are depleted and derailed; finding it, we feel glorious. Whatever sex is, defies simple understanding. Like thirst and hunger, its pull is something we share with insects and beasts. How does a polar bear explain sex? Or a wasp? How could our knowing be any more complete? We do not turn that wheel; we are turned by it.

Sexual desire is so close-in that we fail to recognize it. The primal is both commonplace and commodified. From our inexplicable needs, a culture based on titillation and gratification rolls forth.

So when my child asks, “Mama, what’s ‘sex’?” I’ll say, “Sex is the thing that drives adults mad, and makes them do things they never thought they’d do. Be glad that you are a child now, with a child’s hormones and a child’s concerns. Because when you start to grow up, you enter a mysterious world, and come unwittingly into a power that is beautiful and dangerous, inspiring and devastating, depending on how you use it.” I don’t expect her to understand. After all, none of the mommies and daddies do either.