Prudes, Debauched or Both?
Here’s the rub, and I mean Shakespeare’s version rather than the frottage kind—let’s look at it as the paradox of arousal. We are designed, according to evolution, primarily for the purpose of getting our genes into the next generation. Not much nuance about that. We’re here to breed. And the twist is that the twittering of society and religion has turned this drive into a thing of shame, giggling, judgement, or all three. If I was to disclose the percentage of the people I work with who have torturous issues around sex it would probably get a big old chorus of tutting. And here we go, swinging back to an earlier posting about self-stigma because the tutting really is a self-commentary.
If our most intimate moment of strange arousal was made public most of us would run for cover, blushing all the way. Your colleague at the desk across the way might find it hard to walk past the yoghurt section in the supermarket because the creamy texture has the ability to arouse her every time, very visibly. Would you send her different internal memos if you knew that? Your favourite barista, who has such a light hand on the frother, might fantasise about ejaculating into a frozen chicken, but does it mean that he is any less good as a barista? Would you find it harder to engage him in your daily chit-chat as you order if you knew that? The thing is that most people would, simply because it’s easier to make judgements about others than to have to admit to our own faintly bizarre moments of arousal.
Masturbation is the one that so many people get stuck on, particularly around anxiety and depression. Excessive masturbation is common for people who are struggling with general or major anxiety problems. It is a stress release, but it has the familiar result of diminishing returns. The calming endorphin rush of orgasm decreases with over-stimulation, as in too much masturbation. For men it often results in premature ejaculation, in women a longer lead-time to orgasm. If you stick those two together you get two frustrated people, and sexual frustration has the viral ability to infect every other area of our lives. Almost every man I have worked with, and many women too, have at some point asked ‘How much is too much?’ There is no particularly useful answer. The usual clinical response is two times a week is fine, to keep everything healthy, functioning and not hyper-aroused. But everyone has different sex drives so that is simply a median point of reference.
And here’s the way of looking at it that a lot of people with anxieties around sexual habits seem to find helpful. It is to separate our sexual life from the rest of our life. The primal motivation means that, in a state of arousal we think and do things that we would be pretty embarrassed by when not aroused. Here is the most common one—a lot of people use streams of soft- porn, or even not-so-soft porn chat when they are turned on, as if arousal allows them a release from the social strictures that perhaps they find limiting in daily life. Would that same person use that flood of flesh-slapping vocabulary at the breakfast table, or in a board meeting—of course not. But you can bet your favourite porn clip that when you see people flushing for apparently for no reason, somewhere such as in the midst of a board and boring meeting, or on the bus, it is quite often because they are getting a flashback to a previous moment of heightened, erotic arousal when all their guards were down and the primal drive was running the show.
Who we are in our sexual inner world is ours alone. It needs to be protected by the understanding that we are being driven by the tsunamis of nature and evolution. Isn’t the point to let those we love, and make love with, into this world on the basis of consent, trust, and mutual respect, and in the understanding that this part of us links back directly to the very basis of our being, and survival?
This does not give us licence to be sexually incontinent. If our inner life of arousal is ours alone, this means private, and not something that spills out, possibly hurting those around us, or indeed ourselves. Who we are when we are aroused, and who we are when we are not, are two parts of our identity that should be able to co-exist in a state of mutual respect. This is what we often refer to as a healthy sex life or, perhaps to clarify, it is the understanding that a word like masturbation might embarrass us a bit when heard in the middle of a working day, but that it can have a very different charge when we are aroused. We are both of these things, the embarrassment and the erotic, the one complimenting the other.