Taking another look at human sexuality. (Sexualities).

Global Context

Scientific and technological advances as well as events that attract the attention of international media are all interesting indicators for understanding current aspects of sexuality. Within this context, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky's grotesque tragicomedy is quite revealing. This story had a tremendous cost, not only in terms of the expenditures involved in its orchestration but also for the value of the broadcasting time dedicated to it. The 1998 event exemplifies how sex lives are intermixed with matters of State, still serving as a context for the (re)creation of Troy. (1) It also demonstrates how the prevailing model of intimacy continues to be defined by monogamy and intercourse.

Taken as evidence, the famous semenstained dress became a banner for sexual primitiveness and social insanity at the end of the century. Even though Hillary Clinton responded with good sense to the incident, her measured reaction failed to remedy this humiliating global voyeurism.

The manifold actions and reactions that the scandal provoked--including the president's public confession, his plea for forgiveness, and the possibility of presidential impeachment in perhaps the world's most powerful country--demonstrate the perverse distortion with which human sexuality continues to be seen. On the other hand, the incident opened debates about erotic experiences that were, up to then, publicly unmentionable, such as fellatio and olfactory and oral stimulation. Above all, the crisis demonstrated the weakness of the right to intimacy in our society.

I take the Clinton-Lewinsky example because it documents the need to continue fighting for sexual rights. There are still significant social, government and religious sectors that believe in protecting people from their own sources of pleasure. Very often, they manage to establish censorship and, even worse, self-censorship, a dangerous and debilitating internal veto.

However, we have made some progress during the "post-chastity belt" era, and some of these advances have caused quite a commotion, among them Viagra (sildenafill citrate), which arrived to satisfy not the emotional and romantic needs of woman and couples but the identity problems and complexes of many men. It must be recognized that the impact of Viagra sales revealed a dysfunction of previously unknown dimensions. From March 27 to August 7, 1998, "more than 3.8 million prescriptions for more than 2.5 million men were written. This totals more than 31 million doses [of Viagra]." (2)

The development of Viagra marks progress over other treatments and surgeries for erectile dysfunction. However, that the event is being recorded as one of the past century's major discoveries (apparently, birth control pills have been forgotten) reveals how sexuality continues to be associated with the male erection. This association prevents the erotic from flourishing and demonstrates that the supposed contributions to sexual knowledge remain centered upon biology and intercourse. Despite the advance, there is still--in the year 2000--a perverse norm for many women in which they must have intercourse without desire and cannot have sexual relationships without intercourse. Linked to the narrow, phallocentric vision of sex, these norms ignore women's emotions.

Technological advances in reprogenetics also have made important impacts on sexuality. (3) This area is increasingly separating reproduction from intercourse and bringing to light men's minor role in reproduction. The male contribution is almost unnecessary because no intercourse or conception--that is, no union of gametes--occurs in the process of cloning. With the birth of Dolly the sheep in 1997, the future of the human species made a quantum leap. Ectogenesis--development outside the female body--remains a possibility to be investigated. The philosophical meanings that arise from these reprogenetic advances affect not only how life is perceived but also how sexual life in particular is viewed as it loses its reproductive function.

How far we have come from the time when the missionary position substituted other positions for copulation! According to Gubern, frontal intercourse is a significant innovation that dates back at least 300,000 years, as judged by the pelvis of Homo Heidelbergensis found in Atapuerca in May 1999. (4) An even longer road has been traveled from intercourse to the diverse range of non-sexual reproductive technology that continues to multiply each day. As striking as it may seem, this topic is intimately linked to the sexual practices of a vast majority of heterosexual women.

We are witnessing the final days of sexuality's reproductive and recreational functions rooted in intercourse. The first may possibly disappear in coming centuries due to repro-genetics and cloning. The second may disappear due to the lack of enthusiasm intercourse arouses in heterosexual women since penetration is not the key to sexual pleasure. In other words, the traditional preconceptions of sexuality are faltering, and we must begin to influence the necessary adaptive changes by trusting the guidance of our desires and using our imagination.

It is clear that the advances in reproduction and the knowledge of physiological reactions have not been accompanied by parallel advances in our capacity to feel, nor in our self-determination and eroticism. Even modern sensors that detect organic reactions and measure the intensity of emotions are far from being able to register emotional, symbolic and existential meanings, the private coin of the individual. This is because, in human evolution, psycho-emotional changes trail behind more important aspects of technology and politics. In other words, advances in sexual development are sparse and unequal. However, we also need to recognize the ability of young people and many women (especially feminists) to break with imposed norms.

Subversive Before, Not Any More

Eighteen years ago, when I first proposed women's inalienable sexual rights at the first Latin American Congress of FLASSES in Paraguay 1982,s the reaction was surprise and even concern. However, my proposals were generally well received, unlike the negative response I had received in Columbia some time earlier when I appeared on national television. (6) However, today it is no longer subversive to speak about sexual rights, it is a regular topic in the reports and conferences of international organizations. Nonetheless, conceptual advances have not broken down the social and cellular barriers that prevent us from improving the private lives of many women.

Young people today initiate their sexual lives earlier than before. The concept of virginity, valued decades ago, is now only an anecdote. Many women demand improved sexual encounters; it is accepted that pleasure transcends all ages and that the once-pervasive influence of "vaticanism" on the individual is diminishing. But regardless of these gains, the models we have internalized in relation to formal partnerships, profound love, the separation of sexual closeness from friendships, monogamy, the nuclear family, and other, similar aspects continue unchanged. One could say that the painting has been removed but not the frame of sexuality.

New information, changes in customs and the elimination of norms have not suppressed these models and thus have failed to refine feelings or erotic gains. Both of these are linked to the idea of learning to listen to your skin and interpreting its paths. This development of the erotic implies renovating energies in ways that differ from the cult of the orgasm and which lead to higher levels of sensual consciousness. However, this growth has yet to be understood as a necessity. The consciousness of our sexual rights must be accompanied by an understanding of eroticism as a responsibility.

Sexual enrichment is achieved through successive pleasurable experiences because direct erotic encounters are the best way to improve one's capacity for sexual fulfillment. Emotions give meaning to these experiences. Thus, the route to eroticism is made up of accumulated processes or derivative desires that break away from pleasurable feelings found by being conscious of their value. In other words, pleasurable experiences expand and evolve towards other experiences through a perceptual fine-tuning, that is, through an increased sensory awareness and emotional sensitivity.

As a species, we need more years of erotic evolution to take advantage of the unimagined potential inherent in our human condition. Therefore, we must continue reinventing intimacy, attempting to grasp the meanings we give to feelings and adopting new worldviews that incorporate the erotic. We must accept joyfully our mythical expulsion from Paradise and our arrival to the human realm, with its transcendental impulse of sexuality that we have used so poorly.

A world of people without sexual desire does not seem particularly interesting because our sexuality is one of the elements that most makes us human, helping us define ourselves as human beings at the moment of evolution in which we live. The erotic and its meanings have inscribed themselves on our very skin. The body has a sensory intelligence that awakens and expands with pleasure's arousing--and subsequently soothing--effects.

The topic of the erotic is as confusing as that of sexuality. The erotic can be viewed as a route for personal growth with profound explosions at the level of consciousness. However, the simplistic and consumerist focus associates it with anatomies fixed front and back by plastic surgery that commercializes the female silhouette, copying it according to fashion stereotypes. Whom does this arouse?

Sexual rights should go hand in hand with sexual obligations, such as taking advantage of our own capacity for pleasure: masturbation should be promoted as a sensory experience with relaxing benefits. Chastity and culturally-canonized sexual shame should be banished from our memories. We should also cease to engage in sexual relations against our wishes, and we must stop the self-observation and self-criticism that become obstacles for orgasmic pleasure. According to Masters, Johnson and Kolodny, making sex a job (and transforming it into an activity geared towards a goal, defined beforehand by criteria of success and failure) almost always condemns it to be something without pleasure, spontaneity or satisfaction. (7)

We have a fundamental responsibility to try to make our lives as happy as possible because, "if we lack the courage to live a certain way, even though we could if we chose, can we then say we are free to live in that way, that is, that we are able to do so?" (8) Each person's sexual history is full of decisions and rejections, fantasies and deceptions, emotions and events of varying intensity through which our intimate lives must be permanently reconstructed, driving away the fear of bodily intimacy as we touch and hug each other. We need to join the awareness of our rights with sensual awareness and redeem the intimate relationship of the couple.

Despite the intense persecution of women's sexual liberty in almost all cultures, this repression has caused less damage and alienation compared to men, for whom the emotional mutilation has been more severe. The reconstruction of feelings and emotions is very difficult. It is undeniable that this distortion unintentionally has favored relations and understanding between people of the same sex, and as a result, women are more predisposed to obtain pleasure from lesbian relations.

Women's wide range of emotions and expressive ability identifies them as having preserved the powers and knowledge of caresses and embraces and the ability to dive into the myth of love, to deepen our emotions and re-dimension ourselves through our fantasies of sexual intimacy. In the world of the imagination, we have an endless source of visualizations that enhance our encounters. This gift is less harmful than its absence, even though it makes us emotionally weaker when we are confronted with the bitter chill of rejection--which we tolerate through our ability to reinterpret it.

In the end, it is within the emotional world that we find the creativity needed for sexual pleasure and the space to continue creating new types of relationships, so distant from permanent and exclusive monogamy, which is one of our culture's greatest errors. It may have been favorable at one time, but today--without denying the exceptions--monogamy makes no sense. Knowing only one man or woman intimately during a 70- or 80-year life-span is a useless deprivation, even if it is imposed by desire.

All the theories, messages and formulas that tell people what they should do to maintain a harmonious, orgasmic and interesting relationship for their entire lives are little more than garbage because it is impossible to freeze emotions and moments in the changing life process. Nonetheless, as malleable beings, we easily confuse our perceptions and emotions. If we do perceive them, we may identify their origins incorrectly. For example, sometimes we choose to indentify our partner's clumsy caress as the origin of pleasing sensations that, in fact, originate in us through our conscious or unconscious disposition and willingness.

It is true that the intensity of desire and sexual excitement gradually disappears over years of living together, and the intimate lives of couples, especially heterosexual couples, ends up being very poor. It is as if home life and routine generate antibodies against the erotic and destroy the exciting magic of intimacy, even though it can strengthen the bonds of friendship, affection, devotion and dependency. Yet, why do we talk so little about this?

This perspective may seem even more discouraging because the computer age is opening the home environment to work, thus expanding the intimacy of those who live together. With computers and the Internet, couples spend more time at home, share more time together and, unavoidably, the domestication of their bonds, communication and dislike grows. Relaxation and free time will be disrupted if the home also becomes the virtual office, which indeed it has been for the majority of women in the world. Having more time and intimacy at home does not make one's sex life easier, improved or healthier if the paradigms of the couple and the expectations about intimacy do not change.

With information technology, the apparatus, the media and the network are the new elements in flirting and seduction, not language, images or fantasies. Besides making friends and initiating some type of relationship, the computer screen cannot substitute the thrill of intimacy with another body, the warmth of contact, the intermingled scent and flavor of skin. The true source of pleasure is still a well-used bed and not cyberspace. An image, text, sensor or electric current hardly replaces the magic and fusion that comes from loving and exciting desire. However, at least the Internet has eliminated the clumsy secrets and lies with which adults deal with children's sexuality.

Without a doubt, sharing your life in friendship with a partner, regardless of their gender, sharing life's lessons and pains, as well as the difficulties that society has placed upon everyday life, is a wonderful achievement, very different from simply living together and staying together for fear of separation or because of a prejudice against being alone. Learning to live as a couple or in a group, regardless of sexual orientation, is an art alien to sexual exclusivity and other prejudices, even those which still protect us from incest between adults, which few challenge in the same way as the libertarian Anais Nin.

A Possible Context

Entering the age of post-intercourse erotic sexuality has to do with deactivating male control and male power in bed. We need to break down the paradigms of traditional relationships and strengthen romantic sexual energies that are neither invasive nor based on bonds that restrict our creativity in living. This emotional force makes us lose ourselves in our own emotions; it is similar to the tantric experiences that stimulate the vital flow of energy. This new erotic age means experiencing our sexuality as entertainment, recreation, closeness, interest, companionship, friendship and communication, enjoying it with spontaneity and without the culturally-proscribed importance and hindrances, which are responsible for sexology's long chapters on dysfunction, regardless of sexual orientation.

This new vision has to do with preventing sexual desire from being tamed or expectations from being made homogeneous. This can only lead to failure given the endless variety of inhabitants on the earth. When difference is the norm, rhythms and experiences also vary. We must reinvent another context in order to explore unimagined aspects of life and affection through sexuality, about which we have so many basic questions. Are we phylogenetically programmed for pleasure?

What priority does the search for the erotic have in women's lives today? It seems that it is not recognized as an element of human well-being because of the fear of pleasure. The erotic continues to be seen in a reductionist form. Sexuality is presented as having the goal of "releasing tensions" and is still recognized with popular expressions such as "he always goes for what he likes," a common complaint among heterosexual women. As a result, each of us has the responsibility of rescuing our rather reckless sexual selves from the complex networks and inadequate rules on sexual attraction and love.

The so-called Sexual Revolution is not over; we are still in it and should promote it. To talk of the Post-Sexual Revolution means we no longer deal with the social, cultural, ideological and political importance that today defines the Sexual Revolution. Let people assume their sexuality and discover the erotic within them, enjoy it and develop it through their experiences. Let everyone joyfully experience their sexual orientation and the multiple forms of encounters that have yet to be known.

We must redeem sexuality from the consumerist trap that boxes up and sells pleasure packages through objects (dolls with orifices, vibrators, etc.), tolerated violence (sadomasochistic pornography industry), stereotyped scripts (various forms of the communications media), worldwide trade networks (sexual exploitation, traffic of women and children), and erratic icons (surgically-altered bodies). We must break the socialization of so many perverse inequities.

The Post-Sexual Revolution would mean that heterosexual women could end relationships that endanger their health and lives. It would mean putting an end to the high-risk behaviors which have led to the growing rates of HIV transmission. It would mean refusing, without any extenuating circumstances, intercourse that is not pleasurable, which is also the means of transmission for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). It would mean learning to love without the primitive impulse and reaction of wanting to have children. It would mean pregnancy only when motherhood is safe and desired. After all, freedom to live out oppressive models is nothing more than alienation.

Everything that strengthens individual liberty is terrifying. We must accept this because we have a human responsibility to continue the struggle through persistent political action until sexual and reproductive rights are validated as a new generation of human rights. In private, our duty is to not waste the possibilities of love, happiness and erotic learning. We depend on them in many ways, not simply for our well-being, but for the future of humanity.

Sexual and Reproductive Rights The Most Human of All Rights

1. The right to environmental, educational, nutritional, emotional and health conditions appropriate for the development of human life.

2. The right to the autonomous exercise of sexuality, to enjoy sexuality with or without a final goal of penetration, according to one's own preferences and with the legal protection of these desires.

3. The right to recreational, pleasurable sexuality independent from reproduction. The right to choose and use contraceptive methods of little or no cost, with up-to-date information, professional follow-up and the accountability of those who prescribe them.

4. The right to know, respect and love one's body and genitals.

5. The right to love, sensuality and eroticism. The right to seek out emotional and sexual relationships.

6. The right to orgasm and the right to be free within intimacy.

7. The right to a sexual relationship free from any from of violence, abuse or harassment and regardless of one's age, marital status or type of family.

8. The right to freely decide if and when to become a mother, to experience motherhood as a one's own choice and not by obligation.

9. The right of women and men to share the responsibilities of child-rearing as equals, creatively constructing their own identities beyond traditional gender roles.

10. The right to timely, comprehensive sexual education that is secular, gradual, scientific and that includes a gender perspective.

11. The right to free, quality healthcare services that facilitate the comprehensive care of pregnancy, childbirth, post-partum and childrearing, supported by the appropriate legislation.

12. The right to adopt children and the right to comprehensive, accessible and reasonable fertility treatments.

13. The right to refuse to cooperate with research on our reproductive function, the right to receive understandable information on the repercussions of reproductive technologies, which should be ethically regulated.

14.The right to participate as citizens and as NGOs in the formulation and implementation of policies and programs on population and development.

18. The right to abstain from sexual activity.

Notes

(1.) In mythology, the kidnapping of Helena, the most beautiful of all women, by the Trojan Paris, caused the Trojan War.

(2.) Leonard S. Marks, et al., 1999, p. 19.

(3.) Concept used by Lee M. Silver to unite biological and genetic reproduction.

(4.) R. Gubern 2000, p. 166.

(5.) Federacion Latinoamericana de Sociedades de Sexologia y Educacion Sexual (Latin American Federation of Sex Education and Sexology Associations).

(6.) A pioneer program called "Sex on Screen" by the journalist Elkin Mesa.

(7.) Masters, Johnson and Kolodny, 1996, p. 97

(8.) Nussbaum and Sen, 1998, p. 58.

Bibliography

Huxley, Aldous (1981). Un Mundo Feliz. Mexico: Editores Mexicanos Unidos.

Gubern, Roman (2000). El Eros Electronico. Spain: Grupo Santillana de Ediciones.

Marks, Leonard S., Catherine Duda, Frederick J. Dorey, Maria Luz Macairan and Bryan Santos (1999). "Tratamiento de la Disfuncion Erectil con Sildenafil." In Urology 53 (1), Elsevier Science, Inc.

Silver, Lee M. (1998). Vuelta al Eden. Spain: Taurus.

Masters, William, Virginia Johnson and Robert Kolodny, (1996). Eros. Los Mundos de la Sexualidad. Spain: Grijalbo.

Nussbaum, Matha C. and Amartya Sen, eds. (1998). La Calidad de Vida. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica.

The author, a Colombian psychologist, has written several books on sexuality and sexual and reproductive rights. She also has been Executive Director of SI Mujer in Cali for many years.