"SWF seeks unemployed SWM grad student for hideaway weekends, intimate dinners, and cuddling. Must know how to read, and be able to converse without extensive use of 'you know' or 'wicked.'" This announcement (dated October 6, 1983) is one among many that use qualifying initials, but with one twist: "Must know how to read."-moreover, to be articulate. What over ten years ago was formulated innocently (hideaway, intimate dinner, cuddling) would today be expressed quite bluntly: "Looking for good sex." What does reading, and possibly writing, have to do with our emotional life, with our need and desire to love and be loved; that is, what does reading have to do with sex?
Long before Homo Sapiens ascertained itself, reproduction, and all it comprises in its natural and form, ensured survival. Do literacy, language, or sign systems affect this basic equation of life? Mating seasons and habits shed some light on the natural aspect. Colors, odors, mating calls, specific movements (dances, fights, body language) send sexual signals. Molecular biology places the distinction between hominids and chimpanzees at four million years ago. After all this time of freeing themselves from nature, even to the extent of self-constitution in the practical experience of artificial insemination, human beings still integrate color, odor, mating calls, and particular movements into the erotic. But they also integrate the experience of their self-constitution in language. Since the time hominids distinguished themselves, the sexuality of the species started differentiating itself from that of animals. For example, humans are permanently attractive, even after insemination, while animals attract each other only at moments favorable for reproduction. Along the timeline from the primitive being to our civilization, sex changed from being an experience in reproduction to being predominantly a form of pleasure in itself.
Instead of the immediacy of the sexual urge, projected through patterns subject to natural cycles, humans experience ever more mediated forms of sexual attraction and gratification, which are not necessarily associated with reproduction. An initial change occurred when humanized sexual drive turned into love, and became associated with its many emotions. The practical experience of language played an important part in extending sexual encounters from the exclusive realm of nature to the realm of culture. Here they acquired a life of their own through practical experiences characteristic of the syncretic phase of human practical experiences, mostly rituals. During the process of differentiating these experiences-constitution of myths, moral and ethical self-awareness, theater, dance, poetry-sexual encounters were subjected to various interpretations.
Beyond immediacy
The birth of languages and the establishment of sex codes, as primitive as they were, are related to the moment of agriculture, a juncture at which a certain autonomy of the species was reached. Rooted in the biological distinction between male and female, labor division increased the efficiency of human effort. Divisions were also established, some under the model of male domination, others under the model of female domination, pertinent to survival activities, and later on to incipient social life. Eventually, labor division consecrated the profession of prostitution, and thus the practice of satisfying natural urges in a context in which nature was culturized. The prototypical male-dominated structure of the sexual relation between man and woman marked the history of this relation more than female domination did. It introduced patterns of interaction and hierarchies today interpreted wholesale as harmful to the entire development of women.
What is probably less obvious is the relation among the many aspects of the pragmatic context in which such hierarchies were acknowledged. Moreover, we do not know enough about how these hierarchies were transformed into the underlying consciousness of the populations whose identities resulted from experiences corresponding to the pragmatic context. The implicit thesis of this book is that everything that made language and writing possible, and progressively necessary, led to a coherent framework of human practical experiences that are characterized by sequentiality, linearity, hierarchy, and centralism, and which literacy appropriated and transmits. Consequently, when the structural framework no longer effectively supports human self-constitution, the framework is modified. Other aspects of human existence, among them sexuality, reflect the modification.
Reading and writing have much to do with our emotional life. They remove it from the immediacy of drive, hope, pain, and disappointment and give it its own space: human striving, desire, pleasure. They are associated with an infinity of qualifiers, names, and phrases. With language, feelings are given a means for externalizing, and they are stabilized. Expectations diversify from there. Structural characteristics of the context that makes language necessary simultaneously mark the very object of the self- constitutive experience of loving and being loved. There are many literary and visual testimonies to how the erotic was constituted as a realm of its own: From Gilgamesh, the Song of Solomon, Kama Sutra, Ovid's Art of Love, through Canterbury Tales and the Decameron, to the erotic literature of 18th and 19th century Europe, down to the many current romance novels and handbooks on lovemaking. No matter which of them is examined, one inference becomes clear: the pragmatic context of the continuous human self-constitution effects changes in the way people are attracted to each other. Love and integration of sexual experiences, in the manifold of acts through which hominids move from the self-perpetuation drive to new levels of expectation and new intensities of their relations, is also pragmatically conditioned.
Writing, as a practical experience of human self-constitution, is conducive to relations between male and female that are different from random or selective mating. It is bound to continue along a time sequence severed from the natural cycle of mating, reshaped into the marriage contract and the family alliance. Literacy, as a particular practical experience of language, regulates the sexual, as it regulates, in a variety of forms, all other aspects of human interaction. In the literate erotic experience, expectations pertinent to the pragmatics of a society in search of alternative means of survival evolve into norms. The inherited experience of female-male relations, affected through the experience of rituals, myths, and religion, is condensed in literacy. Encoding hierarchy, some languages place women in a secondary position. There is almost no language in which this does not happen. "Many men and women" is in Arabic ("rijaalan kafiiran wa-nisaa'aa") literally "men many women." In Japan, women speak a Japanese reserved to their sex alone. In the English wedding ceremony, the woman had to repeat that she would "love, honor, and obey" the husband. To this day, Orthodox Jewish men give thanks to God that He did "not make me a woman."
With the demise of literacy, the sexual experience gets divorced from procreation. Statistics of survival in the past world of limited available resources, of natural catastrophes, of disease, etc., cease to play any role in the illiterate sex encounters. Sexuality becomes a diversified human experience, subject to divisions, mediations, and definitely to the influence of the general dynamics of the world today. As markets become part of the global economy, so does sexuality, in the sense that it allows for experiences which, in limited communities and within prescribed forms of ceremony (religious, especially), were simply not possible. From the earliest testimony regarding sexual awareness up to the present, everything one can imagine in respect to sex has been tried. So often placed under the veil of secrecy and mystery, sex is no less frequently and vividly, to say the least, depicted. Yet a rhetorical question deserves to be raised: Does anyone know everything about sex?
The land of sexual ubiquity