Borges, in his own way, would have probably mapped the sexual realm: Freud aside, to know everything about sex would require that one be everyone who ever lived, lives, and eventually will live. Such a Borgesian map is indeed detailed but leads no further than ourselves. Connect all sex-related matter that is on the Internet today- from on-line striptease and copulation to legitimate sex education and the passionate defense of love-and you will still not have more than a partial image of sexuality. When one considers all the books, videotapes, songs, radio and television talk-shows, private discussions and public sermons, the subject of sex would still not be exhausted. If sex were an individual matter-which it is, to a large extent-how could we meaningfully approach the subject without the risk of making it a personal confession, or worse, a pretentious discourse about something any author would unavoidably know only through the many and powerful filters of his or her culture? But maybe sex is less private than we, based on prejudice, ignorance, or discretion, assume.
Ritualized sex was a public event, sometimes culminating in orgies. It took a lot of taming, or acculturation, for sex to become an intimate affair. Myths acknowledged sexual habits and propagated rules coherent within the pragmatic framework of their expression. Like myths, many religions described acceptable and unacceptable behavior, inspired by the need to maintain the integrity of the community and to serve its goals of survival through lineage and proprietary rights, especially when ales began to dominate in society. Art, science, and business appropriated sex as a subject of inquiry, or as a lucrative activity. Sex is a driving force for individuals and communities, an inescapable component of any experience, no matter how remote from sex.
Sexual ubiquity and the parallel world of self-awareness, embodied in forms of expression, communication, and signification different from the actual sexual act, are connected in very subtle ways. Once sexual experiences are appropriated by culture, they become themselves a sign system, a symbolic domain, a language. Each sexual encounter, or each unfulfilled intention, is but a phrase in this language written in the alphabet of gestures, odors, colors, smells, body movement, and rhythm.
We are the sexual sign: first, in its indexical condition-a definite mark left, a genetic fingerprint testifying to our deepest secrets encoded in our genetic endowment; second, in iconicity, that is, in all the imitations of others as they constitute their identity in the experience of sexuality. As many scholars have hastened to point out, we are also the sign in its symbolism. Indeed, phallic and vulvar symbols populate every sphere of human expression (and obsession). Nevertheless, our own self-constitution in the sexual act confirms a double identity of the human species: nature, involved in the struggle for survival, where the sheer power of numbers and strategies for coping with everything destructive make for continuous selection (Darwin's law of natural selection); and culture, in which humans pursue a path of progressive self-definition, many times in conflict with the natural condition, or what Freud and his followers defined as the psychological dimension. The two are related, and under specific circumstances one dominates the other. In my opinion, Peirce's encompassing notion that the sign is the person who interprets it integrates the two levels.
In the pragmatic framework, experiences of self-constitution result from the projection of natural characteristics in the activity performed, as well as from the awareness of the goals pursued, means incorporated, and meanings shared. Does the pragmatic perspective negate explanations originating from other, relatively limited, perspectives? Probably not. An example is furnished by the theories explaining sexuality from the viewpoint of the conflict between sex (libido) and self-preservation (ego) instincts, later substituted by the conflict between life instincts (Eros) and the death instinct (Thanatos, self-destruction). Such theories introduce a language layer into a subject which, although acknowledged, was simply not discussed, except in religious terms (mainly as prohibitions), or in poetry. As with any other dualistic representation, such theories also end in speculation, opposing the experience to the scheme adopted. The scheme functions in extreme cases, which psychoanalysis dealt with, but explains sexual normalcy-if such a thing can be defined, or even exists-to a lesser extent, and inconsistently. The labels remain unchanged-Eros, Logos, Thanatos-while the world undergoes drastic alterations. Some of these alterations affect the very nature of the sexual experience as human beings unfold under new pragmatic circumstances, some of extreme alienation.
The literate invention of the woman
The case I am trying to make is for the acknowledgment of the conflict between a new state of affairs in the world and our perspectives, limited or not by the literate model of sexuality. The current situation recalls the world before literacy, before the expectation of homogeneity, and before the attempt to derive order and complexity through linear progression. The atom of that sexual world was the genderless human being, a generic existence not yet defined by sexual differentiation. The male-female distinction came as a surprise-the realization of seeing the same and its negative, as in the case of a stone and the hole that remains after it is unearthed. Some read the genderless world as androcentric, because the generic human being it affirmed had a rather masculine bent. The significance of whatever such a genderless model embodied needs to be established in the pragmatic realm: how does difference result from same, if this same is an archetypal body with characteristics celebrated copiously over time? Painting, medical illustration, and diagrams, from the Middle Ages to the 17th century, focus on this genderless person, who seems today almost like a caricature.
The pragmatics of the time period just mentioned were conducive to a different image of genders. The sense of excitement associated with human advances in knowing nature certainly spilled over into every other form of human experience, sex included. A new scale of mankind required that the efficiency of human activity increase. This was a time of many innovations and groundbreaking scientific theories. It was also a time of diversified, though still limited, sexual experiences, made possible by a framework of creativity different from the framework of the Middle Ages. Discoveries in many domains shook the framework of thinking according to Platonic archetypes, appropriated by the Catholic Church and used as explanatory models for all things living or dead. Pragmatics required that the one-sex model be transcended because limits of efficiency (in thinking, medical practice, biological awareness, labor division) were reached within the model. The world of practical experiences of this time unfolded in the Industrial Revolution. With literacy established, some sexual attitudes, consonant with the pragmatic circumstance, were enforced. Others were deemed unacceptable, and qualified as such in the literate language of church, state, and education. From the ubiquity of natural sexuality to what would become sexual self-awareness and sexual culture, no matter how limited, the journey continued in leaps and bounds.
To acknowledge the woman as a biological entity, with characteristics impossible to reduce to male characteristics, was not due to political pressure-as Thomas Lacquer, a remarkable writer on the subject, seemed to believe-but to pragmatic needs. It simply made sense to know how the body functions, to acknowledge morphology, to improve the quality of life, however vaguely acknowledged as such, by addressing the richness of the human being. Interestingly enough, the order in nature and matter found by science contradicted the new experience of variety, sexuality included, made possible by the scientific revolution. A gulf opened between reality and appearance, motivating a healthy empirical program, well extended in the realm of sexual encounters.
Back in the medium aevum, Maximus of Torino thought that "the source of all evil is the woman," probably embodied in the prototypical Eve. The social importance of women in the context of the empirical program, leading to the need for generalized literacy and better knowledge of the human body, discredited this prejudice of the Middle Ages, and of any age since. Sexuality made the transition to the two-sex world with a vengeance. Reproduction still dominated, since incipient industry needed more qualified workers in its own reproduction cycles, and productivity triggered the need to maintain consumption. But the unnatural dimension widened as well. The context was population growth, limited means of birth control, and levels of production and consumption characteristic of the pragmatics of high efficiency.