ELIJAH BAK

 

 

Sex is the singular issue on which most human
activity is based. This may seem like a shopworn
notion, but I think it bears some re-examination.
Sex governs our minds like a benevolent dictator
who generously allows most freedoms until his
needs conflict with those freedoms: then the iron
heel comes down, so to speak.

If the sex drive is a dictator, then our reflective
self-awareness, or consciousness, is the Che Guevara
of the mind. Our self-awareness seeks to liberate
our minds from the fleshly prison of desire, or at
least to mitigate its iron control. Other mammals
operate on the level of pheromone acquisition,
meaning that when a dog, for example, smells the
pheromones of a dog of the opposite gender, it
becomes aroused and three months later a happy
litter of puppies gets the “sack in the river” treat-
ment. Humans are fortunate in that we are not at
the mercy of our noses. If sexual desire were due to
certain airborne agents, then we would still be up in
the trees picking nits out of each other's back hair
and humping every orifice available. (Individuals
that still engage in these activities reveal the
grotesque sentimentality of this epoch.)

But the question deepens at this point: why does
human sexual behaviour differ so fundamentally
from that of other mammals? More specifically,
why has the pheromone-based carnality left the
realm of human experience and been replaced by
good conversation, meaningful glances, soft light, .
tight clothing and good rum? Who knows?
Somewhere in*the development of the res cogitans
(Descartes’ name for humanity: the thinking thing)
we lost this most animalistic level of interrelation-
ship and made the transition to the stage of lin-
guistically-based acquaintanceship (meaning we talk
to each other, rather than sniff each other's butts).

_- taAneG Hn 70

Sartre's Sticky Synapses

or Sex and the Sinuses

Simply put, we went from apprehending each
other's desire in a directly physical manner and then
acting upon that perception, to having to converse
with our prospective partners in order to convince

_ them that we are the person with whom they

should spend the night (Wink, wink, nudge, nudge,
say no more).

However, we still like to posit sexual desire as.a
primordial urge, the need to procreate, etc. Sexual
desire is probably the last legal remnant of demonic
possession left over from the Dark Ages. We have
all read, or at least heard of, examples of criminals’
defenses where they claimed to be unable to control
themselves: “I was not myself, your Honour. I was
out of control.” ‘Temporary insanity is the popular
term we apply to this defense. The criminals in
question are saying they were powerless to act other
than they did, hence they were temporarily insane,
or from a medieval perspective they were possessed.

Possession is a good way of describing the effect
of sexual desire on the mind of the self-aware
human being. In the throes of sexual desire our
senses feel clogged, we become mentally sluggish ;
and single-minded in purpose. In short, we lose the
veneer of civility and sink our consciousness into
our bodies. This is how the French existentialist
philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, describes the state of
arousal: as a mental stickiness, that mires, or nearly
does, our consciousness in our bodies. For Sartre
this is as close as we come.to being an object-in-
itself.

Sartre describes two modes of existence: the
being-for-itself, and the being-in-itself. The for-
itself is how humans are: we are, as far as we know,
the only entities which can make our consciousness
an object for itself. This means, simply put, that we
are self-aware, self-reflective. The being-in-itself is
the existence of non-self aware/reflective entities
and is best understood as the contradiction of the