How Did Sex Become a Problem to Solve?

In the previous essay, I suggested that our current concern about declining sexual frequency may begin too late in the story. We ask what has happened to desire without first asking what has happened to our capacity for sensation, receptivity and embodied experience. But there is another way in which the conversation begins too late. We tend to speak about sex as though the meaning we now assign to it were intrinsic to sex itself, when in fact sexuality has been asked to perform very different functions at different moments in human history.

The way I see it, contemporary couples are trying to solve a sexual problem that earlier generations did not experience in quite the same form. This is not because our ancestors were more erotic than we are, nor because they were more repressed. Human beings have presumably always brought longing, inhibition, jealousy, tenderness, fantasy, boredom, infidelity, shame, pleasure, disappointment and considerable ingenuity and creativity to their sexual lives. What has changed are the social structures and psychological environments surrounding our sexual experiences.

For much of Western history, marriage was not principally organized around the sustained emotional and erotic fulfillment of two individuals. It organized kinship, property, inheritance, reproduction, labor, social position and the care of children. Love was certainly present, sometimes profoundly so, but the historical expectation that one should choose a spouse primarily for love and then remain emotionally and sexually fulfilled by that person across a lifetime is surprisingly recent.

This is easy to forget because we tend to project our contemporary orientation to marriage backward. We imagine the couple of 1900 as essentially ourselves without central heating, reliable contraception or couples therapy. They were not. The institutional structure surrounding their marriage was so different, and therefore the questions marriage was expected to answer were different.

Nostalgia for the marriages of previous generations needs to be measured. We sometimes point to their longevity as evidence that earlier couples understood commitment better than we do. Perhaps some did. But a marriage that could not easily be left cannot be compared without qualification to one that can. Economic dependence, religious prohibition, social stigma, legal barriers, gender and racial prejudice, the interests of extended family, the presence of children and the practical difficulty of surviving outside marriage all contributed to marital permanence. A fifty-year marriage may have represented devotion, endurance, economic necessity, social constraint, profound companionship, resignation, or, as human lives usually mess with our cleaner categories, several of these at once.

The sexual world inside those marriages was correspondingly different. A century ago, heterosexual intercourse remained inseparable for many women from the possibility of pregnancy. That sounds obvious until we consider how profoundly reliable contraception has altered consciousness. Before effective fertility control became widely available, a woman did not encounter intercourse simply as an erotic act. She encountered an act that could reorganize her body, her household, her economic future and potentially her survival. Historians of sexuality have demonstrated how deeply the transformation of sexual behavior was connected to the gradual development of effective contraception. Sexual freedom looks rather different when pregnancy is not an abstract possibility but a recurring fact of adult female life.

The twentieth century gradually loosened this relationship between sexuality and reproduction, but the transformation began well before the celebrated sexual revolution of the 1960s. By the early decades of the century, the ideal of “companionate marriage” was already gaining influence. Marriage reformers increasingly imagined spouses as intimate companions rather than primarily participants in an economic and reproductive institution. Sexual satisfaction acquired a new legitimacy because sex itself was being reconceived as part of the bond between husband and wife.

This was an extraordinary shift. Sex was beginning to acquire a new job.

When sexual intimacy becomes one of the experiences expected to create and sustain marital closeness, its absence begins to acquire meaning. If sex helps bind a marriage, then sexual dissatisfaction can be interpreted as evidence that the bond itself is in trouble. By the middle decades of the twentieth century, marriage manuals increasingly presented satisfying sexuality not simply as permissible within marriage but as an important ingredient of marital happiness. The older moral regulation of sex had not disappeared; it was being joined by a new psychological regulation. People were no longer merely being told where sex belonged. Increasingly, they were being told what healthy sex should accomplish.

There is a recurring irony in the history of liberation: human beings are remarkably capable of turning a newly acquired freedom into another standard against which to measure themselves.

The changes accelerated after the Second World War and particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, although historians have rightly complicated the mythology of a single “sexual revolution.” There was no morning on which Western civilization woke up, threw repression out the window and discovered pleasure. Sexual norms had been changing for decades, and those changes occurred very differently depending upon gender, class, race, religion and sexual orientation. Nevertheless, the expansion of reliable contraception, the women's movement, gay and lesbian liberation, changing divorce laws and a growing emphasis on individual autonomy fundamentally altered the place sexuality occupied in adult life.

The oral contraceptive pill was especially consequential because it helped sever a connection that had governed heterosexual sexuality for most of human history. Intercourse and reproduction could now be separated with a degree of reliability previously unavailable to most people. The Pill did not cause the sexual revolution, but it changed the conditions under which sexual freedom could be exercised.

Once sex no longer had to be justified primarily by reproduction or marital duty, an extraordinary range of possibilities opened. Sexuality could be claimed as pleasure, exploration, identity, communication, self-expression and intimate encounter. Women increasingly insisted upon sexual pleasure as belonging to them rather than existing in service of male satisfaction or reproduction. Gay and lesbian people challenged the assumption that legitimate sexuality required heterosexual marriage at all. Feminism exposed the enormous territory that had been concealed inside the idea of marital duty, including coercion, unequal power and the presumption that access to a spouse's body accompanied the marriage contract. Eventually, the language of consent began to alter our understanding not only of sexual violence, but of what legitimate sexual participation requires.

These developments represent genuine expansions of human freedom. There is little to romanticize about a world in which women had limited reproductive autonomy, homosexuality was criminalized, sexual knowledge was restricted, marital rape was legally unrecognized, and pleasure was distributed according to rigid assumptions about whose pleasure mattered.

But freedom did not make sexuality simpler.

It made sexuality more psychologically consequential.

Once sex is liberated from duty, desire becomes enormously important. If I am no longer supposed to have sex with you because I am married to you, then presumably I have sex with you because I want to, and I want you. That is a beautiful proposition. It is also a psychologically precarious one, because desire is among the least obedient capacities human beings possess.

We can make dinner when we do not feel like making dinner. We can attend a meeting when we would prefer not to attend it. We can take out the garbage through a heroic exercise of marital citizenship. Desire is different. The moment desire becomes an obligation it begins to contradict itself.

This creates a predicament that earlier models of marriage did not have to solve in quite the same way. In a marriage whose legitimacy rests substantially upon duty, kinship, reproduction or economic interdependence, the disappearance of erotic desire may be painful, but it does not necessarily call the institution itself into question. In a marriage understood as the freely chosen union of two people who love and desire one another, the disappearance of desire can become evidence.

If I no longer want you, what does that mean about my love for you? If you no longer want me, what does that mean about my desirability? If we love one another but rarely have sex, have we become friends rather than lovers? If I desire other people but not you, what truth is my body revealing that my conscious mind has failed to acknowledge?

Sex has become a remarkably efficient delivery system for existential anxiety.

It now carries information not only about pleasure but about identity, attractiveness, vitality, masculinity, femininity, aging, adequacy, belonging and the condition of the relationship. A partner's desire can reassure us that we are still chosen. Its absence can be interpreted as evidence that we are unwanted, that the marriage is failing. The bedroom becomes not simply a place where two people meet physically but a diagnostic chamber in which each person waits for the other's body to deliver a verdict.

This may be one of the unintended consequences of the modern love marriage. We did not merely free sex from reproduction. We gradually recruited it into the project of proving that the relationship is alive.

Marriage itself is undergoing a similar transformation. As Esther Perel reminds us, partners today are expected to provide an astonishing range of experiences that were historically distributed across families, communities, religious life, work and friendship. We want our partner to know us intimately and continue finding us interesting; to provide security without becoming predictable; to share the practical burden of life while remaining erotically compelling; to witness our wounds without becoming our therapist; to encourage our development without outgrowing us; and to remain a reliable home while somehow continuing to surprise us.

There is something moving about the ambition. There is also something faintly absurd about it. We have concentrated a village's worth of psychological expectations inside two people and then become concerned when they occasionally feel tired, disinterested, uninspired, lack desire.

Sex bears a particularly difficult portion of this burden because erotic desire does not necessarily flourish under the same conditions that make domestic partnership function well. Long-term intimacy quite properly creates familiarity. We learn one another. We develop routines, divide responsibilities, accumulate shared history and become increasingly capable of predicting each other's responses. The person who was once an unknown territory gradually becomes the person whose preferred coffee order, airport behavior, family wounds, bedtime habits and response to an incorrectly loaded dishwasher are known with archaeological precision.

This knowledge can be one of the great comforts of partnership. It can also produce a peculiar illusion: that because we know a great deal about someone, we know who they are.

Perel has written persuasively about the tension between the security we seek in attachment and the otherness that can animate erotic desire. Her argument is sometimes simplified into the idea that couples merely need more novelty, but the deeper point is more interesting. Desire requires some distance across which desire can travel. The other person must remain, in some meaningful sense, other.

Perhaps one of the erotic challenges of long partnership is therefore not how to make a familiar person novel again. That sounds suspiciously like a marketing strategy. The challenge may be to recognize that familiarity never eliminated their mystery in the first place.

We simply stopped looking.

After 32 years, I may know a great deal about my husband. And yet, I did not know what it was like to be inside his body this morning when we woke up. I do not fully know the private life of his imagination, how aging is altering his relationship with himself, what he is becoming curious about, what he has stopped allowing himself to want, or who he might become if I were not continually reminding him who I believe him to be.

Long relationships accumulate knowledge, but they also accumulate conclusions. We begin interacting not only with the person but with our theory of the person. We know what they meant before they finish the sentence. We know why they are upset. We know how they will respond. We know what sex with them is like. Eventually our certainty can become so complete that there is very little living person left to encounter.

That is not intimacy. It is familiarity moving into assumption.

And assumption is erotically expensive.

There is another historical development unfolding alongside all of this that deserves our attention. During roughly the same century in which Western sexuality became increasingly liberated from reproduction, convention and prohibition, ordinary life became progressively more mediated and abstract.

Industrialization had already moved many people away from direct relationships with land, seasons and our place in nature. The twentieth century added automobiles, mass media, office work, television, air conditioning, commercial aviation, computers and eventually the internet, smartphones and social media. Each innovation expanded human possibility. Together they also altered the texture of ordinary experience.

Increasingly, we can encounter representations of life without physically encountering what they represent. We can watch bread being made without smelling yeast, see a coastline without feeling wind, communicate with a friend without hearing a voice, observe war while eating lunch, watch people having sex without another human body anywhere near us, and spend hours examining photographs of bodies while scarcely noticing the sensations occurring in our own.

The issue is not that modern life has become insufficiently stimulating. It may be exactly the opposite.

We are awash in stimulation.

But stimulation and sensuality are not synonymous.

Stimulation demands attention. Sensuality requires receptivity. A nervous system exposed to relentless information may become highly practiced at selecting, filtering and ignoring. This is useful when navigating email and freeway traffic. It may be less useful when the relevant information is the nearly imperceptible change in another person's breathing as a hand moves across their back.

Erotic communication is often extraordinarily subtle. The body does not generally send a push notification announcing that desire has begun. It communicates through shifts in breath, attention, temperature, movement, muscular tone, proximity, hesitation, softening and response. These are not mystical signals. They are ordinary sensory information. But they can only become part of experience if someone is available to receive them.

This returns us to the strange historical convergence at the center of our present sexual life. We have acquired unprecedented permission to be sexual at approximately the same time that we have developed unprecedented opportunities not to be particularly embodied.

The irony deserves more than a passing observation.

When sex was governed substantially by duty, it did not require desire every time. Duty could organize behavior in desire's absence. Once we reject duty as the proper basis for sexual access, something much more demanding becomes necessary. Sexuality now must arise from genuine participation. The person has to be there.

Not merely physically present, but capable of detecting what is happening inside themselves, capable of receiving another person's presence, capable of discovering rather than presuming what they want, capable of tolerating the vulnerability of wanting, and equally capable of recognizing when wanting is absent.

Sexual freedom therefore presents us with a developmental task that liberation alone cannot solve.

Freedom can remove the prohibition against desire. It cannot make us capable of experiencing desire.

It can establish our right to say no. It cannot teach us to feel the difference between an embodied no, a frightened no, a resentful no, a habitual no and a no that protects an identity we formed long before this partner arrived.

It can establish our right to say yes. It cannot teach us how to receive pleasure, tolerate surrender, remain present under intensity or reveal what we want without converting desire into demand.

These capacities belong to another domain altogether.

And this may be why the current obsession with fixing sexless marriages so often feels inadequate to me. We are attempting to solve at the level of technique a predicament that may exist at the level of human development.

Schedule sex. Buy a toy. Take a weekend away. Share fantasies. Initiate differently. Create novelty. Put the phones in another room. All of these interventions may be useful. None is inherently trivial. But technique cannot substitute for capacity. A weekend away cannot manufacture curiosity between two people who have stopped encountering one another. Scheduling sex cannot make an unwanted sexual experience worth wanting. Novelty cannot metabolize contempt. A vibrator cannot resolve a relationship in which one person has become the other's dependent child. Candles, however flattering, have limited jurisdiction over unresolved betrayal.

The larger question is not whether contemporary couples have forgotten how to have sex.

It is whether we have understood what sexual freedom actually asks of us.

For perhaps the first time on this scale, many human beings are attempting to build lifelong sexual relationships in which neither reproduction nor economic necessity nor religious duty nor social prohibition is supposed to compel erotic participation. We are asking sexuality to remain voluntary inside permanence.

That is an extraordinary human experiment.

It means that long-term erotic life must continually emerge from two people who remain capable of wanting, receiving, refusing, discovering, changing and encountering one another as separate beings. The relationship may provide security, but security cannot become ownership. Familiarity may deepen intimacy, but familiarity cannot be allowed to become certainty. Commitment may create continuity, but continuity cannot require the body to produce desire on command.

Perhaps the sexual revolution gave us freedom from many of the structures that once governed sexuality without fully preparing us for the capacities freedom would require.

We learned, appropriately, that the body belongs to the person inhabiting it.

We are still learning how to inhabit that body.

And this is where the historical inquiry begins to become philosophical. Because the question is no longer simply how sex changed or the conditions surrounding sex changed during the last century. The more consequential question is what kind of human being is capable of sustaining sensual and erotic life in a culture that increasingly organizes experience around abstraction, performance, control and separation.

To understand this, we have to stop treating the body as the equipment with which we have sex and begin considering what a body actually is: a living system continually receiving information, transmitting information, relating with and responding to other living systems; participating in a world it was never separate from in the first place.

That is where we will go in the next post.