The phrase home life means the aggregate of activities in the domain of my home. The phrase work life means the aggregate of activities in the domain of work.
The phrase sex life is something of an anomaly, even a misnomer. It
is a relative latecomer to the scene. Home life developed in the 17th
century; work life in the 19th; sex life developed
also in the 19th but as a description of the phases of life
conditioned by the reproductive process and acquired its modern meaning, namely
to denote a domain of life in parallel with home and work, only very recently.
Now, of course, what others do really is none of my business. I speak only
for myself. This is clearly a question on which views vary considerably, and if
you, the reader, have settled views with which you are content, I would not
suggest reading further, as the following ideas may be found disagreeable,
running, as they do, against prevailing mores, at least in contemporary urban western
society. I do not claim that the following is right for anyone else. I claim
only that it is right for me, as it currently appears to me. After all, if a
conclusion is based on a series of premises and highly individual experiences,
it would take only one alteration in the premises and one alteration in the
experiences for the conclusion to be quite different. On a long journey, a left
rather than a right turn at the end of the road on which one lives would
produce a quite different destination even were all other left and right turns
replicated in the same sequence.
Thus, speaking for myself, and returning to the idea of sex life:
My whole problem was sex was considering it to be a domain of my life rather
than, as it were, a particular grammar used to structure communicative content.
I have a social life (the term was first attested in 1812) that involves
communication and communication that involves language and language that
involves grammar and grammar that involves syntax. I do not have a syntactical
life per se. I do not have syntax with people. I converse with them in a social
setting, employing syntax.
The book Alcoholics Anonymous talks about the extreme situation of
people being, in a sexual sense, on a ‘straight pepper diet’ (in contrast to
having no flavour for their fare). This strikes me as being the entire problem
with the notion of a sex life: pepper is not a food group; it is a condiment;
without a vehicle, the meal, it has no function, and it is actually not
required for the meal itself; it is not even the only condiment. Sex, aside
from the specific function of procreation, can be considered a condiment of
certain relationships rather than the raison-d’être of the relationship per se.
I therefore do not have sexual relationships simpliciter. Sex is not the
classifying parameter of any of my relationships. It is an option within
a particular relationship and, being an option, is at no point in time obligatory.
It is not the chief vehicle of communication, the chief activity, the chief
purpose of any relationship I have.
Is there anything actually wrong with elevating sex to the level of
a domain and having it act as the objective, the centrepiece, and the principal
activity of certain relationships?
I have two answers to this.
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions talks about the only scoffers at
prayer being those who have not tried it enough. I would say that the only
non-scoffers at this enthronement of sex are those who have not tried it
enough. In other words, novices in the domain of permissive sex are often overjoyed
at the discovery of sensual thrills and adventures, apparently with no
attendant cost. By analogy, consider the child let loose in the sweetshop. However,
months, years, and decades of the practice will prompt a more nuanced
assessment. I, personally, have not found a satisfactory way of treating sex as
a domain rather than a ‘condiment’ to a particular relationship. Its obvious
pleasures and satisfactions, brief but potent, can give the appearance of
success. However, the prices paid, over time, can spoil not just the activity
itself but the whole show of life, of which sex is merely one part of one scene.
Such prices include but are not limited to: the smuggling of sexual thoughts
and feelings into relationships they are not proper to, sex’s imperious
insistence that it occupy an ever more privileged role in one’s life, not to
mention emptiness, instability, a sense of futility, stress, insecurity, exposure
to others’ unresolved psychological baggage, conflicts, and the acting out of unhealthy
dynamics. I tried, in the spirit of the modern permissive society, to make permissiveness
work, and failed.
Guilt and shame can certainly be inappropriate. Long-held, inculcated moral
beliefs, even if intellectually overturned, can continue to exert an emotional
effect, resulting in inner tension. One knows (or thinks one
knows) that a certain act is either morally good or at least morally neutral, yet
one feels guilty nonetheless.
The case, here, may be different. I was brought up in the 1970s, not the
1930s. The environment in which I was raised was almost entirely silent on the
question of sexual morality. The influences on television were chiefly
progressive. People in television shows and films, from The Benny Hill Show
to D. H. Lawrence, would enthrone sex and romance as a domain of life,
with moral impunity. This was echoed in music, from Madame Butterfly to ABBA,
in the mores of the people around in me, in every quarter. I cannot recall a
single instance where chastity, modesty, or restriction were signalled to me as
substantive virtues by anyone with real moral authority. The only exemplar I
can remember is the almost universally mocked conservative campaigner Mary Whitehouse.
I laughed along with everyone else.
And yet, in my attempts to live up to the permissive ideals of having ‘a
good sex life’, I could not escape feelings of guilt and shame, and these feelings
of guilt and shame were, frankly, a mystery, since I did not intellectually
believe that what I was doing was wrong. I adopted the circulating assumption
that these were vestiges of an outdated morality imbuing the society I lived in
and attempted accordingly to laugh them out of court.
When I questioned this assumption, I discovered, as outlined above, that the
looming shadow of Victorian sexual ethics was likely not the cause of my moral
chill. I had never been systematically or even regularly exposed to such ethics;
I had never consciously subscribed to or been subjected to them; I was non-conformist
in many other ways and felt quite at ease going against prevailing societal
views in other domains. It was simply not credible that I was under the
moralising cosh of a long-gone, textbook society.
Furthermore, guilt and shame deriving from a breach of imposed rather than
innate values tend to peak at the first point of breach. The first time the
rule is broken, a severe internal reaction takes place. Then, as the rule is
broken again and again, and one discovers that the moral threats do not
materialise, that the behaviour is in fact innocuous, the guilt and shame
subside, and the proscription of such behaviour starts to appear absurd. Like a
new pair of shoes, the conduct is ‘broken in’ and becomes more comfortable over
time.
With sex, I experienced the opposite progression. My first experiences were
entirely free of guilt. I experienced no sense that I was breaching a
prevailing norm and that I was going to be punished accordingly. The guilt and
shame started to materialise only much later, as my moral sensitivities were
honed during the course of my sobriety and recovery. The road became, as they
say, narrower, and I started to connect action with moral consequence. The
feelings became more pronounced over time, not less, rather like the increasing
sensitisation taking place in the development of an allergy.
There was only one remaining explanation on offer, namely that the guilt and
shame flowed from the fact that I was breaching a moral absolute rather than an
arbitrary human rule. I was misusing powers, which is the essential nature of
wrongdoing. The powers themselves are morally neutral. Sex is morally neutral.
It is the misuse of sex that is problematic, and I was misusing it. My feelings
were the result of the automatic operation of a moral system. Breach the moral
law, and there are consequences. I noted that the feelings were similar to the
guilt and shame I would feel when, for instance, engaging in gossip or
vilification, when the company or society around me approved of the conduct,
and it would be in my interests, socially, to conform. As in such cases, it was
not imposed mores prompting the guilt but higher laws piercing the veil between
eternity and the shadow land in which we live as the disquieting voice of my conscience.
And, despite this and the questionable satisfactions of the activity in
question, I nonetheless could not and cannot suppress the idea that what I was
doing was wrong, whatever anyone else argued.
To be happy and content, I must be operated, like any created machine or
being, in accordance with the manufacturer’s design, and the manufacturer’s
design appears, in my case at any rate, to be to retain sex as an available
channel in only a very limited type of relationship. In other words, sex is not
a domain. It is one syntactical structure available in human discourse, and by
no means an obligatory one. Since I have adopted this view and started to live
accordingly, I have had two observations.
Guilt, shame, and embarrassment have left me, without being replaced with a
sense of longing, loss, or failure to fulfil some sexual ‘destiny’. It turns
out I am missing nothing at all.
The second observation: the further I get from the old way of life, the more
I can see its insidious stamp in other areas, how sex was the tail wagging the
dog, conditioning values, views, and conduct in apparently unrelated domains.
It is often the case that the full catalogue of damaging behaviour becomes
apparent only when the behaviour has stopped for a considerable period of time,
and this case is no exception. The wind must first of all abate.
Let us stand back from the question about the approach to sex that might be
adopted by the individual and review, instead, the context of this question:
the fourth inventory in Step Four (taking the page 67 questions to be a second
inventory rather than a continuation of the resentment inventory).
The inventories sit in a sequence of activities seeking to bring about
complete surrender to the will of God, to the working of God’s will. We are
promised happiness, joy, and freedom as aspects of God’s will manifesting in
our experience. But there is no indication that these find their foundation in
the particulars of, say, a successful career, a marriage producing impressive
children, even good health, material wellbeing, or ‘an enjoyable sex life’.
Rather, the book Alcoholics Anonymous suggests that these experiential
outcomes willed by God are irrespective of conditions (‘Job or no job—wife or
no wife’; ‘Follow the dictates of a Higher Power and you will presently live in
a new and wonderful world, no matter what your present circumstances!’) It
certainly cannot be assumed that ‘an enjoyable sex life’ per se, in other words
a sex life enjoyable to me, is the ground on which happiness, joy, and freedom
are to be constructed. My enjoyment, satisfaction, or other purely personal
‘good’, as it derives from my sexual activities, is neither the end of the programme
nor an inalienable component thereof.
There are then two further indicators: ‘We subjected each relation to this
test—was it selfish or not? We asked God to mould our ideals and help us to
live up to them’, and ‘our sex powers were God-given and therefore good, neither
to be used lightly or selfishly’. This swiftly puts to bed, if you will pardon
the expression, most pursuits and exploits in the sexual arena, at least in my
history. Others may be more noble than I. Did God’s will, in terms of the
benefit of others (being the opposite of the selfishness we are
enjoined to renounce), come first, with sex the revealed chosen channel for
such activities, or did the libidinous desire come first? The soul need not be
searched long for the answer.
To conclude: I have been shown a narrow path to follow, and I am quite
thrilled with the results. The energy thus released, which might otherwise have
been spent lighting up the night with useless fireworks, has been rechannelled
into far more durable satisfactions, and I regret only that it took as long as
it did for my present course to reveal itself.