December 2, 2012

• Species of sexual desire

  I figure if I post about sex my ratings will go way up, and let’s face it, it’s really ratings that I’m after.

  It’s become apparent to me that sexual desires come in all different sorts of species.  How many different kinds are there?

  1. A general desire to have sex with a certain gender.  In this state someone doesn’t have a specific thought attached to their desire: they simply feel a very general (but perhaps quite strong) sexual impulse.

  2. A desire to have sex with a specific body.  This might happen as you see someone at a party or on the street or on a magazine cover and the desire to have sex with that body arises.  It can’t be a desire to have sex with the person: the entire content of your knowledge of the person is simply a body, and that’s it.

  3. The desire to have sex with a specific person.  This one gets a little tricky and probably breaks into two separate categories.  Here is why.

  People are made up of all kinds of stuff: thought patterns, behaviors, desires, attitudes, abilities – and the unique facts of their birth, family experience, and the ‘emotions of their life’.  Now I think that you can add a lot of these things into your depository of knowledge about a person and still not have a deep knowledge of them.  So we will say the first species here is ‘image sex’, i.e. the desire to have sex with your image of a person, which is probably made up a set of behavior patterns and speech tendencies. 

  The second species here comes when two preconditions are met.  First, you have had a moment where all the bits and details you know about a person become secondary, and you see the them that is at the bottom of it all.  You see that you do not see, you know that you do not know.  I usually consider this to be a time when you come to know and reflect on a time the person spent looking at and loving something in the world that had nothing to do with you.

  The second precondition is that you love them.  In this case you know a person but you also don’t know them.  It is love that is required for both of these things, for it is in this way that we see truly.  Love shines light on the person, but in so doing also shows us where the path veers off and says ‘More here that you can’t see’ and ‘Blocked off to all others’.

  Thus there are two senses in which it can be said you desire to have sex with a specific person.

  4. The desire to repeatedly have sex with someone.  Compare this to the way you hang out with people.  I might hang out with Doug based on a chance encounter.  But let’s say I am hanging out with a friend named Brian; in this case my desire is not just to hang out with Brian, it is to have a friendship with Brian.  My desire spans time.  I think this sort of thing is probably applicable to sex, although the desire here is probably tied to something like ‘I desire to have a full relationship with this person’ and having a sexual relationship is subsumed within that desire. 

  So there seems to me these kinds of sexual desire.  The content of the desire in each case is different: they each correlate to a level of knowledge you can have of a person.  But knowledge and love are intimately connected, and you must ask yourself how each of these are related to time.  How much is time a part of the content of who a person is?  And how are knowledge and love related to the feature of time in a person?  And what is a person? 

  • 9:32 pm
  • 4 Comments