When we are hungry, we eat. When we need to communicate, we talk or we converse. When we feel affection we might hug or even kiss. Sometimes we also argue. When there’s music and we want to move, we dance. And when, in those moments of life when we come closest to another person, when we want to feel the pleasure of physical intimacy or consummate love or conceive a child we … do what? Fuck? Really? The same word that’s used for “to cheat, beat, or tell off someone“? As in “fuck you“? As in “fuck off“? As in “I’m fucked“? Is this really the word for an act of beauty, of sensitivity, even of love?
Or we could say we “have sex”, sort of like we say “have an operation” or “have measles” or “have indigestion”, as though “sex” was a medical condition we would be temporarily afflicted with, that needs to be described with a certain amount of distance, with clinical objectivity, like it’s happening to us — regrettable, but not really our fault, like a covid-19 infection. Also doesn’t seem quite fitting, does it?
For animals, we make it simple: they mate. Gerald Durrel, in his charming memoir My Family and Other Animals, described his relatives as mating from time to time. But, in my experience, like in Gerald’s, it seems we humans don’t like our mating to be called by the same name as that of other creatures.
With no word that fits, the activity that motivates much of human life, that is core to many of our relationships, our longings, our biology, and our culture is literally unspeakable.
What does it mean when there is such a glaring hole in our ability to communicate about something this important?
There has been an enormous cultural effort to make verbal space for more fluid definitions of gender; to take sexual activity out of traditional and patriarchal frames; to liberate our language from racist, sexist, and imperialist habits.
What would it take to also give a name — a true, fitting name — to this part of life that is so central, so deep, and yet so repressed and fraught with shadow? How might it change the culture of understanding and caring for sexual activity if we could actually talk about it without doing grammatical and semantic gymnastics to even put it into words?
Cultures that value the nuance of things learn to speak about them with nuance. If we want to make our mating and lovemaking beautiful and liberating and healing, then we need to liberate our language about it so we can actually speak in true words about what we’re doing.
In the human eye, there is a spot on the retina where the optic nerve attaches to the cells of the retina. This spot, occupied as it is by a bundle of nerves, can’t see. This means the eye has a blind spot. Most of the time, unless we’re doing a little experiment to demonstrate that it’s there, we don’t notice the blind spot because our brains construct what they think is there based on other parts of the visual field.
The same may be true of language. Language builds avoidant holes around things that are culturally unacceptable, and then covers them up with half-meanings and euphemisms until the holes themselves are invisible. But they are still there, still invisibly affecting the flow of communication like a submerged rock affects the flow of a river, or a pothole affects the flow of traffic on a road.
What would happen if we opened up, saw, and fixed this blind spot, so we could actually say what we mean when talking about sex? What would it feel like if our verbal retinas could actually see what it is we are trying to speak about? How would the mass of shadows, traumas, phobias, and obsessions around sex respond to the possibility of simple speech about this most natural, most complex of human activities?
I am curious to find out.