A Typology of Lust
If perchance you are a reader, of the human sort (which means you're probably here by accident, since this blog gets no visits), well, don't hold me to any of this. I'm just trying to make sense of something to my own satisfaction, by building a tentative model, and haven't got far with it yet, and it might yet collapse like a house of cards. I might decide soon that this is just a stupid random notion, as most of my notions are, and bin it.
Meanwhile though... lust. As in sexual desire. Do we all understand the same by it? Do we all experience it in the same way? Seems to me the answer is obviously no, to both. And also, that if we were to approach the question through, I dunno, some sort of triangulation of questionnaires with discourse analysis of people's utterances on the subject, focusing particularly on the distribution of certain keywords, we might be able to distinguish a plurality of discrete views or approaches to desire, each with its own assumptions, its own characteristic vocabulary, and its own emotional and behavioural fingerprint. The following is a summary of what I would expect to find, based on introspection and a little observation, and probably subject to extension if I ever have time to go into the topic more deeply.
Preliminary remarks. The list below is not supposed to have anything to do with the physical manifestations of lust. That's a separate area. Even there, I don't think we all experience lust in the same way, because even from one day to the next or one lustrum to the next I experience things differently, depending on a host of environmental and internal variables (health, state of mind, ambient temperature, etc). No. What I'm trying to get at below is how we conceptualise desire, how we represent it to ourselves, how we build it into our view of the world or into our life goals.
Since I am exploring lust, rather than, say, the concept of love, I hope it will not shock the reader to find no mention below of such things as warmth, affection, kindness, compassion, empathy, etc. The reason is simple: they may accompany lust, but are not actually part of it. Or not necessarily. In modes 3, 4 and arguably 5 below, you may come to the conclusion that empathy is a necessary part of the deal, but it has to be generated separately, by other mechanisms than those that generate desire. (I may change my mind about this later.)
1. The reflex model. According to this understanding of sexual desire, your sexual responses are dictated by biology, and are unamenable to any kind of voluntary control save at the most basic level of expression vs suppression. They serve purely reproductive ends. It is ridiculous to ascribe undue significance to them. A morality based on self-restraint is needed to impose socially necessary limits on the expression of desire. The human object of lust is, in Skinnerian terms, a "stimulus". We don't inquire too much into the details of how lust may be satisfied, because it's merely anecdotal, the stuff of tabloid journalism, and we don't expect a great deal of nuance or variety or originality in our or anyone's responses. Sublimation may be possible and may even be socially useful, but is ultimately just a con trick we play on ourselves.
2. The consumerist model. Your sexual responses are a subset of the "natural" human urge to obtain commodities, i.e. things that provide satisfaction. The entire process of seeking, obtaining and consuming the commodity of sex is banal. Provided there is a free market with no coercion and an acceptable minimum of fraud, moral considerations are irrelevant. The human object of desire is a "commodity" (or means to obtaining such), and can be evaluated like any other, in terms of quality and price. Pay, consume, enjoy, throw away, repeat. We may inquire into the sordid mechanics of consummation as experienced by other people, but only to ensure we're not missing out on the latest cool feature that everyone else is enjoying.
3. The romantic model. Sexual desire is merely an enabler, an adjunct or secondary stimulus that accompanies you on your true quest, which is to find a life partner. It imposes certain conventional restrictions on who might be considered as a suitable partner, which are accompanied by certain responsibilities when it comes to keeping that person satisfied; it may also cement and deepen the "spiritual" relationship you have with your partner, in part by providing an exclusive space of intimacy, and exclusive "shared' experiences of consummation. You pretend that your desire and your partner's are somehow special, different from those of other people, and in thrall to one exclusive object, even while knowing none of this to be the case. This is a necessary (self-)deception in the service of a socially respectable, even noble, ideal of monogamous romantic love. Morality is important, since it encapsulates the wisdom of the species on how best to go about achieving and conserving the desired long-term relationship. Once the relationship has become stable through marriage, sex itself, and desire, become increasingly irrelevant, except as a stabilising technique or tool.
4. The Holy Grail model. According to this view, your sexual responses may be constrained to some limited degree by both biology and the laws of supply and demand, but also represent a personal quest unique to yourself, and this uniqueness extends to the nature of your desires, and your own private definition of what is desirable, to the picturesque but mostly unconfessable details of which you attach great importance. The human object of desire is a possible locus of magic, of transformation of the self. Morality is borderline irrelevant except at the basic level of avoiding harm or annoyance to others. Unlike the Romantic model, you don't demand or necessarily expect a long term relationship with the object of desire: if she's The One, a single encounter, or short lived relationship, may be all you are granted, and all you have a right to expect, and anything long term would be a slow descent into bathos. Sexual desire may be treated as a quasi religious experience, of profound significance, holding out as it does the possibility of a kind of Road to Damascus "conversion" associated with the terrifying prospect of intimacy, of communicating the complexity of one's desires with someone capable of understanding them, and thus achieving a kind of psychological liberation, with potentially positive and even dramatic consequences. When actual sexual encounters lead to disappointment and frustration, this is rationalised as "well, that wasn't the Grail then, just any old drinking cup".
5. The contemplative model. This might be referenced with a quote from Once Upon A Time in the West: "You can't imagine how happy it makes a man to see a woman like you... just to look at her." This is in direct contradiction to the other models, especially the Reflex one, which are predicated on the assumption that sexual desire is similar to hunger: pleasurable only when there is an immediate prospect of satisfaction, and otherwise a source of dysphoria, frustration and misery. The contemplative model asserts that experiencing lust, or something like it, is or can be intrinsically pleasurable, even when (as is generally the case) there is no possibility of actual satisfaction. In practice, this sort of contemplative jouissance seems to involve a degree of learned discipline, and to derive not from any (non existent) prospect of consummation, but from a deliberately (though not necessarily conscious) symbolic and aesthetic reading of the physical attributes, mannerisms, garb and accessories exhibited by the object of desire. By this I mean that a pair of high heeled shoes, for example, or a particular facial feature, is read or interpreted as a symbolic representation of some engaging abstraction, such as "femininity" or "fragility" or "sophistication" or "coquettishness" or "seduction" or "submissiveness/subordination" or "power" or "innocence" (basically, we're talking about the subset of abstract nouns that might conceivably give their name to a French perfume). Contemplation of these abstractions in certain juxtapositions is discovered to be a source of pleasure, whether or not such symbolic reading also involves (as it occasionally does) wishfully projecting emotions and intentions onto the other.
Well, these 5 are as far as I've got. For now, I will only add that if you are a Holy Grail person, as I was for most of my life until I got to the age where a transition to the contemplative model seemed to be called for, you are destined to be constantly struck by a kind of cognitive dissonance between your view of sex and most other people's, since models 1, 2 and 3 seem to be the standard conventional ones for most people. Or rather, they are save in one respect, which I still can't get a handle on and probably means my model is wrong. What I'm referring to is that when people talk about sexual desire, they generally frame the discourse according to 1 or 2, i.e. within a biological/reflex or commodity-market approach (arguably. women tend to favour 3, the romantic approach, more, unless they read Cosmo which is all about 2) but when it comes to evaluating how pleasant or unpleasant sexual desire is, subjectively, suddenly everyone is a Contemplative, and claims to find wanting people enjoyable. This is what I have never been able to understand, and why I tend to fret about this area of experience so much: until I hit 50, I couldn't for the life of me see anything enjoyable, pleasant or fun about wanting sex with people one knew one wouldn't ever have sex with. Far from it: having a sex drive was, for me, a constant drizzle of fluctuating but basically unrelenting misery. I suppose I can't be the only person to see, or feel, things that way. Either I'm weird (obviously I am, but as weird as to be in diametric opposition to the rest of humanity? hmm) or other people are not telling the truth about what they feel, or ... whatever the third explanation is. I'll get there eventually. Or not.
Meanwhile though... lust. As in sexual desire. Do we all understand the same by it? Do we all experience it in the same way? Seems to me the answer is obviously no, to both. And also, that if we were to approach the question through, I dunno, some sort of triangulation of questionnaires with discourse analysis of people's utterances on the subject, focusing particularly on the distribution of certain keywords, we might be able to distinguish a plurality of discrete views or approaches to desire, each with its own assumptions, its own characteristic vocabulary, and its own emotional and behavioural fingerprint. The following is a summary of what I would expect to find, based on introspection and a little observation, and probably subject to extension if I ever have time to go into the topic more deeply.
Preliminary remarks. The list below is not supposed to have anything to do with the physical manifestations of lust. That's a separate area. Even there, I don't think we all experience lust in the same way, because even from one day to the next or one lustrum to the next I experience things differently, depending on a host of environmental and internal variables (health, state of mind, ambient temperature, etc). No. What I'm trying to get at below is how we conceptualise desire, how we represent it to ourselves, how we build it into our view of the world or into our life goals.
Since I am exploring lust, rather than, say, the concept of love, I hope it will not shock the reader to find no mention below of such things as warmth, affection, kindness, compassion, empathy, etc. The reason is simple: they may accompany lust, but are not actually part of it. Or not necessarily. In modes 3, 4 and arguably 5 below, you may come to the conclusion that empathy is a necessary part of the deal, but it has to be generated separately, by other mechanisms than those that generate desire. (I may change my mind about this later.)
1. The reflex model. According to this understanding of sexual desire, your sexual responses are dictated by biology, and are unamenable to any kind of voluntary control save at the most basic level of expression vs suppression. They serve purely reproductive ends. It is ridiculous to ascribe undue significance to them. A morality based on self-restraint is needed to impose socially necessary limits on the expression of desire. The human object of lust is, in Skinnerian terms, a "stimulus". We don't inquire too much into the details of how lust may be satisfied, because it's merely anecdotal, the stuff of tabloid journalism, and we don't expect a great deal of nuance or variety or originality in our or anyone's responses. Sublimation may be possible and may even be socially useful, but is ultimately just a con trick we play on ourselves.
2. The consumerist model. Your sexual responses are a subset of the "natural" human urge to obtain commodities, i.e. things that provide satisfaction. The entire process of seeking, obtaining and consuming the commodity of sex is banal. Provided there is a free market with no coercion and an acceptable minimum of fraud, moral considerations are irrelevant. The human object of desire is a "commodity" (or means to obtaining such), and can be evaluated like any other, in terms of quality and price. Pay, consume, enjoy, throw away, repeat. We may inquire into the sordid mechanics of consummation as experienced by other people, but only to ensure we're not missing out on the latest cool feature that everyone else is enjoying.
3. The romantic model. Sexual desire is merely an enabler, an adjunct or secondary stimulus that accompanies you on your true quest, which is to find a life partner. It imposes certain conventional restrictions on who might be considered as a suitable partner, which are accompanied by certain responsibilities when it comes to keeping that person satisfied; it may also cement and deepen the "spiritual" relationship you have with your partner, in part by providing an exclusive space of intimacy, and exclusive "shared' experiences of consummation. You pretend that your desire and your partner's are somehow special, different from those of other people, and in thrall to one exclusive object, even while knowing none of this to be the case. This is a necessary (self-)deception in the service of a socially respectable, even noble, ideal of monogamous romantic love. Morality is important, since it encapsulates the wisdom of the species on how best to go about achieving and conserving the desired long-term relationship. Once the relationship has become stable through marriage, sex itself, and desire, become increasingly irrelevant, except as a stabilising technique or tool.
4. The Holy Grail model. According to this view, your sexual responses may be constrained to some limited degree by both biology and the laws of supply and demand, but also represent a personal quest unique to yourself, and this uniqueness extends to the nature of your desires, and your own private definition of what is desirable, to the picturesque but mostly unconfessable details of which you attach great importance. The human object of desire is a possible locus of magic, of transformation of the self. Morality is borderline irrelevant except at the basic level of avoiding harm or annoyance to others. Unlike the Romantic model, you don't demand or necessarily expect a long term relationship with the object of desire: if she's The One, a single encounter, or short lived relationship, may be all you are granted, and all you have a right to expect, and anything long term would be a slow descent into bathos. Sexual desire may be treated as a quasi religious experience, of profound significance, holding out as it does the possibility of a kind of Road to Damascus "conversion" associated with the terrifying prospect of intimacy, of communicating the complexity of one's desires with someone capable of understanding them, and thus achieving a kind of psychological liberation, with potentially positive and even dramatic consequences. When actual sexual encounters lead to disappointment and frustration, this is rationalised as "well, that wasn't the Grail then, just any old drinking cup".
5. The contemplative model. This might be referenced with a quote from Once Upon A Time in the West: "You can't imagine how happy it makes a man to see a woman like you... just to look at her." This is in direct contradiction to the other models, especially the Reflex one, which are predicated on the assumption that sexual desire is similar to hunger: pleasurable only when there is an immediate prospect of satisfaction, and otherwise a source of dysphoria, frustration and misery. The contemplative model asserts that experiencing lust, or something like it, is or can be intrinsically pleasurable, even when (as is generally the case) there is no possibility of actual satisfaction. In practice, this sort of contemplative jouissance seems to involve a degree of learned discipline, and to derive not from any (non existent) prospect of consummation, but from a deliberately (though not necessarily conscious) symbolic and aesthetic reading of the physical attributes, mannerisms, garb and accessories exhibited by the object of desire. By this I mean that a pair of high heeled shoes, for example, or a particular facial feature, is read or interpreted as a symbolic representation of some engaging abstraction, such as "femininity" or "fragility" or "sophistication" or "coquettishness" or "seduction" or "submissiveness/subordination" or "power" or "innocence" (basically, we're talking about the subset of abstract nouns that might conceivably give their name to a French perfume). Contemplation of these abstractions in certain juxtapositions is discovered to be a source of pleasure, whether or not such symbolic reading also involves (as it occasionally does) wishfully projecting emotions and intentions onto the other.
Well, these 5 are as far as I've got. For now, I will only add that if you are a Holy Grail person, as I was for most of my life until I got to the age where a transition to the contemplative model seemed to be called for, you are destined to be constantly struck by a kind of cognitive dissonance between your view of sex and most other people's, since models 1, 2 and 3 seem to be the standard conventional ones for most people. Or rather, they are save in one respect, which I still can't get a handle on and probably means my model is wrong. What I'm referring to is that when people talk about sexual desire, they generally frame the discourse according to 1 or 2, i.e. within a biological/reflex or commodity-market approach (arguably. women tend to favour 3, the romantic approach, more, unless they read Cosmo which is all about 2) but when it comes to evaluating how pleasant or unpleasant sexual desire is, subjectively, suddenly everyone is a Contemplative, and claims to find wanting people enjoyable. This is what I have never been able to understand, and why I tend to fret about this area of experience so much: until I hit 50, I couldn't for the life of me see anything enjoyable, pleasant or fun about wanting sex with people one knew one wouldn't ever have sex with. Far from it: having a sex drive was, for me, a constant drizzle of fluctuating but basically unrelenting misery. I suppose I can't be the only person to see, or feel, things that way. Either I'm weird (obviously I am, but as weird as to be in diametric opposition to the rest of humanity? hmm) or other people are not telling the truth about what they feel, or ... whatever the third explanation is. I'll get there eventually. Or not.
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