How deep can a kiss go?

Introduction by Jamieson Webster

British psychoanalyst Darian Leader’s books from the late 1990s, Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They Send? A Meditation On The Loneliness Of The Sexes and Promises Lovers Make When It Gets Late made an indelible mark on me as a graduate student in her early 20s. I was training as a clinical psychologist and desperate to understand how in the midst of my own difficulties with love and sex, I was supposed to begin listening to others circling the same profound problems. 

Leader was neither an authoritative master who dangled before the reader some ideal of sexual maturity he felt himself to embody, nor did he position himself as some kind of guru whose display of knowledge tantalizingly promised sexual cure. Rather, he wrote about our human conundrums with clarity and compassion because our sexual impasses make sense given the strange fact that sexuality begins in childhood, and we prematurely meet a world that has never been all that welcoming to desire. Like a good psychoanalyst, he knows that these early clashes inevitably define us and thus are the keys to making a little more sense of our suffering. The best way forward is to get to know our own particular sexuality and perhaps modify our expectations—especially of others. 

More than twenty-five years later, Leader returns to these themes in his new book, Is It Ever Just Sex? My twenty-year-old self was flattered to find my book, Disorganisation and Sex, footnoted as one of a few recent psychoanalytic contributions to questions of sexuality that moves beyond a reduction of Freud’s ideas to “pen-vag intercourse.” The Freudian notion of infantile sexuality in fact opens an entire field of disorganizing sexuality. To give you a taste of the kinds of questions that Leader probes: 

How do our phantasies form and what effects do they have on sexual life? And if most people’s sexual lives begin with phantasy, what can prepare us for the eventual collision of bodies? Why are arousal and satisfaction so rarely commensurate? What does it mean to be penetrated, and why do we not only penetrate but press, caress and mouth other bodies? Why do we apply pressure to skin and muscle? Why do we bite, scratch and squeeze? In surveys of sexual behaviour, no human society has been found in which violence is absent from sexual relations, and their vocabulary is shared. The word ‘force’ is the single most common verb to describe sexual acts, and the language of domination, possession and conquest is ubiquitous.

In a world that promises sexual agency and liberation and enjoyment, we seem to have forgotten the forces that endlessly work against these when intimacy is at stake. From this contemporary abyss Leader drags up the panoply of our anxieties, fantasies, fears, and feelings (with a particular focus on aggression), to show how we all attempt to mediate, block, disguise, disrupt, split, control and dissociate from our desires. “Given this baggage, it is quite surprising that people manage to have sex at all,” he writes.

Darian Leader: A lot of people make the effort to make sex not mean anything—they leave abruptly afterwards, they often break digital contact with the person they've just slept with, they call their friends to mark the conquest and turn it into point scoring rather than an emotional connection. But what we see here is an effort, an endeavour, which we may be totally unaware of, to take meaning out of the equation or, in some cases, to convert meaning. Calling one's friends to boast of a conquest converts the meaning of the sex into a different kind of meaning—bolstering one's own self-image, for example. Whatever happens, meaning is always there somewhere, and there are also plenty of cases where a casual encounter comes to mean too much for the person, and their friends might have to persuade them that it was just a casual encounter, that it was ”just” sex. One of the reasons this is so difficult is that we tend to equate physical closeness and intimacy with the love we have lost in our childhoods—which always involve parents touching us less as we grow up—and so touch becomes a reminder of love. In that sense, sex always means something!

Just as parental touch fades over the years for children, touch can then become electrifying when rediscovered later in life. We see this not only in sex, where bodily contact reminds us of the lost intimacy with our parents, but also in other practices like massage, osteopathy, or physiotherapy: practitioners know that every now and again their clients will suddenly start weeping, as if overcome by a grief that the bodily contact has evoked for them. Because most of this is unconscious, all we experience is a disconnect between what we are doing and what we are feeling, because the feelings are coming to us from a long forgotten place.  

 This was once a crucial area of debate in the women's movement in the 1970s and ‘80s—how could one reconcile a rejection of patriarchal violence and subjection of women with the seemingly inevitable power inequalities played out in sexual acts? For many people at the time, this meant that rape phantasies and SM practices were prohibited. Yet there was a chorus of female voices contesting this. Writers and activists like Cherrie Moraga and Amber Hollibaugh reclaimed power as the ”heart” rather than the ”beast” of sex, as they put it, and the banning of SM was seen as simply another repressive measure taken by conservatives. Many people today, as you point out, still find the balance confusing, and the metrics of consent applied in some parts of Western culture often fail to resolve the issues at stake. How hard should one press skin and muscle? How deep can a kiss go? What can one request without the request itself becoming an act of violence? And of course, all over the world sexual violence—almost always against women—continues to be the rule rather than the exception. The sheer prevalence of this in Western media indicates how it chimes with both conscious and unconscious phantasies, and probably reinforces these.

 I was surprised to see how the debates in the ‘70s and ‘80s were much more nuanced and complex than the debates today. Why? Today there is less space for recognising contradiction and conflict at the core of human sexuality, yet back then this was widely acknowledged. We have moved into a world where desire is understood as simple, unidirectional, with human beings no longer being sites of conflict and division but one dimensional purposeful units: we have a goal and then we pursue it. Life becomes a search for instrumental goals. We try to ”realize” our dreams, to ”actualize” ourselves, yet in the process what gets lost is the fact that we might want two contradictory things at once, or we might aim at both success and sabotage. We have moved from a Freudian world to one where a human being is more like a rational agent from an economics textbook.

To address the question of violence, and especially sexual violence, we need to think about how sexuality develops in the first place, and how aggression and rage are a part of it. Research from the 1940s showed how sexual arousal occurs when we feel under threat or in danger, and only later becomes linked to the typical social cues of surface sexuality. By around age 12, we have mostly forgotten about all the other contexts that caused arousal, and yet fear and anger continue to shape what we experience as excitement. When someone feels lust apparently out of the blue, when we explore what is really going on, we always find clues as to where the sexual feelings came from: a disappointment at work, a sudden feeling of emptiness, rage that could not be expressed, fear of a reprimand or a loss of love, a sense of guilt or failure.  

 Well, perhaps one effect of the effort of the women's movement to depolarize gender has been to strengthen reactive sex-role stereotypes. As activists tried to deconstruct traditional gender roles and challenge patriarchal male/female divisions, there were corresponding attempts to buttress these roles, and especially with masculinity, as this so often requires a fundamental dichotomization in itself, ridding oneself of any ”feminine” elements. In many cultures, being a ”man” means negating any traces in oneself of woman, a situation made all the more fragile given the fact that one's early educators are often exclusively female themselves. 

 Sandra Bem was totally on point in the ‘90s, when she predicted that the way forward wasn't to renew efforts to smash the male/female dichotomy—what she called ”turning the volume down” on gender—but, on the contrary, to turn the volume up, which meant multiplying gender labels.  

Love and sex are clearing houses for so many different things that we have to see both the tragedy and the comedy! Every small act in sex involves making oneself a cause of the other person's pain or pleasure—or an amalgam of the two. We finally achieve the ability to cause things that most of our lives deprives us of. That's why for some people all that matters in sex is making the other person come, and why the feelings immediately afterwards are often so surprising and unexpected.