Held with Tweezers

With clipped aristocratic accents of a Noel Coward or a Brian Sewell someone holds up human sexuality for examination gripped between the twin prongs of clinical tweezers and held fastidiously at arms length. The tone is a mixture of curiosity and disgust in confrontation with this inexplicable phenomenon which we are all, somehow, expected to participate in. It’s as though a bad joke has been played on principally cerebral creatures by absent but governing powers with the sole purpose of humiliating them and rubbing their noses in the mud. This  antiseptic distancing from a slightly repulsive process which is beneath us and which it is unreasonable to expect us to indulge in seems a distinctively British approach.

However, of course, Coward and Sewell were known for indulging in sex with a more than healthy relish and no cerebellum exists unless its substrate of cells have been created by sexual union. The appearance of a separation between the mental and the physical and that distance created by the priggish are illusions as asexuality in humans is a rarity. Just as, although we do not graze constantly, we are always at the mercy of our need for nourishment, we are never not sexual and our relations are never not mediated through the fact of our being sexually gendered. Sex and us cannot be artificially separated by a kind of Cartesian dualism or as a thought experiment as “we” are wholly embodied in gendered bodies to the tips of our fingers, toes and the extremes of our genitals.

The scientisers affect to live in the apparent mental space created by such distancing and, then, to be surprised by and to rediscover as unfamiliar phenomena things with which we were all familiar before we developed our mental faculties to the full - implanted animal appetites, human, warmth and bonding and the object which springs from them, the family.