The denaturalization of the sexual does not require an abandonment of all we have learned about the stabilities and varieties of the biological substratum, but it does require the effort of going beyond that and examining what can only be understood in terms of individuals situated in specific points of time and social space: individuals with and within history. Moreover, the requirements and variabilities of the human organism, even as experienced at the earliest ages, must of necessity await their destiny in actual experiences; the individual does not come to social life but is created in social life. To use Stoller’s language, we might ask: “Are there data to contradict the opinion that [sexual] preference is, in both male and female humans, an accomplishment rather than a given?” (Stoller 1985b: 101). To which might be added, “Is not the very capacity to be sexual similarly an accomplishment?”—one, moreover, that cannot be taken for granted at any level.
In some ways the denaturalization of the sexual might be described as the deconstruction of the sexual. In effect, as already implied, what is involved is a reinterpretation of the predominant biological explanatory concepts as metaphorical illusions that insinuate a legitimacy of sexual practices whose very legitimacy at least partially rests upon an acceptance of such illusions. As a case in point, to see the sexual as essentially taking its present form because of the sexual character of human reproduction creates an interpretive bias that infuses our sense of the meaning of “proper” sexual relationships. Such a bias confuses the nature of the biological and physical apparatus with the naturalizing of the emotions and social meanings that make the sexual experience possible.
Among the greatest and most neglected of the contributions of Freud was his persistent emphasis upon the abundant continuities between what were seen as normal and abnormal. He argued that the psychopathologies of everyday life were reflective of the potentials of the inhabitants of everyday life for still more profound psychopathologies and that the boundaries that separated the everyday from the profound were extraordinarily fragile. This position is echoed in the later work of Stoller when he observes that, “When it comes to the expression of sexual excitement, most people, whatever their preference, often appear to be quite hostile, inept, fragmented, gratified only at considerable price, and deceptive with themselves and their partners” (Stoller 1985a:97).
The denaturalized approach purposes that the sexual is socially constructed, that the origins of sexual desire can only be found in social life and its variable presence in the lives of specific individuals is predominantly dependent upon their experience in social life. This is a view of sexual desire as the continuously evolving product of human culture, transmitted not through our genes but through language or through the coded behavior of others which, in turn, reflects the impact of language upon their behavior. The difficulty with this position is that it requires that we accept the relatively superficial nature of what many of us experience as emerging from our deepest and sometimes most compelling sense of our own beings.
In a historical context that has over the past several centuries witnessed a persistent erosion of the permanent and the transcendental, such as God, country, family, and community, as well as many of the fixtures of everyday life, this potential abandonment poses a still greater threat of ontological emptiness and alienation from the realm of nature. At best, the claim that the intensity with which many of us experience the sexual is proof of its primary or primitive character represents a very selective description of the universe of encounters with sexual desire, very little of which—at any rate—appears in scientific discourse. Between the opaqueness of the language of drives and the aggressive accounting of sexual events there is an almost complete silence regarding the specific contents of either the desire for sex, the experience of sexual desire, or the different qualities of emotional production associated with either.