While not always specifying the full range of expected behaviors, no social role is without life-cycle requirements in the double sense of, first, either having entry and exiting requirements that are life-cycle stage-specific or, second, having expectations that systematically vary with life-cycle stage attributions. Some roles are very specific about age requirements: “you cannot until age x”, “at age x you must”. Similarly, for many roles and activities, particularly those that are universal or nearly universal, standards of evaluation can vary dramatically with the presumed life-cycle stage of the actor. Only the very young and very old are allowed to be sloppy, self-preoccupied ingestors of food. Indeed, the commonplace admonition, “act your age”, speaks directly to the pervasive relevance of life-cycle stage conceptions to virtually all behavior. There are few roles or dimensions of identity that are more burdened with life-cycle stage specifications or more troubled by the transformations accompanying life-cycle stage changes than the sexual.
Where there is near-universal respect for life-cycle stage boundaries and expectations, individuals tend to experience little conflict in integrating the several roles an individual occupies. However, highly differentiated societies, such as the industrial and postindustrial countries of the West, have great difficulty in effectively sustaining just this kind of syntagmatic integration of age-specific roles. While undoubtedly much that is involved in the association of age with social status persists, in sexual domains confusions, uncertainties, and flexibilities clearly abound. These persist in a double sense: not only do the contents of age-specific expectations become ambiguously complex but even where there is consensus regarding such expectations, the applicability of such expectations frequently remains vague. What do we expect of the young? What do we expect of the old? Who is young? Who is old? The order in which these questions must be asked differs radically between traditional and modern social orders.
Folk psychologies or common conventions regarding life-cycle stage distinctions and recognitions appear to have become less common and less commonly effective over the past century. Siegal and White (1982) suggest that the very mandating of the study of child development rested upon the need to create statistical norms against which the behaviors of specific children could be evaluated in social settings where traditional expectations lost their generality of application. This loss of stability of expectation occurred at the very point in social history where enlarged proportions of middle-class parents were persuaded to accept responsibility for the social and moral destinies of their children, a development that ironically proceeded in approximate correlation with a growing inability of parents to fully control such destinies.
An expression of this increasing complexity is the sheer number of available life-cycle stage distinctions and points in the life cycle where shifts in observed behavior or expectations require new bases for evaluations and explanation. And shifts, in turn, call for new strategies for scripting our own behavior and the behavior of others, and for anticipating the interpretation that others might bring to our own behavior.
One consequence of increasingly common confusions regarding lifecycle stages is that the process of translating cultural sexual scenarios into interpersonal sexual scripts has the effect of empowering the actor who often is able to practice considerable discretion in invoking specific aspects of the semiotic of the life cycle. This is an empowering, it should be noted, that is shared with others who also have considerable discretion in confirming or disconfirming the actor’s representations. Thus an aging “playboy” whose partners, like the Playboy centerfold, never age may be simultaneously an object of ridicule and envy. What were once the coercions of “social facts” increasingly become bargaining chips in negotiation with others, as well as in negotiations with the self.
Infancy, childhood, and, until recently, old age were stages where the appearance of sex-seeking behavior was viewed as pathological because those either too young or too old were assumed to be incapable of comprehending or experiencing the full meaning of the behavior. Community outrage at the rape of an elderly woman or a child is often greater than an even more brutal rape of a mature woman, despite, or because of, the inappropriateness of the object which bespeaks its greater pathological origins and often precludes even the suspicion of initial complicity on the part of the victim.
For some individuals the sequence of life-cycle-based cultural scenarios continues to organize interpersonal sexual scripts in ways that facilitate the harmonizing of sexual commitments with other more public role commitments. For such individuals, cultural scenarios covering conventional family careers serve as the organizing principle of sexual careers; for them, family careers, sexual careers, and the definition of life-cycle stages tend happily (or, in some cases, unhappily) to coincide. Suggestive of the expectation of this integration is the fact that for Kinsey, and virtually all others, categories of heterosexual behavior have been organized in terms of marital status. Sexual careers were subsumed under the headings of premarital, marital, extramarital, or postmarital experiences.
Once a congruence of scripts and identities was essentially mandated and enforced by the institutional order. However, for increasing numbers this coincidence fails to occur or, when it occurs, it occurs with the kinds of strain that subsequently undermine self-stability. The fairly dramatic recent changes in patterns of sexual behavior reflect not only a profound change in the requirements of and meanings attached to the sexual but also equally profound changes in the ordering of family careers and, ultimately, in the very definition of the life cycle itself. The relatively simple and coercively linear description of the life cycle provided by Erikson (1950), a description that is little more than four decades old, has required substantial qualif ication and may have lost a sense of currency, like the world as imaged by Norman Rockwell, a world most of us never knew, one that may not have existed and yet that we feel a need to believe in. Where lifecycle stage conceptions once offered the comfort of appearing to specify behavior, it is commitment to behavior that increasingly advertises, with understandable uncertainty, one’s life-cycle stage.
It is quite common to hear references to the confusions engendered by “blurring of life-cycle stage boundaries”. This is often accompanied by an admiring appreciation of more traditional societies that appear to have maintained clear and nearly universal application of life-cycle stage distinctions. Not untypically, such social orders are admired for facilitating the journey across the conventional life course by utilization of “rites of passage”. The implied comparison is with contemporary societies that often appear to provide very little instruction for individuals in how to manage such transitions, not only failing to provide training in the behaviors associated with a new stage but also failing to provide an unambiguous basis for reciprocal recognitions.
However, what appears as a blurring of boundaries on the collective level is not necessarily fully descriptive of what occurs on the individual level. A highly differentiated society is unlikely to formulate instructive life-cycle scenarios that can simultaneously realize a level of abstraction sufficient to override existing differences and that can, at the same time, become an occasion for evoking powerful feelings. For example, the question of what constitutes minimal sexual maturity varies considerably across time and cultures. It varies rather dramatically across the contemporary social landscape. Where “serious” involvement in sociosexual activities once marked the boundaries between adolescence and adulthood, it increasingly comes to mark the boundaries between childhood and adolescence. Similarly, changing family patterns, conditions of health and nutrition, and altered value given to manifest sexual viability make expectations regarding sexual activities at post-child-rearing ages equally uncertain.
Sexual cultural scenarios persist but can no longer be located within a singular interpretive context. To the contrary, the specifics of person and place effectively compete for legitimating the appropriateness of a specific scenario. Age or lifecycle stage suggests the possibility of sexual activity at the same time that sexual activity affirms firms our claim to a specif ic stage of the life cycle; if I do “it”, I am either old enough or young enough depending on “where I am coming from”. Here we can observe the commitment to the sexual following the essentially nonerotic motive of gaining interpersonal and/or intrapsychic confirmation. Current adolescent sexual patterns speak to this rather eloquently. The fairly dramatic sexualization of early adolescence provides an exemplification of the desire for meaning, in this case commitment to displays of gender competence preceding and shaping a commitment to the meaning of sexual desire (Miller and Simon 1980; Schmidt et al. 1994).
This is not to imply that the sexual is entirely organized directly by the press of external requirements. As I’ve noted, while operative cultural scenarios substantially condition overt behavior, both in behavior and in the anticipation of behavior, internal rehearsals represent the trials or experiments where a multitude of accumulated desires are tested for compatibility with each other, allowing for an initial crystallization of a so-called sexual identity (Laufer 1976). However, sexual identity isn’t the only pressing issue of identity, nor is it the exclusive substance of fantasy. The early eroticization of such trials through masturbatory experience may serve to strengthen the claims of the emergent intrapsychic scripts in seeking expression—however muted—in operative interpersonal scripts. Occurring typically during a period of heightened narcissism, such fantasied rehearsals have a capacity to harness social ideals more effectively to mechanisms of sexual arousal than may result from the actual sociosexual experience. While emotionally charged, not all—possibly very few—erotic rehearsals or fantasies are acted out, though many fantasies continue to be acted within. In the sexual moment, dialogue with the other can often bear little by way of resemblance to the ongoing dialogue with the self. Unfortunately, almost all of our concern with the sexual activities of adolescents centers upon overt behaviors—which indeed have important consequences—while virtually none of this concern focuses upon the imagery informing that behavior. Most adolescents, however, find a negotiated compromise between the requirements of both levels of scripting, though the stability of that negotiated compromise is a matter of considerable uncertainty.
Sheltered by its internality, the imagery of the intrapsychic yields to change far more slowly than the more externally monitored production of interpersonal scripts. With shifts in life-cycle status, from adolescence to adulthood in its varied stages, from being children to being parents, from engaging in violative behavior to engaging in mandated behaviors, the very accommodations effective at one stage become problematic at subsequent stages. The transition from the sexual being a problematic of a relationship to being a conventional aspect of the relationship often occasions a crisis of scripts.
Aside from its own intrinsic requirements, the sexual also shares the burden of demonstrating social, gender, and moral competence and, as a result, the demands placed upon interpersonal scripting often represent distinct influences. Thus, rather than being reciprocally reinforcing, the requirements of interpersonal and intrapsychic scripting of the sexual frequently represent a continuing—and for some a costly—dialectic.
One consequence of this synthetically negotiated sexual repertoire is that it is highly responsive to subsequent narcissistic wounds or threats (Kohut 1978a). The mid-life crisis, for example, often manifests itself in terms of reactivated sexual experiments, though it may represent more of a renewal of the sexual than a failure of previous strategies of sexual repression or containment. This would be renewal in the sense that, had the disturbance not occurred, the individual might well have continued on his or her previous sexual trajectory. In other words, renewed focusing upon the sexual may have roots in a problematic aspect of the self remote from the sexual. The aspects of self that occasion an initial disturbance of the self often link the individual to social life far more critically than any burden the sexual may carry. Typical of these might be the conflicts between the self as child and the self as parent, the crises attending both success and failure in the world of work, and the unpredicted disordering of the social context.
The sexualization of this kind of crisis often has two distinct consequences. First, while appearing initially as a threat to the traditional social order, sexual “acting out” actually lessens the estrangement of the individual by mandating a transformation of the self within the social order and not a transf ormation of the social order. This is done by moving the individual toward a quality of interpersonal scripting that personalizes discontent and its solutions. For example, much, perhaps most, of the increase in female participation in
extramarital sex may not be an expression of a feminist revolution so much as it is a more comfortable alternative to such a revolution.
Second, as a post-adolescent, heightened sexual activity generally follows the eroticization of the sexual and, as such, it utilizes the powers of the intrapsychic to create new metaphors of desire, metaphors of desire that effectively link the “archeology” of desire with new and often unanticipated social destinies. Both the anomie of deprivation and, even more profoundly, the anomie of affluence focus the individual’s attention upon available repertoires of gratification in ways that commonly highlight the promise of the erotic (Simon and Gagnon 1976). The enlargement of psychic functions attending the anomic condition is attracted to the promises of erotic experience: promises of intensity, promises of confirmation. As Lichtenstein (1977) observes, the role of sexuality in its most frenzied dominion is in providing confirmation of a very special construction of identity, however temporarily. The sexual act providing a form of pleasure is particularly salient during moments when self-solidarity is itself in question, And despite a traditionally bleak prognosis offered by Durkheimian and psychoanalytic traditions, for some the promises afforded by the sexual moment may be kept and the confirmation sustained.
For all the confusions attending both adolescence and the vaguely defined midlife crisis or post-adolescent identity crises, it is easier to consider the sexual within such contexts than it is during other segments of the life course. These have become matters of sufficient public concern that speculation on the scripting of the sexual within these contexts becomes possible. Other segments of the life course remain largely uncharted domain. One suspects, however, that even where the journey through the life course appears without trauma or significant episodes of disorder— as it well may be for many—the problems of adapting sexual scripts to changed, even slowly changed, circumstances and conditions are an important if relatively unexamined issue.
The power of sexual scripts, perhaps much of the power of the sexual, is tied to the extra-sexual significance of confirming identities and making them congruent with appropriate relationships. Where identity is for the moment confirmed and relationships stabilized, the meanings and uses of the sexual shift in very basic ways. For many, if not most, there is an inevitable shift from a sexuality feeding off the excitement of uncertainty to a sexuality of reassurance. The stabilizing of identities and relationships tends to stabilize the structuring of interpersonal scripts; even variations and elaborations take on a predictable character, accounting for what for most becomes a declining frequency of sexual activity itself (Lauman et al. 1994; Blumstein and Schwartz 1983). It is possible that the sources of sexual interest, if not sexual passion, depend increasingly upon materials drawn from aspects of intrapsychic scripting that can be embedded within the stereotyped interpersonal script. A useful but potentially alienating adaptation that encourages what has always been to varying degrees a potential aspect of sexual exchanges is that we become dumb actors in one another’s charades.
The problematic qualities of managing the scripting of the sexual by adults in stable relationships can be seen in two ways. First, the cultural scenarios that dominate the social landscape tend to be drawn almost exclusively from the requirements of adolescence and young adulthood. There are virtually none tied to the issues of subsequent segments of the life course. Indeed, the interpersonal scripts of these early stages, along with the intrapsychic elements they facilitate, may become in part the fantasied components of the intrapsychic at later stages, particularly in their ability to offer the illusion of confirmation of attractiveness and displays of passionate romantic interest. And while this transfer may serve to sustain sexual commitment, it also has the capacity to provide a disenchanting commentary on the observable performances.
Second, the imagery and content of intrapsychic scripts tend to change very slowly because they flourish in the isolation of erotic reality from everyday reality. Drawn from what we once were, as well as from what we were not and still are not allowed to be or express in more explicit form, the intrapsychic in muted form feeds our continuing sexual experiences and, not uncommonly, opportunistically enlarges their claims during moments of crisis, disjuncture, or transition. These are words that to varying degrees describe the traversing of the life course for all of us: transition, disjuncture, and, sometimes, crisis.