The very concept of the scripting of sexual behavior implies a rejection of the idea that the sexual represents a very special, if not unique, quality of motivation. From a “scripting perspective” (Simon and Gagnon 1969), the sexual is not viewed as an intrinsically significant aspect of human behavior; rather, in this perspective the sexual becomes significant when it is defined as significant by collective life (sociogenic significance) or when individual experiences or development assign it a special significance (ontogenic significance). The significance of some behaviors, such as those defined as sexual, is determined less by the frequency with which that behavior occurs than by the amount and intensity of individual and collective attention paid to it (Foucault 1978).
Sociogenic and ontogenic factors are necessarily closely interrelated. Societal settings where the sexual takes on a strong meaning, where successful performance or the avoidance of what is defined as sexual plays a major role in the evaluation of individual competence and worth, would also be settings where sexual meanings play a correspondingly significant role in the intrapsychic lives of individuals. However, even in settings with a high density of external sexual cues, not all individuals need experience an equivalent density of internal cues. Similarly, it is possible for some individuals in settings marked by relatively little overt concern for the sexual to create a set of sexual meanings and referents far more intense than those describing that setting.
The motivation to perceive and respond in sexual terms need not be determined by what is the conventional significance of a given social setting. Individuals may attach sexual meaning and motivation to aspects of the external environment that are not conventionally defined as having a sexual content. However, deviations from prevailing cultural scenarios tend to be limited to a universe largely created by such cultural scenarios, the application of conventional sexual meanings to unconventional sexual objects or the expression of unconventional motives through conventional sexual activities. For example, most forms of sexual deviance in their initial crystallization, like most human adaptations, parsimoniously alter the smallest amounts of relevant attending conventional meaning; the capacity to add substantially to social reality is generally limited to the extraordinary or the accidental. The ideologizing of the sexual most often follows the contours of the prevailing antinomies of sexual desire (Davis 1983). Thus, we can conceive of sex as a source of salvation only after it has been advertised as an invitation to damnation. Moreover, what is frequently the highly stereotypical outcome that is experienced by the individual as an act of self-invention or, more accurately, self-modif ication, speaks rather dramatically to the powers of the symbolic. The invoking of social symbols by psychic reality, while subjecting such social symbols to an enlarged number of grammars, does not make them totally plastic. It makes them available to the uses of the imaginary but only in terms set by the symbolic (Lacan 1977).
The most basic sources of sociogenic influence are cultural scenarios that deal explicitly with the sexual or those that can implicitly be put to sexual uses. Such cultural scenarios not only specify appropriate objects, aims, and desirable qualities of self-other relations, but also provide instruction in times, places, sequences of gesture and utterance and, among the most important, what the actor and her or his co-participants (real or imagined) are assumed to be feeling—all qualities that the sexual must share with other domains of desire. Such qualities of instruction make most of us far more committed and rehearsed at the time of our initial sexual encounters than we realize. What becomes problematic is the establishment of linkages between cultural meaning and intrapsychic response.
Where there is a congruence between the sexual as it is defined by prevailing cultural scenarios and intrapsychic response, behavior is entirely dependent upon the shared significant meanings of collective life. In such contexts, the sexual often takes a natural air that obscures the fact that virtually all the cues that initiate sexual behavior are embedded in the social routines of the external environment, just as the absence of external cues served to mute desire. It may have been this reliance upon external cues that made long periods during which sexual activities are not accessible more easily managed in most historical settings than contemporary observers might anticipate.
A lack of congruence between these levels of scripting transforms the sexual into more obscurely metaphoric behavior, as it becomes a vehicle for meanings above and beyond conventionally shared meanings: private sexual cultures grow within the very heart of public sexual cultures. It may well have been the growing number of individuals in Western societies experiencing just such a growing lack of congruence that made prevailing eighteenth — and nineteenth — century discourses on the nature of the sexual, which Foucault (1978) describes, so highly effective in gaining widespread adherence to modern Western sexual values and idealized patterns of behavior (see Chapter 3).
Interpersonal scripting, the actor’s overt responses, must draw heavily upon cultural scenarios, appropriating symbolic elements expressive of such scenarios. Interpersonal scripts are the representations of self and the implied mirroring of the other that intend to facilitate the occurrence of a sexual exchange. And while such scripts generally imply things about the internal feelings of the participants, only the representation of appropriate feelings need be manifested or confirmed. At one time or other, desire will follow rather than precede behavior; not only do individuals often “fake” their sexual responsiveness, often they must simulate sexual interest in order to invoke authentic sexual excitement.3 Interpersonal scripting serves to lower uncertainty by heightening a sense of legitimacy for both the other or others as well as the actor herself or himself.
The motives, conscious and unconscious, that underlie what appears to be manifestly sexual behavior vary widely. As might also be said for any significant genre of activity, there must be many more reasons for behaving sexually than there are ways of behaving sexually. A half century after the death of Freud, the quest for the sexual motives informing nonsexual behavior tends to provoke far less anxiety than a quest for the nonsexual motives that upon occasion organize and sustain sexual behavior (Burke 1941). Moreover, to the degree that most current conceptions of sexual behavior imply a potential for sexual excitement, we also require an understanding of the less directly observable dimension of intrapsychic scripting: that which elicits and sustains sexual arousal.
There are social settings where interpersonal scripts represent, at best, minor variations around dominant cultural scenarios and where enacting these interpersonal scripts appears to satisfy the requirements of intrapsychic scripting. Most typically, these settings have sexual patterns that Freud viewed as characterizing the worlds of antiquity, where great emphasis was placed upon the drive and little attention given to the object of the drive (Freud 1905). However, writing as he did in a world of pervasive sexism, Freud failed to observe that this multiple congruence of scripting elements occurs most often where the concerns for sexual arousal and orgasm were the exclusive or nearly exclusive interests of only one participant—a dominant male.
We must keep in mind that part of the historical record of sexism is the fact that women rarely have been “selected” for sexual roles on the basis of their own interest in sexual pleasure. The very idea of female interest in or commitment to sexual pleasure was, and possibly still is, threatening to many men and women. Even Freud, with what is simultaneously an understandable but still shocking display of sexism, casually comments upon the ease with which women, presumably more so than men, accommodate to varied sexual “perversions” once they have been sufficiently exposed to the potential pleasures of the sexual. This is not to say that women in such settings did not have commitment to effectively utilizing or responding to interpersonal sexual scripts but that these commitments rarely tended to be erotically focused on the production of women’s orgasms.4
In the “modern” era, Freud contrasted, the drive becomes suspect and most emphasis is placed upon the object and on the quality of the relationship to the object. This shift of focus from the drive to the object must inevitably occasion a growth of empathetic concerns. The transformation of the object into a participating other requires the recognition, however limited, of the other as another subject. Sexual actors must not only take cognizance of the behavior of the other, they must also take cognizance of the feelings communicated however uncertainly by that behavior. For both self and other, the eroticized sexual act often represents an act of offering and possession of what can only rarely be wholly offered or ever truly possessed: the intrapsychic experience of another person. “Did you really want it?” “Did you really enjoy it?” These questions are asked repeatedly, if silently.
A social world that requires that we bargain for our identities inevitably trains us to bargain with ourselves. Desire, particularly the desire for desire, becomes one of the most pervasive currencies for negotiating cross-domain exchanges in the highly complex moral accountancy often required by contemporary social life. A highly reflexive, executive self appears, but not necessarily always on demand, to manage the commitments to the world and commitments to oneself. The self in becoming a scripted actor becomes its own producer (managing resources, balancing investments in long-term and short-term pleasures) while becoming its own director in the continuous staging of the self. While non-erotic motives frequently organize and lead us through our selection of interpersonal sexual scripts, an increasing emphasis upon erotic competence describes much of contemporary sexual life.
The estrangement of the erotic from the domain of everyday life, so fundamental a legacy of the modern Western tradition, made the erotic a domain where the abstractions of moral discipline could find concrete and persistent illustrations and tests. This empowering of the erotic often occasions a dominance over an intrapsychic realm where the laws and identities governing everyday life could be softened, a domain where the self could be organized in ways that temporarily included within the nuclear self aspects and qualities that everyday life otherwise exiled or expressed through muted disguises and/or contrary employments.
A cultural tradition that advertised the dangers of the sexual made of the sexual a road map where other dimensions of self that were to be excluded from the everyday self or were denied f ull expression could rally, enriching the erotic and being enriched by the erotic, which is then to be experienced as having a domain, an elaboration of discourses, a license of its own. This erotic license applied to interpersonal scripts, wherein we are licensed to eroticize our ideals, and intrapsychic scripts, wherein we are licensed to idealize the erotic. License for elaboration often made maintenance of self-solidarity more difficult. An
example of such a problem would be the common experience of wanting to express a commitment to elements of interpersonal scripting that were consistent with stereotyped gender-role postures, while simultaneously experiencing feelings intensely incongruous with those very gender-role postures; wanting simultaneously to take possession of the object of desire (the male role in predominant cultural scenarios) and to be the object of desire (the female role in such scenarios), to seduce and to be seductive, to conquer and to surrender, to desire and to be desired and desirable.
The separation of an erotic identity from an everyday identity is reflected in the disjunctive experience that commonly occurs upon the entry into explicitly sexual acts, an experience of disjuncture that commonly occurs even among individuals who have had an extensive shared sexual history. This is reflected in the traditional and persistent practice of putting out the lights before initiating sexual activity in order not to be seen, not to see, not to be seen seeing.5 The problem of disjunctive identities is also reflected in the questions: “Who am I when I have sex?”, “With whom am I having sex?”, and “Why?” In seeking answers to such questions, how often is our everyday identity reduced to being a co-conspirator forever pleading its innocence, and, if not its innocence, its reluctant complicity?
Sexual scripts must solve two problems. The first of these is gaining permission from the self to engage in desired forms of sexual behavior. The second problem is that of gaining access to the experiences that the desired behavior is expected to generate. Multiple desires are commonly implicated in any sex act, not all of which are mutually reinforcing or even compatible. More often than not, the continuing social relationship with the other takes precedence over the immediate pursuit of some desires. Typically, this occurs not only because of the potential importance of the relationship but also because of the inevitable links between the other and complex network of shared social relationships upon which the social standing and reputation of the actor at least partially rests (Lauman et al. 1994).
Pursuit of desired experiences frequently requires that the experiences of actors become contingent upon what their partners appear to be doing and also upon what their partners appear to be experiencing. And while this empathetic inference derives partly from available cultural scenarios and partly from what is perceived as the actual experience of the other, it also derives from what the actor requires the other to be in order to maintain sexual excitement. Thus, sometimes the actor, in her or his presented guise, merely provides the plausible access to behavior, while the desired experience is to be gained not from but from within the other: the not uncommon experience of the other becoming a metaphor for the self. Such a response was typified by a transsexual who, when asked how she could have fathered several children while she was a he, replied, “There was always a penis there, but it never was mine”. Similarly, Edmund White in describing the gay male clone—a figure of hyper-masculine costumes and postures—comments, "we’ve become what we always wanted” (White 1983 [1994] :149).
What Freud saw as fundamental to the psychological novel can also describe the scripting of the sexual.
The psychological novel in general probably owes its peculiarities to the tendency of modern writers to split up their ego by self-observation into many component egos, and in this way personify the conflicting trends in their own mental life in many heroes.
(Freud 1907 [1908]:150)
"Self-observation”, of course, points to precisely the process that must follow the fashioning of an interpersonal script out of sometimes incongruous material, often very careful self-observation. And self-observation represents incipient self-control, and self-control becomes synonymous with the staging of the self. The actor ultimately must submit to the authorial I, while both nervously anticipate the responses of overlapping but not always harmonious panels of internal and external critics (Bakhtin 1981).
The sexual script, like fantasy in general, can be seen as "the mise-enscene of desire” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973). In this sense, the concept of sexual scripting takes on a more literal meaning: not the creation and performance of a role but the creation and staging of dramas. As we are reminded by virtually all introductory sociology texts, roles are meaningless in themselves and take on meaning only in relationship to the enactment of related roles. What the actor/ ego is (including what the actor/ego feels she or he should be feeling) is dependent upon the creation of a cast of others (including what they should be feeling), the others who complete the meaning of the actor. In some cases this requires others who are obliged to experience what the actor cannot or is forbidden to directly experience in her or his own name.
Most typically, these burdens of construction encourage the emergence of slow-changing, rule-bound genre. Few individuals wander far from the formulas of their most predictable sexual successes. Once we evolve interpersonal scripts that work, that occasion the realization of sexual pleasure as well as the realization of sociosexual competence, there is an obvious tendency to fix or para-ritualize that formula. The stabilizing of sexual scripts often confused with the crystallization of a sexual identity, occurs partly because it works by insuring adequate sexual pleasure with a minimum of anxiety or risk. This tendency toward the formulaic occurs because its stabilities represent an effective accommodation with the larger self-process, an accommodation where the experience of sexual practice and sexual identity is only minimally disturbing to the varied components of one’s nonsexual identities.
A recently reported finding (Lauman et al. 1994) was to the effect that among adults 18 to 59 the highest rates of masturbation were observed among those who were the most active sociosexually I would see this as suggesting that such individuals, and perhaps many more, operate with different constructions of the sexual self (Lichtenstein 1977) and that differences in behavior are accompanied by scripts organized to reflect changing power relations between the requirements of the interpersonal and those of the intrapsychic. The enactment of masturbation then is unlikely to be substitutive of a sociosexual experience, but may reflect a different act involving a different construction of the sexual actor (s).
This possibility was expressed vividly by the novelist David Guy in his recent work, The Autobiography of My Body (1992), which devotes a chapter to a recapitulation of the masturbatory history of the narrator/hero. Guy’s hero concludes this celebration of the special pleasures of masturbation by concluding pointedly that “this is why my happiest experiences with masturbation were during the periods I was married”.
It is important that the reader be reminded that much of the process of sexual scripting, while appearing in the obscurity of individual behavior, remains in most critical aspects a derivative of the social process. What appears to be the freedom of the individual from the determination of the social process may, in fact, be little (and yet a great deal) more than a reflection of the increased complexity of collective life and the resulting elaboration of intrapsychic discourses (Gergen 1991).
The ritualization of sexual behavior, however, may depend more on the stability of the individual within social life than in any evolved stability of social life within the individual. Changes in the individual’s status or context, as Kohut observed, have the capacity to call into question the larger organization of the self: “certain periods of transition which demand of us a reshuffling of the self, its changes, and its rebuilding, constitute emotional situations that reactivate the period of the formation of the self’ (Kohut 1978a:623). A potential crisis of the self-process and the production of sexual and nonsexual scripts is occasioned because the entire ecology of the self has been disturbed. Such a moment often requires renegotiation of aspects of the self directly related to change but also a renegotiation of virtually all aspects of the self that previously required a negotiated outcome. In modern societies there are relatively few individuals f or whom the self-process does not involve such negotiated outcomes.