Where societies provide a tight, coercive, yet seemingly frictionless integration of sexual roles with all other roles, the need for the self-conscious management of a specifically sexual identity, one that accommodates both cultural meanings and intrapsychic response, is minimal. In such relatively stable, well-integrated cultural settings, “sexual habits” can be understood in much the same way in which one might seek an understanding of eating habits and preferences. Both eating and sexual behavior in such contexts appear seamlessly attached to related behaviors and beliefs. Indeed, in such social settings, sexual “disorders” or sexual “deviance” would be no more common than eating “disorders” or eating “deviance”. Moreover, sexual behavior in such settings requires little by way of empathy; cultural scenarios that articulate the specification of appropriate objects, locations, and occasions provide effective, predictable guides. As a result there is little need to fashion a sexual identity experimentally; sexual preference, like food preference for most, is a cultural given.
Where this is not the case, as in contemporary society, where heightened heterogeneity and heightened choice produce problematic, alternative, and sometimes conflicting versions of the good life, the testing and creation of links between sexual desires and the requirements of the larger self process may be one of the major dynamics shaping individual versions of the erotic. It may be that it is the uncertainties and ambiguities implicit in social life that foster the widespread salience of the erotic in modern Western societies. As the individual loses a sense of transparency, not necessarily being what she or he appears to be, each individual must learn to offer herself or himself for reading by others just as that individual learns to read the presentations of self offered by others. In such contexts, cultural scenarios become suggestions or options, but not road maps, and interpersonal competence becomes more important. The enlarged role of the empathic requires explanation and understanding beyond the questions of behavior and extends to qualities of consciousness, the dimensions of consciousness that constitute the dimensions of self.
The most general contextualizing aspects along which the construction of the self varies are complexity, pluralism and choice.
Choice is like a river; it broadens as it comes down through history— though there are always banks—and the wider it becomes the more persons drown in it. Stronger and stronger swimming is required, and types of character that lack vigor and self-reliance are more and more likely to go under.
(Cooley 1902:39)
We fail to observe that the response to the challenges of choice (uncertainty) may be met in relatively unspectacular ways by ordinary persons living ordinary lives.
What Cooley’s remark speaks to is a necessary empowerment of individual psychology, of the domain of psychic reality, where the ordering of the self is not merely the reflection of social life, but is occasioned by problematic, choiceladen encounters within social life. “Problematic, choice-laden encounters” more commonly describes the ways in which most adolescents encounter the sexual than it does for any other segment of the population, when they encounter the sexual at either interpersonal or intrapsychic levels. In recognition of this sexual problematic, a great deal of attention has been focused upon the patterns of sexual behavior of adolescents. Relatively little has been paid to the flowering of sexual activities on the level of the intrapsychic. Despite all differences from the now remote experiences of an adolescent, which may be considerable, as well as its continuing similarities, which also may be considerable, youth remains safely unremembered.