writing notes on sex/uality

Some comments/notes on sex/uality

1. A constant problem in the conceptualisation of sexuality, and in particular gender, is the problem of the 'political' evaluation of sexual roles.  Feminism and Queer theory has not been particularly helpful in resolving this issue largely because both derive from a broad 'cultural studies', philosophical, or literary-theoretic background, and both are politically engaged. This results in theoretical perspectives that borrow too heavily from political philosophy on the one hand, and from the needs for a rationalisation and legitimation of political action, remedial action, or other forms of public engagement.  This is fine as far as it goes, but does not permit a genuinely anthropological perspective to intrude on the way in which we understand and study sex. This is not to say that gender, sex, sexuality, and so on does not have a political dimension, but that there is also a religious dimension, an economic dimension, a physical, even 'ontological' dimension, and yet, that sex/uality is also a relatively autonomous domain of social life, separate from all of these other concerns. This makes it the anthropological object par excellence but without an effective anthropological perspective.

2. Female sex/uality is usually represented as 'passive', 'receptive', that is 'feminine;, while male sex/uality is represented as aggressive, active, insertive, penetrative.  What more can be said about this, or how can this be understood differently?  One way is to understand female sex/uality as 'relational', while male sex/uality is 'instrumental'.  By this I mean that females (and female identified males) experience their sexual stimulation as arising from outside of their bodies, and not entirely under their control.  Control is projected onto another person, the 'active' partner.  For males, control is experienced as internal, and while not entirely controllable is nevertheless focused in the 'instrument' of the penis.  The penis is experienced as both external to the body, and internal to the sexual function of the person.  For the female sex/uality to be actuated, an external actor, that is a person who is in some relation to the female person, is required. Women do not experience their own ovulation in any direct way, and as experimental evidence has now shown, are not always--or even ever--cognitively aware of their own arousal.  Their arousal is often 'shown' to them by their partner, who experiences this arousal and relays this information to the 'female'.  The two partners then explore the signs of arousal and feed this information back to each other, increasing arousal.  Through increasing arousal, the relation is then bound into relationship. By contrast, males discover their own arousal by the external state of their penises.  While the biochemistry of arousal is internal, for males (people with penises), their arousal is communicated directly to them without a social intermediary.  For females, and social intermediary, taht is a sexual partner, is required to trigger and to sustain the arousal loop.  For males this is more autonomous.

3. Hypergendering, and hypogendering.
Recent popularity of 'trans' sexual identities, and their high-profile advocates and practitioners such as Bruce/Kaitlyn Jenner especially, raises quite a number of questions that are not entirely comprehended by contemporary gender theory.  Jenner exposes both hyper-gendering as male and hyper-gendering as female.  What is common in both Bruce and Kaitlyn is that they are both hypergendered.

Upcoming conferences for 2014

Well, I’m trying to get a schedule of conferences together for 2014, and have so far sent abstracts off to two of them

The proposal, or abstract is: 

A new archaeology of glass beads in southern Africa, 500-1200 CE

Robert Thornton (Anthropology, Wits University, South Africa)

Jonathan Thornton (Art Conservation, Buffalo State College, USA)

Our experimental reconstruction of glass bead technologies, OLM, SEM, EDS, and XRF studies of their internal structure, ethnographic evidence, and reanalysis of archaeological materials, provides a basis for a radical reinterpretation of the origin, trade, and production of glass beads in the archaeological record.  According to the current standard interpretation, glass beads were all traded into southern Africa from a few sources in the Indian Ocean (‘Trade Wind’ beads), Egypt, and/or the Middle East, and they were all either ‘wound’ (on a mandrel) or ‘drawn’ (as tubes from a molten mass of glass).  In addition, it has been argued that beads constituted ‘wealth’ for class-stratified, agro-pastoral societies. For instance, micro-structural evidence shows that some (many?) beads were made of sintered powdered glass, not ‘wound’ or ‘drawn’.  Experimental reconstruction of possible early pyrotechnologies shows that glass could have been manufactured from raw materials plentiful in the southern African areas where glass beads are found, and experimental reproduction of glass beads that strongly resemble archaeological beads at K2, Mapungubwe, etc., show that glass and glass beads could have been produced locally, possibly at many sites across southern Africa, and probably were.   Re-analysis of ethnographic and historical evidence shows that beads in African societies were primarily used in ritual and healing, rather than as wealth or currency.  This leads to new understandings of historical trade patterns and of social structures in first millennium African societies implying, for instance, that Indian Ocean trade in glass beads was multi-sited and reciprocal, involving societies structured around sacred sites with ritual-technological specialisation, rather than (or in addition to?) class stratification. 

The second paper-to-be is proposed for the Association for Social Anthropology in Edinburgh, in June.  

The proposal is: 

Human sexuality and human origins: The occlusion of sex and the exclusion of social anthropology from the human evolution debate

Robert Thornton, Anthropology, University of the Witwatersrand

Summary

We must include a distinctly human sexuality with tool-making, fire, language, etc., in the original human skill set that made the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens possible.  The lack of an adequately anthropological theory of sex has excluded social anthropology from debates on human origins.

Long Abstract

The emergence of the ‘human’ from hominidae, and of ‘human nature’ from nature, must surely have involved the emergence of a human sexuality from a ‘natural’ sexuality.  Paradigms rooted in Christian theology and Darwinian evolution have precluded the conceptual separation of human sex/uality from reproduction, and have therefore prevented social anthropologists from engaging usefully with the human origins debate.    A distinctly human sexuality, however, can be clearly distinguished from the sex/uality of other mammals by re-envisioning sex as a distinct form of social action/agency, and by recognising that, for humans, sex and reproduction are different forms of (social) action, even as they are often culturally conflated. Many Enlightenment debates revolved around the utility and rationale for ‘marriage’ as a sort of proxy for human sexuality, even as they necessarily failed to grasp the significance of the sexual.  I argue that the emergence of a specifically human sexuality, together with tool-making, fire, language, etc., in the original human skill set, was one of the enabling conditions for the emergence of humanity per se.  If the emergence of a distinctly human, culturally-configured sexuality can be seen as part of the original human skill set, then sex (as social action) had already separated itself from reproduction (and therefore natural selection).  This perspective allows social anthropology to re-enter the discussion of human origins, and provides new perspectives on the relation between sex, religion, and human evolution. 

The (un)naturalness of condoms, and the ‘nature-culture’ binary

In the wake of the announcement at the 6th South African Congress and HIV & AIDS, I have been giving more thought to the question of why the prevalence in southern and South Africa has bee rising, rather than stabilizing or falling, as has been expected for some time.   In front of Aaron Motsoeledi, the Minister of Health, and members of his department, and an audience of some 4000 ACTIVE HIV/AIDS prevention and treatemnt practitioners, Olive Shisana announced that prevalence was at an all-time high.  Knowledge about HIV and how to prevent it was ALSO at an all-time high among the general population, but so was unprotected sex, and so was the number of concurrent partners.

Clearly, there is a large problem here, not just with HIV, but with our theoretical perspectives.  We all believe--and so far it seems to be ONLY a belief--that knowledge and education and communication should have an effect on ‘behaviour’.  Knowledge, education, & communication here mean what is taught in all the well funded and now nearly pervasive HIV/AIDS education and ‘communication for behaviour change’ interventions.  They have not ‘worked’ in South Africa.

‘Behaviour’ here implies ‘sexual behaviour’, that is a set of human activities that are assumed to be ‘biological’, and more or less automatic.  In other words, this set of human activities is not called ‘social action’, or ‘recreation’, or anything else that implies value, motive and meaning,  but is rather termed ‘behaviour’.  In this ‘scientific’ worldview, sex is a behaviour like blinking or walking.  Just as we can be taught to turn the walk into dance, with careful instruction, we continue to assume that sexual ‘behaviour’, like walking, can be trained into something like a dance.  The dance we try to teach the sexually inclined person is to put on a condom, or not to ‘dance’ at all.  It is not surprising that it does not work much of the time.  Indeed the question is, if and when it does work, why should it work at all?

The pervasive use of the term ‘behaviour’ (meaning sex and ‘sexual behaviour) means that for biomedicine and science, as well as for the ordinary man with his dick in his hand, sex is nature.  It is ’natural’ behaviour.  And yet, we wish to change it through communication and education, the very definition of culture.

But let me address one issue out of the many about why this is so difficult, and perhaps not possible at all.

One belief that almost all humans share--scientists, biomedical professionals, the religious, and the ordinary person--is the belief that sex is ‘natural’.  They/we seem to believe this despite the fact that we also believe that it can be taught (or must not be taught--implying, of course, for the religious that is can be taught), and that it is ‘acquired by [people] as a member of society’, to use E B Tylor’s famous definition of culture. It is has to be taught, or can be taught, or should not be taught, then it is--by definition--culture, not nature.  And yet, one of the most widely held cultural beliefs is that sex is not-culture, that is, it is ‘nature’.

The condom, however, is a form of dress.  It is a ‘raincoat’, a ‘sweet wrapper’, ‘an umbrella’, a ‘rubber’, a ‘french letter’.  Its use has to be taught.  It is not by any stretch of the imagination ‘natural’.  Its cultural nature is beyond doubt.

The problem in these terms, then, is how the condom as an item of ‘culture’ is to be integrated into a fact of nature.  Can we make the condom ‘natural’ when it is effectively a form of dress (or decoration) that functions as ‘protection’, and whose use has to be taught.   Alternatively, can we make sex into culture?

The manifest un-naturalness of the condom makes the first alternative unlikely, and probably impossible. It is never going to skin, and even if it were, putting on one’s own skin is not something that anyone would want to get used to.  But can sex be culture?

In fact, it already is. It is the culture of science and of religious beliefs that makes us see sex as ’natural’, that is, as part of nature. Under these conditions, sex and condoms are never going to mix, and the very ‘science’ involves queers the pictures so completely that this combination of nature-culture is unlikely.  As we see again and again, empirically, it is rarely observed.

It would be easier, then, to begin to understand sex as culture, to teach it as an ‘art’, that is, AS CULTURE.  This involves valuing sex as a form of expression, perhaps not like any other, but at least a form that could be understood as cultural form rather than as ‘fact of nature’.

This re-valueing of sex would make it at least PLAUSIBLE that education and communication might have an effect of sex as social action and as cultural form, rather than sex as neurological reflex with a minimal bit of motor coordination required.

As it stands, condoms are refused by many because they involve getting ‘dressed’ just as one has undressed, and getting cultural in the middle of what (we firmly believe) is all natural.

It will be easier to revalue our belief that sex is ‘natural’ than it will be to make the condom part of nature.  We know this because human cultures in many times and places have done precisely this.  The Kama Sutra, for instance, and the other ‘Oriental' ars erotica,’ as Michel Foucault noticed (though not crediting his probable sources, as usual, since the insight is hardly original with him), is not equivalent to a ‘scientia sexualis’.   But as the the art and graffiti of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and many other Ancient sources show, Foucault was entirely wrong that this was a divide between the East and the West.  The Ancient world also had its ‘ars erotica’ as the Song of Songs (Song of Solomon) clearly shows, and which is available to everyone, if not in their bookcase or bedside table, then on the Internet.

Rape in south Africa: what does it tell us?

The following is a response to a BBC report on a study concerning rape in South Africa. It can be found at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8107039.stm

There are a number of things that might be worth saying.

I think one of the keys is what I call the 'flat' structure of South African social relations. (I say 'social relations' since using terms like 'society' or 'social structure' is not quite right in this context.) South Africa is one of the youngest and most mobile societies in the world. No social 'structure' that still functions today has a history of more than a couple hundred years and the same is true for its social identities, ethic categories, racial categories and so on. I think this is even true of its system of gender. Along with this, is an extremely fluid and 'loose' system of kinship, marriage and family property transmission.

There is almost no property passed from generation to generation in families through inheritance (except for a few elite 'oligarchs'--White, Indian, & Black), and very little heritable property of any kind. Outside of the 'canonical' large business enterprises (e.g mining such as Anglo-Ashanti Gold, etc.) and parastatals, there is very little political hierarchy of any kind (that is, hierarchies in which the 'higher' exercise effective control over the real actions of those 'beneath' them, although there are status hierarchies in 'traditional', religious, class and racial terms.) This is true of kinship as well.

This results in almost no control being exercised by the elders over juniors. Although few would accept it (!), in my ethnographic and personal experience of marriage and gender relations in South Africa, there is even very little actual control exercised by men over women. It is the case, however, that there is a universal and powerful ideology that men should and do exercise control over women (This is called 'patriarchy', after early European kinship theorists such as Bachofen, Engels, Freud and many others.) The outcome of this is that men cannot, in fact, exercise the control over women that they believe they should do. Violence results not from excess of control, but rather from an effective lack of it, and the consequent frustration felt by many men who cannot realise their own sense of self.

I know of many cases, too, in which people do not know who their father is. In many cases, they are not even certain who their mother is, since wide-spread fostering, early teen pregnancies, and pervasive mobility often disrupt bonds between mothers and their children. Where mothers die young, or at childbirth, their relation to their children is obviously disrupted, and this is more common that it should be. (SA has one of the worst records of maternal mortality, and this has become steadily worse since 1994.)

The power of ideology also obscure the sociological vision of this society since it is believed by all, including the researcher (Rachel Jewkes of the Medical Research Council, in this case) that only men are implicated in this system, in which 'South African masculinity' and 'patriarchy' become cover categories to explain everything. In my experience, women are also likely to be violent in 'domestic' cases of conflict. They also express the view that men should exercise control and that they should provide; when they don't, or can't, women can become exceptionally abusive and violent. I have seen this is countless court cases in the traditional courts where I work, and in virtually every domestic relationship that I am familiar with in the course of my work. Men always and absolutely deny that they have been attacked violently by girlfriends, wives and lovers, but many men in the town where I work can show scars (usually on their faces) where they have been attacked and deeply injured in domestic 'quarrels'.

Incidentally, my ethnographic work over 10 years in a small South African town in eastern Mpumalanga Province is one of the least violent in the region, and one of the oldest and most established.

It seems to me, even, that the extent and pervasiveness of sexual networks functioning as social structure, that it is almost the case that the South African sexual network amounts to a vast and strangely integrated system of kinship, a sort of national system of 'kinship' in which sex (sexual relations) functions as a primary form of social relation.

All of this has a strong bearing the pervasiveness of rape in southern Africa (NB not just South Africa, although only SA is actually studied in depth in this respect; very little is known about Lesotho, Mozambique, Zimbabwe or Namibia with respect to sex and sexuality; Swaziland and Botswana, however, are better studied.)

Comment on Helen Epstein "AIDS and the Irrational" (BMJ 337, 2008)

Helen Epstein's 'AIDS and the irrational', (BMJ 2008;337; a2638; online 29 Nov 2008, p 1265-1267), framed as an open letter to the new director of UNAIDS, argues that much more attention should be paid to what she and others call 'partner reduction' strategies in AIDS prevention campaigns. Her main complaint is that UNAIDS and other agencies such as USAID do not focus sufficiently on this factor. She argues that while circumcision is also an effective but neglected method, both evidence and argument indicate that 'partner reduction' holds the key. She takes issue with the 'irrational' failure of UNAIDS and other agencies to take this seriously enough.

The 'irrationality' in the title refers to two things. First, the 'irrationality' of the UNAIDS policies toward AIDS prevention that are not always based on good science. They may be based instead on religious and political commitments of the UN's member nations, and on deeply held beliefs about what will work in AIDS prevention.
The second cloud of references to 'irrationality' is her assertion that some of the UNAIDS policies contribute to the impression that sex, especially in Africa, is in fact 'irrational' and that only technical, bio-medical solutions will stem the tide of HIV in these populations. This is predicated, however, on the apparent evidence that "irrational beliefs about AIDS persist" in Africa such as beliefs that "traditional medicine is more effective that antiretroviral drugs," and the resort to witchcraft to explain and deal with AIDS infections.

The idea that African beliefs about sex and AIDS are 'irrational' is, of course, controversial. Thabo Mbeki, former president of South Africa, rejected the hard evidence that HIV causes AIDS and that it is especially prevalent in South Africa in part because he believed that it implied that Africans were "irrational." Nevertheless, African beliefs about AIDS do appear to be irrational. Is there a better way to understand them?

One way in which southern Africans appear to be particularly 'irrational' is their involvement in long-term concurrent sexual partnerships. In some areas and age groups there is almost a one-in-two chance that any new partner will be HIV positive. Yet southern African men and women continue to have unprotected sex under these conditions, and do so with multiple partners. This is clearly "risky sex." In order to understand it, however, we have to examine more critically the notions of 'multiple partnership', 'concurrency', and 'risk'.

As Epstein points out, there is every reason to recommend "partner reduction", even to make it the central part of all HIV/AIDS education campaigns and interventions. However, UNAIDS prefers to recommend what Epstein calls 'needlessly overcomplex … combination prevention,' that is, multiple approaches including the usual ABC, VCT, treatment of other STIs, education, together with bio-medical research on vaginal microbicides, vaccines, and pre-exposure prophylaxis. A great deal of money has been spent on the bio-medical approaches despite the fact that none of them has shown much evidence of success.
It is eminently clear that 'partner reduction' does indeed break up the AIDS 'superhighway' of transmission that a densely connected set of 'multiple partnerships' creates (Thornton 2008). The term 'multiple concurrent partners', however, directs our attention to small ego-centred groups rather than to larger social contexts. This can limit our vision.

Jacob Zuma, culture of polygamy, and multiple concurrent partnerships

In an email on 9 Januiary, I was asked by a South African journalist, Helen Grange, to express some opinions about 'multiple concurrent partnerships', as these have been recently perceived. She is a 'senior contract writer for The Star newspaper' in Johannesburg. She asked four questions:

Polygamy as a cultural practice, referring to Jacob Zuma’s fifth wedding (currently being planned): Has this tradition been corrupted and does it still have a place in modern African society?

Sugar daddies: Has materialism assisted in this perversion of the culture of polygamy, and is it a growing phenomenon?

Celebrity immunity: Why are football stars like Benedict Vilakazi ‘immune’ from social judgement over their infidelities and casual sex? What does it say about modern culture?

Alcohol: To what extent does this contribute to MCP (casual sex) and how does one reverse the drinking culture that’s so pervasive?

Here is what I said, for what its might be worth to others thinking about these issues. Joournalist only use a sentence or two, if that, and there was much more to say about the questions she asked.

9/1/2009

Helen,

OK. Thanks for the questions. I don’t have a lot of time this morning either, so let me make a few comments quickly, on the questions you are raised.

Polygamy as a cultural practice, referring to Jacob Zuma’s fifth wedding (currently being planned): Has this tradition been corrupted and does it still have a place in modern African society?

Yes, of course this has been corrupted. Whether we call it polygamy is a moot point. He is exploiting his political and cultural celebrity in a very directly sexual way. This is not ‘tradition’ in the sense that it comes from the past, or is particularly Zulu.

Polygamy is ALWAYS restricted to the powerful or wealthy since there is numerically one woman for each man. Polygamy is more of a political structure or strategy. Where is it widespread, that is, where powerful men dominate most women through marriage, and incorporate them into households as part of a system of political domination, then the main problem become NOT control of the women (who are looked after), but control of the large numbers of men who will never have opportunity to marry or have families of their own. They must either be incorporated into gangs run by the warlords who dominate the market n women, inducted into armies or regiments, and controlled by military discipline, or sent into battle in order to die. We see this in much of the historical and contemporary Middle Eastern societies, Somalia, Sudan, and so on.

In southern Africa the situation is less dire because married women have liaisons outside of polygamous marriages and thus the unmarried men have some access to goods and sex through this.

The women Zuma is ‘marrying’ are also exploiting Zuma, and marrying or having sex with him for the economic, status, and political benefits it can provide to them. This is not ‘patriarchy’ but mutual exploitation of advantage through establishment of sexual networks. In this case, sexual networks become in practice just another form of business deal or patronage system to distribute state-derived funds and other goods and money.

We must keep in mind too that most of the current ANC political and business elites have been in sexual relationships with each other over the past several decades, including most if not all of the senior women. This is mostly based on hearsay and rumour, and you may not be able to report it, but just the well-known and marital relationships and ex-marriages that we know about establish the fact that the ANC elite is already a dense sexual network. In this they merely reflect a wide-spread South African pattern. Jacob Zuma stands out, however, in seeking to legitimate his sexual relationships through marriage. This probably makes it easier for him to distribute benefits to his followers through his wives.

Again, this is not unusual. King Mswati does the same thing for the same reason. Marrying many wives and using these linkages as ways to establish and maintain political and economic advantage through patronage is a pattern found in many, if not all, African political systems in central, eastern and southern Africa. It is not new; it takes a different form in a ‘democracy’.

The issue that this raises, however, is that should Zuma become President, there will be great pressure to accommodate his many wives, their families, and followers into some aspect of government patronage systems. This will place a great burden on the financial resources of the state.

The next step would be succession struggle among Zuma’s wives and children when/if we were to eventually relinquish the presidency or die early from AIDS.

Thus, the issue is not really ‘polygamy as a cultural practice’. It is not. It is legal, of course, and has been practiced within African cultures in SA and the rest of the continent (as well as by Mormons, European royalty, etc…). It should be treated, however, as a form of political structure designed to distribute patronage from the centre and to form alliances that will support a powerful elite.

Q: Sugar daddies: Has materialism assisted in this perversion of the culture of polygamy, and is it a growing phenomenon?

It is hard to say. In southern Africa, as in West Africa, there are also ‘sugar mommies’, and in this respect, it is pretty equal opportunity. There are lots of wealthy women, or women with sufficient independent resources to support lovers. Although popular culture together with much of the professional literature and beliefs support the idea that men as ‘sugar daddies’ are a problem, this is hardly the case for men alone. The beliefs that this is a male phenomenon are probably not supported by fact, and are themselves a problem.

Are they a ‘perversion’ of culture? No. Since polygamy is always about political and economic domination of sex and other material resources, the continuation of this in other political and economic forms cannot be called a ‘perversion of culture’. In earlier times this involved resources such as cattle a fields, and was tied to dominant lineages and what anthropologists call “family-property complexes”. It is more varied and diverse these days, and usually conducted with cash as the primary medium of exchange and wealth (not cattle and fields), but it is essentially a low-level political and economic system for distribution of wealth among followers.

This is probably what you mean by ‘materialism’.

It is not a growing phenomenon except for the fact that the economy is now bigger (though currently shrinking somewhat).

Q: Celebrity immunity: Why are football stars like Benedict Vilakazi ‘immune’ from social judgement over their infidelities and casual sex? What does it say about modern culture?

Again, this is not a characteristic of ‘modern culture’. Cultural and economic elites in all societies and through time have had greater sexual access and more “immunity” from social judgment. That’s life. The fact that he is a football star makes his life more visible to the press and to his fans, but it does not make it unusual, nor is it something new.

What it says about ‘modern culture’ is that , according to the old adage “plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose”—“the more things change, the more they stay the same”!

I think what is more relevant in this case is that media elites are seen to have multiple partners, and that these are concurrent partners. That is, they have multiple girlfriends (or boyfriends) at the same time, and that this is tolerated, even emulated, and held up as something to be copied and valued.

As we know this is one of the best ways to spread sexual infections, including HIV, but not only HIV. Since large numbers of southern Africans are also murdered as the result of jealousy and domestic conflict, and large numbers sustain both psychological and physical injuries as the result of their sexual choices, the damage is far more than it would seem. Jealousy does not disappear simply because everyone wants multiple sexual partners. That continues to exist, and leads to a great deal of unhappiness. AIDS is only one of the consequences.

Again, it is important to realise that this is not the province of men alone. Women exploit the ‘system’ for reasons that are partly the same as men’s, but also sometimes different. Both men and women have motives to be involved in multiple concurrent partnerships, and clearly both participate more or less equally. Women manage to control knowledge of it much more successfully than men, however, and men a motivated to publicise these liaisons in ways that women do not.

Alcohol: To what extent does this contribute to MCP (casual sex) and how does one reverse the drinking culture that’s so pervasive?

Yes. Of course alcohol is involved, but I doubt very much if the system of sexual networks and multiple concurrent partnerships would change in the absence of alcohol. Alcohol abuse may increase casual sex (though this is not necessarily true just because we believe it to be true), but it is hardly essential to the existence of sex in this form or any other.

I have no idea how to change drinking cultures, and doubt very much that this can be done at all. I don’t think the connection to sex is any greater than its connection to business, excess eating, golf, Christmas, or many other things.

Sexual arousal: towards a truly useful theory of sex

One of my larger projects is to try to develop what I call a theory of sex that is useful for anthropology. This would involve a theory of sex that is truly social and that can lead towards and understanding of sex AS culture, sex AS social, and sex AS social action. The alternative, what we have now, is various social constructionist approaches (Foucault, Lacquer, etc.), psychological (Freud, Maslow, all psychologists), or biological-essentialists (the 'evolutionary' theorists and their just-so stories, the real biologists, etc.)

One of the issues that concerns me now in this effort is the issue of sexual arousal, or what I call (here) Long term sexual arousal (LTSA). It seems to me that this is distinctively human and importantly, even centrally, social.

The existence of LTSA may be responsible for the difficulty in talking about sex. But it is more than this. I want to address a few topics here, and ask a question for anyone who might read this.

In my writing and thinking about sex, ‘the material realities of sexual relations’, as you say, the stuff that gets lost in the ‘discourse’, I have been thinking lately about something that seems to me to be distinctive: long term sexual arousal. This seems to be a human characteristic, and one that is distinctly human and therefore critical to understanding sex. It is largely neglected, however, as a significant feature of sexuality. Clearly it is the ‘condition for the possibility’ of sex, or at least arousal is *for males*, but is still a problematic category for thinking-about.

It seems to me that arousal has some of the characteristics of that other evolutionary mystery, or set of mysteries, loss of oestrus, and concealed ovulation. Also of menopause, and the social role of ‘grandmother’ (caring for grandchildren that this is supposed to have enabled).

In brief, I have been thinking about the social consequences of arousal. According to the theoretical perspective that I am developing, we have to account for the pair-relationship in social ways, and as a consequence and context for sex. This clearly does not mean monogamy in humans, but it does mean that there is a close intimacy established, generally between two and only two people, during sex. I call this ‘the space of the dual’. My current problem is to explain how this ‘space’ of intensive pair-wise focus (the sexual couple) comes about.

Obviously (?), this has to do with arousal. Or that is what I have been thinking. Humans are capable of long-term (hours, or even days ?) of ‘arousal’, that is, an ‘alternative’ or ‘altered’ consciousness of another person that is—or is intensely perceived as—sexual. This long-term arousal is, it seems to me, unique to humans, and is coordinated with loss of oestrus and concealed ovulation since the dynamics of arousal replace the dynamics of oestrus signals (red bottoms on female baboons, oestrus odours, etc.) and effectively make up for the ‘concealment’ of ovulation. In other words, for an aroused, ‘horny’ couple, it does not matter whether their bottoms are red or if their smell signals fertility: they are aroused by each other, and this is a profoundly social bond.

So, one of the lynchpins of a truly social theory of sex that is useful for anthropology is a focus on the notion of arousal, especially long term sexual arousal (LTSA). Clearly arousal is not the same thing as ‘pleasure’ or ‘desire’ but has a more direct effect on social action. In trying to develop such a theory, it may be important to leave ‘gender’ entirely or relatively out of it. That is, to not make sex the reflex of abstract categories, but rather a social act that is predicated on meanings and motives. It would be useful to develop a theory of sex that does not collapse in the presence of “homosexuality” (sex that is seen as wrong, with wrong ‘object’, non-fertile, etc.) but which can account for sex-as-sex, sex in general social terms, rather than moral terms, or in terms of its effect on fertility and populations (evolutionist and bio essentialists views).

The problem, however, is to what extent is arousal ‘gendered’? When I first presented some of these view at the beginning of December 2008 at a seminar at University of North Carolina in the Anthropology department, one of the female members of the seminar said to me afterwards, ‘But its not like that for women; your perspective is entirely masculine’. Of course, and male these days is used to hearing that almost any view they express is nothing but a ‘male perspective’, ‘gendered’ and so on. But there is also some merit to her suggestion that men and women do not experience arousal in the same way. My interlocutor, a woman, suggested that “Of course, women don’t necessarily become aroused at all. You are just talking from a male perspective.” Ouch. But so be it. From a ‘male perspective’. She is certainly right in some cases, but not all.

In thinking about this, it occurs to me that it may be rather the case that no two people experience arousal in the same way, but that some men and women do experience it is very similar or the same ways, while others irrespective of ‘gender’ experience it in other ways. In other words, it seems to me that arousal may be a very social experience, but is also high variable. Indeed, its variability points to a social and cultural dimension since features that are simply determined by biology, or by evolution, are generally much more stable and determined.

Clearly, too, sexual arousal for the male is necessary for sex (penetrative sex) to occur at all and this is not (necessarily) the case for females or for anal-receptive males. This also makes female prostitution possible and profitable (while it is much more difficult for a male prostitute to have as many clients in a night, say, that for a female), but does not make is ‘necessary’—that is, it is a condition for the possibility of female prostitution, but not a cause of (female) prostitution. There are many others issues like this that arise as well.

This difference between the sexes in arousal also, I think, has implications for the question of female ‘subordination’ and for male claims to power (I don’t always agree with the feminists that men have as much social power as they are attributed by feminists, but that is another matter).

The claim I wish to make, then, is that long-term sexual arousal is a fundamental human characteristic that is partly biological and partly social and cultural, and therefore a significant dimension that must be investigated in order to develop a theory of sexual action that is useful to anthropology. Arousal cannot simply be assimilated to the discourse on desire, pleasure (Foucault), impulse or libido (Freud), and is highly social, but in a restricted sense: it involves the pair, the one-to-one relation, rather than the social (Many-to-many, or many-to-one relations), and is not restricted to the psychological (the one, the self).

The problem is that it appears to be so variable in the way it is experienced, and also both necessary AND contingent.

This has become too long.

My question, then, is how to examine this variability in the experience of arousal?