There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it.—Leo Bersani (1987)
That is perhaps the most famous modern statement on sex, and it was a hunch. Bersani admitted he had no statistics to back it up. Indeed, the evidence would seem to be to the contrary overwhelmingly. At the most macro level the current population of the world is 7.888B, its graph line a steady, approximately 15 degree angle rise since 1960 (3.032B). At a bit less than the telescopic level, in the United States, the hook-up culture of Tinder, Bumble, Ashley Madison and so on seem to suggest the same and a direct, unbroken line extends from the "petting parties" of the Flapper Era a century ago through the 1950's to the current. That is, today's hook-up culture is not at all an exclusively modern phenomenon. And at the experiential level on the ground Bersani's claim appears to be an utterly preposterous, "irresponsible" (Bersani's own word) statement to make. Still, Bersani argued,
"If people had sex for pleasure there would be little sex taking place. They do it for all kinds of reasons but pleasure is mostly not one of them."
Why then do we do it and why so often? The answer--because we like it, a lot!--seems too obvious to argue and the undersigned will not argue it.
Rather, these posts will present the experiential evidence of American women who the writer has "known" (in both senses). It is not altogether fitting and proper that he should do this. First, because it is a small, unscientific sample size. Second, because he is a he and is acutely sensitive to the difficulty that hes have had writing shes. It is wincing for him to read Charles Dickens' absurd portraits of women or Ernest Hemingway's uncomprehending anger and resentment, to cite just two authors.
Third, because the poster is a 67-year old post-sexual he by choice. Not to put too fine a point on it, he has not had sex for some years, does not desire sex, would not find sex pleasurable at his age and, looking back on it, although there have been, of course, some experiences of the exception, he mostly agrees with Bersani that when he did it he did it "for all kinds of reasons but pleasure was mostly not one of them." So, perhaps an unusual, but certainly not unique, perspective. I wish to put a very fine point on this: the vignettes here presented are those of women, their experiences, their stories, where available their exact words.
Fourth, because he is not a scholar in any field save the law and therefore has made no systematic study of sex or sexology or whatever it may be called. He has made some study, though. He has some familiarity with the classical accounts from ancient Greece and Rome; with the English accounts from the Proverbs of Hendyng to Shakespeare, Donne, The Canterbury Tales and Dickens; with the psychological insights of Freud; with the work of American women, Friedan, Sontag, Jong, and the writings of Hemingway; he is aware of some of the exceptional attitudes on the subject in the African Democratic Republic of Congo, in Eurasia, Kazakhstan (and no, he did not learn the last from "Borat".), with Muslim North Africa, and the recent studies in Southeast Asia in Japan. To emphasize again, however: these are the attitudes and practices only of American women with whom I am familiar.
The image above, which will serve as title, represents the experiences of one American woman with whom this blogger was intimately familiar and who related her sexual contacts with the thirty-three male sexual partners that she had by age twenty-seven, each contact symbolized by one of the thirty-three stars on the flag. These posts will not be limited to the experiences of that one woman, however, to state what I trust is obvious.
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