How to Think More About Sex by Alain de Botton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
On the onset, it may seem that we think too much about sex already. But no, De Botton’s very short book is meant to help us think more (in a different way) about sex. That is, not just the fantasy of having it, and the meanings that come with our fantasy of who we aspire to be, or feel that we are inside, but more about how our attitudes about sex (love and marriage) come to define us, and set us up in ways that are wholly contradictory.
As many wisemen have pointed out (although I can’t think of any at the moment), “people make their own problems” (or at least problems for one another), which may as well be the direct inverse of existentialism’s “people make their own meaning”.
Sex as a topic, as pointed out by many thinkers, like Lacan, is difficult to explicate, as sex occupies a “hole” in the continuity of our shared social experience… this hole is the unthinkable, unsayable dimension of personal fantasy… sex means something different to everyone. If you accept Lacan 100%, there can be no sexual relationship because our personal fantasies cover the void where sex is concerned.
With this in mind, De Botton sets about illuminating where we go wrong with how we make our own problems, about sex, in as much as where he shows we go right.
The methodology is simple. Think outside the box, not just how a particular action sets us up for folly, but how in its extension, it can also be right, or wrong. There are many great passages in this book. He ranges the topic from sex itself, to love, to marriage, running the gambit of fetishes, adultery and pornography… all features of how, today, we deal (or not deal), with sex.
The root of the problem, De Botton shows us, is how we exist wholly for ourselves. If you were to rely on a genealogy of where our attitudes come from — they come from the very bourgeois beginnings of capitalism. In an era when status was attained by having neat things, or living the dream (rather than titles conferred upon one by a king), the bourgeois set about creating for themselves marriages of happiness and abundance. Marriage was made about enjoyment and happiness. Fast forward to today, and we live in an era when relationships are supposed to be wholly monogamous all the while intensely pleasurable. The pressures of keeping up with the Joneses, managing finance, housework, children, careers AND being in Love and having great sex all the time — the list is nearly impossible to maintain.
Very literally, the images we have of relationships — why we want to get into them — how we assess how we are doing while in these relationships — are the very reasons why we make ourselves miserable. This sounds a little surprising, but also entirely familiar. I won’t steal De Botton’s thunder here, but he does make some compelling every day examples of how a hypothetical relationship can easily go awry, when two imperfect human beings expect the other to be perfect for themself.
But this sounds so general, we do need some examples to put ourselves in. And that’s where De Botton excels. He places us into these examples, general enough to be anyone, specific enough to be familiar, and shows us where things can go if we were to think about it one way, vs another.
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