The birth of languages and the establishment of sex codes, as
primitive as they were, are related to the moment of
agriculture, a juncture at which a certain autonomy of the
species was reached. Rooted in the biological distinction
between male and female, labor division increased the efficiency
of human effort. Divisions were also established, some under the
model of male domination, others under the model of female
domination, pertinent to survival activities, and later on to
incipient social life. Eventually, labor division consecrated
the profession of prostitution, and thus the practice of
satisfying natural urges in a context in which nature was
culturized. The prototypical male-dominated structure of the
sexual relation between man and woman marked the history of this
relation more than female domination did. It introduced
patterns of interaction and hierarchies today interpreted
wholesale as harmful to the entire development of women.
What is probably less obvious is the relation among the many
aspects of the pragmatic context in which such hierarchies were
acknowledged. Moreover, we do not know enough about how these
hierarchies were transformed into the underlying consciousness
of the populations whose identities resulted from experiences
corresponding to the pragmatic context. The implicit thesis of
this book is that everything that made language and writing
possible, and progressively necessary, led to a coherent
framework of human practical experiences that are characterized
by sequentiality, linearity, hierarchy, and centralism, and
which literacy appropriated and transmits. Consequently, when
the structural framework no longer effectively supports human
self-constitution, the framework is modified. Other aspects of
human existence, among them sexuality, reflect the
modification.
Reading and writing have much to do with our emotional life. They
remove it from the immediacy of drive, hope, pain, and
disappointment and give it its own space: human striving,
desire, pleasure. They are associated with an infinity of
qualifiers, names, and phrases. With language, feelings are
given a means for externalizing, and they are stabilized.
Expectations diversify from there. Structural characteristics of
the context that makes language necessary simultaneously mark
the very object of the self- constitutive experience of loving
and being loved. There are many literary and visual testimonies
to how the erotic was constituted as a realm of its own: From
Gilgamesh, the Song of Solomon, Kama Sutra, Ovid's Art of Love,
through Canterbury Tales and the Decameron, to the erotic
literature of 18th and 19th century Europe, down to the many
current romance novels and handbooks on lovemaking. No matter
which of them is examined, one inference becomes clear: the
pragmatic context of the continuous human self-constitution
effects changes in the way people are attracted to each other.
Love and integration of sexual experiences, in the manifold of
acts through which hominids move from the self-perpetuation
drive to new levels of expectation and new intensities of their
relations, is also pragmatically conditioned.
Writing, as a practical experience of human self-constitution, is
conducive to relations between male and female that are
different from random or selective mating. It is bound to
continue along a time sequence severed from the natural cycle of
mating, reshaped into the marriage contract and the family
alliance. Literacy, as a particular practical experience of
language, regulates the sexual, as it regulates, in a variety of
forms, all other aspects of human interaction. In the literate
erotic experience, expectations pertinent to the pragmatics of a
society in search of alternative means of survival evolve into
norms. The inherited experience of female-male relations,
affected through the experience of rituals, myths, and religion,
is condensed in literacy. Encoding hierarchy, some languages
place women in a secondary position. There is almost no language
in which this does not happen. "Many men and women" is in Arabic
("rijaalan kafiiran wa-nisaa'aa") literally "men many women." In
Japan, women speak a Japanese reserved to their sex alone. In
the English wedding ceremony, the woman had to repeat that she
would "love, honor, and obey" the husband. To this day, Orthodox
Jewish men give thanks to God that He did "not make me a woman."
With the demise of literacy, the sexual experience gets divorced
from procreation. Statistics of survival in the past world of
limited available resources, of natural catastrophes, of
disease, etc., cease to play any role in the illiterate sex
encounters. Sexuality becomes a diversified human experience,
subject to divisions, mediations, and definitely to the
influence of the general dynamics of the world today. As markets
become part of the global economy, so does sexuality, in the
sense that it allows for experiences which, in limited
communities and within prescribed forms of ceremony (religious,
especially), were simply not possible. From the earliest
testimony regarding sexual awareness up to the present,
everything one can imagine in respect to sex has been tried. So
often placed under the veil of secrecy and mystery, sex is no
less frequently and vividly, to say the least, depicted. Yet a
rhetorical question deserves to be raised: Does anyone know
everything about sex?