WHAT IS "SEXUAL INTELLIGENCE"?
Article by LiveReal Agents Courtney and Blake
Sex can be a tricky thing to talk about.
It’s a sensitive topic, in more ways than one.
That’s why we often hint around the edges of it, make dumb jokes about it, and keep it mostly private.
Like the sun, we usually avoid looking too directly, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When we do “go there,” it sometimes feels like we’re juggling live grenades or test-driving speedboats. We sense that we’re playing with powerful forces. It's easy for things to get preachy, or out of control, or worse.
All of this translates into yet another important topic that we don’t actually talk about much.
Sounds like a job for your trusty and intrepid LiveReal Agents.
“Sexual intelligence” is important, after all.
Empires have crumbled, wars have been fought, lives and careers destroyed, murder and mayhem unleashed – all because of one little word with three little letters.
The Trojan War involved the deaths of scores of soldiers, for example, and was supposedly caused by “the face that launched a thousand ships.” All that for one pretty face.
Clearly, it’s possible to have a lack of intelligence in this area.
So, it might seem silly, but it’s a question worth asking.
What is “sexual intelligence”?
We assume that we can “get smarter” about math, or spelling, or reaching the 49th level of a video game, with a little effort and inquiry.
Can’t we also “get smarter” about one of the most powerful forces in our lives – heck, that has the power to create life itself?
If we’d want to get more intelligent about this whole business, how would we go about it? Is there a yardstick able to measure this sort of thing? (The intelligence, that is.)
With a topic as complex as this, it seems like a good idea to start at the very beginning.
Let’s assume that “sexual intelligence” is a good thing.
Lack of sexual intelligence is a bad thing.
Beyond that, it gets complicated.
We know that “intelligence” doesn’t come from mere experience. Plenty of people have experience in the matter, but aren’t necessarily intelligent about it (criminals, for example.) There’s no shortage of experience in the world. Most dogs, monkeys, aardvarks, squirrels, platypuses, and other critters roaming the world “know” something about it, and even the basic mechanics of it.
But for humans, it’s a little more complicated.
Sex can lead to either bliss or misery. It can land a person in a marriage, or in prison. It can result in a disease, or an entirely new human being that suddenly appears in the world.
Here’s one humble take on it.
This approach is less about “giving the answer” as much as it’s about offering tools to help us figure out the answers for ourselves.
So what is “intelligence” in this area?
It’s knowing the context, consequences, interconnections, purposes, and potentials of sex.
So, that might not seem super-sexy at first. Fair enough. But the sexy part might happen later.
Let’s break this down.
Context
“Context” refers to what happens “before” and “after.” It refers to everything that leads up to it, and everything that follows.
Consequences
“Consequences” is slightly more specific. It refers to what can happen as a result of the main event. For example, consequences could be anything from marriage, to the creation of a human being, to prison.
Interconnections
“Interconnections” refers to everything in life that’s connected to sex. Is sex an isolated event, independent from everything else in life, or not? Is sex connected to our physical health? Does it effect our physical vitality? Is it connected to our emotional life? Is it connected to our psychological health? Is it connected to our self-esteem, identity, and our level of self-respect? Is it connected to our social life, our professional life, our overall level of happiness in life? Or, the opposite: is sex cut off from everything else, an existential island, something that happens in a vacuum?
Purpose
This is the “why” question. What’s the point?
Potential
“Potentials” refer to entirely new possibilities that can become realities from the entire business. It refers not to direct, immediate, foreseeable consequences of the main event, but areas that are, for lack of better words, “more mysterious.”
That’s one humble take on it.
So, what does this mean?
Someone who is “sexually intelligent” understands the context, consequences, interconnections, purpose, and potential of sexuality, and takes them all into account.
Someone who is sexually unintelligent, on the other hand, ignores all of that.
That unintelligent approach doesn’t take into account what comes before or after, or what will happen as a result, or the various ways the act connects to other aspects of life, or what the point of it all is, or what it could be. The view is narrowly restricted to the immediate and obvious, which ignores a great deal.
“A rapist lack sexual intelligence” is one way to explain just one small part of it. Someone else (almost anyone else) would have more sexual intelligence, compared to that.
So, how might all of this be useful in real life?
Armed with these yardsticks, we can now venture into the world, and test a few approaches to see whether they’re intelligent or now.
For example, we could start with one of the most basic approaches to sex:
“If it feels good, do it.”
That’s a simple formula.
It’s even simplistic. This approach narrows the entire issue down to one simple rule – a rule based on one immediate criterion.
It says, “this is the yardstick to measure sex by.”
It’s based on the old and simple Freudian model that anything less than full expression is repression, and repression is bad.
But is that a good yardstick?
Maybe not. After all, plenty of things “feel good” in the moment, or “seem like a good idea at the time.”
Eating a metric ton of pork rinds, for example, might feel good while you’re doing it. Doing heroin might feel incredible for a few seconds or minutes. Using a flamethrower on anyone who slights or offends us might seem fun in theory.
But each of these involve a tradeoff. It swaps a few moments of pleasure for hours, months, or years of pain. It usually isn’t long before that pork-rind hangover sets in, or we suddenly find ourselves on the other end of someone else’s flamethrower.
Sometimes the consequences aren’t visible immediately, but only become apparent much later. Setting flamethrowing-for-slights as a social norm might sound like some sort of convoluted, abstract theory to someone in the heat of the moment, so to speak – but it becomes quite real when they accidentally offend someone else who is armed and ready to fire.
In that sense, some formulas don’t just narrow things down.
They dumb things down.
By this measure, approaching sex as if pleasure is the only measure assumes that the entire matter is disconnected and isolated from everything else. It ignores much of the rest, which by these measures, make it less intelligent.
What kind of “other matters” does it ignore?
For example: is there a connection between a person’s sexual and emotional life?
Is there a connection between an individual’s sex life and mental or psychological health?
What about physical vitality?
For many, it's obvious: “of course it’s connected.”
After all, sex can be so highly emotional that it’s impossible to talk about rationally. If that’s true, then our emotional life is involved from the very beginning. The amount of energy and drama that leads up to (and follows as a result of) the physical act can involve desire, rage, bliss, fury, joy, guilt, shame, beauty, love, hatred, and everything in between.
In this sense, it seems clear: the idea that sexuality and the emotional life are connected isn’t a big stretch.
And we could keep going.
It can also extend into various consequences, for example.
The consequences of sex aren’t mysterious. What happens after the main event?
It could lead to a deepening of lifelong relationship, for example. Or, it could lead to torturous plunge into shame, guilt, and self-loathing. It could lead to children, or prison. Family, or various forms of disease. Marriage, or murder-suicides, or all of the above. It seems capable of making each of us stronger as a person, or weaker.
It’s a wide spectrum. The range of potential consequences is vast.
And much of this relates to the purpose of it all.
After all, what’s “the point” of sex?
What is sex, anyway? Is it a sport? A stress-reliever? A spiritual connection? A form of entertainment? A fun way to pass the time, show off, make a conquest? Is it a mystical union? Is the Hugh Hefner approach the smart route, where sex is a harmless romp? (And would his ex-wives agree?)
Is it something casual, or serious – something that touches on deeper things, metaphorically speaking?
Practitioners of Taoism, yoga, Zen, tantrism and other fields of thought have often described how sex is intimately connected to “deeper things.” They’ve explored much of this some serious detail.
Even Nietzsche, for example – often described as atheistic – said “The degree and kind of a man’s sexuality reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit.” In all of these, sex ties directly with the deepest part of ourselves.
The simple Freudian model assumes that all of these approaches – and Nietzsche – are wrong. Or, if Taoism, yoga, Zen and so on are on to something, then the Freudian models is wrong.
All of this leads to questions about potentials.
Are there dimensions of sex that we don’t yet fully understand?
Is there more to it than what seems to be obvious?
What’s the purpose of sex?
Is it merely biological reproduction of the species?
If so, then what’s the purpose of the biological reproduction of the species?
In order to answer this – in order to understand the purpose of sex – we need to understand the purpose of life itself.
After all, sex is part of life. It’s one sub-component of a larger system.
If there’s no purpose in life, there’s no “purpose” in sex. But if there is some kind of purpose in life, then the “purpose” in sex must be connected in some way with that.
All to say, “sexual intelligence” covers a lot of territory.
Much of the current level of conversation about sex often seems to either ignore or assume much of this.
This makes the challenge of talking about the topic intelligently even steeper.
Many discussions touch on details, or one isolated dimension, but not the whole picture.
But what is “the bigger picture”?
Our thinking about sex is governed by our basic worldview or life philosophy.
And our worldview is often unconscious. It’s often so close to us that it’s invisible, like the fish who doesn’t understand water.
We often talk with others about sex without talking about our worldview. We can then wind up arguing about sex while ignoring ideas about the larger worldview.
Yet our ideas about sex are determined by our worldview. This is why our arguments about sex often go nowhere. We argue about sex when we’re really arguing about the meaning of life. But our conversation stays on the surface, and we talk past each other.
Many disagreements about sex would naturally evaporate if we’d back up and talk about our underlying worldviews instead.
If we wanted to have an intelligent conversation about sex, then, we’d back up a few steps.
It would be much more fruitful to talk about “The Big Questions.”
For example, our approach to sex is determined a great deal by whether we see it as a purely physical experience, a spiritual experience, a meaningless experience, a matter of body that’s completely separate from our mind, a matter of mind that’s completely separate from our body, etc, etc, etc.
In other words, our approach to sex is determined a great deal by whether we’re a materialist, a theist, a nihilist, a deist, a pantheist, or others.
But this road also goes both ways.
Our approach to sex can also determine our worldview.
Imagine someone who wants sex to be casual. That individual wants the Freudian, Hugh Hefner, sport/play model to be the correct one.
That person will likely become a materialist, existentialist, or nihilist, if they weren’t already.
Or, imagine someone wants to decide that sex is something that matters, is important, and means something. That individual probably won’t wander too far from some form of theism.
Or, imagine that one person wants to put sex over here, and the rest of everything important in life over there, and these two worlds are totally separate, with no connection between the two. In that case, they’re probably some kind of deist, or dualist, with “matter” over here and “mind” over there, and no bridge in between.
And so on.
This is how we can find ourselves in a surprising position. (Intellectual position, that is.)
Philosophy is no abstract matter.
Philosophy, apparently, isn’t pointless armchair brain-canoodling. It’s directly connected with even the most intimate and joyful natural physical act a human being is capable of. Our bodies can determine some of our ideas, but our ideas also govern what we do with our bodies.
After all, when it comes to our mental clarity, emotional strength, our existential fitness and general level of well being, sex plays a vital role.
Sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse.
This can lead us to three other basic conclusions.
One: sex isn’t as simple a topic as many seem to assume.
“Casual sex” is an oxymoron. Sure, sex can be treated casually. So can nuclear weapons. It’s possible to juggle grenades, or pass a newborn baby around like a football. Just because something can be treated casually doesn’t mean it’s a smart approach.
It’s also worth pointing out that some who imagine sex to be “casual” often spend a huge amount of time and energy thinking about it, preparing for it, in pursuit of it, or dealing with the aftermath of it. That hardly sounds “casual.”
Two: the matter is a sensitive one.
In more ways than one, the topic involves the epitome of vulnerability. It involves being literally naked, physically and sometimes emotionally. It’s an intimate act. Even physically, it involves exposing the parts of ourselves we normally keep hidden. (Except for nudists, maybe?) Exposing the most vulnerable, hidden parts of ourselves can mean exposing something about us. In that sense, it can be a direct pipeline to our emotional life and our identity.
Three sex can be, in a way, “neutral.”
“Neutral” here has a specific meaning. Fire can either cook food (good) or burn a house down (bad). A hammer can either drive a nail (good) or smash a thumb (bad). In the same way, sex isn’t necessarily “good” or “bad” in and of itself. It’s like many other things in life: it can be a doorway to bliss or misery, beauty or horror, pleasure or pain, heaven or hell, depending on our individual approach to it. The trick isn’t necessarily in sex itself, but how we approach it.
All of this leads to one final thought about sex.
In the old Disney film The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the wise old wizard went away and left Mickey in charge.
Mickey – the young apprentice – decided to have some fun. Tired of doing chores, he started playing around with the little bit of magic he knew, enchanting a broom to do some of his work for him.
It all seemed like a lot of fun. At first, anyway.
But before long (spoiler alert?), things went wrong. What started casual, soon turned. Things quickly spiraled out of control. Drama ensued.
Sex might work roughly along these lines.
That is to say, sex might involve playing with forces we don’t entirely understand.
There might be more to all this than we sometimes think.
Today, the “wise old wizard” is gone in a different way. We might now be living through The Death of God that Nietzsche tried to warn us about. This could be why soft nihilism is on the rise. This means a lot of folks are now wandering through The Existential No-Man’s Land, and trying to figure things out for themselves, which can involve promise, but also peril.
This terrain can be treacherous. To navigate it well, we have to be smart.
Being smart means knowing the lay of the land, which means asking Big Questions about this land we’re travelling.
In this sense, we’re all philosophers already. We already ask Big Questions. So, we might as well own it, and dive in, and do it well. This means jumping in the fray and clarifying and fortifying our life philosophy, which basically means making sure our maps of the landscape are as up to date and accurate as possible.
If we do this, then we might actually find that exploring, investigating, and upgrading our life philosophy – in the long run, in the Big Picture – ultimately feels pretty good.
And that’s the thing, right? If it feels good, do it.