Monads & Gonads

The relationship of sexual desire to consciousness.

Consciousness is our attempt to organize our experiences, to make sense of multiple streams of experiences as we are having them by arranging them into structures, ones that are both predetermined by culture & evolution and reshaped by ourselves as we gain empirical knowledges about, through, and from the world, our bodies, and our selves.

Sexual desire is a part of consciousness while also subtending it. The rubric through which we view phenomena can be more or less sexualized depending on the person (and so many things about the person), but as sexed (and, subsequently, gendered) persons, we "see" (think, feel, smell, and taste) phenomena through desire that is always sexed and sexualized. We think in terms of libido, just as we feel, smell, and taste by way of libido. Our desire is inseparable from our consciousness, but within consciousness, we can choose to classify things more or less according to the... power? severity? drive?... of our libidos.

Sexual desire has been derided as a basal or fundamental drive that we ought to gain control of (so that society can be controlled by its legislation), but we are never encouraged to think through our sexual desire, and by that I mean two things: getting to the bottom of our own sexual desire, and interpreting the world through our sexual desire. I have felt, in my lifetime, discouraged from exploring the facets of my sexual desire in an attempt to understand them, and I have been discouraged from interpreting phenomena in the world as a sex(ualiz)ed being (in my case, a sexualized woman, both sexual and sexed). Other members of my culture have not rewarded me their approval when I wanted the topic of our analytical conversation to be sex, sexuality, or even gender. But I do not know if it was my cultural cohort or Me who discouraged a libidinal, eroticized, sexually-affirmed me from emerging, from interpreting the world via my own sexual desires, from acting out my existence from a place of sexual desire. All this time, I've thought it must be the society around me who forbade me to think through my sexual desire in these two ways, but has it been, and more importantly, is it now?

I have half a mind to think it's the religious indoctrination I received in my formative years. There's a level of "decency" I've been taught to maintain through a series of rewards and punishments such that I no longer consciously consider what I do or do not omit from conversation based on a definition of virtue given to me by my Southern Baptist faith, my parents, and the church. However, inspiring this blog entry is a recent realization I have had: what I choose to engage or leave out in discourse makes overt the parameters my subconscious puts on thinking through my sexual desire. Objectifying for the purpose of analysis my own conversation -- both the apparent and the gaps -- reveals what I am silencing in myself and what I am allowing my self to convey; it renders obvious the structures upon which my "decency" is built by rewarding through langauge that which I consider virtuous in myself and in others and punishing through silence those phenomena I find deviant and subversive.

Speaking through my sexual desire is one thing: I'm putting into language the aspects I'm willing to reward in my own sexual desire. But thinking through it requires discovering messages from both mind and body, an articulation of both psyche and soma. Thinking sexed and being sexed is lingual and antelingual; it is both thinking the mind's language and discerning the body's natural "language" as well. Thus, it is psychosomaticanalysis that lays the groundwork for thinking through our sexual desire.