What Does Sex Mean To Me?

Sex is boring.  No matter how we try to dress it up, act out our fantasies about it, devise variations, fetishize it, or accept it as natural, it's basically the same physical act, repeated millions of times a day by millions - billions - of organisms for millions of years.  Birds do it, bees do it, etc., and there's nothing special about when we do it.  When you do it.

As evidence, I ask if sex isn't intrinsically boring, why do we feel a need to constantly act out variations on it, with different partners, different genders (if you're into that), or different orifices (ditto)?  If it's not boring, why do we have to engage in fantasies and role playing during it, basically wishing it were something other than the same mechanical act as ever?

My attitude is not unlike that of the fictional Todd Andrews in John Barth's existentialist novel The Floating Opera.  In the book, Andrews recalls his first sexual experience, up in his bedroom with Betty June.  "A seventeen-year-old boy is insatiable," Barth writes.  "His lust is a tall weed, which crushed repeatedly under the mower springs up again, green and unbowed.  He is easily aroused and quickly satisfied, and easily aroused again."  Not to be indelicate, but in the book Andrews recalls first crying like a baby, then bleating like a goat and roaring like a lion.

"And then I looked into the mirror on my dresser, beside us - an unusually large mirror, that gave back our images full-length and life-sized - and there we were - Betty June's face buried in the pillow, her scrawny little buttocks thrust skywards; me gangly as a whippet and braying like an ass. I exploded with laughter!"

Andrews can't stop laughing at the absurdity of it, and when poor Betty June doesn't see the humor in the situation, he can't comfort the nervous tears that run from her face.  "I couldn't help her at all, or myself," Barth writes.  "I bellowed and snorted with laughter, long after Betty June fumed out of my bed, out of my room, out of my house, for the last time."  That night, he laughs through dinner with his father and he still laughs even as he later undresses for bed, noting nothing is so consistently, profoundly and earth-shakingly funny as we animals in the act of mating.  Barth advises,

"Reader, if you are young and would live on love; if in the flights of intercourse you feel that you and your beloved are models for a Phidias - then don't include among the trappings of your love-nest a good plate mirror.  For a mirror can reflect only what it sees, and what it sees is funny."  

Personally, I don't fully share in Barth's sense of hilarity, but then again, fortunately, I have not yet been brought up short by a full-length mirror.  But to my disappointment, although I do see the boredom inherent in the act, I, like almost every other living organism, can't quite free myself of it's primal spell.  I still feel the pull of attraction and arousal, from time to time I still find myself unexpectedly caught up in an erotic fantasy.  We're hardwired that way and we can't escape it.

Unlike the character Duc in the new HBO series Here & Now, I haven't taken a vow of celibacy, although I sometimes suspect that celibacy has taken a vow of me.  Unlike Duc, I can't redirect that flow of libidinal energy into my workout routine or success in the workplace, but also unlike young Duc, I'm now (finally) at an age where the hormonal urge to procreate is no longer as strong as it once was.  The idea of that used to terrify me, but now that it's actually happening, I find the abating tides of testosterone somewhat comforting.

So, in summary, yeah, sex is boring, probably funny and quite possibly hilarious, and although it's something I'd just as soon forget about, I can't quite let it go.