The Sexual System

Original title: Het seksuele systeem 

D.J. Brummel

First published in The Netherlands in 2008 by NVSH

Translation: Stieneke Kamp

Cover illustration: Lex Dirkse

ISBN/EAN: 978-90-6050-

© NVSH, The Netherlands

www.nvsh.nl

The Sexual System

Dik Brummel

Cover illustration: Lex Dirkse

NVSH

No peace without justice
No justice without freedom and equality
No freedom and equality without sexual reform 

Introduction

This book is intended for everyone who, professionally or otherwise, is interested in sexuality and everything connected with it.

Normally, we think of sex as a separate area in our lives, a part of the behaviour of men and women which has more or less been disconnected from reproduction and which has a place in love and family life, but is certainly not their most essential ingredient. Sex or sexuality resides, so to speak, on the periphery of life, even though it can have a great impact on our peace of mind and our dealings with others.

In this book I will take a different approach, which is based on a broader definition of sexuality. There is in my view an undeniable connection between sex difference, sexual desire and sexual reproduction. I use the term ‘sexual system’ to refer to this connection. Similarly, I speak of ‘sexual structure’, ‘sexual order’ or simply ‘the sexual’. Unlike sex, the sexual system is at the centre of things and obviously this has both theoretical and practical implications. In the first chapter I briefly describe this different paradigm, which I then apply to various themes in the following chapters. The final chapter sketches a possible future in which sexual reform takes another step forward.

I consider the sexual system as one of the major systems shaping our personal and social lives, comparable to systems for safety, food procurement or care.

The sexual system needs, in my view, to be at the very heart of a sexology that aspires to be a true science. Although no one will deny that there is a connection between sex and pregnancy, between reproduction and overpopulation, between sexual discrimination and feminism, and between religion and sexual conservatism, there has, so far, been no description which combines these and other connections and explains them in relation to each other. This book is a first attempt at such a description.

Apart from being a paradigm for a scientific sexology, the idea of a sexual system can also help sexual reform enter a new phase. This expectation is based on the idea that humankind will keep evolving in the future, and that cultural and social reform alone will not be enough.

Everyone who writes or speaks about sexual themes knows that misunderstandings easily arise. On the one hand this is due to the limitations of language, which can never fully express the abundance and the complexity of thoughts, experiences, emotions, norms and values that everyone has with respect to sexuality. On the other hand, there is - just as in any other area - an established body of expertise to which many people have contributed their skills and knowledge; a different way of thinking is not easily adopted and at first even fought against with every means available. In the history of sexual reform this reaction - it is better to endure pain and sorrow, suffering and illness, destruction and war than to interfere with creation - has not been uncommon and it still plays an important role in conservative thinking.

Obviously, this book does not just want to be of theoretical interest, but also aspires to have implications for what happens in the field of sex education, sexual counselling and research. One may look at social inequality, sex laws or age as factors that influence sexual behaviour, but when inequality, sex laws and age categories are themselves considered as expressions of the sexual order, the practical effects will be different.

This book has been written on the shoulders of others, though it is primarily the product of my own thinking and as such makes claims to originality. It is impossible to mention all the sources from which I have drawn. The select bibliography at the end only lists the books which I would like to recommend or which I consider more or less as standard texts in this field.

I wish to thank the people around me, especially the staff of the Dutch Society for Sexual Reform (NVSH), for their support, friendship and involvement while this book was written. I am indebted to them also for their corrections and critical notes. Any remaining errors are entirely mine.

Dik Brummel

1. The Sexual System

The term ‘sexual system’ is not new, but so far it has been used only in a restricted sense. Linnaeus’ eighteenth-century taxonomy Systema Naturae (1735), for instance, is called a ‘sexual’ system, because the distinction between male and female plays a major role in this classification of life forms. In his Descent of Man (1871) Darwin uses the term ‘sexual’ selection in a similar sense, to indicate mechanisms and strategies that play a role in partner choice by male and female individuals. And we speak of ‘sexual’ - as opposed to ‘asexual’ - reproduction to indicate that it involves two sexes.  

In our own time, too, sex difference plays a systematic role in the description of the world. It seems to be a matter of course, for instance, that demographic graphs are divided in two, showing the data for the male and the female population separated by a vertical line.

In the social sciences, a distinction is now commonly made between the ‘biological’ sex difference, simply called sex, and the ‘psychosocial’ sex difference, also called gender. The first is associated educational, educational science, sex organs, the body, and the second with perception, relationships and social relations. In the second chapter I shall reject this distinction (which is a variant of the mind-body dualism), because in my view there is no sharp division but a continuum between the biological and the psychosocial. In any case, sex difference is apparent in so many human and social phenomena that no one will deny its systematic function and its significance.

The term ‘sexual system’ is also used in a completely different sense. In this second meaning, ‘sexual’ only refers to what is generally called ‘sex’, or ‘sexuality’: individual behaviour (including mental activity) which has to do with sexual arousal. The Dutch reference book Seksuologie (2004), for instance, describes the sexual system as ‘the psycho-biological make-up of people that makes them capable of/sensitive to sexual response’. This use of the term ‘sexual system’ is an attempt at transcending the mind-body dualism at an individual level by postulating a structural connection between sexual stimuli, thoughts, feelings etc. (which are called ‘mental’) and erection, lubrication, heart rate etc. (which are called ‘physical’). This does not make the dualism disappear, though. By saying that mind and body are one, you are in fact differentiating between them.

There is also a pseudo-scientific use of the term ‘sexual system’ in some advertisements for stimulants. Such stimulants are said to activate the ‘sexual system’ - a kind of sexual starter motor inside a human being - and thus increase lust and improve sexual achievement.

This brings us to a characteristic problem that arises when we write or talk about sexual themes. The word ‘sexual’ is primarily associated with ‘sex’, and hardly anyone, from childhood onwards, can escape a certain tenseness when reading or hearing it. Sex is ‘it’. It is what people do when they are doing ‘it’. It is nice and it is dirty. It is private but also has public significance. It is important and unimportant. It can cause people problems. One person does it this way, another does it that way. It can be risky and dangerous. It is healthy, but it can also be accompanied by violence, which more often affects women and children than men. Most people are heterosexual, but there are also homosexuals. And so on and so forth.

It is this sex, also called sexuality, which is the object of sexology. A predominant school of thought in sexology attaches great importance to this sexuality, but hardly grants it any ‘reality’. It is labelled a ‘social construct’, which means that it is determined by or dependent on conditions that are considered more real, such as upbringing, the quality of relationships, social relations, culture, age, health etc. Thus, mainstream sexology wants to take a socio scientific and undogmatic approach to the idea that sex has a predetermined natural or divine function, form or content. It wants to involve different disciplines in the study and description of sex in order to achieve a scientific and sensible form of sexual counselling and education.

It is a characteristic problem of sexology that it studies something that according to its representatives does not actually exist independently, and about which it, consequently, has no theory. Sexology is in fact not yet a true science, but an umbrella for a collection of individuals who study sexuality from the perspective of different academic disciplines, give assistance and provide information about topics that can be associated with sex.

Summing up we can say that the term ‘sexual system’ is used in two ways. The first refers to the omnipresent sex difference and the second to an individual repertoire of sexual behaviour.

The sexual system as I will describe it in the first few chapters differs from both of these. It is not based on sex difference alone, but sexual desire, reproduction and the family are part of it as well. And it transcends individual sexuality, which is not an element of the sexual system but a variable expression of it. 

The four elements - or subsystems - of the sexual system exist independently of human thought, just like the moon. The sexual system is a reality that affects individual, collective, social and cultural behaviour. It manifests itself in the daily upbringing of children, in education and the media, in art and the economy, sports and politics, and in many other aspects of life, including sex.

The fact that there are two sexes cannot be separated from the fact that so far, humans have reproduced sexually. Sexual reproduction, in turn, is made possible by sexual desire, which leads to sexual intercourse, pregnancy and birth, and thus to family formation and family relationships.

It is this totality of interconnected elements that I call ‘the sexual system’ or ‘the sexual structure’, and sometimes also ‘the sexual order’ or just ‘the sexual’.

The term ‘sexual system’ may be perceived as problematic if the word ‘sexual’ is only associated with sex. There is, however, no other term to express the connection between sex difference, sexual desire, sexual reproduction and the family.

To demonstrate the omnipresence of the sexual system, I will describe the connection between its four elements from an evolutionary perspective. This can easily give rise to misunderstandings. Some people tend to mistrust any description of our world in terms of evolution, biology or nature, because they associate these with determinism and conservatism. Others do not see the purpose of an evolutionary view of the human world when the only thing that matters is to change this world by means of practical political measures.

Both points of view are quite understandable. After all, most biological descriptions are characterised by what is known as the ‘naturalistic fallacy’, the unconscious reasoning that something is good because it is natural and vice versa. This almost inevitably leads to determinism and conservatism. Whether it is a description of a community of ants, the courtship behaviour of peacocks, the political life of bonobos or the monogamous or slightly polygamous behaviour of human beings, everything can be explained ‘functionally’ and this automatically calls up associations of being necessary, indisputable or good.

In fact, every popular scientific description has this same effect. Who would not be fascinated by the processes that take place on a microscopic level during conception and the development from embryo to baby? It looks as if at the precise moment of a pre-timed genesis a particular gland secretes exactly those hormones that, through a feedback mechanism, induce other hormones somewhere else in the body to set off the next change that is necessary for the continuation of the process. This sort of description leads almost naturally to the idea of a good design, or even a Good Designer. When a process develops differently, it usually goes wrong, which is inevitably seen as a deviation of the normal, healthy, natural and ideal development. 

Essentially, this metaphysical tradition - how wonderful it is that a baby is born to a mother who is perfectly equipped to care for it - has not changed under the influence of popular evolutionary biology. Creation has been replaced by natural selection, but nature is usually represented - though not by Darwin himself - as harmonious and good, and also as a model for humankind, to be preserved and conserved.

A better model, in keeping with the very essence of the theory of evolution, is that of imperfection, of trial and error, and of coincidence, in which everything, including humans, is a transitional form between a previous stage and what could be a following stage of development.

The second reason why social scientists distrust biology is the fact that they are focused on human behaviour in the short term. If you study price rises, antidepressants or changing ideas about nuclear energy there is no reason to take the biological origin of human behaviour into account, they argue. I will leave aside the question whether this reasoning is altogether valid, but it certainly does not hold good for the subject of this book.

The sexual in the broad sense of the word is so old and universal that any approach which ignores evolution must fall short as a theory. To build on the knowledge and the insights of evolutionary biology is not the same, though, as to employ a ‘biological’ model in the deterministic way that I have described above. It is, on the contrary, perfectly possible to emphasize the natural origin of our behaviour and our feelings and to call for change at the same time.

Sex difference

Life in its primary form is female. In the first three of the four billion years that have passed since the beginning of life, all life consisted of single-celled organisms that reproduced by dividing. Cell division is still the most common form of reproduction, because the cells in organisms divide, thus allowing, for instance, an individual to grow and develop from conception to adulthood.

When a cell divides, the two daughter cells are practically identical with the mother cell. This is called ‘cloning’. In this way, the various elements of a larger organism - e.g. structures for breathing or digestion, the nervous system - each develop their own characteristic form and function. There will always be small mutations, because no system is completely closed. This is why single-celled life, too, exists in a great diversity of forms and has the ability to change and adapt.  

The exchange of nuclear material between different single-celled organisms was a great leap forward. It led to sexual reproduction, so called because it requires two sexes, to which we refer as ‘female’ and ‘male’.

Thus, with the advent of sexual reproduction, the male sex and the distinction between male and female came into being, whereas life originally was ‘female’ in the sense that it reproduced itself. The principle of sexual reproduction is that the female cell still divides, but only after its DNA - its genetic information - has combined with the DNA of a male cell.

The recombination of genetic material allowed for an enormous increase in the possibilities for property changes and adaptation to changing circumstances. Sexual reproduction made the evolution of innumerable plants and animals possible, including our own species.

The species that reproduce sexually have special cells for reproduction. The female cells are large, relatively slow and few in number. The male cells are small, fast en numerous.

The distinction between male and female is so fundamental that we take it for granted. Many aspects of our nature and our culture derive from this difference. We realize this all the more when we try to imagine a world without any sex distinction.

Sexual desire

Sexual desire emerged at the same time as sexual reproduction. A sexless cell that reproduces by division does not need desire. As soon as two cells have to get together to form a new individual, they need a behavioural programme with the predictable outcome that they will unite. This programme is what I call sexual desire.

The two sexes differ fundamentally from each other as far as their sexual codes of behaviour are concerned. Sexual intercourse requires that the males conquer obstacles - including competition from other males - before they can put their sperm cells into as many females as possible. A female has to attract as many males as possible, but must make a choice between them because only one male sperm cell at a time can fuse with one of her egg cells. In both sexes, sexual desire is accompanied by less pleasurable emotions, such as aggression, aversion and fear. The dynamic balance between these opposing forces is such that a sufficient number of fertilizations take place for the species to survive. This phenomenon can be observed among both humans and animals. 

I consider sexual desire as a function which has enabled humankind to go through an extraordinary development process, which forms the foundation of love and which occupies a key position in our further evolution.

Reproduction

Sex difference and sexual desire lead to a statistically sufficient number of copulations, fertilizations, pregnancies and births of new individuals of the same species. Species exist by the grace of reproduction: no reproduction, no species.