How Sexual Desire Works- The Enigmatic Urge

by Frederick Toates

  Such issues have been central to shaping laws and moral conventions (Kinsey et al., 1948). The notion that sex should serve reproduction means that it can occur only in the context of marriage and even then only when there is some chance of conception. Non-reproductive outlets such as masturbation and homosexuality clearly stand outside these criteria and it is not surprising that they have been strongly condemned. A counter-view to this, which many have advanced, is that consensual sex is a legitimate source of pleasure even where conception is specifically avoided.

  I will start with what could be described as a non-regulatory perspective.

  Buddhism: a non-regulatory perspective

  As described in the classic text What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula, the Buddha (born the son of a ruler in the sixth century BC), lived a life of splendour in a royal palace with a beautiful princess as his wife. However, wandering out one day, he was struck by the misery that he witnessed. The Buddha attributed this unhappiness to several factors, that of most interest here being excesses of desire (‘craving’), sometimes described as a ‘thirst’ for things. Sexual desire is one such; indeed, the strongest, according to the Buddha (Kaza, 2004). The Buddha abandoned his palace and wandered the land, teaching the way to achieve peace of mind, which included trying to quell desire. According to the Buddha’s teaching, all suffering in the world, such as envy, poverty and wars, arises from greedy self-centred wants. The road to true happiness is to conquer excessive desires. An emphasis should perhaps be placed on the word ‘excessive’, since the philosophy does not involve curbing all pleasure (Kalupahana, 1987). However, anyone seeking to become a Buddhist monk or nun is required to dedicate their life to abandoning desires, and respecting celibacy. The state of Nirvana corresponds to the emancipation from attachment to desires.

  Kaza (2004, p. 24) interprets Buddhist teaching in the following way: ‘Quite quickly, in a single moment, craving can lead to attachment to the feelings (positive or negative) generated by contact…A lot of attachment keeps one firmly in the grip of the endless cycle of desire.’ As Kaza notes (p. 24), ‘For some, attachment can arise from addiction to stimulation and arousal, the need for constant sensation’ and ‘Another danger is attachment to power within a sexual relationship.’

  Buddhism has spawned followers throughout the world and these have occasionally experienced serious problems in controlling lust. However, as Kaza (2004, p. 23) observes, sexuality ‘is not easily uprooted even for lofty spiritual ideals’. Somewhat paradoxically, there was a mushrooming of Buddhist centres in the 1960s in the United States at the same time as the flower-power hippie generation was experiencing the liberation of sexual behaviour.

  There is an important similarity between Buddhism and Christianity in that both describe a predicament which is an inevitable conflict in life arising from the existence of desire (Numrich, 2009). Both offer insight and solutions for its resolution. However, a fundamental difference is that the Christian church has made frequent attempts to curb desire by sanction based on divine authority of what is right and wrong. By contrast, Buddhism has no divine authority backed with external sanctions and its philosophy is a pragmatic one (Kaza, 2004): desires stand in the way of enlightenment. Buddhism teaches its followers to inspect their own minds for the existence of lusts (‘impure thoughts’), to deliberate upon and relinquish attachment to them. The only ‘sanction’ arises from the suffering of the individual.

  Some Christian groups have also advocated celibacy as the answer to conflict arising from desire. Implicit in such arguments is the notion that no harm comes to the body in ignoring its urges. Other thinkers in the Christian tradition have taken a diametrically opposite position, describing disturbances to the body and the psychological harm that arises from a thwarting of sexual desire (described shortly).

  Modern psychology relates to Buddhist philosophy in a number of ways. Psychological evidence documents some of the hazards associated with uncontrolled desires, as in addictions to drugs, sex or purchasing, amongst other things (Chapter 17), and the pressure to escalate the intensity of such activity in the quest for increasing ‘highs’. The distinction between wanting and liking (Robinson and Berridge, 1993), introduced in Chapter 1, is relevant here. A large investment of time and effort in the search for pleasure is not necessarily rewarded with a commensurately high intensity of pleasure when the goal is reached. Evolution has ‘designed’ us to keep seeking incentives and the price can sometimes be an uncoupling from pleasure. Clearly, the process of the active inhibition of desire (Chapter 12) is at centre-stage in such Buddhist deliberations. Problems associated with the suppression of unwanted (‘tempting’) thoughts are discussed in Chapter 12. The search for eternal youth and virility might also be seen as somewhat counterproductive when viewed in the light of the Buddhist emphasis upon impermanence of all things.

  Although Buddhist philosophy appears to deny any regulatory role to sexual behaviour, it might be seen as regulatory at another level in terms of maintaining mental stability by avoiding excesses. The discussion now turns to perspectives in which regulation by sexual activity of some sort is explicit or at least implicit.

  Finding a balance: the classical period of antiquity

  In ancient Greece, scholars such as Hippocrates (born 460 BC) articulated the argument that health consists in attaining a balance between different factors within the body. Disease arises when one such gets out of alignment from its healthy state. Furthermore, the body was believed to take corrective action to restore harmony. Males could, it was thought, be debilitated by excessive loss of seminal fluids (Gaca, 2003),3 a theme destined to surface again centuries later. More specifically, it was types of fluid in the body, known as ‘humours’, that principally lay at the basis of health and disease (Conrad et al., 1995). This period of antiquity also saw the recognition that the brain rather than the heart is the principal basis of our mental functions.

  Black bile was said to be the humour of most relevance to sexual desire and it possessed negative properties in that vomit and excreta facilitated its expulsion from the body in correcting an excess level (Conrad et al., 1995). Some in ancient Greece interpreted erotic passion as a disease, with associated mental disturbance (Dawson, 2008). In terms of humours, erotic passion arose from excess levels of black bile getting to the brain. A boiling of the blood was another interpretation. Such ideas might logically lend themselves to the notion of sex as a necessary evil to be tolerated in the service of regulation and reproduction. Early Arab writers reinforced the disease model and a fusion of such ideas permeated the West.

  Plato (born 427 BC) has had a profound impact on Western thought for some two thousand years and set the scene for much subsequent interpretation of desire and its inhibition. From the theorizing of Hippocrates and Plato, an image of human nature as being in three parts emerged: the reasoning and decision-making part was located in the brain; the emotions were found in the heart; while the part responsible for appetites for food, water and sex was housed in the area of the belly and liver (Bendick, 2002; Conrad et al., 1995).

  Sexual excess was thought to arise from moisture in the marrow of the bone and a consequence of this theorizing was profound in its implications for desire, free will and moral responsibility. Thus, Plato (1965) wrote of the male who gives in too easily to temptation (Timaeus, part 45, p. 115):

  his desires and their satisfaction cause him on each occasion acute agony and intense pleasure; for most part of his life he is maddened by this intensity of pleasure and pain, his soul is deprived of health and judgement by his physical constitution, and he is commonly regarded not as a sick man but as deliberately wicked. But the truth is that sexual incontinence is generally a mental disease caused by a single substance (the marrow) which overflows and floods the body because of the porousness of the bones.

  In places, Plato was more specific and described the male seed as having ‘caused there a vital appetite for emission, the desire for sexual reproduction’, with
the consequence that: ‘a man’s genitals are naturally disobedient and self-willed, like a creature that will not listen to reason, and will do anything in their mad lust for possession’. Plato describes the womb of the woman as being unsettled and causing distress by its wandering around the body, settling only when fertilization occurs.

  Of course, medical science has moved on since antiquity! However, certain psychological and moral principles described by Plato have survived the centuries:

  If a physical basis for behaviour can be identified, does this absolve the individual of personal accountability? These days, the physical basis of ‘excessive desire’ is most likely thought to be an abnormality in structure or activity in parts of the brain.

  Plato suggested that something arising elsewhere in the body influences the brain/mind to trigger desire, an idea popular with some even today. There is satiety and regulation implicit within the account, for the man it is exemplified by ejaculation and for the woman by fertilization.

  It seems that in antiquity the expression of sexual desire outside specified bounds was as much a mixed blessing as it is these days.

  There is a source of restraint, expressed by Plato as (Timaeus, Part 48, p. 119): ‘We should think of the most authoritative part of our soul as a guardian spirit given by god, living in the summit of the body.’ In present times, the restraint is still understood to be ‘at the summit’, as exemplified by the Freudian superego or the activity of the prefrontal cortex (Chapter 2) in modern neuroscience. In Plato’s view, God implicitly seemed to need some help and therefore society should be designed with rigid and authoritarian controls. By offering restraints on the various aspects of human waywardness, civic virtue and social justice would prevail (Gaca, 2003). This appears to extend to sex the kind of controls exerted in modern society by, for example, tax inspectors and traffic wardens, probably earning thereby a similar degree of public affection.

  Plato acknowledged the need for expression of sexual desire but took a decidedly negative attitude towards it, viewing its unruly nature with a combination of indifference and distaste. Indeed, his emphasis was upon the restraint of such physical pleasures and their inferiority as compared to more cerebral pursuits, such as philosophy. Plato was one of the first to articulate the notion of conflict for the control of behaviour. His work entitled The Republic describes this (Plato, 2003, p. 147):

  And isn’t the element of prevention, when present, due to our reason, while the urges and impulses are due to our feelings and unhealthy cravings?

  The ideas of Plato are timeless, as still reflected in the struggles of sexual temptation and addiction. Any restraint that can be mustered is based upon long-term and rational considerations, in opposition to the pull of desire in the ‘heat of the moment’. Calling sexual desire ‘tyrannical’ in its capacity to defeat reason, Plato also seems to have been aware of what would be termed today ‘behavioural sensitization’ and the associated ‘escalation’ of behavioural intensity (Plato, 2003, p. 311):

  When a master passion within has absolute control of a man’s mind, I suppose life is a round of extravagant feasts and orgies and sex and so on.

  Plato’s writing articulates the roots of a conundrum and ethical dilemma, which were to reappear in various guises in the subsequent centuries. Plato understood sex to be an appetite that corresponds to a bodily ‘want’, like hunger and thirst (Gaca, 2003). Yet the latter are required for bodily survival, so the argument leads logically to the necessity for a minimum level of sexual outlet. Indeed, abstinence was seen as unhealthy since it led to an unhealthy accumulation of seed in men and disturbed the womb in women. So, what is this minimum level of outlet and what forms can answer the body’s sexual want? Plato feared that young Athenian men, typically driven relentlessly by excessive levels of seed, would protest the loudest against his arguments for restraint. Nonetheless, he tried to divert their lust into the study of philosophy and suggested obligatory city-organized workouts to draw off (‘sublimate’) surplus energy. A principal contributor to excessive lust was thought to be excessive food intake, another theme that was destined to reappear over the centuries.

  By building upon earlier thinkers, Galen (born AD 129) had an enormous influence on Western medical thought. As with Plato, he appears to have had a negative view of all but conventional sexuality (Hankinson, 2008). There were higher things to be pursued in life; apparently following Plato, he saw an intrinsic conflict between reason and passion. However, Galen managed to combine his dim view of sexuality with a belief in a regulatory principle at its basis and an acknowledgement of pleasure’s role in the continuation of the species. According to Galen, even a slight retention of seminal or menstrual fluids could produce grave physiological consequences. Therefore, a regular and corrective sexual outlet is justified physiologically, even if one ought not to enjoy the experience too much! Masturbation was regarded by Galen as a morally superior regulator to the use of ‘loose women’. If only some artificial trigger to discharge, such as a herbal remedy, had been available, one imagines that this would have been considered ethically desirable.

  Bodily and psychological distress from deprivation and temptation

  For the flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other; so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.

  (The Epistle of St Paul to the Galatians 5:17)

  Religious texts

  The Old Testament illustrates the belief that thwarted desire can cause a disturbance to the body, exemplifying what subsequently has been interpreted as ‘lust sickness’:

  And Amnon was so vexed, that he fell sick for his sister Tamar; for she was a virgin and Amnon thought it hard for him to do any thing to her.

  (2 Samuel 13:2)

  A question posed to Amnon by his friend Jonadab reveals one aspect of the disorder in the body, reflecting possibly something like anorexia nervosa:

  Why art thou, being the king’s son, lean from day to day?

  (2 Samuel 13:4)

  A theme running through much religious discourse, both Jewish and Christian, is the notion of an inherently sinful body held in check by a virtuous soul (Cohn-Sherbok et al., 2013; Hawkes, 2004). For example, St Paul wrote of his struggles, locating the ‘law of sin’ in the body. The conflict was seen as between bodily urges and restraint within the spirit, a form of mind–body dichotomy that modern science would reject. Nonetheless, he correctly identified layered control and the ubiquitous struggle with which it is associated.

  Also pointing to an aversive quality of deprivation, St Augustine described, ‘scratching the itching sore of lust’ (Confessions, IX.1). Two influential religious figures from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries appear to have been powerfully influenced by ideas arising in ancient Greece concerning regulation and restraint on desire. However, these ideas led them to rather different conclusions and social prescriptions, as described next.

  Martin Luther

  The German monk, Martin Luther, who led the revolt against the Church of Rome, was born into a world where it was taught that sin and temptation are inherent to the human condition and the body is fundamentally unclean morally (Friedenthal, 1970). Not surprisingly, women were regarded as man’s principal source of temptation: the ‘lust of the flesh’. The official position was one of rigorously imposed celibacy for monks and nuns. A monk could be condemned as a sinner for merely holding his gaze on a woman for longer than a fleeting instant. Any of his colleagues who bore witness to such a moral lapse were obliged to report this to their superiors.

  Reality was rather different from the ‘ideal’; promiscuity, adultery and prostitution were rife. Not all monks honoured the conventions of the church or their own solemn vows of chastity; doubtless, more than a few surreptitious gazes were made. Indeed, the monks’ reputation, as portrayed in popular sayings and humour, was one of lechery. Even certain convents acquired a ‘bad name’. Rome, the ultimate source of spiritual authority, was hardly
in a position to preach with integrity, for a number of popes had fathered children. People with money could obtain forgiveness for their sins by paying indulgences to the church, the required sum reflecting the gravity of the sin.

  Luther was incensed by what he saw as unbridled hypocrisy. His opposition to the prescribed sexual code was a significant factor fuelling the Reformation of the church and the split with Rome. There was perfect compatibility between Luther’s references to sexuality and his arguments in favour of marriage for monks and nuns. Thus, he appealed to a God-given ‘natural state’ of humans and used a regulatory view of sexual desire as a form of liberation (Friedenthal, 1970, p. 431):

  Grow and multiply. This is not a command but something more than a command, it is a work of God that is not for us to prevent or permit; it is as necessary as for me to be a man and more necessary than eating and drinking, sleeping and waking. It is in our nature, implanted in us, just as are the parts of the body essential to it.

  He objected to celibacy for monks and nuns on the grounds that a natural urge exists (p. 431):

  if they hamper it, you can be sure that they will not remain pure but will inevitably be defiled by secret sins or whoredom.