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'Who can say where sex starts and where it ends?' (Rolf Konow/Sygma/Getty)
In hospital, one of the things that is never mentioned, and there really is no reason for it to be, is sex. There are no jokes, double entendres, or exchanged looks. The place is antiseptic in all senses. Of the many losses I have suffered since my immobilising fall last Boxing Day, sexual feeling might be the least of it. A friend of mine who had prostate cancer, and after his recovery could never have sex again, said: “Thank God I’m alive, and every day I’m glad to be. That’s enough.”
Losing one’s sexuality overnight, in a sudden blow, is like losing a sense. Something that has guided and activated one throughout one’s life is unexpectedly missing. To have no erections, to feel no sexual excitement nor have any fantasies, is to be deprived of an orientating engine that has steered, bedevilled, and pursued one since adolescence. It is a major absence, and a puzzling one. I now look at sexuality from another point of view, that of a disinterested spectator. I wonder what all the fuss is about, and why people are risking their reputations for the sake of what seems to me now to be an unimportant, if not minor, excitement. It doesn’t follow that I feel no enthusiasm anymore; I do, just not for that. I wonder where it has gone.
For me now, trying to understand sexuality is a bit like attempting to grasp the strange fetishes of others: if someone has a wild passion for hats, donkeys, or umbrellas, this may seem inexplicable to the onlooker. Yet we know that many people do have these passions, and that they are incurable, lifelong; whole societies are often unconsciously structured around them. To me, all sexuality now feels like this: foreign, almost alien.
Many of my stories, films and novels have been ordered around the bewitching mischief of sexuality; its play and performance, of people desiring other people’s bodies. Sexuality is also seemingly irrational compared to other motivating forces such as money, vengeance, and social aspiration. It is a wonderful excuse for writers to add more than a dash of madness into their subjects. Some people really want sex, but they only want specific kinds of sex and certain kinds of people, and they will give up a lot to get it — often even their lives.
But one can live without it, a lot of people do. And when one thinks of how little time one actually spends having sex — what a tiny proportion of one’s actual life is in fact devoted to it, compared to, say, watching television — it is amazing that so many stories are devoted to its mystery and power. I am on the other side now, an observer, and I’m still curious and will continue to be, but I’ve lost something that was once important, and more than that, I’m even wondering why it was so important, and why it matters so much to so many.
I sit outside the hospital in my wheelchair looking at the strange creatures in their mad clothing or hospital gowns, with their tattoos or blue hair, with their lost limbs and mad aspect, and wonder what sort of sexuality governs them, or if it does at all. There are plenty of people about, hundreds if not thousands of them, getting on and off buses, or cycling furiously up the road. Someone, somewhere, sometime must be having sex, since the world’s population continues to increase.
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SubscribeImplicit in this essay is that men post removal of the prostate lose their ability and desire to have sex. True for some but false for many. Myself post operation my sexual desires/fantasies remained and was able and very willing to establishing mutually enjoyable sexual and loving relationship with a woman who is my wife. And yes mutually orgasmic as well. Yes, sex does change after the operation, but if love and romance remain combined with imagination and creativity, the joy of a loving sexual relationship can reach new heights. And, I say this as a male in his eighties; important to note this since the elderly are so often desexualized.
Well done Barry. I had mine removed a few months back and my drive never wavered. In part because continence was not a big problem. Being 50 helps. Now of course the physical aspect is beginning to come back on line which is great.
If I could sum it up. Sex and sexuality is the sauce that gives life that extra flavour; but it is not the meal. You can live without it but it is better with it.
Kureishi seems to have arrived at the same conclusion as the 4th Earl of Chesterfield: “Sex: the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.”
Hi. I haven’t read the Earl’s letters, but I’d be surprised if he used the word ‘sex’ in that way. I wonder whether this anachronism has become cemented on through constant re-quotation by careless anthologists
Best regards
Not actually Lord Chesterfield. It’s discussed here:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/04/16/pleasure/
A brave article .
My suggestion to men that have lost their libido is to start watching women, as they talk to each other and manipulate each other and the world.
When we men are in our prime we look at women as objects. But we older men see them as subjects, and that is scary.
What do you mean by scary? Are we disillusioned when we see the opposite sex as subjects later n life ? Reality isnt as fun as fantasy that’s for sure for me.Im disillusioned about almost everyone now lol except for dogs they’re the best! Cheers
Quote quiz. Who said, and about what –
“Hush! if you please: to my great delight I have escaped from it, and feel as if I had escaped from a frantic and savage master.”
“Its wonderful, like being unchained from a lunatic.”
Sophocles?
That’s the first.
Antigone 781 – 800, Third Stasimon:
Erôs aníkate mákhan…ktl
Sums it up really.
Very good Father Quinlan, did you learn that at Cashelnagor Station by any chance?
Not there, but in a hedge-school. You do me too much honour, by the way.
I agree with Jimmy Jack in Brian Friel’s play ‘Translations’ :
“Homer knows it all, boy! Homer knows it all.”
But are you not a Balliol man?
How not, o Socrates?
Oncques Sans Reculer Jamais.
Seulement pour mieux sauter.
Floreat Domus de Balliolo!
Yes, I tried to send you that, but the bloody machine refused to accept it! Floreat domus anyway.
(As quoted by Cephalus to Socrates in the early part of the Republic) But excellent quotes!!!
I wish I knew how to get Greek letters, but I don’t!
Since you like the choric ode, I offer a little more. We performed the play at my school, and I can still sing the melody composed by our Head of Music!
Erôs aníkate mákhan
Erôs hos en ktêmasi pipteis
Hos en malakais pareiais
Neánidos ennukhéueis…….
George Melly said the second one I think
that’s it – both on the subject of age-related male libido decline.
An evening in the pub with Sophocles and George Melly… Ah, that would be something!
Rather Cicero & Sumption.
Agreed – but it depends what sort of an evening you fancy.
“Mounk: Why do you feel that it is at this point that people prioritize security over liberty? To that extent, the famous phrase SALVS POPVLI SVPREMA LEX is a very old one.
Sumption: It’s a great fallacy. It’s an old phrase, it comes from Cicero. But it was false when Cicero uttered it, and it’s false now. ”
I have to declare now, Charles, that (since one has to.be one or the other) I am a Caesarian and not a Ciceronian.
Good fun though.
Oddly enough so am I.
In fact I find Cicero a rather sanctimonious prig, unlike for example Robert Harris and his numerous hagiographies.
As to what sort of evening I fancy? Good conversation, with good music and plenty to drink. Rather hard to find in England these days, so I have to head west.
Lloyd George?
Didn’t William Blake say something similar? Although I think his remark included a reference to the losing of chains.
George Melly
“In hospital, one of the things that is never mentioned, and there really is no reason for it to be, is sex. There are no jokes, double entendres, or exchanged looks.”
The author has evidently never spent time in a bawdy 1970’s hospital.
Asquith!!!
Surely not?
He who was lusting after the voluptuous body of one Venetia Stanley, and thus inadvertently allowed us to join the Great War.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcBOX1JBcjQ
But I think you already knew that.
Thank you, no I had never seen that!
Good job somebody still has a sense of humour.
Asquith may have been squiffy, but there was nothing inadvertent about the conspiracy of Grey, Haldane and Churchill to convert what might have been a very limited European war on the XIX century pattern into the Holocaust of European civilization as understood by Erich Auerbach, Ernst Robert Curtius and of course Wilamowitz.
That was an English achievement, and it led inevitably to the collapse of the Empire.
All this talk of apologising for the slave trade and so forth, when it was England that invented Total War – civilians are legitimate targets – for the XX century!
To start two World Wars and lose your Empire is no mean feat!
I couldn’t agree more! After more than two centuries of fighting very profitable wars we threw it all away in 1914 and what was left in 1939. A masterclass in ineptitude if ever there was one!
Yet the architect of both ( limited to be fair in 1914) has been granted apotheosis! And thus is beyond criticism! Holocaust of European civilisation is absolutely correct, and ‘we’ must take our full share of the blame, but of course we won’t!
Consummatum est.
What nonsense.
Cry “Havoc” and let slip the dogs of war!
Have you seen the engravings of the Thirty Years’ War? More recently, the devastation of Sherman’s Georgia and Carolinas campaigns?
Total War was nothing new.
I suppose you mean “Sherman’s devastation of Georgia” since Georgia did not belong to Sherman, nor did he come from there.
Shall I get my kok out?
The author – unusually for one normally so perceptive – wasn’t paying enough attention. Hospital wards and corridors continue to be rife with glances and words exchanged between staff, not directly sexual of course but with an undercurrent obvious to anyone with a pulse and exacerbated by the inherent drama of people on the edge, whether that’s staff, patients or relatives.
I suppose he did have other things on his mind.
I’m afraid I was just being silly and drawing attention to the Mitchell & Webb sketch linked to by Allison above.
Oooh, matron
Sex is hardwired in many species because it produces babies, Hanif. So that explains why people are preoccupied with it. Not such a great mystery after all
People like that who spend years mocking and ridiculing the people who aren’t “hot” or whatever then when they aren’t they make out they’ve just invented some cool new status or way to be that no one ever thought of before. Like Tracey Emin too. For decades not having sex from choice,lack of opportunity or undesirableness (you’re ugly) was only for the uncool ones. So when the cool ones get into this state they are clever enough to be able like this guy to represent their new celibacy as this brilliant new thing they’ve just invented.
I’ve always wondered what thoughts come to someone who had been paralyzed in an accident, right as rain one minute, and changed forever the next. I imagine his substack is full of interesting discussions on what drives us. I’ll have to check it out.
So, finally the flood of hormones bathing your brain starts to recede, illness or just time doing it’s thing, and you can suddenly see the biochemical tyrant driving the better part of your attention for all those decades despite yourself, for what it was. And the realisation leads to what? That existence was in fact completely meaningless? Or finally, the freedom to pursue that which actually matters? Which is what? Just sitting there like some stupid hindoo sadhu with a smug smile on his face because he has realised something about the cruel evolutionary trick nature has been playing out all these aeons? There is a cryptic, throwaway description in ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ of Androids who thought they were human, simply shutting themselves down on the spot when they come to realise they are not – and it struck me when I first read that all those years ago: why would humans, ultimately, behave differently? And, as demographic collapse around the world is currently demonstrating, it seems they don’t.
I can imagine this cheery little reflection might lead to the odd objection. And you can legitimately accuse me of depression, or autism, or aridity, or nihilism, because the species terminating cliché here is of course that everyone thinking this way leads in short order to no species around at all, to think this way, or indeed any way. But I think you might struggle to accuse me of not speaking truth. Face it, you are here because of that flood of hormones, and you either participate in maintaining that flood, meaningless as it is, or everything and everyone dies.
Is there an answer? Yeah, sure. But not one you’re gonna like. Only one thing is worth pursuing: who and why am I. And it makes no sense to remain the static thing we were handed by chance any longer. Because you can give the village idiot a million years, but he ain’t gonna get wave-particle duality no matter what – the limit is inbuilt. But for the first time in human history, the possibility exists, right now, of injecting extra neurones (albeit algorithmic ones) into the village idiot. Whether the village idiot likes it or wants it, is kinda moot. As Rocket says ‘I Didn’t Ask To Get Made! I didn’t ask to be torn apart and put back together over and over’. (For the avoidance of doubt, the village idiot, is… me).
In the end, there is only mathematics.
“…To play out everything ve was, to be complete, ve had to find the invariants of consciousness: the parameters of vis mind that had remained unchanged all the way from orphan psychoblast to stranded explorer. Yatima looked around the jewel-studded tunnel, and sensed the gestalt tags of axioms and definitions radiating from the walls. Everything else from vis life in the home universe had been diluted into insignificance by the scale of their journey, but this timeless world still made perfect sense.
In the end, there was only mathematics…”
I’m reminded of a wonderfully poignant moment in the TV adaptation of Kingsley Amis’s Take A Girl Like You. Leslie Phillips plays a very elderly lord who ‘gooses’ a female member of his staff. He explains wistfully to a visiting guest that, although his libido is long gone, he likes to check sometimes, and compares it to touching one’s tongue to the terminals of a battery one knows is dead, just to see if there’s still the slightest tingle.
No mention of how she responded. Her existence is necessary, but HER feelings about the matter are totally irrelevant and not worth mentioning.
Because, of course, he’s a “lord.” Britain has not moved past 1066. The “upper crust” Normans can still goose the Anglo-Saxon peasants at will.
“In hospital, one of the things that is never mentioned, and there really is no reason for it to be, is sex.”
I have no experience with British hospitals. However, for the dozen or so American hospitals that I have worked in, this is simply untrue. Also, consider the fact that many American soap operas centered around hospitals.
No difference in UK hospitals either. The NHS workforce contains large numbers of young people of both sexes working in often very stressful situations. Anyone who thinks that isn’t a recipe for consensual sexual behaviour outside the clinical workplace hasn’t lived. The middle aged don’t miss out much either.
Now you understand the mindset of women, unassisted by hormones either natural or replaced, who are on the very far side of menopause. I’ve always joked that older men like young women, not because the young women are more attractive than their older wife, but because they are still interested in sex.
” I have another friend, the same age as me, who is very attractive and always horny, and whose husband, due to an accident, has become unavailable. It has been a difficult thing, but she has become reconciled to the hopelessness of the situation”.
We seem to be talking rather more about how tough menopause is for women, quite rightly so. I’d hardly wish to compare the effect of menopause on me with that on my wife; it’s trivial in comparison. However, it’s not nothing. Since teenage years and especially through my marriage, sexuality was the strongest driving emotion. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t difficult to behave decently, earn a living and help bring up a child; it’s just that the urgency of sexuality is powerful.
Much of that remains but the wonderful physical life is gone, perhaps never to return. That’s okay, I’ve been so lucky and my wife is a delight. But, it’s a little death; the boy and young (and not so young) man in me are gone.
Sex, for men, is a very powerful biological drive, on par with the drives for water and food. Women also have a sex drive, of course, but it’s different. I don’t pretend to understand how it is for women, and I’m sure that women don’t understand how it is for men. I just know that for men it is very strong.
For most men, the drive cools with age and eventually becomes quiet. Though not gone entirely. But, like Mr. Kureishi, I find myself now looking at women with a different eye, and wondering what it was that I found so enthralling before. And that is not unpleasant; it’s calm and peaceful.
What an amazing piece of writing. Iv just had a health scare and had similar thoughts, iv recovered,but remember very well the same sort of feelings , particularly the ridiculously small amount of time in one’s life that you have sex as opposed to thinking about it and being driven by it .
You’re confusing perception with reality. Men talk more about it. Women are much more subtle. And women have more intense orgasms too, not the localised shudder-and-squirt of the male.
See: https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/06/turns-out-women-have-really-really-strong-sex-drives-can-men-handle-it/276598/
See also:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3bnez/women-get-bored-in-bed-faster-than-men
Much of this is power-driven. When the power context alters, women are pretty full-on, as any young fella in a sales delivery job who has had to run the gauntlet of a factory floor of bawdy, handsy, women can attest to lol.
I have been told my shudder is top notch.
What a selfish, empty point of view. Almost as bad as defining everything through that self-absorption.
Do you know where babies come from? Do you HAVE children? Because that’s all part if the tapestry.
This reads like the light reading you might see in the back of a Playboy magazine. Ridiculous. Unherd….Do better.