Sex with Soul

You shouldn't use someone for sex. It reduces the person to a mere object: a tool for gratification. This is the popular sentiment; a moral imperative woven intricately into the fabric of our culture, but what does it mean to use someone for sex? I guess it would be like using someone's car. For example, if I know someone has a sweet ass Corvette, then I may befriend him or her with the hopes of one day being handed the keys, or at least I could hope to be seen riding (as a passenger) in a fancy car. Similarly, I may wish to borrow someone's tools or play video games with them. In all of these examples I treat someone kindly in order to use their things. But does this make sense in terms of sex?

The first assumption is that our bodies are something like a car, tool, or video game console. In other words, something separate from ourselves. I am a mind, but my body is an instrument for me to use. If this is so, if our bodies are mere instruments, then I would also be using my body for sex when I have the good fortune to engage in sexual congress? If we understand our bodies as separate from our "true selves", then any sexual act would involve using bodies for sex.

But is it correct to say that our bodies are mere instruments? I don't think so. I believe I am my body, or at the very least, my self (mind, soul, spirit, or what have you) is inextricably wrapped up in my body. Clearly, I can't read a book or ride in my friend's Corvette without my body. Sure I have a separate mental life, but even the richness of this mental life is dependent on how I care for my body. Caffeine fuels rapid and lucid thought, and a lack of iodine in my diet could reduce me to a bumbling fool, and there are countless other examples. If our minds and bodies are so intertwined, then my mind is involved in every bodily action, and as such, every experience involves my true self.

As such, I think we have found a way of understanding ourselves that makes it difficult for us to be used for sex. Our selves are in every conscious experience, and as such sexual experience is also a mental experience. Any full account of sexual experience must involve the mind as well as the body.

On my account, sex is less like using someone's hammer or car or joystick and more like having a constructive conversation, and by a constructive conversation I mean a dialectic, a conversation which meshes two differing opinions and creates something new. Yes, I mean to say that there is sexual listening and speaking; and, thankfully, there are sexual shared meanings and conclusions.

If sex is to be properly understood as a sort of physical conversation, then it becomes evident that bad sex would be something like someone talking past you; he or she doesn't listen to your wishes and allow those wishes to shape the proceedings. Instead, he or she tries to turn your body on like a car; he or she expects you to "start" a particular way, to like particular things. After all, all cars drive similarly. The point is bad sex is instrumental sex: sex that treats bodies as instruments that can yield pleasant results when used correctly; instrumental sex is close minded and cocksure.

When we consider consensual sex, we are left with the realization that being used for sex is only possible in that we allow our partners to ignore our needs. As such, in order to have sex with soul, we must come with open minds and a willingness to listen and learn. Hopefully, understanding sex as discourse, as another part of our conscious life, will mitigate misdirected groping and initiate responsive touching, and, ultimately, we can have sex that is always conducive to new understandings of one another.