“The notion that sex and love are inextricably linked is a component of the modern ideology of love. And the fact that they just cannot is probably the biggest issue facing humans.”
Young E.B. White and James Thurber questioned the necessity of sex in their endlessly amusing 1929 collaboration. Alain de Botton, a philosopher, claimed that more than eighty years later that to think more and better about sex is to recapture our humanity. Despite all of our meditations, sex still seems strangely unconnected to our most accurate conception of love.
One of the most renowned minds of the 20th century, Susan Sontag, who spent decades thinking about love and being confused over sex, zooms in with her persona in Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview, the excellent 1978 conversation with Jonathan Cott that was named among the best biographies, memoirs, and history books of 2013 and also gave us the beloved author on the false divide between “high” and pop culture.
We demand a world of love. We demand that it be chaotic. We ask it to act as the bond that keeps the family together, enables society to function in an orderly manner, and enables the transmission of a variety of material processes from one generation to the next. But I believe that the link between love and sex is quite enigmatic. The idea that sex and love are inextricably linked is a component of the modern ideology of love. They could, I guess, but I believe that would be to one of the parties’ harm more than the other. And the fact that many simply don’t is arguably their biggest issue. Why do individuals desire to fall in love, then? That is incredibly intriguing. They want to fall in love in a way that makes you want to ride a roller coaster again, even though you know it would break your heart. Love interests me because of all the cultural expectations and values that have been incorporated into it. I find it fascinating when individuals claim, “I fell in love, I was madly, passionately in love, and I had this affair.” After that, a tonne of information is described, and you wonder, “How long did it last?” “I just couldn’t stand him or her for a week,” the person will then claim.
From her published diaries, Susan Sontag’s personal musings on love are excerpted and illustrated by Wendy MacNaughton. Sontag, whose ageless and frequently radical wisdom has tackled everything from how to improve education to the creative benefits of boredom to why lists appeal to us, investigates platonic love as another idea filled with cultural ambiguity.
“I have deeply loved people who I would never have had sex with, but I believe that’s a different kind of love. That is love, which can be soft and involve the want to hug someone or something, as well as being a very powerful feeling. However, that in no way implies that you should strip off in front of them. But some relationships can be erotic. Although it isn’t always sexual, I believe friendship to be highly erotic. All of my relationships, in my opinion, have some erotic overtones because I can’t imagine loving someone who I wouldn’t want to touch or hug.”
In the end, though, she refers back to the harmful age-related polarities and stereotypes to which our culture as a whole subscribes, pointing to them as the cause of our apprehension about love:
“The positive and negative valuations of childhood and adulthood are deeply entwined with our ambivalence about the concept of love. And I believe that for many people, love represents a return to values associated with childhood that appear to have been stifled by the dried-up, automated, adult types of coercions associated with work, rules, obligations, and impersonality. Love is sensuality, play, irresponsibility, hedonism, and being silly, and it sometimes gets thought of as dependence, weakness, entering emotional slavery, and treating the loved one as a parent figure or sibling. You retain some aspects of who you were as a child when you were helpless and totally reliant on your parents, especially your mother.”
It is still extremely advisable to read the entirety of Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview. Alain de Botton’s advice on how to think more about sex and Sontag’s beautifully drawn reflections on love are good complements.
