Art, science, and business
appropriated sex as a subject of inquiry, or as a lucrative
activity. Sex is a driving force for individuals and communities,
an inescapable component of any experience, no matter how remote
from sex.
Sexual ubiquity and the parallel world of self-awareness,
embodied in forms of expression, communication, and
signification different from the actual sexual act, are
connected in very subtle ways. Once sexual experiences are
appropriated by culture, they become themselves a sign system, a
symbolic domain, a language. Each sexual encounter, or each
unfulfilled intention, is but a phrase in this language written
in the alphabet of gestures, odors, colors, smells, body
movement, and rhythm.
We are the sexual sign: first, in its indexical condition-a
definite mark left, a genetic fingerprint testifying to our
deepest secrets encoded in our genetic endowment; second, in
iconicity, that is, in all the imitations of others as they
constitute their identity in the experience of sexuality. As
many scholars have hastened to point out, we are also the sign
in its symbolism. Indeed, phallic and vulvar symbols populate
every sphere of human expression (and obsession). Nevertheless,
our own self-constitution in the sexual act confirms a double
identity of the human species: nature, involved in the struggle
for survival, where the sheer power of numbers and strategies for
coping with everything destructive make for continuous selection
(Darwin's law of natural selection); and culture, in which
humans pursue a path of progressive self-definition, many times
in conflict with the natural condition, or what Freud and his
followers defined as the psychological dimension.
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