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Special Report: Sexuality and Gender
deliberate and make rational choices about it? We know that some sort of sexual appetite is present in non-human animals, as is evident in the mammalian estrous cycle; in most mammalian species sexual arousal and receptivity are linked to the phase of the ovulation cycle during which the female is reproductively receptive.15 One of the relatively unique features of Homo sapiens, shared with only a few other primates, is that sexual desire is not exclusively linked to the woman’s ovulatory cycle.16 Some biologists have argued that this means that sexual desire in humans has evolved to facilitate the formation of sustaining relationships between parents, in addition to the more basic biological purpose of reproduction. Whatever the explanation for the origins and biological functions of human sexuality, the lived experience of sexual desires is laden with significance that goes beyond the biological purposes that sexual desires and behaviors serve. This significance is not just a subjective add-on to the more basic physiological and functional realities, but something that pervades our lived experience of sexuality.
As philosophers who study the structure of conscious experience have observed, our way of experiencing the world is shaped by our “embodiment, bodily skills, cultural context, language and other social practices.”17 Long before most of us experience anything like what we typically associate with sexual desire, we are already enmeshed in a cultural and
social context involving other persons, feelings, emotions, opportunities, deprivations, and so on. Perhaps sexuality, like other human phenomena that gradually become part of our psychological constitution, has roots in these early meaning-making experiences. If meaning-making is integral to human experience in general, it is likely to play a key role in sexual experience in particular. And given that volition is operative in these other aspects of our lives, it stands to reason that volition will be operative in our experience of sexuality too, if only as one of many other factors.
This is not to suggest that sexuality—including sexual desire, attraction, and identity—is the result of any deliberate, rational decision calculus. Even if volition plays an important role in sexuality, volition itself is quite complex: many, perhaps most, of our volitional choices do not seem to come in the form of discrete, conscious, or deliberate decisions;
“volitional” does not necessarily mean “deliberate.” The life of a desiring, volitional agent involves many tacit patterns of behavior owing to habits, past experiences, memories, and subtle ways of adopting and abandoning different stances on one’s life.
If something like this way of understanding the life of a desiring, volitional agent is true, then we do not deliberately “choose” the objects of our
20 ~ The New Atlantis