Event: Saint Augustine

Sex is a problem. It always has been. Its drives and torments once prompted Saint Augustine to plead, ‘grant me chastity and continence, but not yet’. But something in the way we think about sex has changed. On the one hand society is sexualised to the max in fashion, music, film and, of course, online. On the other hand, people seem to be having less sex across all age groups. Sex is everywhere, yet simultaneously denied. The way we use the word ‘sex’ today is telling. We now talk about ‘having sex’ as though there’s no one else involved. Its usage indicates a verbal divorce from human relations, just as someone today ‘falls pregnant’ as if it’s an immaculate conception. Healthcare professionals have even been instructed to talk about ‘pregnant people’ or ‘a person with a womb’ as though human beings are now asexual, self-reproducing organisms. This is a denial of sexual difference so profound it seems that any connection to another person has to be disavowed. Sex is a canary in the coal mine of social change. At its heart sits a question of identity: where do I belong? Who am I in relation to the other? Are they my friend or enemy? We appear uneasy talking about sex today. We talk around it instead, discoursing endlessly on toxic masculinity and Andrew Tate, violence against women and girls (which has even acquired its own acronym, VAWG), misogyny in the classroom, sex work, gender dysphoria. Even my own psychotherapy training focussed on sexual difference and perversions. Time and again we shy away from the key component of sex – desire. If we were to take society into the consulting room, I would suggest that it has erected layers of defences deployed to ‘not know’ certain things that feel unbearable. This…