Section 2 > Exercise 6 >Sexual language in context
Now read the following essay, "Sterlizing the Erotic" which Aaron Kheriaty wrote as a third year medical student.
Sterilizing the Erotic
By Aaron Kheriaty
The ancient Greek philosophers and poets knew that sex was something divine, a reflection in man of the activity of the gods. Eros himself was a god. When speaking of love, the Greeks also invoked Dionysus, god of wine, and Aphrodite, goddess of beauty. Sex enraptured, intoxicated; it transfigured us into a state of ecstasy. Plato argued that the erotic desire provoked by beauty was strong enough to force man out of himself, into a realm bordering on madness. Love was not tame. The Greeks did not attempt to tame it.
The spirit of our age pales in comparison. Of all 20th century philosophers, almost none bothered to speak about sex--Karol Wytolya a notable exception. Our poets insinuate the intoxications of love, but their expressions are cheap beer in comparison to the fine wine of the Greeks. Take, for example, the lyrics that Dave Matthews sings to his lover: "Every single thing you do to me is like I'm drunk." Intoxicating, perhaps, but hardly enrapturing.
I suggest that physicians are partly responsible for today's timidity. Our profession requires us to behave as though it were perfectly natural to ask our patients about this most intimate mystery in the same breath as our inquiry about their bowel habits. To get around this conundrum, we attempt to create a sterile field around sex, placing it under the fluorescent light of our clinics. How many times during our first two years of medical school do we hear about the necessity to get used to talking about sex with our patients? We learn to be matter-of-fact, to avoid the supposedly childish blush. While this tact is certainly necessary to gather relevant clinical data, the danger is that we will get used to speaking (and therefore, thinking) of sex as though it were merely one more physiological process. In the wake of Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, the language we use to talk about sex has changed the way we think about sex. As Ludwig Wittgenstein, perhaps the most influential philosopher of the 20th century, said, "the limits of my language are the limits of my world."
What worlds are available to the physician, who must daily tread such dangerous ground? We can start with the obvious word, 'sex,' a most unsatisfactory term that I have already grudgingly resorted to in this essay. A hundred years ago, "sex" simply referred to the fact of male and female. (This usage has since been replaced by the more nebulous, plastic term, "Gender," as in the postmodern claims that "gender is nothing but a social construct," etc.).
On the street, the four-lettered word derived from the Dutch root fokken (a word used to describe breeding cattle) is still employed; but from overuse, this term has become, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, a "meaningless intensifier." I argue that its power of intensification has also been lost, leaving it simply "meaningless."
College campus lingo has taken to using the term "hooking-up" to describe the emotionally detached sexual encounter, usually catalyzed by alcohol. The social commentator and novelist, Tom Wolf, captures the essence of the random hook-up by saying that getting to third base is going "all the way," while hitting a home run is learning the girl's name. David O'Connor has replaced the more colloquial term "affair," which at least carried the connotations of adventure. "Hooking up," on the other hand, is what we do with our VCR, what the cable guy does to our TV. Forget enrapturous, this is not even adventurous.
Even the quasi-divine Greek word "erotic" has today come to be almost "pornographic." Marketers routinely utilize a glossy veneer of the "erotic" to sell us everything from khakis to toothpaste.
The worst terms, however, are those we doctors employ in the clinic. O'Connor, in an article entitled, "The Names of Love," (to which this essay is indebted) has this to say about the medical turn in our language of love:
"'Sexual intercourse' comes from the same region of the language native to various sorts of -ectomies and -oscopies. It does not sound like something for which one would cross the hall, let alone the world. 'I'm sorry, I can't meet you for lunch today; I have to go to the medical center for a sexual intercourse.'" My favorite illustration of where this way of talking takes us is the phrase "sexually active." It seems to be modeled on "radioactive:" the sexually active teenager is an isotope with a short half-life, spewing particles of sexuality that threaten to case beta decay in the surrounding atoms.
I am reminded of the psychiatrist’s constant recourse to the equally silly term "sex life," which is often spoken of as though one were asking the patient, "so, how’s your golf game?" Such questioning usually provokes responses that mirror the golf analogy – some thing to the effect of "well, I’m a bit out of practice," or "pretty good, I’ve played eighteen holes a few times already this week." Another favorite clinical question is asking about the number of sexual "partners," a term that never fails to remind me of tennis partners--sex as mysterious ecstasy becomes sex as sport. O'Connor concludes, "The metallic aftertaste of words medical and the impudent tastelessness of words adolescent make every choice unpalatable."
According to this analysis, "Nietzsche was right to say Eros has been poisoned into degeneracy, but he misidentified the poisoners. It is the intellectuals [or clinicians], not the Christians, who have drugged Eros with a contraceptive mind." All out efforts at taming Eros, whether through language, latex, or countless mechanico-hormonal devices, have failed. Love is never tamed; sex is never safe. Our attempts to create a sterile field around it are useless. Even the Betadine sponges of our medical jargon, ceaselessly scrubbed into our minds, are not enough. As the Greeks understood, sex is something divine, and as such, it can only be brought under control by divine power. We should therefore approach it with a degree of awe, even of reverential fear.
It will come as a surprise to most that the Catholic Church is the institution today that most visibly speaks of the divine character of human sexuality. Words such as the 'conjugal embrace,' and the 'nuptial meaning of the body,' while not likely to make their way into out everyday lexicon, are important reminders (after our umpteenth sexual history or pelvic exam of the week) that in the final analysis, sex is more than plumbing, more than the movement of fluids. Such elevated language is so foreign to our usual linguistic atmosphere, that to claim sex as sacred--to so much as hint at mystery--is to invite ridicule.
I am not suggesting we try to change our medical terminology; such a solution, even if possible, would be doomed to failure. After importing language more equal to the subject, through routine use the sacred vocabulary would rapidly become profane. Instead, as physicians who inevitably employ the detached language of clinicians, we must be aware of the inherent dangers. We must be on guard, lest the banality of our reductive language completely anesthetize our thinking
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Our aspirations stretch further than our language. Words diminish the highest things; they fail to plumb the heart’s deepest longings. Therefore, I say, let not the limits of our language be the limits of our world.
Questions:
- Have you had similar reactions or experiences in your medical training?
- Does Kheriaty have a valid argument or not?
- How does Anne Sexton's poem illustrate /support Kheriaty's argument?
- Do you think Kheriaty's insights could enhance his function or performance as a doctor, or would they be detracting?
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