It’s that holiday/solstice/new year time again. Each year, one way or another, the time of the dark of the sun seems to inevitably put me in some kind of philosophic mood, stepping back to look at some kind of "larger picture." This is when I feel obliged to take stock of the lengthening trajectory of my life, to muse about what makes sense and what doesn’t, what about my life feels rich and rewarding, what feels empty and unsatisfying. In the wee hours of the morning, when I’m awake and staring at the ceiling, wondering whether I should brave the cold to get up and work, adolescent questions like "What matters in the end anyway?" and "Who the hell am I, really?" ricochet through cyclical ponderings of the recurring issues of being alive -- basic things like family, intimacy, life, death, love, guilt. And (of course) sex.

It seems to be in the nature of my genes -- or my chi, or my upbringing, or my personality structure -- to always be attentive to what I see as the sexual nature of everything and everyone around me. Maybe I’m just monomaniacal, but my curiosity and interest keep getting tweaked by the sexual dimension of, well, just about everything and everyone. Sometimes I think this tunes me in to sexual issues that other people just don’t notice; other times it inevitably leads me down blind alleys. If nothing else, it keeps me amused. Watching the ongoing sexual nature of the universe, which most people seem to ignore or deny, is like looking at the world through a kaleidoscope, endlessly changing and fascinating. "Why do you have to sexualize everything?" my mother would ask me over and over again, year after year. "Why does everyone else desexualize everything?" was all I could ask in return.

I suppose it’s a question of semantics. If "sex" means putting Tab A in Slot B, then sex is a very narrowly circumscribed part of life to be sure. But if sex is a certain kind of feeling, acted on or not, directly expressed or not -- a certain way of being on and alive, a certain way of engaging whoever and whatever is around us -- then the territory that owes at least some fundamental allegiance to the sexual stars and stripes is very far-reaching indeed.

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Of Sex and Metasex

It was the inveterate sexual voyager and philosopher Marco Vassi who coined the intriguing term metasex. Vassi thought it was essential to separate sex undertaken for the purpose of procreation from all the other forms of sexual activity that had nothing at all to do with perpetuating the species.

In his 1975 essay, The Metasexual Manifesto, Vassi proposed restricting the term "sex" to procreation, while designating all other things sexual by a different term entirely, metasex. "Sex is," he wrote, "as the traditionalists have it, a vehicle for making babies, and nothing else.... However, there is a vast realm of erotic behavior which falls outside this stricture." Metasex, according to Vassi, is all that we engage in "for pleasure, for expressing affection, for exchanging energy, for money, for communication and exploitation, for meditation."

"The failure to distinguish between sex and metasex," Vassi asserts, is "at the very core of all our erotic difficulties. The basic error in all erotic thinking lies in muddying the aesthetic of metasex with the moral contingencies of sex." Sex and metasex, he says, "have different qualities of tone or texture. With sex, reverence and responsibility are the guiding attitudes." With metasex, on the other hand, "the necessary quality is compassion. Since the circumstances of metasex are so flexible and range over the full spectrum of human behavior, it is all the more essential that the participants do not lose sight of one another’s humanity."

Remember that this was back in the 70’s. Vassi was, with characteristic grandiosity, identifying the very shift in sexual paradigm that has been preoccupying our troubledly evolving sexual culture ever since that time. The mass availability of reliable, affordable birth control that swept the land in the late 60’s and early 70’s made it possible for the first time since the Mayans (who also seem to have had access to reliable contraception) for people to pretty effectively disconnect sex for pleasure (or power or adventure or self-discovery or recreation or pissing off one’s parents) from what had previously been its inevitable consequence: babies. As a result, all the traditional cultural perspectives on what sex was all about, and therefore how it should be conducted and socially regulated, were essentially irrelevant, misguided, and obsolete. The basic sex-cultural divide we have been witnessing over the last thirty years or so -- and the political and cultural battle for control of sexual values and attitudes that that divide has precipitated -- is the division between those of us who relate to sex primarily as what Vassi calls metasex and the traditionalists whose sexual values and social codes address sex as if it were still basically and fundamentally an activity fundamentally concerned with procreation.

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Putting the Meta Back in Metasex

I have always liked Vassi’s term, metasex, but not in the way that Vassi defined it. What I like is the idea of metasex that’s analogous to metaphysics -- that which goes beyond what we usually think of as sex, that goes beyond the territory that we usually think of as sexual turf. Twentysome years after Vassi’s essay, separating sex from procreation doesn’t seem very meta. Most of us outside the fundamentalist fold know and feel that sex is not essentially about procreation, that sex is primarily an emotional, psychological, and sensual sort of thing, rather than something biological.

Like a lot of people, I am intrigued with sex that is meta in the sense of being taboo, of crossing some socially defined limit of propriety, whether that be homosexuality, or bisexuality, or s/m, or blood play, or fisting, or group sex, or all the issues around crossing and blurring gender lines and definitions. I think the intrigue for me in all these sorts of boundary-crossing sexualities is not essentially about being bad but rather a fascination with anything that expands the limits of what it is possible for people to do and experience. My instinctive reaction to all the metaproper sexualities isn’t really "Oh my god, how naughty!" but rather "Oh my god, how amazing that there are all these different ways people get to be and get to be sexual!"

But there is something rolling around inside of me that’s meta to even all this, that has to do with seeing sex everywhere, with feeling that there is a sexual component to much of life that most other people don’t seem to think of in sexual terms. I think that most people, even those people who have separated sex from its biological roots and from its socially defined rules of propriety, still think of sex as a rather well-defined, literal activity. For me, there is something about what it means to be sexual that is more ubiquitous and less specific. For me, sex is also a state of mind or, better, a state of being, that affects not only what we do, but also how we think, how we feel, how we relate to just about every part of being alive. To wit:

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Passion According to St. Matthew

I first sang in a choir when I was in college. I went to Oberlin College, a school known among other things for its excellent conservatory of music. The Oberlin College Choir was, and still is, known nationally as one of the finest collection of young choral singers around. Hearing them sing was a definite thrill, but of course to be a member of the College Choir meant you had to be one of those people with magical and well-trained voices, neither of which was me.

At the other end of the skill spectrum, however, Oberlin also had a choral group called the Musical Union, where untrained, inexperienced music lovers like myself could have the experience of rehearsing and performing major pieces of classical music. When I was at Oberlin, both the College Choir and the Musical Union were conducted by a man named Robert Fountain, an ecstatic mystic who totally devoted himself to the wonder of making beautiful music happen every time he took a baton in his hand.

There were 300 of us in the Musical Union, including many of the fine musicians from the conservatory. We sang some of the most transporting and transcendental choral music in the world: Brahms’ Requiem, Mozart’s Mass in C Minor, Honegger’s Joan of Arc at the Stake, Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion. We would work on a piece of music for an entire semester and then perform it in the college’s immense chapel for all the other students, faculty, and townspeople. Week after week we would perfect phrases and passages, learn more and more how to deliver ourselves over to the music, let the music take us far beyond our normal states of existence to a state hard to put into words. The more familiar we became with the text, the more comfortable we became with the technical aspects of the music, the more we could just let go and soar. And Robert Fountain would demand that we do just that, always setting a personal example for us, facing us from his podium, sweat drenching his t-shirt and emotions washing over his face as he waved his arms and moved his body, and shouted and smiled at us to give him what he wanted to hear.

I was 17 years old (and then 18, 19, and 20). I was discovering sex with an intensity I had never imagined, let alone experienced, before. My girlfriend and I couldn’t keep our hands off each other. Night after night after night we would drown in the wonder of each other’s bodies. I was truly possessed. And there was no doubt about it: The feeling I had when I was being swept away by the texture of her skin or the taste of her mouth was the same kind of feeling I had when I was sailing on the passion of Brahms’ musical homage to his dead mother. Every Monday night for four years I had group sex with 300 young men and women at a college that was too sexually conservative to allow males and females to so much as sit in each other’s rooms, in a chapel named for Charles Finney, the notorious 19th-century, fire-and-brimstone Protestant evangelist.

Later I sang in other choirs, and although the experience was never the same as singing under Robert Fountain, the ecstasy was definitely there. Was it just me? After particularly moving rehearsals I would turn to other people in the choir, wanting to share the excitement of the moment, to not be alone in all that I was feeling. "Was it as good for you as it was for me?" I would want to know, though of course I would never ask anyone such a question directly. People who sing in choirs tend to be good churchgoers; it’s not what you’d call the most sexually open of subcultures.

Usually, although I would swear I could hear the ecstasy in other people’s voices and see the ecstasy in their faces while they were singing, their faces would be positively sedate afterwards, their bodies composed, their eyes unshining. When I would say something like "Wasn’t that wonderful?" they would answer with something like "Yes, I thought we sounded really good tonight." I would be confused and to some extent embarrassed, feeling suddenly very exposed, very vulnerable, and very alone. Maybe it was just me who experienced choral singing in a sexual way. Or maybe other people’s experience was similar to mine but they didn’t see it or acknowledge it as sexual. Either way, I learned to keep the sexual nature of my experience to myself. But in the privacy of my inner self I knew that, at least for me, sex was precisely what was going on.

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A Gastronomic Tale

Olav André Manum and Hanne Grasmo of the Norwegian erotic magazine Cupido are in San Francisco, and Helen and I are showing them around. They have brought ten pounds of smoked Norwegian salmon and two bottles of trans-equatorial Aquavit liqueur as presents, and we are having a wonderful time sharing perspectives and getting to know each other. We make our way to Manora’s, that wonderful Thai restaurant south of Market. The mood is festive and we are famished. Olav, it turns out, is a grand lover of good food. He pours over the menu with excited eyes, having the hardest time choosing between one appealing dish and another. I don’t remember what he orders, only that both he and Helen order the same thing.

The food comes and we all dig in. Olav and Helen raise their forks to their mouths at the same moment. Whatever it is they are having, it is exceptional. Both their faces go blissful, their eyes close, and in unison they moan their delight. Hearing each other, they open their eyes and exchange an electric look of deep intimate understanding. Then all four of us burst out laughing.

There is no question about it: Helen and Olav have just come simultaneously, with Hanne and me appreciatively watching. The four of us, happily, have learned our way beyond whatever church training and restraining we may have experienced somewhere in our lives. We do not have to keep our ecstasy private. We do not have to desexualize it or be embarrassed by it in the least. We are free to acknowledge and share the sexual nature of what has happened. We laugh, I think, both for the beauty of the moment and for the freedom to experience that moment in a frankly sexual way. We take a quick step closer together in becoming friends.

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Toward an Omnisexual Perspective

Maybe it just confuses things to talk about things like singing and eating dinner as sexual experiences. But I think it is helpful to notice that many of the most powerful and meaningful feelings we have when we are doing the things we think of as sexual also show up when we are doing things we think of as non-sexual. Indeed, I think those feelings and that transcendental way of being also show up at times when we’re not necessarily doing anything specific at all.

I think there is something sexual about singing, about eating, about swimming, about dancing, about walking, about lying still, about breathing. I think there is something sexual about talking, about touching, about looking at another person. I think there is something sexual about simply being in our bodies, being in our imaginations, being in our thoughts, being in our dreams. I think sexuality exists in us continuously, at least from birth and probably before, separate from what we do and don’t do with it, separate from how we express it or try not to express it. I think that sex is, in the end, the primary life force, that sex simply is.

If we see sex as an omnipresent continuity, then we can stop being so dismayed when its presence makes itself known at unexpected and seemingly incongruous times. It is certainly my experience that paying attention to the ongoing sexual aspects of who we are and how we interact with others helps explain why things happen the ways they do. And we can acknowledge the continuity of sexual existence without being afraid that this sexuality will therefore somehow take us over and distort our lives. We can see that sex is everywhere and still get to determine what kind of overt and covert sexual expression is appropriate in different circumstances and with different people. Indeed, attending to the ongoing sexual subtext of our lives can help us to be better able to shape and manage our sexual natures so that they better serve both ourselves and the people around us.