Telling Sexual Stories

Power, Change and Social Worlds

Ken Plummer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134850952
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the rites of a sexual story-telling culture and examines the nature of these newly emerging narratives and the socio-historical conditions that have given rise to them.

Part I
Entering the story zone

If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.

(Suzanne Langer)

Stories are necessary to weave a web of meaning within which we can live. We all live in story worlds.

(Miller Mair)

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

(Joan Didion)

Chapter 1
Prologue
The culture of sexual story telling

Who could have supposed that this childish punishment, received at the age of eight at the hands of a woman of thirty, would determine my tastes and desires, my passions, my very self for the rest of my life, and that in a sense diametrically opposed to the one in which they should normally have developed?… I have spent my days in silent longing in the presence of those I most loved. I never dared to reveal my strange tastes, but at least I got some pleasure from situations that pandered to the thought of it. To fall on my knees before a masterful mistress, to obey her commands, to have to beg for her forgiveness, have been for me the most delicate of pleasures; and the more my vivid imagination heated my blood the more like a spellbound lover I looked…

Now I have made the first and most painful step in the dark and miry maze of my confessions. It is the ridiculous and the shameful, not one’s criminal actions, that it is hardest to confess. But henceforth I am certain of myself; after what I have just had the courage to say, nothing else will defeat me.

(Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, 1782)

Four years after Rousseau’s death, the world was to learn his ‘sexual story’ through a celebrated posthumous autobiography. For many, it is the first ‘modern’ story of its kind. It tells of the ‘loving’ childhood punishments he had received from one Mile Lambercier; of the beatings becoming a secret preoccupation of his adulthood; of a silence about his passion and desire which he almost took to his grave. But not quite. For his Confessions took the first painful step of telling, not just the story of his life but the story of his ‘sadomasochistic’ desire. It was a bold personal narrative of sex that broke a silence.¹

One hundred years later, at the end of the ‘Victorian’ era, all manner of sexual desires were being made to speak. From the latinate prose of the ‘anxiety makers’ who made people tell of their damned desires and the emerging clinical case studies of Krafft-Ebing ‘freaks’ and Freudian ‘neurotics’, through the sensational narratives of ‘sex crimes’ printed in the penny press and early tabloids, and on to the confessional tales of a Walter’s Secret Life, personal sexual stories were given a voice.²

Today, yet a hundred years further on, the modern western world has become cluttered with sexual stories. We have moved from the limited, oral and face to face tales told throughout much of history in epic poems, songs, and narratives; through the development of a public print inscribing sexual stories in limited texts, first for the few and then for the ‘masses’; and on to a contemporary late modern world where it seems that ‘sexual stories’ know no boundaries. Indeed, every invention—mass print, the camera, the film, the video, the record, the telephone, the computer, the ‘virtual reality’ machine—has helped, bit by bit, to provide a veritable erotopian landscape to millions of lives. The media has become sexualised.

Sex, then, has become the Big Story. From Donahue and Oprah getting folk to tell of their child sexual abuse to Dr Ruth’s televised advice programmes listening to the stories of ‘rape survivors’; from the letters of men and women to a Nancy Friday telling of their changing sexual fantasies to the collected writings of lesbians and gay men ‘coming out’; from the research studies of Shere Hite, encouraging the telling of ‘sex lives’, to the therapeutic declarations of ‘sex addicts’; from the inner musings of Freudian patients to the masturbatory raunch of the Dial-A-Sex lines; from Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill telling the whole of America about sexual harassment to women speaking out at a ‘Reclaim the Night’ rally; from the paperbacking of sexual confessions to the hyper-selling of Madonna’s Sex, a grand message keeps being shouted: tell about your sex.

Tell about your sexual behaviour, your sexual identity, your dreams, your desires, your pains and your fantasies. Tell about your desire for a silk hanky, your desire for a person of the same sex, your desire for young children, your desire to masturbate, your desire to cross dress, your desire to be beaten, your desire to have too much sex, your desire to have no sex at all, and even your desire to stop the desires of others. Tell about your sexual dsyfunction, your sexual diseases, your orgasm problems, your abortions, your sexual addictions. Let us know what you get up to in bed—or what you don’t get up to! Tell about your partner who loves too little or too much, who is gay or transexual, who is older or younger.

Different moments have highlighted different stories: puberty stories, marriage-bed stories, perversion stories, coming out stories, abuse survivor stories, women’s fantasy stories, men’s tribal fairy stories, stories of living—and dying-with Aids. And more. Once outside the world of formal story telling, we are all being enjoined to do it daily to each other. Somehow the truth of our lives lies in better communication: in telling all. There should be no ‘sexual secrets’. Tell your partner exactly what you desire. Tell your children every nook and cranny of the erotic world. Come out to your parents if you are gay, tell your teacher if you’ve been sexually abused, tell your therapist if your husband is a sex addict. Stand in the public square and shout through a microphone the story of your rape, or your abortion or your gayness. Go on television to announce your impotency, to demonstrate your sadomasochism, to reveal the innermost secrets of your heart, to get a ‘Blind Date’ or find a ‘Hunk’. Tell, tell, tell. An intimate experience, once hardly noticed, now has to be slotted into the ceaseless narrating of life. If once, and not so long ago, our sexualities were shrouded in silence, for some they have now crescendoed into a cacophonous din. We have become the sexual story tellers in a sexual story telling society.

Most of these stories have been taken as signs of a truth: they have been presented to us as ‘fact’ and presumed to tell us something about our sexual natures. I suppose I started both this book and my research with this view in mind. We could and can find out ‘the truth about sex’ and the flood of sexual story writing will enable us to progress in our understanding of our myriad sexual problems. And of course in part this is the case. Thus, research will tell us what we do through orgasmic bookkeeping; tell us who we are through accounts of our identity struggles; tease us back through our sexual histories to a sense of our sexual nature. All the medical tales, the historical narratives, the psychodynamic case studies, the agony columns, the oral histories, and twelve-step recovery stories will, indeed, reveal things. But it is much more than this. They do not in fact take us towards the Sexual Truth: towards a full, absolute, real grasping of our essential, inner sexual natures. If I once thought, naively, that all these sexual stories may be seen as signs of the truth, this has long since ceased being my view and is not the argument of this book. For instead of taking all these dazzling stories mentioned above as givens—as providing rays of real truth on sexual lives—sexual stories can be seen as issues to be investigated in their own right. They become topics to investigate, not merely resources to draw upon.

That we live in a world of sexual stories should come as no surprise. The ceaseless nature of story telling in all its forms in all societies has come to be increasingly recognised. We are, it seems, homo narrans: humankind the narrators and story tellers.³ Society itself may be seen as a textured but seamless web of stories emerging everywhere through interaction: holding people together, pulling people apart, making societies work. Recently, from all kinds of different theoretical perspectives in the human studies—the folklorist, the oral historian, the semiotician, the anthropologist, the political scientist, the psychoanalyst—there has been a convergence on the power of the metaphor of the story.⁴ It has become recognised as one of the central roots we have into the continuing quest for understanding human meaning. Indeed, culture itself has been defined as ‘an ensemble of stories we tell about ourselves’.⁵ Barbara Hardy has expressed this so well that she is worth quoting at length:

We cannot take a step in life or literature without using an image. It is hard to take more than a step without narrating. Before we sleep each night we tell over to ourselves what we may also have told to others, the story of the past day. We mingle truths and falsehoods, not always quite knowing where one blends into the other. As we sleep we dream dreams from which we wake to remember, half-remember and almost remember, in forms that may be dislocated, dilapidated or deviant but are recognizably narrative. We begin the day by narrating to ourselves and probably to others our expectations, plans, desires, fantasies and intentions. The action in which the day is passed coexists with a reverie composed of the narrative revision and rehearsals of past and future, and in this narrative too it is usually hard to make the distinction between realism and fantasy which we make confidently in our judgements of literary narratives. We meet our colleagues, family, Mends, intimates, acquaintances, strangers, and exchange stories, overtly and covertly. We may try to tell all, in true confession, or tell half-truths or lies, or refuse to do more than tell the story of the weather, the car, or the food. We may exchange speaking silences or marvelous jokes. And all the time the environment beckons and assaults with its narratives. Walls, papers, mass-media, vehicles, entertainments, libraries, talks, slogans, politicians, prophets and Job’s comforters persuade, encourage, depress, solicit, comfort and commiserate in narrative forms. Even when we try to escape narrative, as when we listen to music or do mathematics, we tend to lapse. Even logicians tell stories. Humankind cannot bear very much abstraction or discursive reasoning. The stories of our days and the stories in our days are joined in that autobiography we are all engaged in making and remaking, as long as we live, which we never complete, though we all know how it is going to end.⁶

Sexual stories are part of this and are also probably as old as human time. But in this late modern world—at century’s end, at the fin-de-siècle, at the turn of the millennium⁷—they seem to have gained an unusual power and prominence. It is curious, perhaps, that they should have become so celebrated. When I grew up as a child in the late 1940s and 1950s such stories resonated a deafening silence.⁸ But now the time has certainly come for personal sexual stories to be told—at least for some groups. In this book I ponder what this is all about: what the stories are, why people are telling them, where they are heading. I focus on the personal sexual narratives in which folk recount some aspect of their most ‘intimate’ life, seeing how they come to be told, the role they play in contemporary lives, and where they be may be heading at century’s end. The book moves from a general analysis of the ‘sociology of stories’ to an examination of some specific ‘tales of sexual suffering and surviving’ such as those of ‘rape victims’, lesbians and gays ‘coming out’ and ‘recoverers’; and on to an analysis of the political role of such stories and their potential future in creating a new form of intimate citizenship—one in which ‘intimate relations’ become a key focus. Although the focus throughout is on the specific instance of personal sexual story telling at century’s end, the ultimate aim of this study is broader: to help build a more general, formal sociology of stories.

SIGHTING SOME SEXUAL STORIES: REPORTS FROM THE FIELD

What is a ‘sexual story’ and just what kinds of ‘sexual stories’ will this book specifically examine? They are simply the narratives of the intimate life, focused especially around the erotic, the gendered and the relational. They are part of the wider discourses and ideologies abroad in society, and they have much in common with all manner of other stories with differing foci—detective stories, travel stories, life stories, near-death stories. They come in many forms. There are scientific sex stories which narrate sex in a scientific rhetoric, historical sex stories which place sex in the historical narrative, fictional sex stories which provide imagined worlds. While many kinds of stories will be mentioned in this book, personal experience narratives around the intimate will be my prime concern. To set the scene this introduction will provide glimpses of these stories and the kinds of questions I plan to address.

THE STORY OF AN EVERYDAY LIFE

First, it will help to begin with one fleeting autobiographical tale, from a multitude. And we could all tell our own.

It is the mid 1960s and I am a young man, going through many of the little pains of adolescence. Only, like many others although I didn’t know it then, my pains went a little further. One evening I recall the pains becoming too much: I am sitting with my parents watching television, I hurl a book at them, burst into tears saying ‘that’s about me’, and leave the room. The book was by the English criminologist Donald West, and was called ‘Homosexuality’. It must have been influential for several generations of young would-be-gays in the UK at that time. Gay Liberation was still five or so years away, and this ‘scientific’ book was at least not outrightly hostile and in places indeed was decidedly liberal.

My loving parents were confused and upset: like most parents of that time, it was not only a ‘bad thing’ but also beyond their comprehension. My father went to the family doctor, who arranged for me to see a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist asked me a few perfunctory questions. I told her bits of my story and she arranged for me to have a brain scan; luck had it that my brain waves were normal! She asked me if I could accept being gay, and I said that I could. In which case she said, it was no problem. I think I was lucky…

This truncated little tale is one bit of my ‘coming out story’. I could, as many others have,⁹ make it much longer, and indeed such ‘coming out stories’ will become a central focus of the second part of this book. There are many other kinds of personal tales that people tell of their sexual lives: of marital breakdown through lack of sex—or too much sex; of sexual disinterest, dysfunction or delight. But ‘the coming out tale’ will suffice for here and now. Many questions arise from the brief vignette above. What, for instance, brought me to the story of my own gayness, and was it a ‘true story’? What made me tell my parents—I recall it being a huge emotional struggle, so what made it matter? Why did I tell them this way—by literally throwing a ‘text’ at them, and what does this say about the way I view the world? What would have happened if my psychiatrist had received my story differently, even hostilely? And what would have happened if I had not told my story—to myself, to my parents or to my psychiatrist: as so many people haven’t both before and since? What role did this personal experience narrative of my intimate life perform both in my life and the wider social world?

THE MEDIA IS THE MESSAGE

To move quickly from the very private personal story to the much more public personal tale, the late modern world has become increasingly saturated by the mass media—in ways that simply weren’t possible for earlier generations. As I shall argue later, it may well be that the changing media is the key to the growth of s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Telling Sexual Stories
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Part I: Entering the Story Zone
• Part II: Coming Out Everywhere: Modernist Stories of Desire, Danger and Recovery
• Part III: Sexual Stories at Century’s End
• Notes
• Bibliography