Sex And Sexual Will– The Irrelevance of Sexuality And Gender Identity

Much is made of sexuality these days, but only of the benign categorical type.  Where one fits on the gender spectrum is far more important than what does, and it seems that sex, the most fundamental, defining aspect of human relations has been forgotten.



Of course sex is still as diverse as the billions of people on earth, and no combination or permutation should surprise; but the current trend of classification if anything devalues the principal purpose and nature of sex.



Procreation, a one-off, deliberate practical outcome of sex, has little if anything to do with the more important dynamics of sexual behavior – dominance and submission, fantasy, infantilism, anger, frustration, and resentment; and whether one is M, F, Bi, Trans, gay, lesbian, or anything in between even less.

Gender classification is very American.  Social equality, justice, community, identity, and other procedural issues have always been more important than behavior.  It is far more important to create well-defined sexual spaces rather than to focus on the primal energies that are common to all.
Sex –the act itself – is as uninteresting as a cheap pornographic movie if it is divorced from need.  A rape is not sex but anger, hostility, resentment, misogyny, and sexual insufficiency.  Weekly sexual intercourse between married couples is duty, obligation, and a clausal fulfillment of contract.

 Affairs are cheap anodynes, incest is sick, and transsexual adventures meaningless .
Sex is an expression of will; bad sex – workmanlike, obligatory, and socially sanctioned a sign of complaisance, dissatisfaction, and anomie. 

No one understood this better than D.H. Lawrence who knew that sexual dynamics are complex and complicated in the best of cases, let alone in the case of Lady Chatterley and Sir Clifford; and it is not surprising that Lady Chatterley reflects not only on her sexuality but on more existential questions.

As for sex, the last of the great words, it was just a cocktail term for an excitement that bucked you up for a while, then left you more raggy than ever. Frayed! It was as if the very material you were made of was cheap stuff, and was fraying out to nothing.

Eventually such intellectual distancing and philosophical settling are not enough for her.  She is angry and resentful – angry at herself for having so willingly enslaved herself to her invalid husband and so cowardly ignored her own desires.  Her sexual frustration has eroded her basic goodness, her moral judgment, and her sense of worth and goodness.

Her body was going meaningless, going dull and opaque, so much insignificant substance. It made her feel immensely depressed and hopeless. What hope was there? She was old, old at twenty-seven, with no gleam and sparkle in the flesh. Old through neglect and denial, yes, denial. Fashionable women kept their bodies bright like delicate porcelain, by external attention. There was nothing inside the porcelain; but she was not even as bright as that. The mental life! Suddenly she hated it with a rushing fury, the swindle…!

And yet, deep inside herself, a sense of injustice, of being defrauded, had begun to burn in Connie. The physical sense of injustice is a dangerous feeling, once it is awakened. It must have outlet, or it eats away the one in whom it is aroused. Poor Clifford, he was not to blame. His was the greater misfortune. It was all part of the general catastrophe.

Whether or not his impotence and her moral and sexual dilemmas were indeed part of a ‘general catastrophe’, her sexual demands were not met, and his masculine identity stolen.  They were the quintessential sexual couple – not the romantic image of a loving, sexually satisfied couple, but the more real couple dealing with power, identity, and purpose.

In what French intellectuals have called America’s ‘puerile sexuality’, most sexual partners look no further than the orgasm.  If it was good for both of them, then their emotional bond has been annealed.  Yet as time goes on they will inevitably have to deal with sexual frustration, an expression not only of their physical disappointment but psycho-social one.  Lack of sexual satisfaction, women know, is less a matter of male performance than male attitude.



Clifford tries to put the best spin possible on his impotence.  It is not so much the sex itself but the bonding it represents.

It's what endures through one's life that matters; my own life matters to me, in its long continuance and development. But what do the occasional connections matter? And the occasional sexual connections especially! If people don't exaggerate them ridiculously, they pass like the mating of birds. And so they should.

What does it matter? It's the life-long companionship that matters. It's the living together from day to day, not the sleeping together once or twice. You and I are married, no matter what happens to us. We have the habit of each other.

And habit, to my thinking, is more vital than any occasional excitement. The long, slow, enduring thing. . .that's what we live by. . .not the occasional spasm of any sort. Little by little, living together, two people fall into a sort of unison, they vibrate so intricately to one another.

That's the real secret of marriage, not sex; at least not the simple function of sex. You and I are interwoven in a marriage. If we stick to that we ought to be able to arrange this sex thing, as we arrange going to the dentist; since fate has given us a checkmate physically there.

Of course Lady Chatterley disagrees.  Sex is not simply a part of marriage, it is the part; for only out of the complexity of sexual arrangements can one understand the other.

And yet, deep inside herself, a sense of injustice, of being defrauded, had begun to burn in Connie. The physical sense of injustice is a dangerous feeling, once it is awakened. It must have outlet, or it eats away the one in whom it is aroused. Poor Clifford, he was not to blame. His was the greater misfortune. It was all part of the general catastrophe.

And yet was he not in a way to blame? This lack of warmth, this lack of the simple, warm, physical contact, was he not to blame for that? He was never really warm, nor even kind, only thoughtful, considerate, in a well-bred, cold sort of way!

Worst of all Connie feels betrayed by and hostile to men.

Connie felt again the tightness, niggardliness of the men of her generation.  They were so tight, so scared of life!

In the old days women rolled over and men did their duty, and if God was willing, a child would be conceived and born. There were never questions of meaning, identity, or purpose.  Sex was neither a joy  nor an adventure but a duty.  There could never have been a D.H.Lawrence nor questions about power and identity.

Edward Albee is perhaps the most observant critic of marriage and sexual relationships of any modern playwright. George and Martha flail themselves to the bone in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, victims of sexual jealousies, insecurities, and hostilities.  They have been trapped in a decades-long unhappy marriage which ultimately frees them. Marriage is the crucible of maturity, said Albee, and unless couples suffer the indignity of the marital gantlet can they possibly become adults.

Dominatrices are a staple of alternate sex.  Many men have an need to be dominated by women while others must dominate them. Submission-rape are the end-points of a sexual spectrum with uncountable intermediates.
Women want to finally fulfill love of their fathers.  Men always marry their mothers.  Sex is the common intermediary between fantasy and reality.  It never was about procreation, Biblical injunction, or simple satisfaction.

The women in Women in Love – Ursula and Gudrun – are determined and willful.  Their relationships with Birkin and Gerald always take place within a struggle for dominance and subjugation.  Lawrence was right about the impossibility of sexual resolution.  At best an equilibrium can be established – a stand-off, an accommodation which allows for co-habitation – but at worst, men and women will constantly battle for supremacy, right, and superiority.



In Lady Chatterley’s Lover Lawrence has put aside gender wars. The story of  Connie, Clifford, and Mellors is not one of victory and defeat but a more natural and even romantic denouement.  Connie was indeed romantic to imbue simultaneous orgasm with so much existential meaning; and should not have been surprised that the fundamental social and intellectual differences between her and the gamekeeper would eventually determine their fate.

Most women are quite happy with a man who is so attentive, so thrilled by a woman’s sexual pleasure that he wants to delay his ‘crisis’.  Coming together in one moment of climax is far less sexually and emotionally fulfilling to both man and woman than  a woman’s multiple orgasms.   Connie invested far too much in an ideal idea of mutuality.

For Lawrence sex, whatever its configuration within a relationship, can never be ignored.  It is never insignificant, never meaningless.  Too much desire or too little; too little patience or indifference; too little caring or too little passion; too much sex or too little.  Every sexual innuendo is parsed, worried, or buried.  Sexual slights are rarely forgotten.  Sexual attention always given more value than it is worth.

Lawrence was not the first author to write frankly about sex, nor the only one to raise issues of will, dominance, and sexual authority.  Shakespeare’s plays were all about strong women and their dominance in a patriarchal society.  The will of Goneril, Regan, Tamora, Dionyza, Volumnia, and Lady Macbeth was indomitable and profoundly sexual.  Othello was as much about Iago’s sexual jealousy of Othello as it was Othello’s mistrust of Desdemona.   The Comedies are all about sexual foreplay within a demanding social context.



Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf was all about sexual dominance and subjugation.  Tennessee Williams was the most mature and sophisticated about women’s sexual longings, disappointments, and courage.



Yet Lawrence writes with an honesty and a forthrightness that the others often lack.  He may be a less accomplished writer, but he never shies from sexual truth.  His choice of pitting a sexually impotent invalid with a strong, determined woman shows his own emotional courage.


Sex, sexual will and the irrelevance of sexuality and gender identity – lessons from D.H.Lawrence.