Though things are certainly changing, there is some legitimacy to the stereotype of the physically detached philosopher, almost pridefully neglecting their body in the belief that doing so makes a grand statement about the strength and virility of their mind. You won’t find many philosophical works – at least not among the most historically valued – that include detailed discussions of sex acts, or devote significant words and thought to why some people are aroused by choking (it’s called asphyxophilia).
In On Getting Off: Sex and Philosophy, Damon Young, a philosopher based at the University of Melbourne, seeks to change that. He looks at every mechanical and vulgar aspect of sex that you might care to think of; not merely for the sake of it, but to answer central questions such as “What makes sex so funny?”, “Why are we captivated by nudity?” and “What do our sexual fantasies say about us?”
Young interrogates the philosophy and psychology that are so immanent to our experience of our individual and collective sexual lives, and yet so generally detached from them. Cutting his reader adrift from the familiarity engendered by our sexual habits, from embodied experience and disembodied assumptions, from the shocking banality of pornography and the drab functionality of masturbation, Young writes carefully about sex. Not just sex itself, but its correlates – love, romantic and otherwise, beauty and gender, meaning, technology and prostitution.
The philosopher wades knowingly and sometimes apparently with delight into the shark-infested waters of sexual discourse. In overcoming the inherent self-consciousness of writing about sex, he shares stories – weird, intimate and sometimes a bit embarrassing – from his own life.
Going deeper
This approach, while highly unusual and quite laudable for a modern academic philosopher, is the means by which Young circumvents our cultural tendency toward surface-level engagement with sex and sexual concepts, along with an overarching tradition of prudery and puritanism. He is, as it were, proving his humanity to the reader in order to be able to discuss what are usually such privately guarded intimacies.
In doing this, he moves back and forth between accessible but formal language and the overtly crude; sometimes with jolting swiftness. In order to write exhaustively about sex in such a neatly sized volume, he must inevitably discomfit the reader, traversing vulgarity as much as the sublime. The result is passages such as this: “Faced with the body-denying Christian legacy, I also want to praise wanking … I see it as normal and healthy. And this is not just wishful thinking: turning a lazy pull into therapy.”
Despite the force of its prose and occasional purposeful brashness, On Getting Off is ultimately surprisingly sensitive in its presentation of challenging material.
It would be so easy for Young to lapse into a lazy, binary gender analysis of how we live and relate to others as sexual beings, but he manages for the most part to avoid doing so. Perhaps most refreshingly, this is a philosophy book that is not for philosophers. They will find much in it to think about, but it is written for a general audience. It has a narrative lightness, an engaging voice, and a sense of humour in the weight and absurdity of its own mission that makes it a really pleasurable read.
Small parts
Less commonly for a work of modern philosophy, or at least for the accessible treatise on sex that the book is, it is written in small, digestible parts. You can put it down and pick it up later without losing a sense of the work’s momentum. Young has a deftness with language that lays complex ideas before you with such beautifully written digestibility that you feel osmotically clever when you read them.
The book does not shy away from showing us our own capacity for ugliness. Young presents the scenario of paying a doctor for a prostate exam, and questions why we consider this more noble or acceptable than paying a sex worker for a similar service. Through the course of a short chapter, he mercilessly peels back the layers of lazy assumption and historical disgust around sex work, unravelling the view that it is in some way essentially different from other labour: “these orthodox arguments are weak … perhaps this is because they are often afterthoughts: ethical stretches used to cover up more primal tics and flinches”.
Ultimately, On Getting Off successfully situates sex firmly within the bounds of philosophy, and itself represents the merit of doing so. “Witnessing carnality, we ought to ask,” urges Young, “what else might this mean? And more specifically, what might my own feelings be disguising or distorting?”
Whatever our own relationship with sex, Young’s work is an accomplished entreaty to examine and talk about it. After all, if the book makes anything clear, it is that there is plenty to say.
