HUMAN SEXUALITY can be seen as a river ejected from a hot spring that flows downward and divides into a number of discrete streams, all flowing their separate ways until their final currents blend into the all-consuming sea. The dominant river is the straightest one, which, along with the others that wend their way down the mountain, has no awareness of its origins or its oceanic destiny.
This short essay will not deal with the many contradictions that human sexuality underwent as it battled to the death with labels too narrow for its overflowing waters or with social mores that had placed opaque veils over its jets. I discuss here what could be the endpoint of a predestined history as Hegel may have imagined it: the end of a rainbow whose rigid set of colors may have been necessary for
the human eye to discriminate at one time, but which may yet be overcome by a synthesis in our understanding of sexuality.
Gay, bisexual, queer, pansexual, sapiosexual, demisexual… these are but a few of the plethora of labels whose reality cannot be doubted, even if these categories of sexuality are doomed to become a relic of the past. One might say that the tragedy of history lies in the fact that it needed the gay man and the lesbian woman, their social alienation and their struggle held as tokens of their martyrdom for some greater cause or peaceful finality.
My hope is that what I set forth in this essay does not question the raison-d’être of the LGBT community nor feed the vanity of whoever proudly and surely naïvely identifies as “straight.” What I propose is the last of the labels: autosexuality. And what I attempt to do is shake the very foundation of a hydraulic landscape, to continue that metaphor, an approach that encourages us not to follow an increasing number of separate streams but to perceive them as converging into a single waterfall.
Where, then lies the root of the problem in our handling of sexual labels? The argument I make stems from a rudimentary question: why do we regard sexuality as a relational matter? To identify as straight means that one is or can be attracted to someone of the opposite sex; gay, to someone of the same sex; bisexual, to both sexes. The focus is entirely on the object, the other.
Even a term as hip as “queer,” which has sought to minimize the primacy of gender in our attractions, is not as liberating as one would hope. As proof, one ought merely to visit those new dating sites that center around this fluidity, and yet whose algorithm necessarily matches you with an other—which in ancient Greek translates as heterou. Thus the grand irony lies in the fact that even the queerest among us is the most “heterosexual” in this ancient sense, because we continue to measure our sexuality via an external stimulus (“She’s so my type!”), the nature of the other’s genitals (“Dicks only, please.”), and so on.
Up until now, autosexuality has not been seen as a fertile ground to deliver us from our obsession with relational sexuality. We think of autosexuals, should anyone have the nerve to identify as such, as another distinct group: those in the corner of the human orgy who are content with self-induced ejaculation and require or wish no one to help them with it.
My ambition is to expand the meaning of autosexuality by stretching its terrain to cover not merely them or him or her but also you and me and everyone else, thus engulfing all the rivers in one sea. But how are we all autosexual?
To understand one’s own autosexuality, the task is far more complicated than merely discerning the gender I am attracted to or not attracted to. It is a tour de force, an energy that spirals down to the very core of the sexual apparatus within one’s own unique psyche—a castle of desire that has been and continues to be shaped by an unconscious process of experience and memory.
To say that one is attracted to a man or a woman is perhaps the most scandalous product of our human need to speak in succinct and comprehensible sentences. It is not enough; one must prolong the flow of thoughts—and not in one stretch, but in an incremental and exponential way. Thus, for example, a man could admit to himself that he’s attracted to his female partner because she’s a reflection of his mother, though he would do well to prolong his sexual inquiry and think about the deep-rooted reasons that motivate his attractions.
I choose the Œdipal example not without purpose. Indeed, if Freud has given us anything through his psychoanalysis, it is this critical sense of investigating one’s own psyche. Yet Freud would be spinning in his grave right now if he were to hear about the myriad of sexual labels that have proliferated, including a “heterosexual” category capable of inspiring “straight pride” parades in the U.S.
For Freud—and perhaps if he had lived a century longer he would have stated this more clearly—we are all essentially autosexuals. Freud could never think of sexuality in purely relational terms, even if several of his unresolved cases had failed because of his inability to understand female or queer sexuality.
It is worth reminding ourselves that the term Freud and his contemporaries used to name homosexuality was “inversion,” which placed its emphasis on the internal psyche rather than upon the sex or gender of the other, as does the term “homosexuality.” Freud’s notion of inversion is related to his suggestion that homosexuality is the product of a narcissistic personality. This claim may seem scandalous to us today (or reassuring to homophobes), unless we’re willing to apply the charge of narcissism to heterosexuality as well.
Two Freudian notions are sufficient testimony to human sexuality’s universal narcissism, its autosexuality. It is worth looking into Freud’s analysis of infantile sexuality, the idea that our first sexual object is our own body, or observing his emphasis on distinguishing between sexual object and sexual aim, The latter is more powerful for Freud, being an instinct that dwells within us. By this logic, we are not attracted to other people but to ourselves. Our arousal follows much less the rules of geometry in our perception than the laws of gravity in our psyche: a one-sided magnet of some sort that attracts its objects rather than one that is attracted to them.
Another theory worth exploring is Jacques Lacan’s “mirror stage”: the metaphor of the child who sees its reflection for the first time and becomes forever distraught by an appearance that clashes with its previous imagination of itself. This dichotomy ought to be in the back of the mind of all of us who prefer—or abhor—sexual intercourse amid mirrors or under the light of lamps, a fascination with the self that makes whomever we share this moment with and their gender and fetishized apparatus merely a means to an end: the true finality of our drive both stemming from and culminating in the basin of our own bodies.
Thus when trans activist Paul Preciado tells us (as he did recently) that sexuality is a theater in which desire, not anatomy, dictates the script, we are urged again to see the reflexive finality of our sexual development as members of the human species—an indiscriminate, savage, and nameless drive, which, though derailed by centuries of improvised vocabulary and poor political judgments, must fatefully return to its former purity: the great detour back to the desiring ego itself and its passionate yet understandably hard-to-explain autosexuality.
But are we there yet? In a time of unequal rights and increased persecutions, probably not. The rivers need to flow separately for a while longer, slowly but surely. In the meantime, however, for those who are able to put aside the comfort they had found in a sexual label, straight, gay, or whatever, the time may have come to look toward the vast ocean into which all rivers must eventually flow.
