Composing a Further Life

trying to figure out,” he mused, “where my wisdom came from.” It would be overly facile to conclude that Dan’s sexual orientation came from having to care for his mother and replace her at many “feminine” tasks, but his narrative made me think him fortunate for having learned as a child something that many men in our society never have the opportunity to learn, that loving someone means being willing to care for them.
    At college Dan found an older man who became a mentor, helping him find a safe way into the gay scene in Denver, and even said to him, when he was a senior, “I don’t know, you may not be gay.” Meanwhile, he had met the woman he later married, assuming that, in spite of having fooled around with other men, this was the next thing to do. “I was really taken with her, and she reminded me of my mother,” he said with a shrug. “Everybody gets married, I thought, … and I’d read that everybody went through this homosexual phase and then you move on to the next thing. We’re talking about the fifties, remember. They didn’t call it homosexual but same-sex phase or something. And I was able to function with her fine. It was just every once in a while I would fall off the wagon, usually when the marriage wasn’t going real well. We were having some other problems and somebody else would pop into my life and it was never a satisfying thing because I never … It wasn’t until well into my forties that I began to know how the equipment really worked. I think we should have seminars on this. It’s like, when they brought out
The Joy of Sex
and things like that, I’d suddenly realize, Hm, well, that’s a good idea.” 1
    Sex is not, for human beings, simply a matter of “doing what comes naturally” but something that has to be learned, like walking—or like love, for that matter. Everyone has noticed the joy with which toddlers begin to walk, a satisfaction stronger than the falls and bumps along the way. Easy as it is to find examples of destructive pleasures, it is important to recognize that the capacity for pleasure is part of what makes human beings able to explore and to learn. Sexual pleasure also becomes a basis for fidelity and gratitude, and for responsibility to partners and offspring. It follows that, in human evolution, sexuality has played multiple roles, roles perhaps as important as procreation.
    The capacity to experience and remember pleasure works as what the ethologist Konrad Lorenz called an “innate teaching mechanism,” a reward that reinforces behavior, pleasure leading to repetition. 2 An example Lorenz used in a lecture I heard him give was a bird learning to build its first nest, gathering twigs (which is apparently innately programmed) and discovering that neither rigid nor limp twigs are useful but that flexible, elastic twigs introduced into the weave knit themselves together, which leads the bird to experience something like an orgasm, after which the bird seeks out and recognizes the right kind of building materials.
    Freud’s great contribution was uncovering the connections between human sexuality, including the experiences of early infancy and childhood, and other activities of life. 3 Erik Erikson took Freud’s thinking further by showing how the bodily pleasures and modalities that emerge during development underlie the strengths we value most—the capacity to love, to hope in the future, to work, and to care for others. 4 In this sense at least, pleasure and virtue are not opposites but directly and naturally linked. There was a case several years ago when a woman confided in a health-care practitioner that nursing her baby gave her pleasure and excited her in a way akin to sexual pleasure. This was reported as an ominous portent of sexual abuse, and the infant was removed from her care and returned only after a long struggle. Yet we are all aware now that breast feeding, which is important for the health of the child even when alternatives are available, involves pain and discomfort at various stages and has to be learned. How logical that a woman’s innate capacity for pleasure would become part of her learning process.
    It seems probable that pleasure plays an essential role in learning and in other adaptive processes and that human sexual pleasure, even when separated from reproductive possibility, is part of what makes family life—and the labor-intensive rearing of human infants—sustainable. Pleasure builds the groundwork for