Anatomy Is Not Destiny

Sex, according to Freud, is a biological drive clamoring for gratification from the moment of birth. In normal human beings, its imperatives can be throttled by the rules of morality, but they can never really be denied. In the current issue of Transaction magazine, Sociologists William Simon, 38, and John Henry Gagnon, 37, argue heretically that Freud was mistaken: the sex drive is not strong but weak, and can be easily resisted. Moreover, sex forms no integral part of man's inherited endowment; sexual behavior is something he must learn.

Where Freud went wrong, the authors contend, was in interpreting the sexuality of children with grown-up eyes. "It is dangerous to assume," they write, "that because some childhood behavior appears sexual to adults, it must be sexual." Parents who catch a young child playing with his genital organs will instinctively define the act as masturbation; to the child, the experience may well be a nonsexual experience of bodily discovery. Nonetheless, the child is taught, directly or indirectly, that certain activities are sexual in nature as soon as he is considered mature enough to absorb the lesson.

The Beast Within. Gagnon and Simon argue that Freud's error has been compounded by a tendency to confuse the adult obsession with sex, which is powerful, and sex education, which is incessant, with the sex drive--which is neither. "The whole imagery of sexuality as 'the beast within' was true because society defined it as true," says Simon.

In the authors' view, a much stronger case can be built on the premise that sexual expression is primarily a social phenomenon. Far from asserting a primordial urge, it varies from culture to culture and from individual to individual. In Polynesia, what the West calls foreplay is epilogue, not prologue, to coitus. Gagnon notes that for some writers--among them Lawrence, Hemingway and Mailer--sex is as much a political as a procreative process; Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover struck a calculated blow against the morality of the time. To prostitutes, it is only a livelihood, and frequently no more erotic than punching a clock. Some clerical celibates abstain for life without showing any adverse physical or psychological effects.

A Few Universals. Gagnon and Simon developed their Victorian-sounding conclusions amid the welter of sexual data still accumulating at the Kinsey Institute, where they worked together for three years. Gagnon is now with the sociology department at the Stony Brook, L.I., campus of the State University of New York; Simon is program director in sociology and anthropology at Chicago's Institute for Juvenile Research. Both writers found that Freud's views on sex are not only misbegotten but unrealistic and sadly out of date. One of the reasons that his theories still command popular respect "is that in a world fraught with instability and change, one wants to be able to hold onto a few universals. Freud tried to define an inner core of constants in man." Among them he placed the sex drive, and in a period of rapid change, it can be comforting to know that some things do not change at all. "But a man's anatomy doesn't become his destiny," Gagnon says. "Man is primarily a social being, unlike the animals, and his destiny is determined socially, not biologically or instinctually."

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