Response paper history of sexuality

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CHAPTER 3

Sexual Scripts William Simon and john H. Gagnon

Profoundly enlarged attention has been paid to the issues of human sexuality since World War II. Yet, discussions of these issues remain almost as theoretically barren as before. We say 'almost' because some progress has been made. Among Freudian revisionists, Kohut (978) and Stoller (979) have moved us beyond the rigidities of traditional libido theory. These developments have largely remained indifferent to the dramatic changes in the patterns and structures of everyday social life over the past half-century and to the impact these must have upon the developmental process.

Recent work in social history and psychohistory makes it less easy to treat the sexual as an unchanging constant, providing the illusion of a unifying thread in the human record. For the most part, work in this tradition has persisted in traditional metapsychological conservatisms, largely attempting to sustain a static model of the human within alandscape of changing ecologies and cultures. The history of the psyche remains the unfinished business of psychohistory. We attempt to move this discussion further by proposing an approach that allows us to consider human sexuality in ways that are responsive to both the sociohistorical process and the necessary understandings that preserve a sense of individually experienced lives.

Scripts are a metaphor for conceptualizing the production of behaviour within social life. Most of social life most of the time must operate under the guidance of an operating syntax, much as language is a precondition for speech. For behaviour to occur, something resembling scripting must occur on three distinct levels: cultural scenarios, interpersonal scripts, and intrapsychic scripts.

Cultural scenarios are the instructional guides that exist at the level of collective life. All institu- tions and institutionalized arrangements can be seen as systems of signs and symbols through which the requirements and the practice of specific roles are given. The enactment of virtually all roles must either directly or indirectly reflect the contents of appropriate cultural scenarios. These scenarios are rarely entirely predictive of actual behaviour, and they are generally too abstract to be applied in all circumstances.

The possibility of a lack of congruence between the abstract scenario and the concrete situation must be resolved by the creation of interpersonal scripts. This is a process that transforrns the social actor from being exclusively an actor to being a partial scriptwriter or adapter shaping the materials of relevant cultural scenarios into scripts for behaviour in particular contexts. Interpersonal scripting is the mechanism through which appropriate identities are made congruent with desired expectations.

Where complexities, conflicts, and/or ambiguities become endemic at the level of cultural sce- narios, much greater demands are placed on the actor than can be met by interpersonal scripts alone. The need to script one's behaviour, as weIl as the implicit assumption of the scripted nature of the

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CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS

behaviour of others, is what engenders a meaningful 'internal rehearsal', whieh becomes significant when alternative outcomes are available. This intrapsyehie seripting creates fantasy in a rieh sense of that word: the symbolic reorganization of reality in ways to more fully realize the actor's many layered and sometimes multivoieed wishes. Intrapsychie scripting becomes a historieal necessity as a private world of wishes and desires that are experienced as originating in the deepest recesses of the self must be bound to sociallife: individual desires are linked to sodal meanings. Desire is not reducible to an appetite, a drive, an instinct; it does not create the self, rather it is part of the process of the creation of the self.

The relevance of the three levels of scripting - cultural scenarios, interpersonal scripts, and intrapsychie scripts - is far from identieal in aB sodal settings and/or for aB individuals in any given setting. In traditional societies, cultural scenarios and a lirnited repertoire of what appear to be 'ritualized improvisations' may be all that is required for understanding by either participants or observers. Such societies might be termed paradigmatie sodeties. They are paradigmatic in a double sense: in the sense of a high degree of shared meanings and in the sense of specific or concrete meanings being perceived as consistently derived from a smaB number of highly integrated master meanings. Specific shared meanings are experienced substantiaBy as being consistent both within and across distinct spheres of life.

Postparadigmatie societies are those in which there are substantiaBy fewer shared meanings and, possibly of greater significance, potentiaBy profound disjunctures of meaning between distinct spheres of life. As a result, the enactment of the same role within different spheres of life or different roles within the same sphere routinely requires different appearances, if not different organizations, of theself.

The cultural scenario that loses its coercive powers also loses its predietability and frequently becomes merely a legitimating reference or explanation. The failure of the coercive powers of cultural scenarios occasions anomie, personal alienation and uncertainty. Much of the passionate intensity associated with anomie behaviour might best be interpreted as restorative efforts, often desperate efforts at effecting a restoration of a more cohesive self, reinforced by effective social ties. Anomie feeds on the ultimate dependence upon coBective life that describes aB human experience. The integration of personal metaphors and social meanings that make sodal conduct possible is complex. Scripting becomes a useful metaphor for understanding this process.

The scripting of sexual behaviour implies a rejection of the idea that the sexual represents a very special, if not unique, quality of motivation. From a scripting perspective, the sexual is not viewed as an intrinsieaBy significant aspect of human behaviour; rather, the sexual is viewed as becoming significant either when it is defined as such by collective life - sociogenie signijieanee; or when individual experiences or development assign it a special significance - ontogenie signijieanee. The significance of some aspect of behaviour does not determine the frequency with whieh that behavi- our occurs, but only the amount and intensity of attention paid to it.

Sociogenic and ontogenie factors are elosely interrelated. These are societal settings in whieh the sexual takes on a strong meaning and successful performance or avoidance of what is defined as sexual plays a major role in the evaluation of individual competence and worth. These should also be settings in whieh sexual meanings playa correspondingly significant role in the intrapsychic lives of individuals. Even in settings with a high density of external sexual cues, not aB individuals need experience an equivalent density of internal cues. It is also possible for some individuals in settings marked by relatively little concern for the sexual to create a set of sexual meanings and referents far more intense than those apparent in the setting.

The motivation to perceive and respond in sexual terms need not be exelusively determined by what is essential to a given setting. For most part, ontogenie variations from prevailing cultural scenarios tend to be limited to a universe largely created by such cultural scenarios, i.e., by the

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application of conventional sexual meanings to unconventional sexual objects or by the expression of unconventional motives through conventional sexual activities.

The most basic sources of sociogenic influence are the cultural scenarios that explicitly deal with the sexual or those that can implicity be put to sexual uses. Such cultural scenarios not only specify appropriate objects, aims, and desirable qualities of self/other relations, but also instruct in times, places, sequences of gesture and utterance and, among the most important, what the actor and coparticipants (real or imagined) are assumed to be feeling. These instructions make most of us far more committed and rehearsed at the time of our initial sexual encounters than we realize.

When there is a fundamental congruence between the sexual as it is defined by prevailing cultural scenarios and experienced intrapsychically, consequent behaviour is symbolic. It is entirely dependent upon the shared significant meanings of collective life. The sexual takes a natural air obscuring that virtually all the cues initiating sexual behaviour are embedded in the external environment. This reliance upon external cues may have made what later eras would define as 'sexual deprivation' -long periods during which sexual activities are not accessible - more easily managed in most histor- ical settings than contemporary observers might think.

A lack of congruence between levels of scripting transforms the sexual into more obscurely metaphoric behaviour, as it may become a vehide for meaning above and beyond conventionally shared meanings: private sexual cultures grow within the heart of public sexual cultures. It may weIl have been the growing number of individuals in Western societies experiencing such a lack of congruence that made prevailing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses on the nature of the sexual so highly effective in gaining widespread adherence to modern Western sexual values and idealized patterns of behaviour.

Interpersonal scripting, representing the actor's response to the external world, draws heavily upon cultural scenarios, invoking symbolic elements expressive of such scenarios. Among other functions, interpersonal scripting serves to lower uncertainty and heighten legitimacy for both the other or others as weIl as the actor. Interpersonal scripts might be defined as the representations of self and the implied mirroring of the other that facilitates the occurrence of a sexual exchange. While such scripts generally imply things about the internal feelings of the participants, only the representa- tion of appropriate feelings need be manifested or confirmed. For virtually all , at one time or other, des ire will follow rather than precede behaviour.

Interpersonal scripts represent our definition of the immediate social context. The motives, con- scious and unconscious, that underlie what appears to be manifestly sexual behaviour, may vary widely. As might also be said for any significant area of behaviour, there are many more reasons for behaving sexually than there are ways of behaving sexually. Almost half a century after the death of Freud, the quest for the sexual motives informing nonsexual behaviour tends to provoke far less anxiety than a quest for the nonsexual motives that upon occasion organize and sustain sexual behaviour. To the degree that for our time and place the most current conceptions of sexual behavi- our imply a potential for sexual response, we also require an understanding of the less directly observable dimension of intrapsychic scripting: that which elicits and sustains sexual arousal, at times making orgasm possible.

There are some collective situations in which almost all interpersonal scripts represent, at best, minor variations of dominant cultural scenarios and in which the practised interpersonal scripts satisfy the requirements of intrapsychic scripting. Most typically these come dose on the sexual patterns that Freud viewed as characterizing the world of antiquity, when emphasis was placed upon the drive and little attention was paid to the object of the drive. Writing as he did in a world of pervasive sexism, Freud failed to observe that this multiple congruence of scripting elements most often occurs when the concerns for sexual arousal and orgasm are the exdusive or nearly exdusive interests of only one participant - the male.

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CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS

Part of the historical record of sexism is that women rarely have been selected for sexual roles on the basis of their own interest in sexual pleasure. The idea of female interest in, or commitment to, sexual pleasure was, and possibly still is, threatening to many men and women. Even Freud casually commented upon the ease with which women, presumably more so than men, accommodate to varied sexual 'perversions' once they have been sufficiently exposed to the potential pleasures. This is not to say that women in such settings did not have commitments to effectively utilizing or responding to interpersonal sexual scripts, but that these commitments rarely tended to be erotically or orgasmically focused.

In the modern era, Freud also noted, the drive is 'despised'; the emphasis is placed upon the object and, we would add, the quality or relationship with the object. This shift in focus from the drive to the object must inevitably occasion a growth of emphatic concerns. The transformation of the object into a participating other often requires the recognition of the other as another self. The sexual actor must not only recognize the behaviour of the other, he or she must also recognize the feelings communicated, however uncertainly, by that behaviour. The eroticized sexual act often represents for both self and other an act of offering and possession of what can only rarely, if ever, be wholly offered or possessed: a recognition of the intrapsychic experience of another person, e.g., Did you really want it? Did you really enjoy it?

A social world requiring that we bargain for our identities, inevitably trains us to bargain with ourselves. Desire, including the desire for desire, becomes one of the most pervasive currencies for negotiating exchanges across domains. The self in becoming a scripted actor becomes its own producer, managing resources, investing in long-term payoffs and short-term cash flow while becom- ing its own playwright. While nonerotic motives frequently organize and lead us through our selec- tion of interpersonal sexual scripts, an increasing emphasis upon erotic pleasure characterizes much of contemporary sexual life not merely in response to the changing contents of available cultural scenarios, but as an expression of the changing experience of the self.

The estrangement of the erotic from the domain of everyday life, so fundamental apart of the modern Western tradition, made it available to fulfill the beliefs of those who sought its expulsion in the first place. The erotic became the badlands of desire; a domain in which the abstractions of moral discipline could find a concrete and persistent test. lronically, for that reason, the erotic also became arealm in which the laws and identities governing everyday life could be suspended and the self be organized in ways that include aspects and qualities otherwise exiled or expressed through muted disguises and/or contrary uses. The puritan tradition created a road map where the dimensions of self that were to be excluded from the everyday self or were denied full expression could rally, enriching and enriched by the erotic. The erotic is to be experienced as having a domain, a license of its own.

Erotic license applies to both interpersonal scripts, wherein we are licensed to eroticize our ideals, and intrapsychic scripts, wherein we are licensed to idealize the erotic. This license for elaboration more often than not makes accommodation more difficult. An example would be the common experience of wanting to express a commitment to elements of interpersonal scripting that are inconsistent with one's feelings - to simultaneously take possession of the object of des ire (the male role) and to be the object of des ire (the female role); to seduce and to be seductive, to conquer and to surrender, to desire and to be desirable.

The separation of an erotic identity from an everyday identity is reflected in the highly disjunctive experience that commonly occurs upon the entry into explicitly sexual acts. An experience of dis- juncture usually occurs even among individuals who have had an extensive shared sexual history. This is reflected in the traditional and persistent practice of putting out the lights before initiating sexual activity - not to be seen, not to see, not to be seen seeing. The problem of disjunctive identities is also reflected in the questions, Who am I when I have sex? With whom am I having sex?

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In the most pragmatic sense, sexual scripts must solve two problems. The first of these is gaining permission from the self to engage in desired forms of sexual behaviour. The second is that of access to the experiences that the desired behaviour is expected to generate. Frequently this requires that an actor's experience becomes contingent not only upon what his or her partner appears to be doing, but also upon what the partner appears to be experiencing. This emphatic inference derives partly from available cultural scenarios and partly from what is perceived as the actual experience of the other. It also derives from what the actor requires the other to be in order to maintain sexual excitement. Sometimes the actor, in his or her presented guise, merely provides the plausible access to behaviour, while the desired experience is to be gained not from, but from within the other: the not uncommon experience of the other becoming a metaphor for the self. This response is typified by a transsexual who when asked how she could have fathered several children while she was a he, replied, 'There was always a penis there, but it never was mine'.

What Freud saw as fundamental to the 'psychological novel', also describes the scripting of the sexual:

The psychological novel in general probably owes its peculiarities to the tendency of modern writers to split up their ego by self-observation into many component egos, and in this way personify the conflicting trends in their own mental life in many heroes.

The phrase 'self-observation', points to the process that must follow the fashioning of an interpersonal script out of sometimes incongruous material: self-observation, often very careful self-observation. Self-observation represents incipient self-control, and self-control becomes synonymous with the stag- ing of the self. The actor ultimately must submit to the playwright, while both nervously anticipate the response of overlapping, but not always harmonious internal and external critics.

The concept of scripting can take on a literal meaning: not the creation and performance of a role, but the creation and staging of a drama. Roles are meaningless in themselves and take on meaning only in relation to the enactment of related roles. What the actor/ego is Cinduding what the actor/ego feels he or she should be feeling) is dependent upon the creation of a cast of others Cinduding what they should be feeling), the others who complete the meaning of the actor; others may be required to experience what the actor sometimes cannot experience in his or her own name. To use the lan- guage ofLaplanche and Pontalis (974), the sexual script can be seen as 'the mise-en-sceneof desire'.

This complex process of sexual scripting encourages the conservative, highly ritualized, or stereotyped character that sexual behaviour often takes. This conservative character is often cited as support for the view that the sexual is shaped early and possesses only a limited capacity for subsequent change. This conservative aspect may depend more on the stability of social and per- sonal history than on an ironhanded legacy of the early developmental process.

Few individuals, like few novelists or dramatists, wander far from the formulas of their most predictable successes. Once finding a formula that works, Le., the realization of sexual pleasure, as well as the realization of sociosexual competence, there is an obvious tendency on some levels to pararitualize that formula. Variations can occur, but variations generally occur within the limits of a larger, stabilizing body of scripts both interpersonal and intrapsychic. The stabilizing of sexual scripts, often confused with the crystallization of a sexual identity, occurs partly because it works by insuring adequate sexual performance and providing adequate sexual pleasure. It also represents an effective accommodation with the larger self process, in which sexual practice and sexual identity do not disturb the many components of one's nonsexual identities.

Changes in status or context, expected or unexpected, as Kohut (978) has observed, have the capacity to call into question the organization of the self. A potential crisis of the self-formation process and the production of scripts - sexual and nonsexual - is occasioned by change not merely

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CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS

because some aspect of the self is under pressure to change, but also because the ecology of the self has been disturbed. Such moments require renegotiation of aspects of the self involved in or related to change: all aspects of the self that previously required a negotiated outcome must be reestablished. In modem sodeties there are relatively few individuals for whom the self-formation process does not involve such negotiated outcomes or outcomes of either compromise or dominance and repression.

Much of the process of sexual scripting, while appearing in the obscurity of individual behaviour, remains in most critical aspects a derivative of the sodal process. What appears to be the freedom of the individual from the determination of the sodal process may be little (and yet a great deal) more than arefleetion of the increased complexity of collective life.

Few cultural scenarios are without implications for age or life-cyde stage. While rarely complete in the sense of specifying the full range of expected behaviours and responses to behaviour, it is hard to designate a role that is without life-cyde requirements in the double sense of (1) having entry and exiting requirements that are spedfic to a life-cyde stage or (2) having expectations that systematic- ally vary with attributions of the life-cyde stage.

Some roles are very specific with respect to age requirements, e.g., 'you cannot until age X', 'at age Y you must'. For many roles and activities, particularly those that are universal or nearly universal, standards of evaluation can vary dramatically in terms of the presumed life-cyde stage of the actor. For example, only the very young and very old are allowed to be sloppy, self-preoccupied ingestors of food. The commonplace admonition, 'act your age', speaks directly to the pervasive relevance of conceptualizations of life-cyde stages to virtually all behaviour. There are few roles or dimensions of identity other than the sexual that are so troubled by the transformations accompanying life-cyde stage changes.

Conceptualizations of life-cyde stages are implicit in the multiple roles most people are expected to play. This makes them an effective instrument for assessing the degree to which a collectivity might legitimately be called 'paradigmatic'. The term paradigmatic can be applied when there is a high degree of consensus regarding the boundaries and the differential expectations assodated with each life-cyde stage, when there is near universal respect for boundaries and expectations, and when the application of these causes little conflict in integrating the several roles an individual occupies.

Failing all else, highly differentiated or postparadigmatic sodeties, such as the industrial and post- industrial countries of the West, have great difficulty in effectively sustaining this kind of integration. While much that is involved in the association of age with status persists, particularly in sexual domains, confusions, uncertainties, and flexibilities abound. Not only do the contents of age-spedfic expectations become ambiguously complex, but even when there is consensus regarding such ex- pectations, the applicability of them frequently remains vague. What do we expect of the young? What do we expect of the old? Who is young? Who is old? The order in which these questions must be asked differs radically between paradigmatic and postparadigmatic sodal orders.

The translation of cultural sexual scenarios into interpersonal sexual scripts has the effect of empowering the actor who often realizes considerable discretion in invoking specific symbolic aspects of the life cyde. This empowering is shared with others who also have considerable discre- tion in confirming or disconfirming the actor's representations. An aging 'playboy' whose partners, like the Playboy centerfold, never age may simultaneously be an object of ridicule and envy. What were once coercive obligations increasingly become bargaining chips in negotiations with others, as well as in negotiation with the self. This is least troublesome at the extreme ends of the life cyde, the extremes which might be termed the presexual (childhood) and the postsexual (old age). Not that sexually significant events do not occur during these periods, but they are not or only rarely antidpated in prevailing cultural scenarios dealing with the very young and the very old.

Infancy, childhood, and until recently old age, were periods in which the appearance of sex- seeking behaviour was viewed as pathologieal; an assumption of pathology was made because those

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either too young or too old were assumed to be incapable of comprehending or experiencing the full meaning of the behaviour. Community outrage at the rape of an elderly women or a female child is often greater than an even more brutal rape of a 'mature' women, despite, or because, the inappro- priateness of the object bespeaks its greater pathological origins and often predudes even the suspicion of initial complicity on the part of the victim.

For some individuals the sequence of life-cyde based cultural scenarios continues to organize interpersonal sexual scripts in ways that facilitate the harmonizing of sexual commitments with more public role commitments. For such individuals, cultural scenarios covering conventional family careers serve as the organizing principle of sexual careers; for them, family careers, sexual careers, and the definition of life-cyde stages tend to coincide. Suggestive of this is that for Kinsey, and virtually all others, conceptualizations of heterosexual behaviour have been organized in terms of marital status: sexual careers are subsumed under the heading of premarital, marital, extramarital, or postmarital experiences.

Such a congruence of scripts and identities were once mandated by the institutional order. For increasing numbers this coincidence fails to occur or, when it occurs, does so with the kinds of strains that undermine stability. The dramatic recent changes in patterns of sexual behaviours reflect not only profound change in the requirements and meaning attached to the sexual, but equally profound changes in the ordering of family careers and in the definition of the life cyde itself. Life- cyde stages once appeared to specify behaviour; now commitment to behaviour increasingly speci- fies one's life-cyde stage.

We commonly hear reference to a 'blurring of life-cyde stage boundaries', often accompanied by an admiring appreciation of more traditional societies that appear to maintain dear and nearly universal life-cyde stage distinctions. Not untypically, such groups are admired for facilitating the journey across the conventional life course by utilization of 'rites of passage'. The implied compar- ison is with contemporary societies that often appear to do very little to instruct individuals in how to manage such transitions; failing not only to provide training in the behaviours associated with a new stage, but to provide a dear basis for recognition by others.

What appears as a blurring of boundaries on the group level is not necessarily fully descriptive of what occurs on the individual level; it is often not fully descriptive of what is happening on the collective level as well. A highly differentiated society is unlikely to formulate instructive life-cyde scenarios that can simultaneously realize a level of abstraction sufficient to override existing differ- ence and become an occasion for evoking powerful feelings. For example, the question of what constitutes minimal sexual maturity varies considerably across time and cultures; it varies dramatically across even the contemporary sociallandscape. Where serious involvement in sociosexual activities once marked the boundaries between adolescence and adulthood, it increasingly comes to mark the boundaries between childhood and adolescence.

Sexual cultural scenarios endure, but no longer provide the exdusive interpretive context. The specifics of person and place effectively compete for legitimating the appropriateness of a specific scenario. Age or life-cyde stage suggest the possibility of sexual activity at the same time that sexual activity affirms our daim to a specific stage of the life-cyde. If I do 'it', I am either old enough or young enough, depending on 'where I am coming from'. We can observe the commitment to the sexual following the essentially nonerotic motive of gaining interpersonal and/or intrapsychic confir- mation. Current adolescent sexual patterns speak to this eloquently. The dramatic sexualization of early adolescence provides an exemplification of the des ire for meaning, Le., confirmation of status competence, preceding a commitment to the meaning of erotic desire.

We do not imply that the sexual is entirely organized directly by the pressure of external require- ments. Operative cultural scenarios substantially condition overt behaviour, both in behaviour and in the anticipation of behaviour. Internal rehearsals represent the trials or experiments in which a

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CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS

multitude of accumulated desires are tested for compatibility with each other, allowing for an initial crystallization of sexual identity.

The early erotidsation of such trials through masturbatory reinforcement may serve to additionally strengthen the claims of the emergent intrapsychic scripts in seeking expression - however muted - in operative interpersonal scripts. Occurring most typically in contemporary sodety during aperiod of heightened nardssism, such fantasized rehearsals often find their narrative plausibility far more dependent upon personal ideals than upon sodal ideals. Occurring in the realm of fantasy, such emergent intrapsychic scripts have a capadty to more effectively harness sodal ideals to personal passions than may be possible in the enactment of interpersonal scripts that must simultaneously serve the erotic and the conventional.

While emotionally charged, not all - possibly very few - erotic rehearsals or fantasies are acted out. Many in varied representations continue necessarily to be acted within: the sexual dialogue with the other often bears little resemblance to the sexual dialogue with the self. Unfortunately, almost all of our concern with the sexual activities of adolescents centers upon overt behaviours - which have important consequences - while virtually none of this concern focuses upon the imagery informing that behaviour. With the exception of Stoller's work, virtually none of it focuses upon the sexual acts within sexual acts. Most people will find a negotiated compromise between the requirements of both levels of scripting, although the stability of that negotiated compromise is rarely assured.

The imagery of the intrapsychic yields to change far more slowly than the more externally mon- itored production of interpersonal scripts. With shifts in life-cycle status - from adolescence to adulthood in its varied stages, from being children to being parents, from engaging in violative behaviour to engaging in mandated behaviours - the accommodations effective at one stage become problematic at subsequent stages. Aside from its own intrinsic requirements, the sexual also shares the burden of demonstrating sodal, gender, and moral competence and, as a result, the demands placed upon interpersonal scripting often are compelling. Rather than being redprocally reinforcing, the requirements of interpersonal and intrapsychic scripting of the sexual frequently represent a continuing - and for some a costly - dialectic.

One consequence of this partially nardssistic sexual repertoire is that it is highly responsive to subsequent nardssistic wounds or threats. The mid-life crisis, for example, often manifests itself in terms of reactivated sexual experiments, thought it may represent more of a renewal of the sexual rather than a failure of previous strategies of sexual repression or containment. Renewal may have roots in aspects of the self initially remote to the sexual, aspects of the self that link the individual to sodallife and his or her past and future far more critically than any burden the sexual may carry. Typical of these might be the conflicts between the self as child and the self as parent, as weIl as the crises attending both success and failure in the world of work.

The sexualization of this kind of 'crisis' serves two distinct functions. First, while appearing initi- ally as a threat to the traditional sodalorder, it actually lessens the estrangement of the individual by mandating a transformation of the self within the sodalorder, not a transformation of the social order. It moves the individual toward a quality of interpersonal scripting that personalizes discontent and its solutions. For example, much, if not most, of the increase in female partidpation in extra- marital sex may not be an expression of a feminist revolution so much as it is a more cornfortable alternative to a revolution.

Second, as a postadolescent phenomenon, it generally follows the eroticisation of the sexual and utilizes the powers of the intrapsychic to create new metaphors of desire - metaphors of des ire that effectively link the 'archaeology' of desire with new and often unanticipated sodal destinies. Both the anomie of deprivation and, even more profoundly, the anomie of affluence focus the individual's attention upon available repertoires of gratification in ways that commonly highlight the promise of

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the erotie. The enlargement of psychie functions attending the anomic condition are attracted to the promises of erotie experience - promises of intensity, of confirmation.

For all the confusions attending both adolescence and the vaguely bounded 'mid-life crisis' or postadolescent identity crisis, it is easier to consider the role of the sexual within such contexts than it is during other segments of life. These have become matters of sufficient public concern that the speculation on the scripting of the sexual within these contexts becomes possible. Other segments of the life course remain largely uncharted domains. We suspect that even when life appears untraum- atie - as it may for many - the problems of adapting sexual scripts to changed circumstances is an important, if relatively unattended issue.

The power of sexual scripts is tied to the extrasexual significances of confirming identities and making them congruent with appropriate relationships. Where identity is for the moment confirmed and relationships stabilized, the meanings and uses of the sexual must shift in basic ways. Almost inevitably, for many there is a shift from the sexuality feeding off the excitement of uncertainty to a sexuality of reassurance. The stabilizing of identities and relationships tends to stabilize the structur- ing of interpersonal scripts. Even variations and elaborations take on a predietable character, accounting for what for most becomes a declining frequency of sexual activity. Possibly, the sources of sexual ipterest, if not sexual passion, increasingly depend upon materials drawn from aspects of intrapsychie scripting that can be embedded within the stereotyped interpersonal script. A useful, but potentially alienating adaptation encourages what has always been a potential aspect of sexual exchanges: we become dumb actors in one another's charades.

The problematie qualities of managing the scripting of the sexual by adults may be seen in two general ways. The major cultural scenarios that shape the most common interpersonal scripts tend to be almost exclusively drawn from the requirements of adolescence and young adulthood. There are virtually none tied to the issues of subsequent segments of life. The interpersonal scripts of these early stages, along with the intrapsychie elements they facilitate, may become in part the fantasied components of the intrapsychie at later stages, partieularly the confirmation of attractiveness and displays of passionate romantic interest. While this transfer sustains sexual commitment and perform- ance, it also has the capacity to provide a disenchanting commentary on such performances.

Partly derived from the process of evolving intrapsychie scripts and partly derived from the isola- tion of erotic realities from everyday reality, the imagery and content of intrapsychie scripts change very slowly. The language of accumulation and reorganization might be more accurate. Drawn from what we once were, as well as from what we were not and still are not allowed to be or express in more explicit form, the intrapsychie in muted form feeds our continuing sexual experiences and, not uncommonly, opportunistieally enlarges its claims during moments of crisis, disjuncture, or transition.

Explorations such as this almost inevitably begin with promise and conclude with apology. What we offer is not a theory of sexual behaviour, but a conceptual apparatus with whieh to examine development and experience of the sexual. An examination must inevitably take us beyond inarticu- late permanence of the body to the changing and diverse meanings and uses of the sexual. In doing so, we see the sexual not in traditional terms of biologieal imperatives, but in terms of the natural imperatives of the human: our natural dependence upon social meanings - upon symbol and meta- phor - to give life to 'the body without organs'.

Suggestions for Further Reading

DELEUZE, G. and GU.\TTARI, F. (1977) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalisrn and Schizophrenia, New York: Viking Press. FOUCAULT, M. (1978) 1be History o/Sexuality, Volurne 1: An Introduction, New York: Pantheon Books. FREUD, s. (1962) 1bree Essays on the 1beory o/Sexuality, New York: Harper/Colophon Books.

Co py ri gh t © 1 99 9. R ou tl ed ge . Al l ri gh ts r es er ve d. M ay n ot b e re pr od uc ed i n an y fo rm w it ho ut p er mi ss io n fr om t he p ub li sh er , ex ce pt f ai

r us es p er mi tt ed u nd er U .S . or

ap pl ic ab le c op yr ig ht l aw .

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS

FREUD, S. (1963) 'On the relation of the poet to day-dreaming', in RIEFF, P. (Ed.) Cbaraeter and Culture, New Y ork: Collier.

KOHUT, H. (1978) 'Thoughts on narcissism and narcissistic rag', in ORNSTEIN, P.H. (Ed.) Tbe Seareb for tbe Self, New York: International University Press.

LAPLANCHE, J and PONTALIS, JB. (1974) Tbe Language of Psyebo-Analysis, New York: W.W. Norton. LrCHTENSTEIN, H. (1977) Tbe Dilemma of Human Identity, New York: Jason Aronson. STOLLER, RJ (1979) Sexual Exeitement: Dynamies of Erotie Life, New York: Pantheon Books.

Co py ri gh t © 1 99 9. R ou tl ed ge . Al l ri gh ts r es er ve d. M ay n ot b e re pr od uc ed i n an y fo rm w it ho ut p er mi ss io n fr om t he p ub li sh er , ex ce pt f ai

r us es p er mi tt ed u nd er U .S . or

ap pl ic ab le c op yr ig ht l aw .