Cathexis

What I love most about studying sexuality is that I am constantly being proven wrong. Sexuality is something so intangible that it is impossible for there to ever really be a right answer... ideas are formed, then contradicted, then reformed, then contradicting again.

Today, after completing my reading assignment for my class about masculinity - an idea I've held onto pretty strongly for a while was definitely contradicted.

The idea involves the natural aspects of sexual desire. In academia, sexual desire is most often viewed as a socially constructed phenomenon. Some aspects of this idea I have always agreed with, and some I have always disagreed with. For example, the ways in which we chose to explore our sexuality are completely socially constructed. I don't believe anyone is born with a fetish for leather or even a desire for practicing something so common as the missionary position. (Therefore, no, I do not believe heterosexuality or homosexuality are "naturally" created occurrences.) What I always believed was that we were born with a general desire for sex/sexuality and that society (which is completely limiting) taught us what it is we desire. Of course society can work in the opposite way as well - as it often does - to teach us instead what we don't desire. But more than anything, unfortunately, because society isn't free from ideas of normalcy... it most often teaches us what we should or should not desire. Therefore, desire for sex is natural but the ways we express that desire are unnatural. (Unnatural meaning socially constructed.)

However, my ideas about this were thrown off as I read a part of R, W. Connell's book, entitled Masculinities.

Connell discusses the idea of cathexis - which according to wikipedia is a process of investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, object, or idea. Connell relates this idea to gendered sexual desire. Gender order is an unmistakably socially constructed occurrence - but what I failed to see before is that our sexual desire is entirely related to this social construction. "The processes that shape and realize desire are thus an aspect of the gender order" (Connell 74). The following statement by Connell is what really convinced me - "It is striking that in our culture the non-gendered object choice, 'bisexual' desire, is ill-defined and unstable" (74). We are often incapable of understanding sexual desire without incorporating some kind of gendered object choice.

How can general sexual desire be a natural occurrence if it is constantly manifesting itself in a socially constructed (and gendered) object? Is it sex we desire or the object itself? I always thought it was sex but now I am not so sure. Sexual desire cannot exist without a specific socially constructed object choice and therefore, perhaps sexual desire is entirely social.

So, there you go. I was waiting for something to come along to prove me wrong about all of this and it finally did.

So, thank you, R.W. Connell for mentioning cathexis and thank you Freud for coming up with the idea in the first place. (Well - Freud came up with the German term besetzung which was then later translated into cathexis.)