The Snake is our Friend: Sexuality, Choice and the Development of Consciousness
Toyin: I am intrigued by your idea about relationships between feminine biology, particularly menstruation and the development if human consciousness. Although it seems to be me that you are overstretching your case there in a determined, perhaps even desperate effort to valorise the biology of you and your sisters in response to all the persecution you have suffered all these years
Letisa: Frankly speaking. Look at it. Sexual drive is one of the most fundamental of human drives. The argument I am making relates in a fundamental way to this drive.
Toyin: Please go over it again.
Letisa: I am arguing that the peculiar structure of female menstruation is fundamental to the manner in which human consciousness has developed. I think that the fact the female menstrual cycle, unlike similar biological cycles amongst animal females enables the possibility of sex at all phases of the biological cycle. Other animals can only have sex at particular phase of the female’s cycle. The possibility of this range of possibility with the human female foregrounds the question of choice. Do we or do we not do it and in what context? The presence of choice in the human psyche, particularly when it operates not just in relation to the individual to the entire social group is constituted by a humanity implies necessarily a quantum development in the character the complexity in human social and individual consciousness. Ethical norms, modes of dress, artistic and philosophical and even scientific achievements relating to sex could all be said to relate directly to the possibility of choice opened up by this possibility.
Toyin: Go on
Letisa: Without the possibility of choice, the contraceptive, whether the female or the more recent male variety would not exist. Ethical standards that regulate sexual life have grown in complexity because of the unpredictability of desire and the possibility of its graticication. Massive libraries of literature, and of various artistic forms respond to the vagaries ,paradoxes and unpredictability associated with sexual desire and its possible gratification.
Toyin: And you think that all this emerges from the capacity of the female to have sex at any pint of her menstrual cycle? Since her capacity for sex is what attracts the male in the first place?
Letisa: Yes. In other animals sexual desire does not arise in the male at any just any point in the biological cycle of the female. It emerges only at the point when she secrets particular hormones that indicate that she is available for sex. But its not so with humans. The fact that the female may be theoretically ready at any point of her cycle indicates/ enables the response of the male at any pint of the cycle.
Toyin: I would expect you are not describing sexual desire and response as something automatic, that emerges with compete instinctive ness and is uncontrolled by the mind and the host of social codes that regulates human behaviour.
Letisa: Certainly not. I am describing a theoretical possibility of the emergence of desire and of response to that emergence. Of course it is this very possibility that amplifies the development of mechanisms of choice, of selectivity in both men and women. That I argue has contributed fundamentally to the complexity of human consciousness. Greater availability implies the development of choice, of means of regulating and ordering choice.
Toyin: Intriguing. It does have coherence. But don’t you think you are making male sexuality overly dependent on that of the female. At least, even though humans share characteristics with animals, they really can not be called animals, only their relatives at best.
Letisa: I doubt that I am overemphasising that dependence, as you call it.
Toyin: I would think that this theory of yours needs to be examined in terms of empirical study of the chemistry of human sexual development and attraction. I wonder if the process of attraction and response is as direct and unequivocal as your ideas seem to suggest.
Letisa : I am working on that scientific aspect of the study.I do agree that I would need to examine the theory in the light of empirical study in relation to human chemistry.
Toyin: I would think, though, that the theory does demonstrate a significant degree of internal consistency and of correlation with actual human experience. Your construction of such an idea implies that the conceptions of the feminine have come a long way from its demonisation in Western culture.
Letisa: Sure! Many cultures describe female biology, particularly female body fluids and the menstrual process in particular in terms that indicated it as unclean and/or dangerous. Women, in these contexts, are treated as creatures under what was known in Europe as the “curse”, whenever they had their periods. When, in fact, that very “curse” was vital not only to the possibility of procreation in indicating what points in the biological cycle where procreation was possible but was symbolic of vital network of possibilities in relation to sex that has been so vital for the development of our species.
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