Betraying My Feminity: A Concession That There Aren't Words for Everything

Apparently, the children in France had a problem: they were unable to find answers to their pressing questions about sex. Wishing to rescue these poor unfortunates, a museum generously went to the trouble of opening a new exhibit, one that graphically answers any questions these youngsters, pining for knowledge, might have. According to the article in the LA Times concerning this exhibit, over 100,000 children have visited this exhibit and many more are anticipated to visit in the future. (The article didn’t mention why no one considered that mentioning to schoolchildren a site called Google or this modern invention commonly referred to as TV might have prevented the expense and trouble of building an exhibit.) The exhibit answers delicate questions, features pornographic photographs (albeit ones that promote gender equality, apparently), and urges adult patrons to be careful not to block children’s views of the displays.

Aside from the issue about whether it’s appropriate or desirable to educate children about sex in this fashion, I was particularly struck by one line in the article. The goal of the exhibit, according to the writer Geraldine Baum, is to "encourage[s] children and their parents or teachers to shed all modesty and embarrassment about touchy topics and start talking."To which, I can only wonder: why? Is there really something so terrible about modesty on this particular subject?

Granted, I’m not about to advocate we return to the Victorian era, where, if the tales are true and Edith Wharton wasn’t a singular case, some women found out about sex the night before their weddings. Nor am I suggesting sex is a shameful act, one that should only be mentioned in dark corners, and by vulgar characters.

But I am suggesting that perhaps shame isn’t the exclusive cause of modesty or shyness concerning a subject. Do children or teenagers, or even adults, refrain from talking about sex due to an unhealthy attitude that sex is ugly, or do they refrain due to a realization that something about sex almost makes it beyond language, something that becomes tawdry when limited to the expression of language? I know this might be a radical notion, in our era of free speech and constant expression of self and endless communication, but it seems that our language only stretches so far—and its ability may not extend to talking about sex.

Certainly, we can express the physical components of sex, something amply demonstrated by many newer books, TV shows, and movies. Without a doubt, we have words for all that—but is sex merely that to us? Is love only an attempt to gratify the physical desires of the body, not the emotional and spiritual ones? When animals have sex, there’s nothing more than the physical desires of the body, but with people, it seems that sex is—or at least, may be—something more. There aren’t great stories about people who just want to get laid, without having any interest in the other person beyond the happy coincidence that they, too, wanted to get laid. There’s nothing human about sex like that—and if that was all it ever was, I somehow doubt we’d ever have had reticence on the subject.

Sex, for humans, is a physical union, but one that also should signify an emotional and spiritual union, as well—a complete union, in short, between the totality of two persons. And the notion of this complete union, and the longing that humans naturally have for it, is something that I think there should be modesty about. Why? Because it’s beautiful—but beautiful in such a way that we cannot convey it adequately in language, and to do so, to inflict unfitting and inadequate words upon it, is to destroy that beauty.

Our era promotes the notion of the “tell all,” but the idea of telling all is an impression founded on a myth, on a belief that anything can be told, be expressed, be spoken. It is a belief that language itself gives no credence to, a belief that the very existence of the word “inexpressible” belies. Sometimes we are doomed to speechlessness, not by any fundamental ineptitude in our ability to conjure words, but by the fact that what we are encountering is something beyond the power of words themselves. When we say that sex not only may be talked about, but ought to be talked about, freely and without reserve, we are ultimately claiming that sex is among those things that are expressible. But it is not the expressible aspect of sex which inspires love, which inspires the hope of a total union—and to reduce sex to that will eliminate modesty, but it will also eliminate the possibility of it being something more.