Sex as a Metaphor for Language

I like it. Surely sex has as many nuances, deep meanings and expressions as language does. You can potentially express anything with sex – from hatred to love, from submission to domination, from pain to pleasure, beauty to sorrow to ecstasy to insanity. Well, on the other hand, maybe you couldn’t write the constitution with it, but it surely has written the history of humanity.

Sex was our original language. Maybe it went like this: sex led to grooming, grooming led to ritualistic gestures and eventually meaningful sounds, and sounds led to language. So maybe language originally evolved to codify complex sexual concepts.

Sex can be considered a sacred language, in that it can lead directly to transcendence. Legally, certain sexual conversations are required for fulfillment of marital obligations. Economically, sex is a means of production or rather reproduction. In the business world, sexual conversations are implicit and submerged into the background, but the power and glamour of sex as a language is assumed into every transaction.

Sex as language is translatable – generally participants have no trouble understanding one another. Plus it requires attention, it’s hard to ignore, thus it involves everyone as meaningful communication must. Sex is generally memorable – allowing people to take up the conversation precisely where they left off. As a creative medium, sex is great. It’s fluid enough that sexual communicators can assign their own meanings to certain acts or aspects.

Yes, sex is humanity’s primeval language.