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As between women and youths, do not confine your inclinations to either sex; thus you may find enjoyment from both kinds without either of the two becoming inimical to you…During the summer let your desires incline toward youths, and during the winter toward women.
Qabus Nameh: Amir Onsorol-ma-Ali enjoins his son, Gilan Shah, 1082
The Israeli poet Yona Wallach deconstructs and reconstructs, examines and challenges the concept of “sex.” “We're told that there's another (an-Other) sex,” she writes. “It's good that someone hears about it. If there's another sex, bring it here and let's speak frankly.” Her voice is a woman's, or perhaps a man's; it is certainly the voice of a worn-out and confined sexuality. She says, “We, too, are so tired of our virgin wives,” seeking her own sexuality and desire as well as that of her kindred virgin, puritan women, and within Israeli poetry, she clearly symbolizes a different, provocative woman who oscillates between center field and society's margins, between darkness and light.
Is there indeed “another” sex? A sex that is neither in opposition to nor defiant of Freud? One that is not Jewish or Christian, not European, and not Western, one that arises from a different history that psychoanalysis barely acknowledges? Do we, too, carry such a sex within us?
The concept of sex, which was an embarrassing and threatening word in my youth, a word that according to Michel Foucault became “sexuality” in the beginning of the 19th century, is accompanied by a tension between prohibition and pleasure. This tension is resolved somewhat differently in different cultures. The mystery of sexuality involves not only touching ourselves and each other, but also touching solace, divinity and the abyss, loneliness and existential sorrow, the experience of infancy, and the excitement of adolescent awakening.
In this short essay I try to play with the different categories associated with Western sexuality, and with another cultural sexuality, east of Freud. T