Love me tender: sexual impulse and creativity in the 21st century

Creativity and innovation are often seen as driven by market-related imperatives.

Growth, profit, jobs; in more advanced companies, happiness, employee engagement, environmental stewardship…

But these rational motives tell only part of the story. Few organizational perspectives consider the importance of the very natural impetus that has initially led to the development and advancement of arts and creativity: human reproductory urges, and its corollary, sexuality.

Chilean author Isabel Allende describes her creative process of writing as an act akin to “making love”, where you “don’t worry about the orgasm, but concentrate on the process”.

In sexuality as inspiration, societies have historically found original ways to correlate productive creative work to sexual drives. The Greeks had nine muses — Clio, Thalia, Erato, Euterpe, Polyhymnia, Calliope, Terpsichore, Urania and Melpomene — goddesses of inspiration in literature, science and the arts. In secular monogamy, muses became the unique subject thanks to which sexual desire became art.

In contemporary thought, Freud’s notion of “sublimation” as the process through which it occurs is only one of the most significant theoretical views on the libidinal source of creativity.

In psychology, authors like Mihalyi Csikzsentmihalyi have described the state of flow as a mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity if fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, which is not completely dissimilar to the feeling involved in the admiration of a loved one, or in love-making.

Showing nudes: the Playboy paradox

From sexual identity, to sexual activity, to sexual discourse and intimacy, much is to be said to the contribution of these matters to the study of contemporary creation. The role of women in society has evolved significantly over the last one hundred years, and the evolution of publications such as Playboy magazine attest to these deep changes in the fabric of societies.

While many have decried Hugh Heffner’s magazine as a somewhat passive promoter of the objectification of women and the instrumentalization of their physicality, it has also served the cause of feminism more than a handful of beauty magazines.

By promoting the ability of women to dispose of their own bodies as they see fit, by adopting a neutral stance in the representation of racial minorities, of women of all sizes, ages and political backgrounds, Playboy has played — paradoxically — the role of sociocultural avant-garde in the liberation and empowerment of women.

Powerful women and the rise of new sexualities

As we examine the peculiarities of female leaders and their positive contribution to economic activity — with reputed publications such as Time Magazine and Forbes editing lists of most influential women in power — the role of female sexuality in driving productive activity should be usefully examined.

Some have accused the detractors of presidential candidate Hillary Hilton of succumbing to ordinary sexism. And in recent talks at FailCamp, leading women have described how the relationship to failure is more difficult for women than it is for men. More to the point, successful women tend to have difficulty finding a partner, with men being often subject to representations of their own role as dominant partners that are incompatible with strong, successful female mates.

While we move towards gender equality in an increasing number of countries, and with the growing acceptance of alternative sexualities as an entirely acceptable fact of social and economic life, these questions will become more and more important. They will force us to examine further the sources of creativity, and how they are driven by various experiences and interpretations of sexuality.

Publications, workshops and research need to feed the public discourse, so that we don’t shy away from these conversations and contradictions, but rather hold them openly, in full light, and with as many different perspectives as possible.