[NSFW] Is sexuality separable from the rest of our personality? Is any one aspect of personality separable from the rest?

There have been two questions this morning that ask us to consider some human activity aside from it’s sexual aspect. One asked us if we could consider a question about whether someone had a girlfriend or boyfriend to have anything but a sexual context. Another asked us how we enjoyed our SO’s body in other than a sexual way.

The presumption behind both these questions was that you could separate out sex into it’s own world and that actions could have a significance that was either sexual or not.

This perplexes me. To me, we are all of ourselves, all the time. We are always sexual and always intellectual and always soulful and always whatever other aspect you want to consider. We might be more or less some things at sometimes, but we are never devoid of any of it. It’s all there, to a greater or lesser degree, all the time.

But others seem to see it differently. Is this just a kind of fiction we use to understand things? Or do people really separate humans into completely separate kinds of creatures. Today I am just a colleague. Tomorrow I will be just a friend. The next day will be devoted to being a gardener in the morning and a lover at night.

What happens to us when we think about these aspects of ourselves as separate and separable? Is there any harm to this kind of thinking? Do we lose anything? Is Wundayatta just being some kind of fuddy duddy in his insistence that separating things out like this is a problem? A dysfunction in our thinking?