What Might Happen If We Weren't So Scared of Sex?

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What is sex when we strip away the sometimes confusing beliefs and emotions which surround it? It can be a reproductive activity, but that is only in the minority of instances. If we only had sex to produce offspring it would be something which occurred no more than a handful of times for most of us and never for others. But sex is also a form of pleasure usually generated by the rubbing of one or more erogenous zones. More often than not the source of pleasure is the genitals. Sometimes this involves the penetration of an orifice by a part of the body, sometimes, but not always, the male genitals. If we leave aside the pleasure which may be experienced, this is no different from picking our nose or receiving a rectal exam from a doctor. There isn't anything inherently serious on a physical level about any of this, unless it results in pregnancy or disease. Of course it is possible to do damage through sexual activity by trying to put something too big into an orifice which isn't big enough to accommodate it. But the physical element of sex, in and of itself, is not serious in the way that violence is serious. Stroke someone's genitals and it is unlikely to do much long-standing physical damage.

So if sex has a special mystique for us, it is not an obvious part of the physical act itself. Which leads to the question – Why do we treat genital pleasure differently from oral pleasure? We get oral pleasure from eating chocolates. Why is it socially acceptable to talk about enjoying a delicious chocolate, but not about enjoying an orgasm? If one of our friends gave another a box of chocolates for his birthday we would think it appropriate. If they gave him a hand job we might not. Sex can carry the risk of spreading disease, but so can eating contaminated food. And sex can lead to an unwanted pregnancy. But there are forms of erotic activity, such as mutual masturbation, which are completely safe, and yet we still act as if there is something about these activities which makes them essentially more serious than a hug or a kiss on the cheek.

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One difference is that sex is not always equal and consensual. Coercion or force can be involved. But coercion and force are themselves a problem. If someone were running around grabbing people and ramming their mouths full of chocolate we wouldn't view the chocolate as the problem.

Sexual behaviour and sexual desire can also be a currency for the ego. Some think in terms of “sexual conquests" or “knots on the belt" rather than loving encounters with other equal and complete human beings. And some use their ability to attract the sexual interest of others as a power trip.

What are the consequences of viewing sex as something more than a physically trivial way of giving ourselves or others pleasure?

We live in a society where a man who makes children laugh by exposing his genitals to them may be viewed as a monster but we have no legal way to protect a child from the lifelong trauma which can result from being told by a parent that he might burn in hell for eternity if he masturbates or if he grows up to be a homosexual.

I recently discovered that a friend of mine has lived with crippling shame and fear of the judgement of others for about 25 years as a result of the response of his psychiatrist to a confession that he had engaged in acts of mutual masturbation with a male work colleague and had experimented by hiring a couple of adult male prostitutes. The psychiatrist told him he had done something very very bad. He said that, if his work colleagues knew that he had seen male prostitutes they would ostracise him. And he said, apparently out of the blue, that if my friend had sex with a fifteen-year-old boy he would be put in jail for life and that the other inmates might force him to eat his own faeces. As a result of this event twenty-five years ago, my friend was afraid to tell me about the incident lest I responded angrily like his psychiatrist.

Perhaps the area where our irrational attitude to sex does the most damage is in the area of rape and child sexual abuse. Unpleasant experiences which end when they end in a physical sense are usually not hard to recover from as long as we don't suffer permanent physical damage. Traumatic events are traumatic because, in some way, they put a rent in our relationship with our self or between ourselves and others.

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Non-judgemental communication is love, and love heals. This idea is at the heart of the psychotherapeutic relationship and also the institution of the confessional in the Catholic Church. If something happens to us which causes us emotional suffering or leaves us with desperately confused feelings, it is talking about it honestly and openly with sympathetic people which allows us to recover. But because we treat sex, whether pleasurable or abusive, as something embarrassing if not shameful, and because the consequences of talking about sexual offences can lead to traumatic trials for survivors and a harsher punishment than they may want for perpetrators, especially if the perpetrator is a family member, there is a tendency for them to lie or remain silent about what happened. I think it is the lies and the silence and inability to receive the loving comfort that would come from openness, which is the major factor in the trauma. Without this element, the effects of the event would probably disappear fairly quickly. And this must be particularly true where an individual has mixed feelings about the event, such as the case of an adolescent who may have taken sexual pleasure and emotional comfort from an inappropriate relationship with an adult. If other adults try to deny such an adolescent's experience and insisted that they view the incident exclusively as an act of abuse, then they may be doing more harm than good. Healing requires that our experience by listened to without demands.

Sexual self-control and sexual repression are not the same thing. Sexual repression does not require that we act on our sexual desires, only that we accept them and enjoy them. We might not actually have sex with anyone other than a chosen partner, but, if we are emotionally healthy, we will feel sexual feelings for many other people. To be unrepressed is to allow ourselves to feel such exciting feelings fully. And if we are masturbating we can feel free to fantasise about any kind of act with any individual. There are no consequences in the imagination. If we feel sexual feelings which it would be problematic to act on then we can have a really good time by getting off to fantasies about them in our imagination. There can be a tendency, because of our cultural fear of sex, to think that indulging in taboo fantasies during masturbation will lead to us losing our ability to behave appropriately in real life. The opposite is true. If a man has truly depraved desires, such as having sex with his mother-in-law, he will find that, if he indulges these fantasies during masturbation, his relationship with his mother-in-law will improve because he will not be weighed down by the anxiety generated by trying to hold such desires in when in her presence.

Fear of the erotic can undermine our ability to enjoy non-sexual pleasures as well. Anyone who has ever gone for a walk on the beach or eaten a delicious meal after having an orgasm knows that sexual release opens up the full treasure chest of pleasures in the world around us.

When we think of the bonobos, those most sexually uninhibited of primates, and their happy, healthy and peaceful existence, one wonders if the root of our aggression, our mental illness and vulnerability to physical illness does not come down to pleasure deprivation. If our lives were more filled with pleasure would we build up the level of frustration which overflows into violence. One of the defining features of mental illness is living more in our head than in our body. And it stands to reason that a body which feels good will work more efficiently to heal.

Now I'm not suggesting that we need to participate in orgies. Only that we take a more common-sense, practical approach to sex, that we be less afraid and more tolerant, and that we create an environment in which sexual experiences, loving or abusive, can be more easily talked about rather than becoming a potential source of life-long trauma.

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Untying the Sexual Knot

How did something as natural and enjoyable as sex become something about which we may feel shame and even something we may use to express hostility to others?

To examine this question it seems best to consider my own experience.

My mother once told me that I used to masturbate when I was a baby. Of course I don't remember that, but this comment did perhaps make some sense of a fleeting thought I had when I first rediscovered masturbation at about the age of thirteen. "This feels like being a baby again," I thought, but I didn't know why.

But in the years before I rediscovered masturbation I had a strong interest and attraction to the opposite sex. I remember at the age of about ten enjoying seeing a scantily clad woman on television, and while taking a swimming lesson I felt an ecstatic feeling of excitement when I bumped into my busty young teacher and felt her soft breasts pressed against me.

I liked to play games with my sister and brother or my sister's school friends which involved taking our clothes off. And I enjoyed acting out fantasies about accidentally on-purpose revealing my body.

At some point I bought a cartoon magazine with risque jokes and pictures of sexy women. My mother told me it was O.K. for me to look at something like this as long as I didn't hide the fact that I was. For me this would later be a dilemma as, when I got old enough to buy Playboy, I wanted to but didn't because I was too embarrassed to look at it openly.

When I rediscovered masturbation I enjoyed it immensely, but then for a while I began to feel a deep sense of shame about it. For about six months I didn't do it. Eventually I spoke to my parents and was reassured by them that masturbation was normal and healthy. Once I went back to masturbating I did it a lot. I would watch television at night masturbating the whole time, always hoping to see girls in bikinis or preferably naked.

My first two years of high school were spent at a Catholic school. My fellow pupils would often bring soft porn magazines to school and would delight in holding up the centrefolds for me to see. I think they hoped to embarrass me. I was embarrassed and so I didn't respond, but I loved it. I wished I had the courage to flaunt authority and look at porn magazines at school. But the teachers came down hard on this kind of thing. I remember one of them warning that we should be aware of how easy it is for someone to spread their addiction to this kind of material to others.

By year 11 I was in a different school, a secular one this time. Some of my friends would read sex novels and one day one of them was caught in English class writing an erotic story about a family who engage in incestuous orgies. He was told by his teacher that he should not only not write something like that, but that he shouldn't even think it.

I never developed any relationships with girls. I felt a strong attraction to them, but was too timid to act upon it.

As I moved into adulthood my sexuality was exclusively directed towards masturbating to sexy images and fantasies. And I continued to feel shame about how much time I spent on this activity which seemed to be a social taboo.

So where did the sense of shame come from? Not, presumably, from the home environment, as my parents were fairly relaxed and accepting about these things. But what I noticed in the school environment was that people had strong sexual desires like my own, but they were ashamed of them. The boys would joke about masturbation, but nobody would acknowledge that they did it. And the teachers often seemed frightened by the sexual, which could only be the case if their own desires were frighteningly strong.

It is helpful to put aside all our prejudices and look simply at what happens as our sexuality develops.

We are born unconditionally loving and uninhibitedly sensual beings. We are affectionate and like touching and being touched, and we bond closely with our family.

At puberty genital functioning is added to the mix. We start to have sexual feelings. Our strongest initial sexual attraction is liable to be to members of our own family. We have no taboos. Taboos have to be learned. And we live intimately with our family.

Our parents, however, do have a taboo against incest. As our bodies develop, they may feel sexual attraction to us, but they recognise that this needs to be curtailed, and also that our expression of our innocent sexuality needs to be curtailed lest it lead to problems in a society characterised by sexual repression and armouring. The degree of sensitivity with which this curtailing of our original innocent sexuality is managed may determine the level of our own repression, our own armouring, during adulthood. It is important to remember that the young person's incestuous desires are an expression of love. Love is open spontaneous honest communication. If we feel sexual attraction towards someone then affectionately expressing those feelings is a part of love in practice. It is important that a curtailing of innocent sexuality is not interpreted by a young person as a rejection of their love.

When we are a child we take a lot of mistreatment from adults and we are very resilient to this, but what eventually wounds us so deeply is the rejection of our love by adults. All of us are God when we are born, we come into this world like Jesus did, wanting to love away the problems of the world, but at some point it will become too much for us. We will be spiritually crucified by a world of adult's who refuse to believe that they deserve our love. Our sexuality develops within this context.

In my case, at about the age of 16, I developed an obsession with the idea that I might gouge out my own eyes. In looking back and wondering why, it occurs to me that when someone is ashamed of something, they won't look us in the eyes. If a sense was growing in me that my fellow students and my teachers were ashamed of themselves, and particularly ashamed of their sexual feelings, perhaps I started to think, on some level : "If you are so ashamed for me to see you, perhaps it would be easier for you if I were to tear out my own eyes."

This is similar to what can happen to adolescent girls and boys who become troubled by the fact that some adults are suddenly too ashamed to look at their bodies, and so they, too, become ashamed of their bodies and punish them with starvation or cutting.

If we are to manage sexuality in a way which does not leave such scars, we need to distinguish between innocent sexuality and armoured sexuality, that is the form of sexuality which grows out of the sense of shame with which our elders may contaminate us.

It is innocent to enjoy sensual pleasures. It is innocent to enjoy genital pleasures. It is innocent to want to be naked. It is innocent to want to see other people naked. It is innocent to be curious about other's sexual behaviour. It is innocent to feel sexually attracted to our own relatives. It is innocent to be sexually attracted to adolescents.

Armoured sexuality grows out of the fear of any of these feelings either in ourselves or in others. The passive extreme of armoured sexuality is frigidity or impotence, where sexual feelings are entirely deadened. The active extreme is aggressive sexuality driven by the need to attack innocence. This is what we term "lust" and is considered a sin because it is a form of selfishness not a form of love.

We cannot truly love others as long as our sexuality is armoured. Such armouring is antagonistic to openness, spontaneity and honesty. When we open up to love erotic feelings become stronger and repressed taboo desires rise to the surface. But there is no need to fear such feelings as they do not require being acted upon unless to do so seems appropriate to us.

You can also find this post on the How to Be Free forum here. You may find further discussion of it there.

Taboos and Fixations

We are sensual beings capable of many forms of bodily pleasure. The giving and receiving of such pleasure is one of the ways in which we can express love. There is no need for our desire or capacity for giving and receiving of such pleasure and affection to be specifically limited to interactions with the opposite sex. If our earliest proto-human ancestors lived in a similar way to our closest living relatives, the bonobos, which seems fairly likely, then their erotic exchanges were not limited according to gender, age or, in most cases, kinship. These erotic exchanges, or genital-genital rubbings, amongst bonobos are not related to mating. Similarly in our own individual history, we began life, according to Freud, with an unbounded capacity for sensual enjoyment in all parts of our body and a tendency to desire sensual contact with others regardless of gender. He referred to this as polymorphous perversity. This is actually not a very good term, as perversity is defined as a deliberate deviation from that which is good. It was actually from this state that we deviated, but Freud began with adult behaviour which was viewed as deviant and tried to explain it as a regression to one aspect of our original state. When we reach puberty we develop a bias towards the genitals in our search for pleasure. Before this happens we are liable to also start developing a bias towards sensual, and later sexual, contact with one gender or the other.

Since erotic contact is an expression of love we come to principally seek it from those with whom we feel the greatest need to bond. Since our historic neurosis has left us with a split psyche in which one part of our nature is lived out and the other repressed, we are most likely to feel an erotic attraction to members of the opposite sex, since it is usually, but not always, the masculine which is repressed in the female and the feminine which is repressed in the male. Judging by the behaviour of the bonobos, this was not the case prior to our neurosis. At that point we were most likely unrestrainedly bisexual. It should also be explained that, in the neurotic state, the sexual behaviour of males can tend to become an expression of aggressive feelings toward the feminine. Sex between men and women is not always a case of affectionately sharing a capacity for bodily pleasure. A desire for conquest or domination can also sometimes be expressed in the sexual behaviour of men or women, but as long as this is consensual it can be part of the therapeutic nature of the erotic. It can be viewed as a cathartic form of psychodrama.

This explains why most of us have a principally heterosexual orientation and it explains why bisexual behaviour would be reasonably common, especially among those who are least repressed. But what of exclusive homosexuality? Here we don't have a case of opposites attracting in the hopes of forming a whole.

This is where it is important to examine the nature of taboos. A neurotic society brings with it the establishment of taboos, some for practical reasons and some having their basis in neurotic insecurity. An incest taboo serves the useful function of impeding inbreeding. But many sexual taboos originate in the neurotic's fear of the anarchic potential of unchannelled erotic desires. Such is the case with the taboos which grew up around same-sex erotic exchanges. These most likely began when the neurosis of males reached such a level that we were compelled to institute the oppression of women and the establishment of a patriarchal society. There have been some patriarchal societies, such as ancient Greece, where there was no taboo against homosexuality, but in many it has been particularly strong. Since our basic nature is to be bisexual, the neurotic heterosexual adult male is prone to fear of his repressed homosexual side and to feeling hostility towards those who express this potential. This can also be the case for the neurotic female, though the problem is generally less severe. Men are less likely to be troubled by homosexual behaviour amongst women, but may feel that it is a threat to their control over them. Women whose neurosis has led them to look to patriarchal males for a sense of security may feel the urge to mock homosexual men.

Taboos tend to contribute to the formation of fixations. A fixation is a response to an inability to accept something about ourselves. More often than not this is a learned response. We perceive that someone else doesn't accept something about us, and so our attention focusses on that thing in the same way that our tongue keeps going back to a sore tooth. A simple way of understanding this is to look at the situation of a young boy who is caught by his parents experimenting by dressing himself in his sister's dress. If they are shocked and punish him, then he may feel that they don't accept that part of him which led him to try out female attire. If this becomes a fixation he may, in adult life, be a transvestite, someone who gets a special satisfaction in dressing up in female clothes and spending time with those who accept this behaviour. This isn't the only thing which can lead to transvestism. Some boys are dressed up by one of their parents in girl's clothes against their wishes and end up becoming transvestites. The only thing which is needed for a fixation to form is for there to be a sense of not being accepted for what we are. The behaviour arising from the fixation can take the form of defiance of the lack of acceptance or an obsessive need to seek acceptance through submission. The boy caught in a dress is following the first path and the one forced to wear a dress is following the second.

Given that our state during childhood was one in which sensual enjoyment and attraction was unbounded, any kind of sexual or sensual desire is liable to pop into our mind. If we accept it, then our mind will just flow on to something else unless it seems to be a desire which is practical to act upon. But if we don't accept such a desire, either because we have been taught that it is taboo, or because we tried it once and were punished, then we may become fixated on it.

Fixations can take two forms. We may develop an obsessive fear that we will act on the desire. This is a common form of obsessive compulsive disorder and may lead us to avoid situations in which this would be possible. On the other hand we may feel compelled to act on the desire as an expression of defiance of those who have told us that it is a part of us that is unacceptable. So a fixation can be either passive or active. And if it is active, it can take a dominant or submissive form. The transvestite who wears a dress in defiance of his parent's lack of acceptance is being dominant, which the transvestite who wears a dress in an attempt to retrospectively earn the acceptance of a parent is being submissive.

The behaviour of an infant is clearly not sexual behaviour, but this is an age when we often are taught that aspects of our behaviour are unacceptable. We might eat our own shit, we might piss on somebody, we might fiddle with the genitals of the family pet... If the lesson leaves us feeling strongly rejected rather than simply corrected, then we may develop a fixation. When we reach adulthood and become fully sexual beings the fixation can become an erotic one. Thus some adults have a sexual desire to eat their lover's faeces, to urinate on each other or to have sex with animals. There are also various things which give us comfort when we are infants. If we feel generally unaccepted we may fixate on something which we associate with a time when we were accepted. The second transvestite is an example of this. Other such elements of infancy which can be fixated upon and eroticised during adulthood include : shoes (since our mother's shoes accompanied us when we crawled around on the floor), breast-feeding, diapering, spanking, and being tightly held (which in adulthood can take the form of a fondness for bondage).

To get back to exclusive homosexuality. In a society which has a taboo against same sex erotic activities, a fixation on such activities is bound to occur very commonly. This is not to belittle exclusive homosexual relationships. Sex is therapy and the sharing of sexual pleasure and the healing that comes from it is love in practice. The only disadvantage of having a sexual fixation is if it leads us to engage in destructive or self-destructive behaviour or if the practicalities of satisfying it undermine the potential for a healing relationship with one's sexual partner. While, as Woody Allen pointed out, bisexuality doubles one's chances of a date on a Saturday night, homosexuality, of all the potential fixations other than exclusive heterosexuality, holds the greatest potential for a healthy loving relationship.

If this thesis is correct then the irony is that homophobia gave birth to homosexuality rather than the other way around.

But this theory about the relationship between taboos and fixations holds serious implications for one of our most serious social problems, that of child sexual abuse.

Sexual attraction of an adult to an infant (nepiophilia), a pre-pubescent child (pedophilia) or a pubescent child (hebephilia) and the acts which sometimes arise from such attractions is perhaps the most severe taboo of our society. A fixation on such feelings can have disastrous results. And anything which causes harm to children naturally is a source of strong condemnation. But if a lack of acceptance of a thought or a desire is the cause for it becoming a fixation, then here we have a very dangerous potential for a negative feedback loop in which the horror with which society views this phenomena makes it more likely that we will develop a fixation on any thought or desire of this kind which our mind throws up. And this seems to be happening. Everyday we hear of another child porn ring being cracked and large numbers of respected individuals being exposed as child molesters. We also have seen a change in how these issues are viewed. When Stanley Kubrick made his film of Lolita in 1962 it was considered controversial but it was generally accepted and a popular success. When Adrian Lyne's Lolita came out in 1997 it had trouble finding a distributor and was held up from release in Australia for 2 years due to claims that it was pro-pedophile propaganda. Similarly, while nude photos of children or adolescent girls were common on the covers of record albums, etc. in the 1970s, in Australia in 2008 an installation of decidedly non-sexual nude photos of adolescent girls by Bill Henson led to a hysterical response from many community figures including then Prime Minster Kevin Rudd who referred to them as “absolutely revolting". We have gone from a time when the issue of pedophilia could be artistically examined to a time when the unclothed beauty of young bodies can no longer be celebrated for fear that this might turn us into child molesters. This social phenomenon is often referred to as “moral panic".

If a fixation of this kind is acted upon it can, once again, be in one of two possible forms. In the submissive form, the adult seduces the child. This is a plea for the child to accept those desires of which he himself is ashamed. The dominant form is rape, in which the man angrily attacks the object of the desire which has robbed him of the ability to accept himself.

So what is the answer? It seems to me that the negative feedback loop could be broken if we were to treat child sexual abuse the same way that we do murder. We have a no tolerance policy on murder. Murderers are jailed. But most of us are happy to admit that at some time we have felt like committing murder. We read books full of descriptions of murders and we watch movies in which murders are simulated in gruesome detail. Because we accept thoughts about murder and even the admission of sometimes having the desire to commit it, the incidence of individuals so fixated on the act that they have an addiction to committing it (i.e. serial killers) is thankfully relatively rare. The problem with our taboos about pedophilia isn't that we condemn the action, but that we also condemn the desire to commit the action. We don't allow ourselves the possibility of simply having the desire and realising that it would not be a good idea to act upon it. Like with so many evils, the fight against it is the driving force behind its very growth. Two things could reverse the trend. One is to understand the psychology of fixation, and the other is to stop teaching children to obey authority. A child who has been trained to do what their parents and teachers tell them, rather than to make decisions for themselves based on the information and suggestions provided by adults, is liable to also obey the authority of a child molester, especially if that individual is a teacher or their parent.

You can also find this post on the How to Be Free forum here. You may find further discussion of it there.