THE NEW SEXUAL NARRATIVE
The New Sexual Narrative
If you stop to think even for a short moment, you realize that sex really is the great mystery of our lives. This is truer today than it was in any previous generation. For we have lost the story line of meaning around our sexuality. There are four basic stories about sex that we have inherited in our culture, and none of them address our sexual experience. These hand-me-down narratives can loosely be labeled as sex negative, sex positive, sex neutral, and sex sacred.
Sex Negative
The sex-negative narrative is articulated in our culture to prevent us from having sex. They tell us, of course, that it is for our own protection. According to this narrative, sex is somehow wrong, immoral, or sinful. The spokespeople for sex negative are quite potent. Even when we think we have gotten free of them, they pop up again inside our hearts or heads, wagging their fingers disapprovingly. Even if we have successfully removed them from our minds and psyches, they still show up in the way our bodies respond and behave. And, of course, they remind us constantly of all the trouble sex has gotten the world into — from the Trojan War to the Clinton/Lewinsky drama. Not to mention the trouble it has gotten you and I into — emotionally, psychologically, personally, professionally, and physically. It’s all the fault of sex.
You have to admit that the sexual renunciates and conservatives have a point. If you want to keep life simple, clean, and orderly, foregoing or limiting the sexual experience might be an excellent decision. If you like spiritual exercises — and you are up for it — take a few minutes and write down all the times sex got you into trouble in any or all of the above areas. We predict you will probably generate quite a list.
Lots of religious and conventional moralists fall into the sex-negative category. Religion typically affirms love and passion as virtues but divorces them entirely from sex. Moralist religion works hard to erect boundaries that will protect us from the pitfalls of our sexuality.
But the sex negative narrative, while it certainly has a point, clearly does not fully capture our experience of the sexual. While we all know that sex requires a dimension of discipline — context and commitment matter for sure — most of us know in our hearts that the moralists are wrong and that sex is ultimately, and overwhelmingly, good. And it’s not merely a side benefit of (or a tool for achieving) a loving relationship. As the fourteenth century Zen master Ikkyu observed:
“With a young beauty, sporting in deep love play;
We sit in the pavilion, a pleasure girl and this
Zen monk.
Enraptured by hugs and kisses,
I certainly don’t feel as if I am burning in hell.”
Sex Positive
This brings us to the second story about sex that we hear in our culture: the sex-positive narrative. This story is told by a powerful coalition of forces talking about sex. This group tells us, “Sex is wonderful. If liberated, it’s the panacea for all ills; if repressed, it’s the source of all dysfunction.” Sexual revolutionaries, Freudians in disguise, along with many other intelligent folk and proponents of schools of modern psychology work hard to strip sex of anything remotely spiritual or even emotional. They want to liberate sex from love, from Eros, and from the myriad of existential and emotional complexities. To these individuals, sex is simply positive.
Truth be told, Freud himself was the most influential modern cheerleader at this party. Rooted in a hydraulic model of the psyche, which slightly confuses human beings and steam engines, he taught us that if we could just find a way to release sexual tension in a balanced way, we would be healthy and happy. The problem with this narrative is that, though we may be having much more sex, we are not feeling much more positive.
In fact, after engaging in all of the sex that so many generations thought would signal heaven on earth, we are shocked to find that the same feelings of alienation, depression, and emptiness still plague us. Okay — hydraulic equilibrium achieved — what are we supposed to feel when the sexual revolution failed to bring us any closer to liberation? We remain mired in suffering, just as before.
Sex Neutral
This brings us to the third sexual narrative: sex is neither positive nor negative. The third sexual story is the sex-neutral narrative. This story was articulated by a host of sex researchers, perhaps most prominent the highly controversial, but highly impactful, Alfred Kinsey. Kinsey’s father was a fundamentalist Christian who raised his son squarely in the sex-negative camp. Kinsey rebelled, however. Receiving his PhD in biology from Harvard, he argued that sex is simply a neutral biological mechanism. He sought, both in his personal and professional life, to completely disinhibit sex from any sense of being either negative or positive. For Kinsey and the sexual story he put into our culture, sex — all forms of it without exception — is simply biology. “So, let’s get over all of these inhibitions. Why all the fuss about it anyway?”
The problem with this third narrative is that, like the sex-negative philosophy, it does not fully capture our sexual experience. Sex just does not feel neutral to us. Having sex and having dinner just are not the same. But that’s not all. The more neutral we make sex, and the more we make it available, like food, the less satisfied we are. Uninhibited sex is available in infinite variety in almost every imaginable social or commercial context, and yet we do not seem any the better for it. So much sex and so little pleasure. So many orgasms and so little fulfillment.
A few decades ago, a sociologist named David Reisman called sex “the last frontier.” If this is true, then we have crossed it and found it wanting. Psychologists report that patients rarely complain about sexual dysfunction or repression anymore (what seemed to be the most common complaint in the days of Freud). Rather, the malaise of our time is the lack of feeling or passion and a disconnect between sex and spirit. Sex is all around, and yet it is hard to tell whether anyone is truly enhanced by it. Indeed no one even seems to be really enjoying themselves — at least not in any sort of sustained manner.
T.S. Eliot describes this state of affairs in his epic poem, “The Waste Land”:
“She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass;
‘Well, now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.’
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smooths her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.”
Sex Sacred
The fourth sexual story, often deployed as a counter to the sex-neutral narrative, is sex sacred. Rooted in certain strains of the great religions, this narrative claims that sex is neither negative, neutral, or even positive. Rather, it is holy. The evidence of sex’s holiness, the sex-sacred story, is taken to be self-evident. Sex creates life, life is holy, therefore sex is holy.
That is a pretty good argument as far as it goes. But again, it does not address our full experience of sexuality. Just ask yourself: is most of the sex that you have for the sake of procreation? For most people, most of the time, most of their sex has nothing to do with making babies. So to root the sex-sacred narrative in sex for babies just does not speak to the truth of our full sexual lives. Besides all of that, are we really sure what we mean when we talk about sex or anything else as sacred or holy? We know it means that sex is not just neutral or even merely positive. But what does “sacred” really mean, anyway?
The New Sexual Narrative: Sex Erotic
So while all four of the sexual narratives contain some elemental validity, they are, at best, true but incomplete. They each may be spiritually and politically correct in their respective cultural space, but they do not address our deepest knowing and yearnings about sex.
We need a new sexual narrative. We need a new story. Enter the philosophy of sex erotic. This fifth sexual story, the one that addresses most fully our sexual experience, is that sex is indeed sacred but not only when it creates children. Sex is not sacred only because it creates life. Sex is sacred because it is life. Sex is the very pulse of life itself. Sex is the fundamental nature of all existence. Therefore, sex is the ultimate guide to living in alignment with all of reality. Let us call this new sexual narrative “sex erotic.”
If sex is life, then naturally sex is the seat of all wisdom about life. Sex is not only our great delight and pleasure — sex is our ultimate teacher about living. For life itself is, at its core, Eros.
Sex Models Eros
The paradox of this body of work is that it is all about sex and not about sex at all. Sex is life. But if we are only alive in our sex, then we are already dead. By contrast, being fully alive in the sexual, models for us what it means to be radically alive in every facet of life. The experience of being radically alive is called Eros. To be fully alive in every dimension of your life is what it means to live an erotic life.
That is why we have termed the new sexual narrative “sex erotic.”. Sex erotic suggests that sex and Eros are not to be collapsed synonyms. Sex and Eros are different but closely related terms. Sex is sex. Eros is the radical aliveness that animates and drives all of reality. The new sexual narrative of sex erotic informs us of two great truths. First, that sex is the expression of the evolutionary Eros which animates and drives all of reality, awake and alive in us. Second, that sex models for us what it means to live in Eros in every facet of our existence.
The purpose of our book, A Return to Eros, and one purpose of this Sexually Incorrect Medium forum, is to articulate this new sexual narrative. Sex is neither negative nor neutral nor merely positive. Sex is not even just sacred because it creates life. The new narrative is that sex is life. That’s why our aliveness is most directly accessed through sex. To be sexual is to be alive, and to be alive is to be sexual, but our basic yearning is not just to be fully alive during sex but to be radically alive in all parts of our life. It is this voice of authentic yearning that is our most reliable spiritual guide. To be radically alive in every part of our life is what it means to live in Eros.
What then is the relationship of sex to Eros? The answer is as profound as it is simple: sex models Eros. But sex does not exhaust Eros. Sex models what it means to live an erotic life in every arena of your engagement. To be radically alive means much more than simply being sexual. To be erotic only in sex is to live a deadened life of quiet desperation. Sex erotic implies that sex — when it is lived in its fullest form — both incarnates Eros even as it models Eros. Sex erotic teaches us how to live in Eros, not only in sex but in all of the nonsexual dimensions of our lives. That is what it means to live an erotic life.
