The TGIF Sex Blog [The Fear of Sex]

¡Hola! Everybody...
I didn’t get a chance to write anything for today, so I’m offering the following instead. Enjoy the weekend...

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-=[ Eros and its Discontents ]=-

The Suppression and Denial of Sex

Repression is not morality.

We come into this world as erotic and sensual beings focused on our senses, at one with our bodies, filled with a life energy that we do not suspect, do not fear, and not even separate enough from to conceptualize. Before we are taught to divide ourselves and our world into mind and body, order and chaos, good and evil, proper and improper, normal and perverted, male and female, we simply are what we are, and this includes the simple, irrefutable fact that we are erotic creatures. Children of all ages (as I will show in a future post) are erotic, sensual, sexual beings. We are sexual even the womb: male fetuses experience erections regularly.

However, as soon as we are born, our basic natural erotic feelings come into conflict with the morals of the people who are closest to us. Almost from the beginning, we receive signals, some subtle and others not so subtle, that being erotic is not a “good” thing. By the time we have become socialized, much of our original, erotic nature has been thoroughly condemned, judged, punished, twisted, and turned against itself. Because this conditioning process begins so early in our lives, we never truly have the opportunity to discover who we really are as erotic beings, to name clearly what we want, what we feel in the erotic/ sexual realm, let alone to learn how to develop our desires into a rich, satisfying, and healthy erotic/ sexual existence.

Some social commentators have noted that when it comes to sex, “we live in fear of being known. We know we are ugly before we have even seen ourselves.” Before we understand who we are as individual erotic/ sexual beings, before our erotic identities have had a chance to form, before we have any awareness of our self in these matters, we already have a vivid understanding that there is something fundamentally wrong with us because of how, or when, or toward whom we feel erotically charged. In other words, we are conditioned to accept the notion that there is something fundamentally wrong with us when we feel sexual.

Our basic erotic nature runs right smack into the wall of our culture’s irrational fear of the erotic, but we really don’t understand this. Instead, we feel that there is something terribly wrong with us. We pick up the cues that we must make a choice between what we feel in our bodies and what everyone else around us is telling us what we should feel. Somewhere along this path we are forced to split into contradictory beings. Freud call it id and superego, but call it what you want (body vs. mind, primitive vs. civilized, etc.), the point is that in order to gain approval of those around us, we have to reject our primal erotic nature. As we repress these desires -- in the process pushing them into the shadows where they gain more power over us -- we lose the ability to honor, or even be aware of the erotic within us.

These are the dynamics of the suppression and denial of Eros. In a culture such as ours, neurotically suspicious of erotic feeling and power, it becomes crucial for us to understand how this suppression occurs so that we can begin to reclaim our essential erotic vitality. We lose sight of this at great peril.

Fortunately for us, our erotic essence doesn’t die easily, even when strangled in early infancy. In fact, the erotic impulse cannot be eradicated at all -- it is too much a part of us for that. However, it can be stunted, twisted, and contorted so that it becomes limited to expressing itself in ways that are mundane, repetitious, painful, even violent, and certainly unsatisfying. It can be twisted so beyond recognition that it can even become dangerous to others and ourselves.

Fundamentalists and right wing conservatives tap into our internalized fears about sexual expression, as well as the fears that came about from the shift in sexual mores and gender roles during the social movements of the 60s and 70s because Eros is a powerful force for personal and collective liberation. The ongoing attacks on things erotic is part of a larger campaign to control and suppress sexual expression and it has major, destructive implications for our society.

Love,

Eddie