Sex: The Elephant in All Our Bedrooms

Sex exists as a strange kind of paradox in our modern lives. It is one of our most basic biological functions, and all complex living organisms share it. In a certain light, it shouldn’t be seen as much different than eating, sleeping, or going to the bathroom. It’s a drive and a need that every healthy human should be aware of about themselves, including how it affects them (or doesn’t) and how best to express it.

But sex is also so, so much more than that. It can be the deepest emotional experience of someone’s life. It can bring them profound new levels of awareness over their own body. Exploring a partner’s body can create a similar level of heightened awareness over their form and emotions, creating unmatched intimacy between them. Deep sex requires total mental, emotional, and physical vulnerability with someone, which is why I think it tends to be pretty rare, even among highly sexual people.

Then there is all the cultural superstition built up around sex—as a concept, as an act, as a sanctimonious set of values. Large populations of people often fear the lifelong consequences that can occur from rushing into an activity not fully understood.

Some of this fear is justified. Reckless sex can change life for the worse. Then again, so can reckless anything.

But a greater amount of this fear is also based on nothing and perpetuated only by ignorance of what is true and what is possible about sex. This is what leads to widespread sexual repression. We repress that which we are afraid to fully express.

The sexual impulse sits at the foundation of our animalistic selves. There, its repression is incredibly harmful to people and society. Under healthy conditions of self-exploration and -expression, every individual would be free to determine for themselves what part this biological drive and everything that comes from it will play in their life.

Sex vs. Other Biological Functions

What should we expect if the sleep impulse is repressed as much as biologically possible? What should we expect if we scold hungry people innocently exploring the foods they naturally find appetizing? What should we expect if we traumatize a child every time they defecate and convince them that what they’ve done is some unholy abomination of their sinful and impure soul? Nothing good, certainly.

So why is it so common to discourage sexual impulse and activity so much more than all other natural biological drives? We don’t discourage people from eating as a total concept. We encourage a passion for and a love of food, though we caution against eating too much of it and the wrong types because unhealthy eating habits lead to poor health. We don’t discourage defecation. We’ve just created controlled systems for minimizing the mess and health hazards that are an inherent part of going to the bathroom. When someone defecates incorrectly, usually a child or a pet who can’t control the impulse or use the systems we’ve implemented for it, we never say that it was wrong to defecate—only that they did it in the wrong place or in the wrong way, creating an undesirable and unnecessary mess. We still recognize the impulse itself as necessary to healthy functioning and mostly beyond our control.

But sex seems to occupy its own place across most modern societies compared to the other biological functions. Perhaps it is because most of us spend the entire early portion of our lives not experiencing any significant sexual drive. Teenagers entering puberty are usually the first to show strong sexual interest in others and feel the physiological effects of the drive in their own bodies. Maybe that’s why we associate non-sexuality with innocence—because it is characteristic of childhood, which is not true of any other biological drive. Rather than seeing sexuality as a normal and healthy thing that just happens to take about 13 years to start to show up in most people, we might default to viewing the non-sexual starting conditions of childhood as the healthy norm. We might erroneously assume that adults should seek to maintain non-sexuality as the rule throughout life. Sex can be seen as an aberration forced upon us as we get older, an illness to be ashamed of because it has polluted our innocent natural state.

The fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil mythos, as found in the Bible regarding Adam and Eve, captures this perspective well. Life can never be the same once the apple has been eaten, and sex is now an unignorable part of a maturing individual’s life. Once you are aware that you are a sexual being, you cannot return to being non-sexual.

Perhaps this is why so many cultures try to shield young women, in particular, from the concept of sex until marriage. They know that once a healthy young woman is aware of her own biological urges, she will not be able to comfortably contain them. Therefore, she should remain blind to them until she has a husband with whom to safely and exclusively explore them. Any woman who experiences sex outside these confines might as well be treated as a prostitute in such cultures– good for nothing more than men seeking cheap and casual sexual experiences outside of marriage.

The Inherent Grossness of Sex

Maybe the magic of sex is how it takes something so inherently gross and transmutes it into something enticing, something irresistibly appealing under just the right conditions with just the right person.

We normally don’t go around sticking our fingers in other people’s mouths for obvious reasons. That would be pretty gross and unsanitary. By extension of that logic, we can say that sticking your genitals into someone else’s genitals is also pretty gross and unsanitary. Penises get covered in vaginal secretions. Vaginas get shot full of seminal secretions. Sweaty bodies rub together. Saliva gets swapped and spread around from all manner of kissing, licking, and sucking.

And maybe sex should be gross most of the time. We shouldn’t want to swap so many bodily fluids with every member of the opposite (or the same) sex we encounter. But through some kind of biological wizardry, conditions can be just right such that we come into close contact with someone with whom the extreme grossness turns into equally extreme and mutual attraction. Suddenly, we want to be inside this person or have them inside us. We want to smell their sweat on us and taste their saliva. We want to be pumped full of or covered in the grossest products of their biology. And when it happens in just the right way with just the right person, it’s the most magical experience in the world. Grossness becomes love, care, excitement, and affection.

Human vs. Animal Sex

We almost never find the sexual drive strange or reprehensible when non-human animals display it. It is only an inconvenience at times, such as if a pet cat or dog goes into heat and entices every other pet from the neighborhood to visit for some casual encounters.

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that humans are unique among the animal kingdom in that they can remain sexually interested and active at all times once they’ve undergone puberty. Mammalian females typically go through cycles of ovulation (which might occur regularly each month or at only a designated time during the year) that coincide with a sudden intense interest in having sex. Their interest is spurred by the biological possibility of conceiving a child. The males are more opportunistic and remain ready for sex whenever a willing female happens to appear nearby.

Humans are interesting in that both males and females tend to remain horny in perpetuity, even when conception is not viable. This gives a lot of credence to the idea that the role sex plays in our societies is far more dynamic, nuanced, and complex than it does among lower animals.

Perhaps it has something to do with pair bonding and child-rearing. Human children take more than a decade to reach a bare minimum state of self-reliance and reproductivity. It’s much more important to have multiple parents available during this extended child-rearing time to ensure their health and safety. It wouldn’t be good for the parents attempting to raise a child together if dad was always seeking to fulfill his lust with whichever other woman was ovulating at any time. And it would be equally bad if every man in the tribe knocked at his wife’s door whenever she was fertile and feeling sexually interested. It’s much better for both of them if they can keep having sex with each other all the time.

Sexual Miseducation

It seems very strange to me that the common global paradigm of sex is that it is something that must be vehemently (and often violently) controlled for the sake of society. The mind that categorizes sex goes to war with the body that experiences it. And perhaps it is because the body experiences the sexual drive so intensely that the mind is so motivated to take control of it through force and trauma.

Even in the modern age of enlightenment and information, lesser-developed societies do their best to restrict the flow of information about what sex is and how it works, even on a purely objective and scientific level. The thinking seems to go that the less people know about how their bodies work, the less capable they will be of using them in risky and impermissible ways. And the less awareness they have of possible paradigms about healthy sexual expression, the less they will know to even question the narrow paradigm they’ve been given.

These cultures overlook the fact that the best defense against the inherent risks of something lies in greater education about how it works. If you don’t want to die from obesity and heart disease, it will behoove you to learn which foods and lifestyle factors contribute most to those risks to avoid them. If you wish to avoid getting pregnant, acquiring an STD, or getting addicted to sex, it would similarly behoove you to learn which negligent sexual behaviors lead to these things and how to avoid them.

A Brief Personal History of Sex

My sex life since age 17 has taken me to some of the highest highs and grossest lows I’ve ever known. I come from California, probably one of the most sexually liberal and open-minded places on Earth. I used to associate with people who were convinced that everyone in the world was secretly bisexual and polyamorous (meaning they wanted to have sex with both sexes and maintain active sexual relationships with many partners concurrently). Basically, these people believe that the only thing stopping everyone from having sex with everyone else at all times is that they are too repressed to know they want this. Ironically, they pride themselves on being open-minded but can’t conceive of the possibility that the way they express their own sexual nature is not necessarily appropriate for or authentic to everyone else.

This is the inverse problem of the global norm to repress sex under almost all conditions. Some vocal minority believes that any sexual discretion at all is a betrayal of one’s true nature. I’ve been molested by both men and women who thought this way. They naively assumed that I’d welcome and encourage their sexual advances because I was a virile young man who, in their eyes, should have been interested in all sex all the time. It’s a strange countercultural response, as though they seek only to become the embodiment of the opposite of what repressive cultural authorities would want for them.

I’ve also lived in some of the most sexually repressive places in the world, places where men and women are actively discouraged from expressing themselves sexually at all. In milder cases, the consequences of sexual expression might just be social ostracism. In more extreme cases, it could easily lead to physical violence or murder. 

In my exploration of the role this biological impulse plays in my life, I’ve directly experienced a great amount of variation in what is possible from sex. I’ve made love to people I was deeply in love with and convinced that I would spend the rest of my life with. I’ve also been in love with and physically attracted to people I felt so disrespected by that I could never get comfortable enough to truly make love to.

I’ve had intense fucking sessions with physically attractive strangers I hardly knew. Some of them were surprisingly rewarding, at least because of the perspective they brought from the novel experience. It’s nice for me to know what different types of women’s bodies of different proportions and from different places feel like pressed up against mine. But many were also disappointing, and I realized I didn’t want to pursue that type of cheap sexual experience anymore. It would be just as rewarding and far more convenient to stay home and jerk off in most cases.

I’ve had sex with women who displayed a stronger sex drive than me and who frequently shared vocal interest in the activity, only to find the experience of being with them mostly mechanical. Touch here. Rub there. Lick and suck every which way that you’re supposed to. Now harder and faster until we’re done. Intimacy is overrated. Thanks for that. Same time next week?

I’ve had sex with what I thought were timid and homely maidens who surprised me with how expressive and outgoing they became once they felt comfortable enough to activate all their hidden emotions around me. They tend to go a little wild, perhaps to compensate for all the times they normally don’t express themselves. Sex is one of the few activities during which they find the freedom to do anything they want. This contrasts with the outgoing and expressive women who become limp fish once their clothes are off.

I’ve had sex with women 20 years my senior and ten years my junior. What’s most interesting to me about the experience of an age gap in sex is how you can sometimes see the youthful spirit in the older woman and the old soul in the younger one.

I’ve had sex with friends who became much more to me than just friends but with whom I didn’t exactly fall in love. Sometimes, this has worked out well for both of us. Sometimes, it has backfired tremendously. I’ve even identified and fallen in love with my soulmate without ever seeing her naked or touching her in any manner more sexual than a prolonged embrace and kiss.

In my experience, many women, especially those from sexually repressive places, are just looking for someone they can feel safe enough to have a good sexual experience with. It’s ironic that the stereotypical assumption is that men are most often looking to use women for short-term consequence-free sexual thrills. The inverse can also be true. Women want experience just as much as men, though they tend to have a much harder time finding it due to the cultural stigmas that apply to them and the often far more crude behavior of the men they have the option of having sex with. Many saw that opportunity in me, specifically because I was a foreign tourist in their country. They knew I came from a different background and was more open-minded about sexuality. They also knew I’d be leaving the country eventually, and they’d be free to return to their regular lives and pretend I don’t exist after our intimate encounter.

There are times when I’ve told these types of stories to people who couldn’t believe that women would ever willingly engage in non-commital sex unless they were tricked into it by some dastardly farce I was perpetuating. They simply couldn’t envision that some women enjoy sex enough to choose to engage in it for their own pleasure and of their own accord.

The only rational conclusion I can draw from what I have witnessed and personally experienced is that there is no singularly correct answer about the best way to express sexuality except that which most aligns with each individual’s values. No universal cultural mandate will apply equally well to everyone. Those who think so and try to force one way of being sexual upon everyone else through force or miseducation tend to feel threatened by the possibility of others living differently than they do, especially about such a sensitive subject. Perhaps they even feel that they will lose their own chance at being sexually active in the narrow way they have been conditioned to think they should unless everyone around them accepts the same limitations.

Still, I will never advocate complete sexual indiscretion. People anywhere must be wise and discretionary about how they explore this drive as it emerges in them. Even if one is careful to avoid disease or pregnancy, the emotional consequences of engaging in such a vulnerable act with a partner who has different ideas and expectations than you do can be devastating. If nothing else, quality communication is paramount to ensuring both parties walk away glad to have had the experience and better in the long run because of it.

I’ve learned to view sex itself as a type of conversation, one that involves the whole body and incredibly sensitive messages to interpret. The way everyone communicates this information is different. No conversation between any two partners will be exactly the same as a conversation between any two others. That’s part of what makes the act so personal and special. You don’t know exactly what you’re getting into with a new person, and finding out is half the fun. When either person goes into it assuming that it has to go a certain prescribed way, it spoils much of the magic of exploration and working together to find a meaningful outcome for both of you. You communicate what you are feeling and modify your communication based on how your partner responds. Anything else is a monologue, not a conversation.

Sex is not a secret act to be ignored until a few fleeting moments under covers and in darkness. It’s a fundamental part of how our bodies operate and how our psychology has evolved. The fact that we are all aware of it, seek it out, yet cannot talk about it, places it among the most unnecessarily obscured of human cultural phenomena. I think we would probably all be a lot happier experiencing it without the veil we’ve cast over it.