[Greta Christina] Tantric Orgasms and Sacred Sex: New Age Spirituality in the Sex Community
Why is New Age spirituality so prevalent in the sex- positive community?
A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece on this blog about my skeptical, materialist, atheist, entire non- spiritual view of sexual transcendence, and why you don’t need to see sex as metaphysical to see it as magnificent and meaningful.
I deliberately didn’t make the piece critical of spirituality and religion. Partly, that simply wasn’t the point of the piece: the point wasn’t to tear down the spiritual view of sex, but to offer an alternative to it. And partly, I’ll admit, it was because many of my friends and allies in the sex community have spiritual beliefs about sex, in some cases deeply held spiritual beliefs, and I was gun-shy about alienating them.
But I recently gave an interview to Greg Fish of the Weird Things blog, who read the piece and wanted to talk with me about it. And what Greg mostly wanted to know was the very question I’d been deliberately avoiding. He wanted to know why, in my opinion, so many people in the sex- positive community are so heavily invested in associating sex with spirituality and religion.
This is an attempt to answer that question.
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I want to say something at the outset: This is pretty much speculation. Since I’m writing this piece from a skeptical point of view, I feel honor-bound to make that clear. It’s reasonably well-informed speculation; but it’s not based on double-blind, peer-reviewed research or anything. It’s just my opinion, based on my own observation and reading and thinking on the subject.
That being said:
Why is there so much New Age spirituality in the sex-positive community? I think there are three basic things going on.
The first is the extremely prevalent, deeply- rooted idea in our culture that being spiritual means being good and virtuous, and that the spiritual world is the important world, the most real world.
One of the central tropes of religion is that being a religious person makes you a good person, pretty much by definition. God is good, supposedly, so the closer you are to God, the better a person you are. And related to this is the notion that being a spiritual person means being connected with the most real, and most important, part of life and existence. The material world is hollow, according to this trope; a mere shell for the creamy metaphysical goodness that lies within. Focusing on the material world makes you shallow at best; focusing on the spiritual makes you deep.
Now, even when people reject conventional religion, these ideas can still be very pervasive. And if people have been brought up with any sort of religious teachings (which most people have), the ideas are learned from a very early age: they’re not necessarily conscious, but they’re deeply rooted nevertheless. And even people who aren’t brought up in religion usually still have this idea drilled into them by their surrounding culture.
So when people embrace sex as good and important, it seems natural to frame it as a spiritual experience. If you’ve absorbed the idea that the spiritual world is both the most good and the most real world there is, then once you reject the conventional view of sex as trivial and wicked — once you start reframing sex as valuable and beautiful and a central part of human life — it seems natural to see sex in spiritual terms. If the spiritual world is the most virtuous and precious part of the world, then seeing sex as a spiritual experience is a way of distancing it from the smear of being pointless, selfish, guttural, and evil, and repositioning it as honorable and worthwhile.
And so instead of saying, “Religion is wrong about sex being bad, therefore I’m going to reject religion,” many people say, “Religion is wrong about sex being bad, therefore I’m going to find — or make up — a new religion.”
Second: The sex-positive community tends overwhelmingly to be a progressive community: one that rejects, or at least questions, the mainstream. And unfortunately, a lot of progressive people see science as “the man” — part of the mainstream establishment.
So they throw the baby out with the bathwater. In rejecting the things that are genuinely troubling about mainstream institutions, they also reject science. Including the scientific principles that human judgment is fallible and needs to be rigorously tested and counter- checked, and that claims about the world should be backed up with solid evidence, and that your own personal intuition isn’t by itself enough reason to believe something about the world.
Principles that tend to put the kibosh on spiritual beliefs.
I’m not saying that science and spiritual belief are inherently incompatible. •But it does seem to be the case that a greater degree of familiarity with science — not just with scientific knowledge, but with how the scientific method works, and what its history is, and the degree to which it’s radically changed our understanding of the world — tends to make people more skeptical about religion and spirituality. So when they reject science as just another oppressive mainstream institution designed to deaden the human spirit, people in the sex positive community become more likely to embrace spirituality, almost by default.
Finally:
I think a big part of this phenomenon has to do with the nature of sex itself.
When it’s good, the experience of sex can feel very much like what people describe as a spiritual experience. It can take you out of your body; change your experience of time; give you an almost telepathic connection with another person; make you feel ecstatically transported out of ordinary physical experience; etc., etc. etc.
And again, even if you reject conventional religion, the deeply- rooted reflex in our culture is to see these kinds of experiences as metaphysical. Our culture doesn’t have a widely held framework for understanding and processing these experiences, other than a spiritual or religious one. The idea that the brain and the body, by themselves, can produce these altered states of consciousness — that’s not very prevalent, or very well- understood.
So when people start to have really good sex — the time- bending, body- transcending, ecstatically transporting kind of sex that seems like a religious experience — and when they start to take those experiences seriously and see them as both valuable and important . . . again, the reflex is to put those experiences into a spiritual framework. That’s the main framework we have in our culture for this kind of experience . . . and it’s not surprising that even people who whole- heartedly reject conventional religion as hateful and fearful of sexuality would still put transcendently ecstatic sexual experiences into a larger spiritual outlook.
Which is exactly why I wrote A Skeptic’s View of Sexual Transcendence: to offer an alternative framework, a way of experiencing and understanding sex and sexual transcendence that doesn’t rely on spiritual belief, one that is entirely rooted in the physical world.
Now, I can already hear some critics gearing up to ask, “Why do you care?” Why do I care what other people believe? Why do I feel compelled to poke holes in those beliefs, try to persuade people that they’re mistaken and unnecessary? Aren’t I being just as intolerant and evangelical as the sex-hating hard-core religious fanatics I oppose so strongly?
I don’t really have the space here to get into that discussion, in any detail that would do it justice. And in any case, a sex blog isn’t the right venue for it. If you are interested in why I think spiritual belief is mistaken, you can see my arguments (among other places) here, and here, and here and here and here. If you’re interested in why I think it’s harmful, you can look here, and here, and here and here and here (again, among many other places). And if you want to know why I care what other people believe, you can see my explanations here, and here, and here. Again, among many other places.
But if you want to know those arguments in a nutshell: I think spiritual belief is mistaken. I think that, on the whole, it does more harm than good. And I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t discuss it and debate it and criticize it, just like we do with any other hypothesis about how the world works and why it is the way it is. The fact that I see spirituality as both mistaken and harmful is exactly the reason that I care.
And all of that is every bit as true in the sex-positive community as it is anywhere else.
So I plan to keep looking at where these spiritual beliefs about sex come from. I plan to keep critiquing them. And I plan to keep offering alternatives to them, whenever I can.
(Some of the ideas for this piece originated in my interview with Weird Things.)
This entry was posted on Friday, 5 June 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Saturday, 6 June 2009 at 7:14 pm DuWayne wrote:
I think that all your points are salient and suspect accurate as well. But the first one was kind of a headslap for me - I am not nearly long enough and far enough out of my own inundation with Faith to see a lot of things that are really fucking obvious and that is one of the most obvious things I have thus far missed.
I am really getting enthusiastic about the notion of writing about human sexuality, because I think that there is a) little enough of a reasoned discussion of it within the academic community I tend to follow and because b) there is little enough discussion that doesn’t involve notions of spiritual transcendence - that including a lot of educators and even professional sex therapists - though the same problem is sometimes true of general psychotherapy as well…
I am definitely going to reference this and the piece that inspired it. Though it will probably be later in the postings, that I will address spirituality. I am much more excited about getting into the mechanics of exploring your partner and then into fetishes and fantasies, which is just such big fun…Personally I tend to be pretty basic (not vanilla, just no major fetishes), but I am absolutely fascinated with what gets people off and the understanding that there isn’t a damned thing wrong with most fetishes.
on Saturday, 6 June 2009 at 10:53 pm sav wrote:
I really liked this piece. I’ve always had a problem with the mixing of spirituality or religious utility with sex, mostly because I just don’t experience sex in either one of those ways.
I’d like to add that there are creepy people who co-opt the spirituality that is prevalent with some sex-positive people, and they do it for their own gain, whether it be financial or sexual (or something else). I don’t think the creeps are one of your three reasons. I think they are part of the “harm” you described. I think they capitalize on the beliefs you outlined that some non-creepy, quite regular sex-positive people hold.
And when I say creeps, I mean, specifically, self-described sex “gurus” and all those other types of woo-pushers, as opposed to people who just know a lot about sex, help people dispel myths about it, and encourage people to let go of their fears and strive to have better sex if they’re currently unsatisfied in their current sexual situation.
Anyway, thanks.
on Sunday, 7 June 2009 at 9:11 am Blake Stacey wrote:
In the same vein, I’ve seen people take a “spiritual” attitude to psychedelic drugs. I suspect a similar set of factors are at work, but I still find it perplexing, perhaps more so than the case of “spiritual” sexuality. Dude, don’t you realize that pill you’re taking came from a laboratory? That’s not the semen of angels you’re swallowing, dear: it’s 2,5-dimethoxy-4-iodophenethylamine.
on Sunday, 7 June 2009 at 5:07 pm Indigo wrote:
@ Blake Stacey: oddly enough, I know one person who will take shrooms but not acid on the reasoning that shrooms are plants (well, fungi) and therefore okay, but LSD is a bunch of chemicals and therefore dangerous. I’ve pointed out that the reason shrooms make you high is because they’re *poisonous*, whereas a better reason to be suspicious of LSD is that it was probably cooked up in someone’s laundry room under less-than-ideal conditions. She remains unconvinced.
on Sunday, 7 June 2009 at 8:10 pm Blake Stacey wrote:
As Alan Alda once said, “People will offer you a pill made from the leaf of an obscure plant and say, ‘Take it, it can’t hurt you, it’s natural.’ But so is deadly nightshade.”
on Tuesday, 9 June 2009 at 2:53 am ToppHogg wrote:
I am not surprised when you also note that New Age spirituality goes hand in hand with sexuality. Both are very affirming and beneficial.
The longer I live, the more it seems to me that autocratic religions are the ones most likely to suppress sexual activities in their members. It may be stereotypical, but if a church has a hierarchy, then sexuality is a great evil to be opposed. The worst of these is the Catholic Church, in which a clergy which is to never have sex expects that non-clergy will also follow that dictate. Have they ignored the example set for them by the Shakers? With a membership sunning sex, there is no subsequent generation to carry on the tradition! May they all die out!
on Tuesday, 9 June 2009 at 10:57 am Mark Michaels & Patricia Johnson wrote:
You make some very interesting points in both this and your article last month. You’re right on target when you point out that the need to see sex in spiritual terms is a reflexive attempt to re-valorize sex in response to a cultural/religious paradigm that denigrates it. This is perhaps most apparent among neo-Tantric practitioners who define certain kinds of sex – generally prolonged and ritualized – as superior and “sacred,” while the three minute quickie bent over the bathroom sink is somehow less valuable or perhaps even profane.
That said, you paint with too broad a brush and misunderstand some core principles of Tantra, which is a tradition that in no way demands rejecting science, adhering to new-agey precepts, or believing in any deity whatsoever. In fact, Tantra is ultimately not about faith at all; it’s about self-discovery (at least that’s one way of understanding it.) A Swami who was trained in India along with our teacher likes to say the “Tantric practitioner is both experimenter and experiment.” We like to add, “and laboratory.” The laboratory is your own body, and all experiences (including non-sexual ones) are opportunities to discover something new. For some, this creates a sense of wonder, a feeling of connection with what many call “divine,” but there’s no need to label it that way. You don’t have to believe in anything to have these experiences, and you certainly don’t have to reject reason or the scientific method.
We both came to Tantra (independently) because we’d had sexual experiences that were extraordinarily powerful, indeed transcendent. These seemed to happen somewhat randomly, as they depended on circumstances and the partners involved. We’ve found that Tantric sexual practices, many of which are based on sound psychological and physiological concepts (prolonging arousal to create altered states of consciousness, for example), have helped us have these experiences at will, rather than by chance.
As for orgasms, they can take many forms, and we can train ourselves to experience them in a variety of ways. Tantric and neo-Tantric techniques are very useful in this regard. For example, you don’t have to believe in “energy” to accept that a man can learn to have full body orgasms by imagining he’s spreading the orgasmic sensations throughout his entire body or that one can induce an orgasmic experience without genital contact, by combining breath, movement, sound, and visualization. There’s not really any such thing as a “Tantric orgasm,” but contemporary Western Tantra can give people an expanded orgasmic skill set.
Jesus is credited with saying “the kingdom of heaven lies within you.” There’s a well-known Tantric maxim “What is here is elsewhere. What is not here is nowhere.” The latter strikes us being pretty close to: “We are stardust. We are golden. We are billion year old carbon.” At the very least, it’s certainly not an incompatible perspective. While the former statement comes from the Western tradition, it is Tantric at its core. It really doesn’t matter whether God (or Gods and Godesses) exists. It’s all about what’s here, right now, and how we can connect with that.
on Tuesday, 9 June 2009 at 12:08 pm JPunx wrote:
I think you’re on point with the theory that much of the need for spirituality to be connected to sex comes from the old belief that if it’s religious, or spiritual, it is “good” and not evil. For those folks carrying around guilt (likely of religious origins) this re-connection to spirituality makes them feel absolved for their sexual needs, desires, gosh, maybe even their particularly guilt ridden fetishes. Personally, all that guilt just sounds hot to me the way it is.
I think some of this is reflected in all the new age “polyamorists” I’ve been encountering. Upon questioning them about the depth of their relationships I get the sense that they’re just dating, or non-monogamous, or as I like to call it “slutting around”, but labeling it “polyamory” makes them feel more comfortable. I’m leaving out the charlatans who are just using the polyamory label to get laid. Some people need to attach some gravitas and sense of legitimacy to their sexual self expression because the belief that sex is bad or wrong is so deeply ingrained by our religions and culture, that it really does become part of their own internal programming. They aren’t o.k. with having sex just because it feels good or it’s fun; it has to mean something significant so that it can be “good”.
All that aside, if you can get sex into a religion and throw in the mushrooms and Ecstasy, I’m all for it. And yes, “the kingdom of heaven lies within you”; I have the vibrator to prove it. ; )
on Tuesday, 9 June 2009 at 12:12 pm Wrik Sen wrote:
I have read this article and it seemingly points to areas I have been thinking about for a long long time…
I am a shallow person in terms of knowledge, because I have never delved enough into this realm, to testify with conviction, whether or not I am knowledgeable enough on this. What I say is what I have experienced uptil now…
I have been a man far away from real sexuality and the only experience I have gone through so far have been the usual teenage fantasies and self satisfaction… Its been a painfull area of my life for as long as I know, and it has been with me for so long, it has literally become the centre of my life, which in all is very sad. I have taken a baby step towards the positve my starting to read some positive texts on spirituality, and I guess it might have some answers to the questions we may have regarding sexuality.
Sexual Intercourse or other acts of sexuality could be spiritual, depending on how you look at it and what you go through in that small moment in time. I have always found this extremely debatable as an issue, because the lines in this realm of sex as a physcial act and a spiritual experience, are always thin and you never know which side you might be on.
What I have noticed in the past and now see everyday is that, it is personal bias and a narrow view of people that describes sexual encounters today. Women have slept around with just about anyone for the pleasure of it, thinking nothing about what repercussions whether medical or else-wise. The pure emotions associated with people, who might think otherwise have become the butt of jokes of everything, and this is every brain to justify this act, which really depresses me and hurts me deep within. I guess people like us have rights to this act as well, and we need to be supported, and not drawn up like cartoons, like always done.
on Tuesday, 9 June 2009 at 5:35 pm Greta Christina wrote:
Mark Michaels & Patricia Johnson: Just to clarify, my critique of New Age spirituality, or indeed any sort of spirituality or religion, is not limited to a belief in deities. It includes a belief in any sort of supernatural or metaphysical entities or energies. Are you saying that a belief in Tantra does not involve any sort of belief in any metaphysical or spiritual energies whatsoever?
And BTW: Plenty of religious and spiritual beliefs claim that they don’t contradict science. In fact, many claim that they are supported by science. That doesn’t make it true.
on Tuesday, 9 June 2009 at 6:37 pm Mark Michaels & Patricia Johnson wrote:
It can involve such beliefs, but it need not. They can also be understood strictly as metaphors or be rejected entirely.
Spirituality is a pretty nebulous term, and it’s entirely possible to be an atheist and a spiritual person at the same time. For us, this entails having a sense of wonder at and reverence for the universe and its processes. Many scientists achieve this sense of wonder through science itself. God, metaphysical entities, or energies, who knows? It doesn’t really matter whether they exist or not.
Without getting into the whole post-modern critique of science, it has its limits too. It’s a product of the human mind, and is therefore fallible and limited by our own cognitive capacities. And merely dismissing the statement that many spiritual practices (from whatever tradition) don’t contradict science doesn’t make the dismissal true either. Prolonging sexual arousal produces changes in brain chemistry, and that’s what “Tantric sex” is all about. The well documented health benefits of various meditative and yogic techniques (so-called kegel exercises have been a yogic practice, and a very refined one, for centuries, if not millenia) also come immediately to mind.
on Wednesday, 10 June 2009 at 1:33 pm Greta Christina wrote:
Mark Michaels & Patricia Johnson: If the way you practice and teach Tantra doesn’t involve theism or metaphysics or the supernatural, and are seeing it as a way of producing changes in the brain and the rest of the body, I don’t really have a problem with it.
But even just a cursory Google search shows me that this way of practicing Tantra is not the standard. Just about every Tantra site I located discusses some sort of deities, psychic energies, the divine, a non-physical plane, cosmic energies, psychic centers, and so on. Not in a metaphorical sense, but in a very literal sense. That may not be how you practice Tantra, but you seem to be outliers, I don’t think it’s unreasonable of me to include Tantra in a list of religious and metaphysical beliefs. (BTW, while I know some people use the word “spiritual” to mean “a sense of wonder and awe at the universe,” that’s not how I’m using it — I’m using it to mean “metaphysical or supernatural.” And I think that should have been clear from context.)
And re science: I may not have been clear about my point. Of course I understand that science is flawed and has limits; scientists understand this too, which is exactly why the scientific method is so full of cross-checks (such as double-blinding, placebo controlling, replicating experiments, etc.), to catch those mistakes as much as possible. It’s not perfect, but for investigating what is and is not true about the real world, it is by far the best tool we have. And while, yes, scientific research has shown meditation to be beneficial in reducing stress and other conditions, not a single scrap of good, solid, double- blind, placebo- controlled, etc. research has offered a scrap of evidence supporting the idea that this, or any other supposedly religious experience, is anything other than an entirely physical phenomenon. That’s what I meant. Many religions claim that their beliefs are consistent with science… but that doesn’t make it true.