Sex is a potentially sacred thing. The earliest religious expressions we have from the paleolithic era are fertility goddesses with emphasized reproductive organs. Sex is the ultimate form of coupling - life and death, male and female (or not,) self and other, lust and love. It is a dangerous thing. potentially life threatening to both parties and to the community. It has torn people apart and brought them together. It probably motivates human action more than any other force.
Naturally then, it has always needed to be regulated. the earliest and most primitive, and the latest and equally primitive societies may be understood as sexual systems. their primary purposes may be to regulate sexual behaviors.
This has largely been done through taboos...
However, the expression and exercise of sexuality has, until relatively modern times, been maintained as sacred and healthy outside of the established taboos. In our culture, the taboos have been threatened by a process of secularization and a rationalistic approach to sexuality which has denied its life-threatening and life-giving power. Sex has been made mundane, and so has come to be approached not with a reverence and awe appropriate to the Sacred, but with a flippancy which is destructive of the sexual force.
This secularization of sex has led to a kind of sexual fundamentalist reaction which has tried to make sex evil rather than sacred. It has led to sexual repression and bigotry which fuels a kind of fetishism when the sexual impulses are finally released. Sex is then approached as an act of secret weakness and perversion, motivating people to seek out correspondingly perverted sexual endeavors. (Like foot fetishes?)
The ironic thing is that this fetishism which is the legacy of fundamentalist sexual repression is the real source of sexual sin in our culture, and it in turn fuels the fundamentalist conviction that sex is evil.
Duchamp brought a urinal into the art gallery and someone brought feet into the bedroom. Neither are sacred. But both are expressions of the same phenomenon. The sacred has lost its force and become mundane so that no one can tell the difference between art and plumbing, or sex and fucking.
The reaction to these breakdowns has not been a search for the Sacred behind the empty forms of artistic and sexual porn, but a condemnation of and
distrust of art and sex.
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