Readings on Sexuality

The Undergrowth of Literature (1967) 

Gillian Freeman with an introduction by the psychiatrist David Stafford-Clark

 

Sex And Spirit: Ecstasy, Ritual And Taboo (1996)

Clifford Bishop

 

Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism (2006)

Hugh B. Urban

 

Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

Esther Perel

 

 

The Undergrowth of Literature is an intriguing bit of history, both because it was written in the mid-1960s when sexual liberty was under discussion openly for the first time in decades and because of the subject matter - the types of pornographic literature available at the time.

The inclusion of women's magazines from a feminist perspective and Marvel Comics from a fetishistic perspective make it a true curiousity. It is not a great book. It is of its time. But it is useful to read because it shows how much we have changed since 1967. Intellectuals cannot now be quite so po-faced and mildly patronising about other people's sexual fantasies.

The violence implicit, often very explicit, in the underground pornography marketed to a generation of males damaged by war and social disruption has become more ritualised and mainstream. We seem to have become nicer. The book works as an argument against suppression of vice.

Personally, I liked finding out how boringly 'normal' I am (despite best efforts to be more interesting). The relevant chapter also renewed sympathy for trans-gender people (still under pressure as much from the dictates of their own extremist advocate as from the populist right) who went through more hell even than the gay and lesbian communities during the dark days from Queen Victoria to the 1950s. One for the library and for reference purposes.

 

Sex and Spirit, written three decades later proves to be a surprisingly good book. At first sight, it looks like one of those titillating books on sex that might be laid by the bed for surprise guests in order to get them in the mood.

In fact, it is a thoroughly professional, sensible and non-ideological basic review, well written and beautifully illustrated without gratuitousness, of the way that sexual and spiritual feeling have been and are associated in various human cultures through prohibition, ritual and ecstasy.

I cannot judge whether it is perfectly accurate as far as its anthropology is concerned - reading Frazer, Campbell and Eliade has made me highly suspicious of many claims based on hearsay evidence and on the 'observations' of the academic visitor to the tribal hut. Yet it reads reasonably true to its subject.

The very idea that the sexual urge and the life of the spirit can be integrated seems profoundly counter-intuitive to most Christians. Indeed, nearly all other religious cultures that have had to go through the maw of Western materialism in order to become accepted in the global economy seem to have ended up more puritanical rather than less as a result.

Americans go into paroxysms over a nipple on prime time TV while Indians will not let subjects kiss in their movies - and Chinese Communists are clearly not entirely happy with the new sexual liberalism brought with international trade flows. The Europeans and the Russians tend to be a lot more relaxed about these things but, if the wider world is anti-sexual, the Eurasians cannot be called spiritual in their approach, merely pragmatic.

Perhaps there is a necessary link between the loss of spirit and the loss of sexual energy in the dynamic of the development of a country from pre-industrial to materialist post-industrial culture - or perhaps (more likely) any deep understanding that sexuality and spirituality might be closely associated is only a matter of interest to those few people whose brains are wired up in that way. Many are interested in sex and many in religion but those who see the two as integrated are working against social norms that insist on their separation.

Such people who do see synergies have had to operate in secret or not at all in those many societies where sex and spirit are not integrated. Even today, in the liberated corners of the West, such people are always in danger of being caught up in a world of fetishism, essentialism (as in the obligation to label oneself as, say, gay or polyamorous), materialism (as in the swinger community), perceptions of eccentricity and seaside postcard naughtiness. Actual liberation is not easy under the sway of all this socially conditioned performance art.

Often, the demands to be recognised as present within society end up enmeshed in an excess of spiritual gobbledygook as if the 'believer' feels obliged to explain the conjunction of the libidinous and the numinous to others and to themselves in acceptably distanced terms in order to meet social norms - instead, that is, of just 'existing' on terms that express sex as spirit and spirit as sex with likeminded people, or alone, without social disgrace or turned heads.

This particular book makes no judgements as to what is good or bad, right or wrong. Some practices in less developed societies have been deeply unpleasant and are rightly corrected with modernisation - but wouldn't it be nice if the physical abuse of their own by primitives was not so often displaced by the psychological abuse of whole societies inherent in more sophisticated systems such as churches?

Progress of a sort sometimes came with the missions but at what profound cost! For some reason (probably a matter of maintaining order in a world of scarcity), a global religion of sexual tolerance seems never to have been on the cards. The geographical territories in which gays or bisexuals can feel secure (for example) are still very small in population terms when set against the whole of humanity - and it must be absurd to postulate that there are not as many gays per head of population in Iran, Tibet, Zambia and Burma as there are in the US or Germany.

Similarly, much sophisticated 'spiritual' sexual practice has involved excessive male cultural dominance (as in the original Taoist model), breach of taboo for the sake of breach of taboo (though the use of breaking of taboo in Tantra can have profound spiritual meaning) and the containment of sexual practice within largely abusive systems like temple prostitution or the sort of carefully tolerated alternative sexualities (overlapping with identity politics) that makes such practices socially 'safe' through the construction of convenient spiritualities or specially created social structures to contain them.

This book is recommended precisely because it offers a complex menu of human practice in a narrative form that should help anyone starting out on their spiritual-sexual adventure and who is trying to find their own meaning in sexuality, not only to develop a better understanding of their condition but also where they might go to explore further and so make wiser choices.

One thinks here of Foucault's opinion that each of us is a work of art in the making - through our own choices within a world not of our making. This open-minded and intelligent book might be seen as a simple artist's tool, a cultural pencil, that will assist sketching one's life pattern. Any subsequent choice to link or not to link the spiritual with the sexual will be the more informed as a result of this text.

In this context of the spiritual and the sexual, Magia Sexualis can be seen as a thoughtful academic but readable account of the influence of 'sex magic' within (and on the cultural shift from) Victorian values through modernity to the current post-modern melange of consumerism and radical individualism. Urban looks at the issues through key figures and 'schools'. 

 

His book shows how Ronald Hutton (see our earlier review of books on paganism and alternative belief systems) has opened a space for other academics who can offer serious insights into our contemporary condition by exploring previously taboo subjects despite the anxieties of their academic peers.

Randolph, Reuss, Crowley, Evola, Gardner, LaVey and Spare are all studied through a glass that has its mildly Marxist moments (and is no worse for that). The book, like Hutton's, might already be considered a classic.The anxieties of the last century about worthy subject matter for study have now long since disappeared.

 

However, if you are looking for a sex book as opposed to an analysis and source for the social treatment of sex, forget it - this is an anti-aphrodisiac text. You will never see Western Tantra in the same light again. A strong recommendation and a significant contribution to cultural studies.

Esther Perel's seminal text on polyamory (the new frontier of consensual sexual difference), Mating in Captivity, really could be a life-changing book if it hit the right person at the right time. The thesis is simple and powerful. The only problem with the book is that the personal stories pad out a simple message.

What Perel does is undermine the more dumb-ass aspects of the Anglo-Saxon approach to psychological fidelity and relationships in favour of a more European view that permits play, calculated deceit and fantasy in a way that is really quite shocking to contemporary femino-liberalism.

She is right. The tight-buttocked 'liberals' are wrong - the divorce rate and lack of ability to talk about sexuality with any erotic wisdom amongst grown persons is proof enough that she has identified a problem that is endemic to contemporary liberal culture.

This book is like Bataille without the neurosis and nasty bits and written with compassion as a challenge to generations of learned behaviour. Recommended as liberating. But it could have been snappier and less eager to join the self-help shelves in the book store. What is it with psychotherapists that they have to talk down to us?