The Erotic Human: (A)shamed Sexuality & Our Vital Lack

Human sexuality is perhaps one of the more--if not the most--intriguing area of interest to anyone with philosophical leanings. Whether we are talking about religion or we are discussing the seedier side of life evidenced in pornography and prostitution, the sexual slave trade or East Asian bordellos, there is a sense of both intrigue and interest on the part of humanity, as well as disgust and aversion. Human sexuality is the beast desired and the beast despised. There is really no other way to say it. It is the primary element in human existence that we seek to control and contain (shame and guilt, taboo and ritual) as well as unleash and let loose.

Consider for a moment if you will how it is that human sexuality is seen as both salvific (that is, human sexuality needs to be unfettered from social mores and a repressed cultural milieu, so that we can be happy and free--i.e., Hippie Generation, Free Love, 1960's) as well as being seen as verging on the satanic (which means that human sexuality needs to be avoided, controlled, contained, and even exorcised from our person in some cases like a demon or spirit might be--i.e., Victorian era, Puritanical Colonies of the Americas, Monastics). It is as if human sexuality were an ink-blot upon which we project both our fears and our longings.

Inter-generational speaking, it is possible for parents to pass their 'sins' (missing the mark) around the nature and significance of human sexualtiy to their children. A mother uncomfortable with her own sexuality may tend to pass that sense along to her child--thereby conveying to the child that sexuality is 'bad' or 'evil.' You are simply not supposed to touch yourself there (even though damn near everyone does!). Which sends the message that you are not supposed to feel there--sensitivity in the root chakra is, well, to be ignored, dismissed. And I wonder when that is the case how much human vitality is lost, not to mention barred from ascending serpentine like up the higher centers of humanity for the purpose of en-light-ening those higher centers.

So, in covering ourselves we symbolically send the message that Eros is better left in the dark, which leads me to ponder if whether or not a God has been banished to Hades by our own discomfort with being all that we are--sexually, sensually, spiritually (and again, remember that an erotic deprivation is a psychological one as well--as the Fate of Eros and Psyche is one and the same).

The distinct possibility that arises, then, is that in being (a)shamed sexually we are in a sense also being (a)shamed psychologically. Much more than our sexuality is lost in trying to hide or distance ourselves from our sexual nature--a part of our humanity goes too, and I would suggest so does a large part of our divinity. Like I said, do we banish the God of Love, Eros, to a fate of darkness; essentially leaving Eros no choice but to work in the underground, plying the black-market, precisely because of our personal and political discomfort with the bare fact of our sexuality?

And when we fight the God of Love--when we fight Eros--how much vitality (libido) is lost? How much (com)passion is denied the world so thirsty... so parched... so in need of a drink from Love's Waters? How might our ages long tangle with human sexuality result in some of the geo-political storms we see raging in the world? After all those busy loving, full to the brim with Eros, do they have time to make bombs... or even an inclinatino to do so? Isn't a bomb just a highly potentt phallic symbol often meant to substitute for the impotent status of Erotic man?