We talk about it a lot and we think about it a lot too. It is a major subject that must be studied in detail in order to understand the place it must take in our lives. Otherwise, sexuality becomes a source of enormous tension, conflict and violence.
The fact is that we give it too much importance. This can be explained by the different influences of religions and modern psychology. Indeed, religion has always denied the body, pleasure and sexual desire. The female body, the menstrual period and childbirth have been considered impure in some religions.
For example, Saint Jerome says (4th century): "When a man has intercourse with his wife during this period, leprous or hydrocephalic children are born to him; stained by this impure blood, the bodies of both sexes become either too large or too small" (Commentary on Ezekiel, 18, 6). Most religions have taken up this deep-seated anxiety about female fertility and have tried to control it with prohibitions and purification rites.
We also find in Genesis the story of Adan and Eve who, with the help of the serpent, tempts Adan to taste the forbidden fruit... The woman symbolized the temptation and the evil, turning the man away from God.
As for modern psychology, it has sought to address sexuality by making it a huge problem. Freud imposed himself as an authority on the subject. He developed the theory of the unconscious, while focusing on sexuality. He gives it an excessive importance in the role it plays in everyday life. He even considered it more important than the need to feed oneself.
He also aborted another theory just as shaky: the Oedipus complex, namely wanting to kill his father to sleep with his mother. Let us recall that he was a misogynist and obsessed by the phallus. He was impregnated with his own repressions and embodied a distorted vision of sexuality.
We reject all these abstractions. They have imposed pressure and suffering on all those who believed they had to impose standards and duties on themselves in matters of sexuality. All the different representations have contributed to make it a complex, conditioned and taboo subject in the collective conscience. It is not surprising that there are so many images, symbols and ideas about it.
Today, we find ourselves with an ever-increasing pressure to constrain ourselves in the pseudo-exploration of our orgasms and fantasies. Otherwise one would be frustrated and deregulated in the non-realisation of oneself. One thus imposes new standards and norms to which one must submit. This only leads to more tensions, conflicts and frustrations. It is only a matter of giving importance to the ego and to the self in an ever increasing quest for pleasures and identifications. Again, we reject this.
Sexuality has also generated pornography on the internet. It is a culture of performance, of the commodification of women's bodies, and of all the violent aberrations, and vulgar fantasies. This does not help.
If one is a man, one then wants to resemble these standards which can hold hours without enjoyment in sexual practices always more deviant, perverse and brutal. Domination and humiliation seem to be the prevailing standards. We then try to identify with authorities who are supposed to embody normality. These pornographic archetypes have established standards that pervert the discovery of bodies, sensuality and gentleness in couples. As for women and the images associated with them, they encourage submission and enjoyment in pain.
One thus made of sexuality a paralyzing and atrophied universe from which the beauty is absent. One inflicts oneself with images which condition and denature any natural and healthy impulse.
However, sexuality out of the need of control and sublimation offers the possibility of discovering a state where the self with all its conflicts disappears. Indeed, it is because the self is no more, that the conflicts cease to be operative, and that joy can be manifested. But joy is not pleasure. However we approach sexuality through pleasure only, without deep love.
The thought seizes the emotion, identifies with it and makes of it a pleasure, an attachment and a memory, which we will wish to reproduce again. It is the thought that has travestied this source of creative energy that is sexuality. We then find ourselves in well-coded roles, always looking for more, always looking for results.
In men, the partner has all the characteristics of a prostitute. His images and his need to perform lead to a biased and unhealthy relationship. There can be no fulfillment in sexuality until we solve the problem of the self and the ego, with its images and its need to become. We have made it our only escape in a world where we are constrained by so many things, lacking fundamental freedoms.
We have invested too much in the role she must play. Culture and society encourage us to do so.
The relationship between partners is usually purely physical. But there can be no communion if one uses the other as an object. Marriage and its contract of mutual exploitation encourages the man, in his great sexual appetites, to use his wife, considering it his right. This is called ordinary rape.
Men and women have so much to discover about themselves and their humanity in the love and sexual relationship. It is possible to go beyond oneself and discover an unsuspected unity and creativity. To do this, it is necessary to approach sexuality with love.