Facing The Real Taboo:
Love & Sex

by Christopher S. Hyatt, Ph.D.

Many methods have been developed to control, transform, and regulate the sexual force. Each of them has failed, creating more misery in its wake. No one alive knows what "natural" sex is for Humans. We have been too "civilized" (domesticated). We think that our own sexual preferences and habits are enlightened, when in most cases, they are a result of our genes and of being born into a particular civilization and time. We have the hubris to believe that the opposites of abstinence and indulgence are the only two poles which exist on the sexual discrimination scale.

• [an error occurred while processing this directive]

  We have Dionysian indulgence as one morality.

• We have Christian abstinence as another.

"Christ versus Dionysus" was Nietzsche's motto. Even he, who challenged most dualisms, did not challenge this one: he chose Dionysus.

• But there is also marriage, monotheistic style.

• And there is marriage, polytheistic style.

• There is marriage and affairs.

• There is marriage and swinging.

• There is living together.

• There is spiritual sex with no orgasm, as in Hindu Tantra.

There are other Tantras of one flavor or another. In fact Tantra as we use the term has nothing to do with what most people call sex. Tantra is Meta-Sex.

• There are "perversions" of one type or another.

• There are fetishes: leather, chains, "cross dressing," etc.

• There are male/female sexual happenings.

• There are female/female, male/male relations etc.

• Then there are techniques, which include various orifices and body parts.

The list goes on and on. There is every combination in the world including sex with oneself.

All of this however, has not led to transformation either individually or collectively. We simply have different forms of the same thing.

A New Sexual Ecology 

To paraphrase Dr. Robert Stein, (1974) from his fascinating book "Incest and Human Love", when a culture becomes preoccupied with inhibiting and controlling the instinctual forces of life, which of course includes sexuality, we can assume that its methods of coping with the incest taboo are also inadequate. In other words the culture's social institutions are failing.

If we combine this idea with Michel Foucault's notion that "sexuality" evolves from the need of the power structure to control sex for its own economic and political purposes, we are left with a sorry state of affairs.

This sorry state of affairs is known as splitting. What I mean here is that sex and love have a difficult time in finding complete unified expression. 

From Stein's point of view this is the way a culture copes with the incest taboo, and from Foucault's it is the way a culture channels sex for its own purposes of power.

In other words, love is disconnected from sex in Western Civilization. We have been told that sex and love should be one, but not as an experience -- rather as a state of law. 

In this sense we are left with sex as reproduction and loveless compulsion. Marriage is designed as a unit of reproduction for the purposes of creation and consumption. The true expression of love and sex are secondary -- left in the realm of romantic fantasy, a hope or a dream.

It is truly infrequent in this culture that the depths of both the love and sex instincts are felt completely. When they are both felt deeply, and remember, this is always inhibited by the incest taboo and the assumption that a commitment is necessary, we have complete orgastic love.

Conversely, compulsive sexuality is an attempt to free sex from the purposes of reproduction and social control. However, it too is devoid of true Union, as deep love has a forced association with the necessity of a commitment. Would orgastic love be felt more readily if commitment were not an obligation, not a "law" indoctrinated since infancy?

Compulsive sexuality also serves to demonstrate the "failure" of our culture in controlling the fear of incest. Instead of addressing incest, it has addressed sexuality itself, thus confounding us to believe that the "awful" effects of incest are co-extensive with sex itself. How does our culture differentiate sex from incest? In fact it does not address this issue in a conscious manner at all, but allows the unconscious to deal with the problem. Thus sex and love are split in practice, although frequently alive in fantasy. We have been taught that the deep love we felt as children toward our parents "must not" be associated with sex and the sex we felt during our adolescence "must not" be associated with love.

The culture then assumes that upon marriage or commitment the union of these two instincts will automatically take place. I have been kind in making this last statement. More correctly it doesn't care. Its purpose is to create more orderly producers and consumers.

Continued on the next page: 
Western Tantra Unites Love & Sex;
Love, Death, & Sex: Another Taboo

This article was excerpted from the book Secrets of Western Tantra: The Sexuality of the Middle Path, by Christopher S. Hyatt, Ph.D. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, New Falcon Publications, Tempe, Arizona, USA. http://www.newfalcon.com.

Info/Order book

About The Author

Christopher S. Hyatt, Ph.D. was trained in both psycho-physiology and clinical psychology and practiced as a psychotherapist for many years. He has published many articles in peer-reviewed, professional journals. Today he is known as the world-famous author of a wide variety of books on psychology, sex, tantra, tarot, self-transformation, and Western magic. Among these books are: Tantra Without Tears;  Undoing Yourself With Energized Meditation and Other Devices;  The Tree of Lies;  and  Taboo: Sex, Religion and Magick.