Sex only has meaning insofar as we experience it. The meaning is "emergent", not objective. We discover the meaning of sex each time we are sexual,
ie that it only resides in our experience. The meaning of sex change and is reinvented each time we do sex..............Most people need sex to have
meaning because the alternative is too frightening, effectively, sex without meaning would require participants to float freely in sexual
experience...............This is scary because of our indoctrination that sex is bad. We learn that we need protection from our sexuality: its
cacophony of impulses and feelings and its transcendent possibility of taking us away from ourselfes............ We might not, after all..........
"Sex" is not limited to intercourse. In reality, "sex" describes a huge range of activities. Sex has whatever meaning we experience moment by
moment and the scope of activities that can properly be named sexual is very vast..............People who believe they know the objective meaning of
sex can easily say what sex is and what it isn't.That's one reason such people can be so self-righteous about what humans should and should not do
sexually.
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Let's stay on the subject......... "Intimacy," for example, is a common rallying point for people who need sex to have Meaning. "Intimacy" (which
mean radically different things to different people............) This must be true in regard of the particular meaning people decide sex really have.
In this sense, Christians and other sex-negative institutions are not the only source of sexual repression in our culture. Rigidity about sexual
experience, meaning, and decision-making is in fact the true factor............
With the perspective that sex has only emergent meaning, we can experience a huge range of sexual feelings. Much are either invisible, or worse,
repugnant....... Sexuality has a dark side........... The fact that sex has no intrinsical meaning is, actually, it's ultimate positive quality!!!!
It gives us the opportunity to discover an infinite number of meanings in sex, and to play with sex.
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But the fact that sex has no meaning is very scary. It means you have to take responsibility for your choices and experiences. Sex lack of meaning is
also scary because it means partners are not subject to our control. It means we have no authority to tell a partner, "you're obviously wrong for
what you like or do sexually, so you should want what I want Sex having no meaning requires that we trust ourselves when doing sex. It is making
choices from a vast amount of options. Then will we make good choices? Will we be attracted to activities that good people are not? Will our choices
hurt our families?
I think we have to trust sex. Will it take us so far out that we can't come back? It takes courage............ And we have to trust our partner. Can
he handle whatever we create sexually? Can he go to new sexual pleasure with me as we invent them? In reality, sex is almost always an experience of
oscillation: of partners being alone and then finding each other, again and again...........
Many troubling behaviors reflect how badly people wish sex to have meaning. To sustain the illusion that it does, for example, society is willing to
persecute some members through "consensual sexual behavior" or preventing sex education at school.........In this sense, the desire for sex to have
meaning makes society a theocracy, with the government theorganized religion, and medias a kind priesthood...........
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To conclude :
It is meaningless in the philosophic sense. But it is meaningful on the personal, experiential level. One reason that people engage in sex is to be
periodically nourished in their experience of whatever kind of meaning they expect whether that meaning involves intimacy, closeness, pleasure,
creativity! The desire to pretend that sex has meaning is understandable. It indicates a desire to be grounded, to depend on something, for
constructing a mature universe. So we need to deal with this fear by confronting it: by looking sex "straight in the eye", and trusting sex and
ourselves, knowing that the worst thing that can happen is merely that we'll have an experience we don't want to repeat........... Simply because
one can't learn to walk without falling a few times.........
[Edited on 7-5-2003 by VzH]
[Edited on 7-5-2003 by VzH]