The Meaning of Sex
Sex has no intrinsic meaning. Almost everyone wishes it did.
The desire to give sex meaning is an understandable, important enterprise. Honestly approached, it can be a valuable exercise; disguised as the righteous desire to simply appreciate the meaning sex has, or as the pursuit of restoring sex's "true" meaning, it is a common source of conflict for both individuals and society.
Sex only has meaning insofar as we experience it. Its meaning is emergent, not objective. We discover the meaning of sex each time we have it, meaning that only resides in our experience. The meaning of sex changes--is reinvented--each time we participate in it.
Most people need sex to have meaning because the alternative is too frightening: having sex in an existential vacuum. Sex without meaning would require participants to float freely in sexual experience, rather than being snugly anchored in a cognitive framework, an explanation.
This is scary because of our indoctrination that sex is bad. We learn that we need protection from our sexuality: its non-linear, open-ended nature, its cacophony of impulses and feelings, its transcendent possibility of taking us away from ourselves. We might not, after all, make it back.
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