On the road with The Soul of Sex

I spent much of the summer of '98 on a book tour that took me to over twenty cities, giving talks and interviews and signing books. I always signed the books slowly and personally, so I'd have a chance to have mini-conversations with people in each town.

This summer the topic was sex. I addressed three areas of human sexuality: deepening our imagination of what sex is, reconciling sex with spirituality, and imagining a more sensuous environment at work and in public life. In the writing of my book, The Soul of Sex, I found the topic fascinating beyond expectations. I joked to the audiences that I was considering a twenty-four volume set on the theme.

But, although the responses to the book have been overwhelmingly favorable, save for one unfortunate review, I realized after a while that my excitement about the topic was not shared by most of the people I met. At times it seemed that people might be understandably reticent to talk about sex. After all, my audiences tend to be made up of people concerned with spirituality, and the relationship between sex and spirit in our culture has rarely been a positive one. Some people told me that they were hearing too much about sex and were looking for some relief, a little blessed silence on the matter.

In the middle of the summer I traveled with my family to England, where my wife and I taught a course on sexuality, spirituality, and nature. There we found that people were much more relaxed about talking about sexuality and more able to see it in relation to the environment and the rest of life. In America we look for a dark corner where sex can be safely stuffed -- pornography, medicine, psychology -- and then go about life as though it were hard work and unrelated to pleasure.

I wonder if the difficulty I found in my own country talking comfortably about sex has to do with the deeper issue of vitality. We are a nation of people who believe in hard work, self-restraint, and virtue defined as control of the appetites. At the moment we seem to be in one of our periods of unusually severe virtuousness. Reading a few obituaries along the way, I noticed that often we praise a person for self-denial and excessive work. Not once have I read a notice about a person celebrating the fact that he or she had had a good time.

Faced with trouble, we immediately sign up more police officers and make new laws. Our prisons have become notorious reflections of our inability to deal with drugs and crime. Our courts are overrun with work, and we are making sure that people pay their way, no matter how many children they have or what their circumstances -- no welfare. Behind all this socially sanctioned behavior lies a profound resistance to life, a resistance often inspired and sustained by religion. So I suppose I should have known ahead of time that traveling across America speaking about sex I would run into trouble. It's not that people are generally prudish about sex specifically, but, in a broader sense, we are distrustful of the life that continues to course through us in spite of our efforts at stability and security. We would prefer that life were not quite so lively.

Lately I have been reading one biography after another. I am reading about remarkable men and women of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who chose the life principle over the death principle as life offered them opportunities. I see this reading of vibrant lives as a continuation of my sexuality studies. Sex is like an invisible ether that enlivens everything it touches, unless, of course, it is choked into submission by a guilty and death-loving ego who exploits its shady side. In all these ways, it is intertwined with religion and serves, rather than obstructs, our spiritual aspirations.

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