Mindgasms: Why is sex such a taboo?

The shhh moments probe our lives every day, when we are bombarded with cues of inappropriateness and discrepancy. Some will just shrug their shoulders, melding into the “ought to be this way” narrative which is constantly hammered by cultural mores and social institutions into us since we were dumb blobs of flesh in our cradles. But some restless creatures of our kind, would like to scratch their heads and ask “Why did that happen?”

How come, sex, which our species is undeniably obsessed with, became such a “behind the covers” and often times, a “dirty” business. In other words, why is sex such a taboo? Let’s take a foot back, and ask “what do we exactly mean by that?”. Does this means sex outside marriage or practices like incest, on which large volumes of thought and literature has been expend. No, that is not what I mean. By, sex, I mean the very act of sex, which is supposed to be done behind closed doors, or possibly bushes in ancient times, without announcing it out loud or talking about it.

But before answering that, it is important to muse another question. “Has sex always been a taboo?” If yes, then why. Did it serve any particular purpose? Humans have the tendency to look at their surroundings and think that things have always been the way they are now.

This is one of the spheres, where you find the most diverse and even contradictory schemes of theorizing. Because it’s like asking, why the word ‘fuck’ became so popular in language? Is there any particular reason for it besides that so many people started using it at once?

Culture and obviously, religion has a big hand in fencing taboo around the act, just like it does arbitrarily in matters of food and clothing. But, let’s dissect the ‘standard narrative’ which is often given in answer to this question, which goes something like this

“Sexual taboos are natural, it is a mechanism by which nature controlled whose offspring is who, so that men and women could work in functional units”

It does look quite good, and seems to make sense, but it is not quite true. Because, we know, that humans at least around pre-historic times were highly promiscuous and lived in shared societal structures, sharing food, resources and well..women. This kind of dynamics and practice, did not only exist in pre-historic times, but practiced in primitive forms of societies even later. Surprisingly, some of these practices were sanctioned by religion, which vary a great deal on their position about sex and sexuality. This does not necessarily mean that taboo on sex was nearly absent, but that it did not exist in forms like it does today, with masturbation, nudity, sex talk, female sexuality being surrounded by contempt.

However with the advent of agriculture and changing cultural constrains, the standard narrative does hold some water, but taboo on sex was not ‘nature’s planning’ but rather a social adaption in response to religion and possibly, changing societal dynamics. When it comes to planning, nature is the worst entity. It is blind. Many people think it’s something useful that comes out of their sweet Motherly nature, which almost always has to serve some purpose.

We, coming from Abrahamic paradigms which spread and soon merged in and affected other cultures, have the tendency to fill our voids of knowledge, with pre-existing assumptions of today. It’s not that our ancestors sat around and carefully discussed what benefits would doing it behind the bushes would serve. It’s just that the ideal of ‘being civilized’ and therefore ‘unlike animals’, which has been at the very heart of our cultural conditioning. You can say, that humans did not want to look back at their animalistic past, and that sex out in open, reminds them of their primitive instincts, which culture has dictated to be embarrassing and something to get disgusted about.