When a man or woman gazes at the body of another, whether in sex, in the movies, in a magazine, or in the privacy of a daydream, it isn’t readily apparent what is going on. For many, this gaze is so alluring that it seems to answer a strong need, not just a passing fancy, and sometimes it can be overwhelmingly compulsive. For others, it is a scandal. But then, compulsion and scandal are often closely connected. Both reactions indicate that the sexual gaze has strong emotional power and is mysteriously and fundamentally meaningful.
Sex is so stunning and powerful that the sexual gaze would seem to have something in common with the religious gaze. Of course, for many religious people, sexual fascination is the opposite of the religious spirit, but in some traditions where sex is considered sacred, it isn’t much of a leap from honoring the image of a saint to venerating an image of a sexual god or goddess.
Sex is so stunning and powerful that the sexual gaze would seem to have something in common with the religious gaze. Of course, for many religious people, sexual fascination is the opposite of the religious spirit, but in some traditions where sex is considered sacred, it isn’t much of a leap from honoring the image of a saint to venerating an image of a sexual god or goddess.
In considering sexual imagery for its deeper purposes, my interest is not to find ways to eradicate it, but to look for its telos, its deep necessity. It doesn’t do us much good to maintain public disapproval of sexual imagery while private appeal to it is so widespread and compulsive. Highly educated and deeply spiritual people are sometimes drawn to pornography, like Paul Tillich, who, his wife tells us, would sometimes place a sexy magazine inside one of his theological tomes. In the other direction, Erica Jong describes Henry Miller as “the most contradictory of characters: a mystic who was known for his sexual writings.”
Images of Aphrodite and Venus, as well as other deities, hint at the human body’s mysterious iconic quality. Today, without thinking about religion, people go to darkened theaters and small booths, or sit before a television or a computer screen, and become deeply absorbed in imagery depicting the naked human body or sexual acts. We know that both of these sights were part of religious rituals in the past, and it may be that the sacred is indeed camouflaged in these ritual-like situations.
In modern life, sex is one of the few numinous areas we have left, numinosity being the aura of awe and mystery usually associated with religious feeling. We have destroyed the mystery of the planets and stars with our telescopes and roving machines. We have diminished the numinosity of nature through our countless studies and exploitation. But, fortunately, we have not yet reduced the power of sex to stir deep desire and to compel the contemplation of images. Maybe it is a saving grace that the human body can still evoke the overwhelming desire to gaze and even the deeply felt need to insist on taboo.
The looking that goes on in sex is not mere seeing. We are not looking for information; we are not looking at the human body the way a physician would. It might seem that we are looking for the sheer pleasure of it, or that we are interested in raw physical gratification. But the compulsion is too strong to be explained away in purely physical terms. The soul is clearly involved, and in some mysterious way, sexual looking has enormous meaning to a great number of people. To see what is going on in this compulsion, we may have to move beyond our moralistic judgments and ask, as openly as we can, what deep longing drives us to this gaze that is so compelling and so rarely fully satisfied.
Why do people want to watch others make love on a stage? Why do they want a camera’s close-up of organs and penetrations? Why are magazines printed and sold every day filled with the same views, the same acts, and the same situations? Desire and pleasure play a central role in the quest for the sexual scene, just as the wish to heal might move the physician and the hope for religious awareness might drive the churchgoer. What do we see when we gaze at the human body erotically? The answer to this question is elusive because sexuality itself is, blessedly, still a mystery.
Contemplation is a religious word: the numinosity that surrounds sex and gives it its emotional charge calls for religious categories. The language we usually use for sex is too physical, too idealized, or too vulgar to touch its numinosity. Sometimes it seems that we use clinical language for sex to distance ourselves and maybe even to protect ourselves from its power, and vulgar language may have the same effect.
In monastic practice, contemplation is distinguished from prayer by its meditative quality. It is a receptive attitude whose purpose is union with divinity. The medieval Christian mystical teacher Meister Eckhart often refers to the object of spiritual contemplation as “naked divinity”: “the soul’s naked being finds the naked, formless being of the divine unity, which is there, a being above being, accepting and reposing in itself.”
This divine nakedness gives us a hint about the numinosity in human nakedness. A powerful aura surrounds the well-painted or well-photographed nude and may give a certain halo to a lover in the flesh, as well. Unclothe the human body, and we are granted a glimpse of the nymph, the Aphrodite that gives life such pleasure and satisfaction. If the sexual body were not numinous, people would not be hypnotically drawn to it, nor would religion be so concerned about its propriety.
At one level, gazing at pictures of nudes, whether or not they are involved in sexual activity, may be an attempt to see naked reality in the most absolute terms. Why would such a gaze be so compelling unless it had a fundamental attraction and purpose?
In his celebrated book The Nude, Kenneth Clark tells the story of the Knidian Aphrodite, created by Praxiteles in the fourth century B.C. The story goes that the people of Kos, who had commissioned the statue, rejected it, and so it was moved to the island of Knidos, off the Asia Minor coast. It was set in a sanctuary full of fruit trees and surrounded by grapes. The goddess is shown naked, about to step into a bath, holding in her left hand the garment she has just taken off. Her lips are parted and her right hand covers and emphasizes her pubic area. According to a surviving story of a visit to the shrine by devotees, one person threw his arms around the goddess’s neck, and all who sought a view of her backside had to enter the shrine through a locked door in the rear. Clark concludes the story with a telling remark: “No one questioned the fact that she was an embodiment of physical desire and that this mysterious, compulsive force was an element in her sanctity.”
It’s difficult in our culture to appreciate how this Aphrodite could be the object of religious veneration. But if we could arrive at that point, we might turn Clark’s statement around and see that sanctity has a role in sexual imagery. Gazing erotically at the human body, we are contemplating the mystery of our own nature, as well as the mystery of our passionate longing toward union in absolute terms. The body is indeed a temple, not simply for its beauty and value, but because it houses the holy mystery of human existence. By approaching it, gazing at it, even being frozen by its allure, we engage in profound wonder, full of fascination and pleasure.
It is as though the sexual gaze answers the most fundamental questions: Who am I? How did I get here? What am I supposed to do? The answers are contained in the body, if only we knew how to look. Not knowing, we look hungrily and without full satisfaction. Some people complain bitterly about our looking, and maybe they should. Any true religious act requires taboo as a way of preserving its sanctity.
In a movie theater or at a stage show, the objects of lustful gaze are likely to have no personal relationship to the ones who are looking. Some find this arrangement depersonalizing, and it clearly has its denigrating aspects. But in the best of circumstances, this sexuality may be impersonal rather than depersonalizing. It may point beyond the men and women showing their bodies, to the Aphrodite that is the soul, the nymph invoked by the sexual or pornographic rites.
It is possible to gaze on the sexual body and be drawn into a particular kind of contemplation — sexual meditation. I recall once walking down a street and noticing a young man on the opposite side. A beautiful young woman passed him, and as he was looking at her, he walked straight into a telephone pole. This is contemplation. I once had dinner at a restaurant with a woman who couldn’t take her eyes off our handsome waiter and finally spilled sauce all over her dress. If we ever lose this capacity for absorption in sexual fantasy, we will be another step further from the soul that defines us as human.
Gazing at the naked body, we are exploring the nature of life, the mystery of a human being, and the secrets of all bodies — the body of the world, the body politic, bodies of water, the body of a book, and, in a phrase from D.H. Lawrence, “the body of God.” The world’s body often reveals itself as a source of pleasurable gazing, as when you notice the moon in the sky at a particularly splendid moment or a waterfall in a forest. In an equally captivating way, human nature stands revealed in the drawing of a breast or in the literary portrayal of eyes or hands in the moment of love.
Our challenge is to really see, to look penetratingly and amply for a perception of the world that lies within and beyond the obvious. To contemplate an image is to become absorbed in it, not just to scan it at a distance. Sex inspires the gaze, peek, glance, and stare, all of which are specific ways of being present to an image, and in the realm of sex, presence is of the essence.
It is also part of human life to be seen, to be the object of desire. Men and women alike generously show themselves to the gaze of lovers, some to the gaze of the public. The exhibitionist demonstrates that there is something in human nature, neurotic or not, that enjoys being seen, especially sexually.
Through the body, we are seeing something of the soul and, therefore, of the mystery of life itself. The compulsive aspect of sexual gazing betrays the fact that our looking is not deep enough. When we honor a holy icon, we know we’re in the presence of the numinous. But in our secular society, we have lost an explicit awareness of the sanctity of sex. We think of it in purely human terms, as far from religion as possible, and, therefore, our looking is not right.
Our sexual gaze is full of numinosity, but we have no language or artful ritual for this kind of veneration. Perhaps our colorful slang and the tendency to surround the sexual gaze with the light of a brilliant Las Vegas show or the darkness of a movie theater are concealed attempts at ritual, but the soul requires explicit devotion. The split in our culture between body and spirit has repercussions so profound as to be almost unimaginable. Sex lies at the foundation of our identity and at the core of our need to escape loneliness and discover joy. By so effectively secularizing it, we suffer an enormous chaos and emptiness at the very base of our existence.
It would be unrealistic and incomplete to present only the positive side of the sexual imagination, for it’s obvious that such images can also offend and disturb even those of us who consider ourselves broad-minded. Erotic images can be unsettling in many ways. We may find them simply too graphic and harsh. Some are clearly sexist, coming down hard on one side of the power struggle of the genders. Some seem to have no heart and to show only bodily organs. Some are associated with violence and sacrilege. Some are merely inane and silly.
It is simplistic to claim that erotic images are always beneficial and that anyone who finds them objectionable is moralistic and narrow-minded. Certain sexual images can shock, embarrass, unsettle, and inspire outrage. The completely open-minded pornography connoisseur may be as much defended against the shadow of eros as the moralist is against the vitalizing power of sex. As any advertiser knows, beautiful and ugly sexual images are potent, and they have a powerful impact on people of all moral persuasions.
Those men standing at the magazine and video racks or searching the Internet or placing an intimate commercial phone call or phoning for an escort, and those women enjoying books on sexual fantasy or patronizing male-stripper shows, represent us all in our desperate attempt to find our needed sexual ecstasy and the spirituality of the senses.
If indeed our compulsiveness and anxiety around pornography are due to fearful repression, then recommendations for all of us are fairly clear. We might reflect on our prudishness and our hypocrisy. Do we in fact protest too much against those very images that have a powerful appeal to us? This question is appropriate not just for those who make broad criticisms of sexual imagery, but for each of us as we try, throughout our lifetime, to weave our sexuality into the rest of life. Can we enter more energetically into life by lifting our sexual repression, without losing our important sexual inhibitions and privacy? Is it possible to enjoy the sexual gaze — as those who see and as those who are seen — without literal diminishment of our persons? Can we be sexually creative and free and, at the same time, sexually moral?
Feminists have rightly complained about the humiliation involved in the pornographic gaze. We may feel objectified and depersonalized when someone stares at us on a subway or bus; much more so when the gaze is sexual. On the other hand, there is a kind of looking that is neither distancing nor humiliating. It is an intimate erotic gaze in which you, as object, agree to be a stand-in for the god or goddess. It can be uncomfortable, especially if we’re taught that it’s humiliating to be made into a sex object, but it can also be pleasurable and ennobling.
The very sacredness of sex may be due to our glimpsing in our beloved the vast world of meaning and value that lies behind the facade of ordinary life. “Life is a door to existence,” says French philosopher and novelist Georges Bataille, and through the loved person, we find deliverance. Sex is also a doorway to a level where life is lived with extraordinary immediacy and presence, a model for what is possible when eros leads the way.
If we are depersonalizing and deanimating our world and ourselves in this age of analysis, then instead of trying to intensify the subjective, it might be better to find a soulful way to treat things as objects and even to be an object. But how do you gaze soulfully and how do you become an object of sexual gaze without losing your soul?
When I present myself to the gaze of my lover, I am making a gift. I’m letting down my defenses, exposing myself not just to an eye’s perusal but to a soul’s reflection. I am being seen not just in my physical stature, but in my very being. The intense feelings involved in disrobing, the inhibition as well as the pleasure of self-exhibition, are due not merely to physical conditions but to subtle emotions and states of soul. It’s an enormous thing in any life to be made visible, to be revealed.
We live in a world where objects have been deprived of their souls, and the last thing we want is to become lifeless objects ourselves. But even the things of the world want to be seen and touched, and the most ordinary objects of daily life have soul. We can bring soul back into mere objects by the way we make them, treat them, and respect them. The same is true of ourselves as sexual beings. We can discover the depths of our own gazing and the importance in sex of looking and watching. And we can recover the value and pleasure of being the object of a mystery-filled sexual gaze.
It may be important to have occasions for sex in daylight or outdoors, to have appropriate leisure and privacy for looking, to dress revealingly and provocatively at times. It may be helpful to have paintings and photos on our walls to open us up to the subtleties of gazing and to invite the spirit of eros to enter.
Today, many think we need to teach couples how to be better lovers, but I want to emphasize a deeper project: discovering the depths and heights of sex, its inherent and unsentimental sacredness, the spirit and soul within the mechanics, techniques, and paraphernalia. We have to invite the spirits of sex into our bedrooms, or else sex will remain a secularized, egocentric, narcissistic, and exploitative endeavor, even in the midst of our supposed sexual enlightenment.
It’s up to us to push through the symptomatic, depersonalizing gaze and to have a vision of the mystery that is sex, but I would never expect a complete solution to the problem of erotic imagery and pornography — a perfect balance, a full integration, a pleasing amalgam. Life doesn’t work that way. The best we can hope for is a constant creative dialogue so that the pornographic doesn’t become debilitating or neurotic, and the more innocent erotic imagery is not lost amid our fears about the pornographic. Aphrodite herself was once called Porne, patroness of prostitutes, a sign that pornography is more a mystery than a problem, and that hiding behind its evident noisomeness is a dark beauty.
Our sexual fantasies have a great deal to do with our search for meaning, direction, and individuality. Fantasies of sex obviously draw many people into intimate relationships, married life, and parenthood. They may entice us out of a bad marriage or away from a relationship that has lost its vitality. In a stable and generally happy relationship, sexual fantasies may help keep desire itself alive and at work.
Eros serves the soul by leading it on through desire and pleasure, and the objects of our desire are not always as simple and obvious as they may appear. Sexual fantasies may call forth new life in the guise of new sexual experiences, and so the motive for repressing these fantasies may not be as much moral sensitivity as fear of life’s irrepressible abundance. Many times in therapy, I have seen a person with a broad smile and a look of satisfaction on his face just after he has convinced himself of a new way to repress his desires. It isn’t easy sometimes to distinguish between neurotic gratification and deep pleasure.
Whenever I see men standing passively in small groups before magazine racks filled with pictures of men and women in various levels of undress and sexual pose, it seems obvious that they are wrapped in contemplation. As I peruse volume after volume of sexual literature written and published by women, I sense a powerful longing to restore to sex its full body and soul. We crave the very thing that we repress — our need to explore and contemplate the mysteries of powerful desire, intimate intercourse, and the drama of erotic encounter.
I’m reminded of a dream I once heard from a young man in which he found himself lying on the floor in a throne room, looking up between the legs of a mother goddess who was seated on the throne. Completely absorbed in his vision, he felt that, blessedly, the whole of life’s activity had stopped to allow him this absolute pleasure. Compulsion is too weak a word to describe his need to have this vision.
This dream was pornographic in a certain sense, and yet it was obviously a ritual act, as well. At the time, it made me wonder if every recourse to pornography is not an enactment of this dream, a ritual return to a god or goddess who is appropriately approached in a sexual manner and whose presence is to be visually contemplated in a rather humble, if not humiliating, posture. Do those men at the magazine rack act guilty and try to hide because they fear society’s disapproval, or is there a sense of shame about having to succumb to the goddess, to give up the rewards of propriety and submit to a necessary ritualistic contemplation? Do they feel the shame of being drawn by a powerful lure to the very goddess whose existence and claims on them they deny or neglect? Are they doing in public what my client was doing in the privacy of his powerful dream?
Sexism has deep roots in the unwholesome way we live in this world. The ultimate sexist attitude is not simply denigration of women, but an absolute neglect of all that is represented by the images of goddesses around the world. Sexism is the expression of a divided and constricted way of life and a deep rejection of the goddess in our lives. Achieving political equality for women, as necessary as it is, is not enough. Maybe contemplation and the holy gaze are themselves gifts of the goddess whom we have repressed and whom we now adore only in our dreams and compulsions.
One of the most remarkable sites of sexual fantasy on earth, one in some ways connected to the pornographic newsstands, lies in a small village in central India called Khajuraho. Between the early ninth century and the beginning of the twelfth, a number of relatively small beige and pinkish temples were built there on high terraces. On the facades of many of the temples are erotic scenes showing every form of lovemaking, even intercourse between a man and a mare. Everywhere are images of jeweled, rapturous, curving, graceful bodies, and couples in tender embrace.
In his memoirs, Carl Jung tells of his travels to India in 1938, when he saw similar images at Konarak. His Indian guide explained them as a means of reminding unenlightened young people of their dharma, the law of their lives. First they must deal with their sexuality, and then they can find their spirituality, he said. Jung was doubtful that young Indian people needed to be reminded of their sexuality, and he was especially incredulous when the guide suggested that Jung and he had attained a higher level of consciousness and were above that sort of thing. But Jung seems to approve of the idea that we have to deal with our sexuality as our karma, as the stuff of which we are born and made. Erotic images keep people from being spirited away in their religious practice.
There is much more to erotic images than the reminder to fulfill our ordinary lives, but the point should not be lost. One reason pornography is so inescapably present in our culture is that, in many ways, we ignore the sensual life before us while pursuing culture-building, analysis, understanding, and a highly controlled, technological future. We need to enter more fully into our karma — our family, the needs of our bodies and hearts, and our ordinary lives — or sexuality will continue to press upon us as a threat to tranquility rather than a comforting source of it.
When a religious statue has a sexual theme, we may conclude that it houses a sex spirit, and the point in approaching such a shrine might be to take some of that spirit home to vivify our daily lives. Alan Watts, whose books of the 1960s advocate a sensuous approach to spirituality, commented on the Sun Temple at Konarak. In Erotic Spirituality, he reminds the Western observer — who typically divides thought from sensation and finds meaning only in the rational mind — that Indian yoga is a “purification of the senses from their bondage to concepts.” It would be a mistake, in Watts’s view, to translate this erotic imagery into ideas and symbols, since its very point is to keep us engaged sensually and erotically.
Watts points out that the sculpted couples are not “going to bed” but dancing. They are not nude; they wear crowns, necklaces, bracelets, and bangles. They show us, without explanation, how sex is a ritual and not an animalistic act, a yoga of ecstasy and not a mere necessity for the survival of the species. In the West, Watts says, we don’t realize that we have a need for ecstasy. I would add that, in these extraordinary Indian sculptures, we also discover that beauty, grace, rhythm, and form are essential to sex, and that they reveal the potential for spirituality in sex.
Watts describes sex not, as scientific studies often do, as an “outlet,” but as an “inlet.” It is not a release of pressure but a holding of pleasure, where the goal is not orgasm but sustained sensation. Giving ourselves plenty of time, preparing a place, adorning our bodies, and creating a spiritual milieu — an arena bigger than ourselves and our “relationship” — might pull off the veils that have shrouded sex in the shadows of biology and psychology during the modern period. We can restore the mystery grasped so palpably by our ancestors who built temples to eros in realization of our absolute and unforgiving need for enchantment.
The erotic images on the temples of India have a special grace, but we could add to them the sexual themes in Greek and early Mediterranean art, the churches and pagan centers of the British Isles and Europe, the estates and streets of Pompeii, the paintings of Japan, the sculptures of Africa, the sacred sexual images of Peru. Around the world, religion and sex have come together in graphic images that sublimate sex creatively by granting it a spiritual context and purpose.
I have been warned by friends who know Indian culture and religion well that I probably cannot grasp the real meaning of Indian erotic religious art. The Indian people, they tell me, generally do not see the lingam (the stylized male sex organ) and the yoni (the religious representation of the vulva) as sexual at all, but as symbols of life itself or of the great, ineffable, sacred mysteries of religion. I’m sure this warning is wise, and yet I still wonder if a much broader, deeper, and mystery-filled Western notion of sex might not bring us closer to the unspeakable mysteries of Eastern erotic imagery, shedding some light on our strange preoccupation with pornography.
It is difficult to imagine in our current context, but maybe one day we will arrive at the point where we can have graphic erotic imagery around us and not think much about human sexuality or feel a compulsion to stare. We may be able simply to enjoy erotic images and to see through their surface sexuality to the fundamental, creative eros at their core. Then we will have discovered the deepest secret of sex: that it is life itself, precisely in its holiness rather than its secularism.
“The Role of the Erotic Imagination” is excerpted from The Soul of Sex: Cultivating Life as an Act of Love, by Thomas Moore. © 1998 by Thomas Moore. It appears here by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.
