Sex Is All Metaphors

by Jean Roberta

Ritual Sex

When I was very young and clueless about sex, I was warned by the grownups in my life not to accept candy from strangers (or specifically from strange men) and never to be alone outdoors after dark. When I was old enough to date, I was warned not to accept favors (drinks, rides) from guys I didn’t know very well, even if they were friends of friends.

The general message was clear: the scariest monsters in my world were likely to be males on the hunt for sex without emotional commitment. Everyone I knew seemed to assume that sex in that context would be against the interests and the nature of any “normal girl” – that in fact, the inability of most females to understand raw lust as something separate from a personal crush was the main cause of a huge credibility gap between men and women.

Certain assumptions die hard. The confusion of sex between strangers with assault, violation, trauma and exploitation still causes girls and women to fear dark alleys and dark bars more than the Significant Others who are statistically more likely to be sexual assailants than are strangers.

The persistent belief that sex with a stranger is a Fate Worse Than Death (at least for females) causes chivalrous men and certain feminists to campaign loudly for the elimination of prostitution in all forms on grounds that stranger-sex as an occupation is more harmful to the seller than punitive laws or a social stigma. Some opponents of the sex trade even suggest that being forced or misled into that pit of shame to earn a profit for someone else is less degrading than the trade itself. By that standard, sexual abuse within families, which never involves strangers and rarely involves payment, must not deserve the same level of moral outrage.

For centuries, stranger-sex has been compared, at least implicitly, with marital sex (an expression of “love” and therefore safe and fulfilling for women). Yet marriages are not necessarily based on personal attraction, and until very recently they were male-dominated by law. (The few good men who were married to feminists in the nineteenth century could only relate to their wives as equals by rejecting their husbandly “rights.”) Abuse in marriage is generally harder to escape than a hit-and-run assault by a stranger.

Stranger-sex, based on informed consent between adults, is probably as old as the human race. It has taken place in temples as well as whorehouses. In northern climates and extreme temperatures, it probably occurs indoors more often than in the shrubbery. Certain rock songs and erotic stories tell us that sex with the right stranger can be a magical escape from ordinary life. The mysterious stranger who seduces a mortal in ancient mythology is likely to be a deity in disguise.

There is a theory that the sex trade as we know it developed from a sacred ritual in which a priestess or devotee of the goddess of love, pleasure and beauty would wait in the temple to offer sexual service to any passing stranger. The stranger who was blessed in this way would be expected to make an offering, usually in cash, to the temple and indirectly to the goddess herself.

The principle involved is not hard to guess. Sex between strangers, especially if one of them is a professional pleasure-giver, trained and motivated for that purpose, can be a celebration of sexual energy as a good thing in itself, unmixed with the baggage of a personal relationship. It can be a generous sharing of sensual joy, a way to give thanks for the privilege of living in a sensitive human body.

The degradation of this kind of exchange into a secret, illegal and widely scorned activity didn’t happen by accident, nor as an inevitable result of historical progress. Stranger-sex was deliberately discredited in the past, as it is now, by those who don’t want sexual pleasure to be separated from marriage and childbearing.

More recent and more credible evidence than the temple-sex theory suggests that the pagan (pre-Christian) people of Europe held spring festivals, including sex parties, for centuries before the Christian establishment managed to drive such practices underground. A child with an unidentifiable father (in an age before DNA testing), conceived in an orgy on May Eve, was called a “merrybegot.” This term sounds more respectful than “bastard,” which is still used as an all-purpose insult almost independent of its original meaning.

Having no known or official father (or “no name,” as my parents’ generation put it) has been a traditional source of shame and deprivation in patriarchy, a social system in which individual fathers had/have power over and responsibility for their wives and children. In other social systems, however, having no known father could be considered equivalent to having been fathered by a god: a spirit, a superhuman force, or one’s tribe as a whole.

Christian disapproval of sexual promiscuity and “fatherless” children is loaded with irony. The central Christian myth of a holy Son, born to a mortal woman and fathered by God, is parallel to older myths about the exceptional half-divine offspring of women and gods. Many of these offspring (such as Dionysus, son of Zeus) were worshipped as gods in their own right. And according to many Christians, past and present, Christ’s most important message for humanity at large is that we should all love each other without reservations. If emotional promiscuity is holy, it is hard to see how sexual promiscuity could be a clear sign of the Devil at work.

Another pre-Christian sex ritual which seems related to stranger-sex is now called the Great Marriage, in which a tribal king or chief would mate with a woman representing the Goddess or the land or the natural world to ensure the general welfare of the tribe for the coming year. This ritual still holds great appeal for psychologists, anthropologists and fantasy writers because of its symbolic value.

In the world-view of pagans, past and present, a man and a woman can be seen to represent complementary forces in the universe, Mother Earth and Father Sky, the yang and yin which can unite to produce something new which is greater than the sum of its parts. In some modern or postmodern neo-pagan circles, “man” and “woman” can be self-defined even if the essential polarity between them remains unchanged. Ritual sex between people who are consciously playing roles is supposed to be both higher and deeper than personal chemistry.

Would the world be a better place if we could all safely do it in the streets to raise energy and provide comfort and relief for all who need it? Possibly. Sex for the pleasure of a moment happens openly in cultures that allow for it and secretly in cultures that persecute it. Sex outside the bonds of monogamous relationships attracts people of all genders, orientations and cultures, regardless of what they claim to value. We might as well acknowledge what no institution has been able to kill off.

The argument that hooking up with a stranger is not an adequate substitute for Real Love seems self-evident to me. Does anyone really need to choose between lifelong monogamy and Looking for Mr. Goodbar? As far as I know, the Great Marriage was never meant to replace more ordinary sexual relationships, nor was the ecstasy of Beltane or May Eve meant to replace sex in a context of shared personal history. I suspect that those who still celebrate May Eve in the old way don’t deprive themselves of sex or companionship for the rest of the year.

Hooking up with a stranger can still be dangerous, and not only for women. Doing it secretly while pretending to be faithful to a partner or spouse opens a whole other can of worms. However, theories about stranger-sex as unhealthy or “unnatural” for anyone just don’t apply to much of human history.  We humans like to get it on in a dazzling variety of ways.

Jean Roberta
March 2009

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"Sex Is All Metaphors" © 2009 Jean Roberta. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written


About the Author: Jean Roberta is the thin-disguise pen name of a writer who teaches mandatory first-year English classes in a Canadian prairie university and who writes fiction (erotic and otherwise), research-based articles, opinion pieces and reviews. She joined ERWA in December 1998, and has never looked back. Several of her stories can be found in the "Treasure Chest" gallery. Over sixty of her erotic stories have been published in print anthologies, and Eternal Press has released her single-author e-collection of erotic stories in various genres and flavors, Obsession (2008).
Jean is a staff reviewer for the monthly reviews site, Erotica Revealed (edited by D.L. King). She blogs on Livejournal as "Lizardlez" and at www.goodsturdyjeans.blogspot.com. Her website (www.JeanRoberta.com) is a work in progress.
Read Jean's full bio at Erotica Readers & Writers Association.

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