by Terry Gould
And so, as the uniformly college-educated couples gathered round Joyce and took their yard of muslin, I completed a conversational poll of the Lifestyles tour I’d been working on and determined that, as in the general population, not only did most of them take God or a Supreme Being seriously, but they believed in Him. There were a few, like Chuck, who were determinists or agnostics, but the fact that more than a handful actually prayed to Jesus Christ or meditated on Buddha-consciousness and admitted it was consistent with most groups of couples I’d met at conventions and clubs. Everyone I’d ever talked to in the straight world always found this one of the strangest bits of information about swingers, as if, smart or stupid, they must be in deep denial about opposing the moral laws enjoined by God that it was their duty to obey. Combining God with an orgy seemed as impossible as combining ethics with hedonism.
“This, if it’s done right between couples, is not aspiritual,” a Catholic nurse by the name of Evie told me, trying to figure out how to wrap her toga creatively. “It just expands the accepted definition, I guess.”
Beside her, Carla said, “You call this material?” She held it up to the light, lowered it, held it up again. “I’m lookin’ through a fishing net!”
“If you’re not into it you can’t interpret it as pleasant or a turn-on,” Evie said. “It’s hard to understand from the outside. Most people think it’s a terrible thing, and so they say that women are doing it against their will.”
“That’s exactly what they think about it,” said Evie’s husband Lance. “All the guys taking their wives out—it’s all abuse.”
“It really confronts all your issues in life,” Evie explained. “You have to throw off so much to be in this environment. I’m looking for my pure energy, I guess. If I get through all these hang-ups and all these walls, then I can truly love people. That’s what I’m looking for. You get that ecstatic energy with other people, and that’s something!”
“That’s the pagan philosophy,” said Harvey, the anthropology buff. “You get so far into your sexuality so that all the personality stuff falls away, and what you’re left with is the bare humanity.”
“A poor soul is he who does not love or lust under summer’s sun!” Chuck called—offering a paraphrase, I later learned, from his favorite piece of music, Carmina Burana, whose libretto sometimes just informed his thoughts or sometimes was quoted verbatim.
“Maybe ecstasy’s what all people in this movement recognize they’re struggling for, and that this is the way to get there,” Lance said.
“Well, that’s a pagan belief,” repeated Harvey. “Ecstasy means to get outside yourself. It’s a Greek word. That’s the main pagan belief. I’ve been all over the world and that was the belief before the missionaries arrived.”
“Whether it be through sexuality or spirituality or some form of our emotional being,” Lance said, “what I’m after is to tear away the shell and get at the inner being. I really believe that.”
“To admit who you are, to tear away all those layers, then you can really kind of laugh and love yourself when you’ve been hating yourself,” Evie said. “You’re not presupposing so much, and you’re not so fickle of other people’s personalities, you can just have your core being and flow with it without judgment. We went to Lance’s birth mother’s funeral about six months ago. I hadn’t been in a church in a long time, and it was kind of sad for me, because I was remembering how it was all judgment, no forgiveness. And I was just thinking how bad religions are if you’re different—you have to go outside the church to reach out. I seek it, or God, or whatever on the outside. I don’t have to be in a church to be spiritual. I can be here and be spiritual. Churches are all about orthodoxies and I just can’t stay hidden in that box, hiding myself from God.”
“Here’s something else for your book,” the ever-helpful Harvey said to me. “I spend a lot of time on the Internet and there’s Christian groups in the lifestyle promoting the pagan roots. Liberated Christians.”
“Actually, I’ve looked them up,” I said.
They were a Phoenix-based organization whose evangelical preachers presented one of the more popular seminars at the annual Lifestyles convention—its theme: “Swinging: Not a Biblical Conflict.” God-loving playcouples weren’t “guilt-ridden and shameful slugs of the sexual underground,” the Christian Libbers preached on the Internet, and we shouldn’t be shocked “that the innocent-looking wife next door likes to drag two or three men onto a bed at a time and be smothered with their attentions without guilt.” On their Web site, visited by thousands of spiritually inclined swingers a month, Dave Hutchison, an exile from the Billy Graham Crusade, and Bill Paris, a certified theologian, attacked the belief that lust was sinful, based as it was on a “Bible that has been misquoted and mistranslated to falsely suppress sexuality.” In their view, adulterous lust in the Old Testament was declared an evil not because of immoral sexuality, but because of unethical “covetousness, the desire to deprive another of his property… the essence of adultery.” Since lifestyle couples were supposedly not covetous of their extramarital partners, they were not sinful but ethical. “The loving women-centered sensuality and satisfaction of natural desire for sexual variety has absolutely nothing to do with ‘lust’ as most assume it to mean. Lust is the selfish desire to take something from another.”
It was a question, again, of ethics, not morals—of motives and ends. Instead of staying morally loyal while unethically cheating, swingers stayed ethically loyal while immorally exchanging spouses, having group sex, or watching others do both. The world might view secret adulterers as angels compared to orgiasts, since adultery was sometimes redeemed by love and thus closer to God than a four-in-a-bed scenario, but swingers viewed themselves as actually having taken a step up from this moral code. They claimed that the ethical lust they cultivated with others was a plaything of their loving marriage and that they were not doing anyone harm by enjoying affectionate encounters with like-minded couples. They did have love on their minds, they said—for each other—and so they did not feel separate from God and His goodness.
Yet you would be hard-pressed to find a paragon of ethical and spiritual goodness in any culture’s pantheon of saints who would reflect this reasoning. When Mahatma Gandhi titled his autobiography The Story of My Experiments With Truth, the big truth was not pacifism or independence for his homeland, but brahmacharya, “literally conduct that leads one to God. Its technical meaning is self-restraint, particularly mastery over the sexual organ.” By mastering sexual desire, one became master of oneself. “Purify one’s mind,” was the first lesson of Buddha. “Flee fornication,” was Saint Paul’s advice. “Hell has three gates: lust, anger, and greed,” the Bhagavadgita warned us, lust being immoral, anger and greed unethical, and all three interlocked at the low level of a hedonistic existence. “No man,” Christ said atop the Mount, “can serve two masters.” And so on across all religious barriers and national borders, even unto that moral pit America, where triple-X-rated movies are still “wicked” and “dirty” and all the more profitably promoted as such by purveyors of porn.
This fundamental theological and cultural tenet—that hedonism is separate from “good” behavior and from God; that chastity is completely unified with both; and that matrimonial sex is somewhere between—is so ancient that we need to look beyond its cynical exploitation by kings, priests, scribes, and pornographers and ask: where, in truth, did it come from? Why did sexual pleasure, persistent across millions of years of evolution and the perfection of nature’s and presumably God’s reproductive laws, come to be considered the basest of human pursuits, involving one in a web of selfishness and evil? And why has the struggle against hedonistic enjoyment always been waged with appeals to our “higher,” spiritual nature, with threats of irredeemable harm for those who ignored the appeals?
When the righteous American general in the film Dr. Strangelove raged against women because they corrupted men and stole their “vital juices,” he gave a clue
to at least one of several possible answers, which, in this case, could derive from what John Money has called “an ancient bit of proverbial sexosophy.” The notion that one’s goodness or evil fluctuates up and down on a divine scale according to one’s orgasmic self-restraint or hedonistic expulsions may in part have originated in the mistaken belief of our male ancestors that they were losing something precious when they lost semen.
This singular misapprehension probably dates back at least ten thousand years to about the time of the domestication of herd animals at the dawn of civilization. Farmers would have noticed that the castrated animals in their herds grew up tamer, weaker, and smaller than the breeding males who were allowed to keep their testicles. Warriors, too, would have learned the same lesson: after they had castrated the male children of their conquered enemies to keep them from reproducing, they would have watched them mature into passive, stunted, beardless men. Since the castrated boys and animals produced no semen, the implication would have been clear: semen must be a fuel required for growth and development, and its loss had negative consequences. It was one of the great sexosophical discoveries of civilization, rediscovered again and again throughout the world.
But it was completely false. “The error in the folklore,” Money assessed in The Destroying Angel, “… stems from the centuries when absolutely nothing was known about hormones.” It was not known, for instance, that when a male is gelded, his body loses testosterone—the hormone testicles secrete into the bloodstream—without which males appear weak and unmanly. “The ancients knew that without testicles an animal is sterile and also unable to ejaculate semen. But they did not know that almost all the fluid of the semen is produced in the prostate gland and that only the sperm are made in the testicles. Thus, it was easy to arrive at the wrong conclusion that, because castration causes loss of semen, semen itself must be the vital fluid that should be conserved in order to be virile, strong, and healthy.”
If they had known about testosterone, and that it was not ejaculated with semen, we might have wound up with a slightly different version of sexual morality. But by the time writing was developed in 3000 B.C., the sexosophy was already part of the fabric of society, and it was codified for the first time by the chaste Brahman priests of the Indus Valley, patriarchs of the world’s oldest living religion, Hinduism. Semen was declared sukra dhatu, “sacred white metal.” It was believed that by some mysterious process semen—the essence of the divine “life force” known in Sanskrit as kundalini—was converted into spiritual energy if retained, and would rise up the spine through the various “spiritual centers,” the chakras, lifting one’s mortal consciousness from the urge to expel semen to a superconscious godhead completely removed from sexuality. The spine became viewed as a sort of evolutionary thermometer, with the seven chakras its mystical scale markings and the transmuted semen, in the form of kundalini, its quicksilver.
The belief in this vertical “ladder to God” is pervasive across cultures. Indeed, the baroque sexual mythology of the Hindus (which arose a thousand years before the codification of the Eden myth) is so obviously an antecedent of many of the other traditions equating sexual self-control with Godly behavior, that the imagery is worthy of some scrutiny.
According to the Hindus, in most unevolved humans, that is, in those souls who had not evolved much over thousands of incarnations on earth, the hot fuel of kundalini sat coiled like a snake at the two lowest chakras—survival and sex. There they whispered seductive entreaties for expulsion, much like the Satanic serpent in Eden did as it lay coiled about the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which yogis to this day interpret as a metaphor for the spine, with the fruit representing orgasm. The expression of kundalini through the sex chakra, while reproducing life, tied one’s consciousness to the body and its “gross” perceptions and needs. By retaining one’s sexual energy, meditating on God, and practicing yogic breath techniques that helped remove the buildup of evil karma, one sped up the reincarnational process and one’s kundalini began to rise through the various centers, expressing itself in ways commensurate with the higher states of more evolved beings.
When, for instance, the kundalini passed the third “power” center and reached the fourth center, opposite the heart, human love began to be expressed selflessly. When it reached the fifth center opposite the throat, Platonic ideals and the uniformities underlying all differences were perceived—taking one even further from earthbound emotions and desires. The divine vision center, the sixth chakra or “spiritual eye,” sat in the middle of the forehead: here the arrival of kundalini caused one to behold God as St. Paul reportedly beheld Jesus—which caused him ever after to denounce sex as a grievous sin that kept him from union with this infinite being. Had he held onto his semen, according to the lore, he would have found all separateness finally transcended when the kundalini reached the seventh, samara, center, situated on the crown of the head within the “thousand-petaled lotus of light”—the center of cosmic consciousness, the “self” of self-realization. At that moment the sansara blossomed open and one experienced a flood of bliss thousands of times more powerful than the expression of kundalini in sexual orgasm. That is why the yogic goal of life was crucially dependent on the mastery of sex. Sex short-circuited the rise of kundalini and wasted the latent potential for eternal orgasm. By expelling semen in orgasm, one lost the spiritual fuel, leaving one stranded in earthly delusion and evil.
Thus, the true purpose of sex was revealed: it was not reproduction but God-realization. Sex, in the words of Elisabeth Haich, a modern proselytizer of this sexosophy, was “the only fuel absolutely indispensable for this purpose.” Since God-realization was the most important goal of life, the retention of semen became an obsession of the Brahman rulers. It was vile when emitted, holy when retained. And so they developed their mystical beliefs into a science, the world’s oldest sexosophical practice, kundalini yoga—literally, “joining together with the life force”—which occupied one’s every hour with breath techniques, meditation, a “noninflammatory” diet, and a host of other ascetic practices to keep one’s mind off that fruity repository for semen offered by Eve.
There is an argument to be made that upon that mythological belief in the conservation and transmutation of sexual energy into spiritual energy rests almost all the religious, sexual, and moral laws man must follow if he is to live an ethical and spiritual life. Whatever encourages the excessive expulsion of semen is at the bottom of the scale; whatever encourages its retention is at the top. The belief may have arisen from sincere faith, but it was a faith that fit in nicely with the agenda of priests and kings who, as we have seen, are always anxious to keep the lustful masses guilt-ridden and beholden to their powers as intermediaries between a God who condemns those who indulge in sexual pleasure and loves those who strive for chastity. It led eventually to all the crackpot sexual-degeneracy-disease theories of the Victorian era, one of which claimed that sexual excess led to spermatorrhea—the uncontrollable “leaking” of vital essence. It led also to those equally crackpot notions purveyed to this day in the rafts of yogic texts in every New Age bookstore that explain the precious energies required by the body to produce semen. Such as the theory that the body “purifies” semen from “vital spirits in the blood.” Or that semen is made from “neurine” taken from the blood. Or that when semen is expelled it drains away brain fluids down the spinal cord—an old hammer used to keep nineteenth-century boys from masturbating.
Although you will find lots of testimonials in passionately written books with names like Arousing the Goddess, Sexual Energy and Yoga, and Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man, there is not a shred of scientific evidence that the retention of semen accomplishes anything except egotistic pride in accomplishment. It does not increase a male athlete’s performance in sporting events or raise scores on IQ tests or increase concentration in any way that has ever been measured by external observation, the foundation of all scientific hypotheses. As for women, although most te
xts on kundalini and yoga “emphasize that everything said in this book about sexuality and the development of consciousness applies as much to the female as it does to the male,” as Elisabeth Haich has stated, I have not been able to discover a single volume that postulates the female equivalent of “sacred white metal” that is lost during sex. (Rare women do expel a clear fluid during “female ejaculation,” but no kundalini text—sacred or popular—has ever pointed to the need to retain this fluid; on the contrary, as we shall see below, that expulsion is cultivated by aspiring Tantrics.) Even if we are dealing only with a “psychic” loss that sidetracks the mind and ensnares one mentally in illusion, there is still no observable evidence that kundalini exists beyond the realm of metaphor, much less that it rises through the equally unobservable seven chakras, purifying the body and uplifting the consciousness as it goes. Lastly, while meditation demonstrably calms people and vastly increases their alpha brain waves and immediate powers of concentration, there is no evidence that the techniques advocated by kundalini yogis and yoginis cleanse the soul of “bad karma” or speed up one’s psychospiritual “reincarnational” development. We are dealing simply with a matter of faith.
And yet there is a swinging twist to this story of faith. Kundalini yoga has seen an amazing resurgence in the West. Some people follow the original tenets of the tyrannically ascetic Brahmans but others follow the rebel branch known as Tantra. Tantra emerged four thousand years ago to promote the same “conservationist” truth as the Brahmans—for men, that is. At the same time it radically affirmed that sexuality did not have to be denied in order to obtain enlightenment. If semen retention was the goal of kundalini yoga, the Tantric masters decided, then they could offer another route to that goal. Their erotospiritual alternative accommodated human lust by actually encouraging the night-long pleasures of God-conscious lovemaking—including the sort of outrageous group sex pornographically pictured on Tantric temples all over India—but with one fabulous benefit: no loss of semen. The key was for males to delay their eight-second orgasm indefinitely so as to: 1) cater to the female’s endless capacity for orgasm even unto a G-spot-stimulated waterfall; and 2) save the precious fluids in their own bodies.