As I look back over my blog entries, I am happy to remember that I’ve blogged on topics not directly related to sex. I only post once a month and the last few months I’ve felt called to write about some aspect of sex although that is not all I want this blog to be about. Still, there are a lot of immature ideas about sex circulating in society, especially on the internet, so once I got started on the topic issues to address just seemed to keep growing. I’m okay with that, however, because my posts on sex are never just about sex, they’re about evolution and enlightenment. So in that spirit, I want to share some ideas that have been generated by recent activity.
If you look at my last post, you’ll still I was invited to speak at BU’s School of Public Health about my experience using porn then not only renouncing it, but also taking a public stance advocating others do the same. The occasion of the BU talk was the screening of a documentary film to Public Health students about the dangers of porn consumption. After the event, I posted on Facebook how I was satisfied with my talk and several men mentioned they wished they had attended. So I decided to do a screening of the film in the men’s group I attend in Dorchester so all my brothers could see the documentary and we could have a serious discussion with mature men about how porn influences our lives. Well, none of the three men who expressed interest on FB showed up, but nine guys including myself did and we had a great conversation.
Most of us, however, myself included, felt the film did not do justice to the complexity and diversity of porn (think of Reefer Madness for pornography) and also offered no alternative perspective for what to do rather than consuming porn.
The film was not without its good points, in fact, watching it again helped me frame the juxtaposition that I will present to you as a motivation for this article. First, we have to realize that (for the most part) those who create pornography do not have their consumer’s (much less performer’s) best interest at heart. This is stone cold capitalism, designed to extract the highest profit margin for the lowest investment. History has shown that a “free market” with no public oversight leads to human slavery, hence, the patchwork of regulations preventing conscienceless corporations and their masters from totally exploiting the Earth and enslaving her inhabitants.
I am in favor of wealth creation, but so much of what goes on in the porn industry is devoid of integrity and ethics that the products cannot help but be toxic. So when we leave these folks in charge of the sexual education of a population, which is the de facto position that the porn industry occupies, we end up with a huge variety of sexual and relationship malfunctions. Watching this anti-porn documentary, The Price of Pleasure, with a group of conscious brothers, I realized there was a major piece of the puzzle missing. The film railed against the violent, misogynistic worldview perpetuated by most porn, but it offered no alternative. So I would like to provide an alternative perspective.
Porn can be thought of as Corporate Sex, it’s created with the simple idea of hooking as many consumers (mostly men) into watching as much as possible. Much, if not most of the product, is degrading to women and men and certainly does not show the great potential of sex to awaken the higher virtues in humanity. So if porn is Corporate Sex, the alternative is Sacred Sex. Sacred Sex can be intuitively understood as that which leads to genuine intimacy between partners and greater connection to the higher, more divine, more evolved part of our being. My wife, Radiant Jasmin, and I have been incorporating elements of Sacred Sexual practice into our lives since we first found love together in 1987.
In 2009, we gave a talk at the Tantric Indian Bistro in Boston that laid down some fundamental tenets of this practice (her mic didn’t work which is why none of her comments are included). So in this first video I’ve ever posted on the internet, I invite you to see why I say I’ve used porn and I’ve used Tantra. Tantra is like Ambrosia. Porn is like dog shit. You decide.
