Journal of Human Sexuality

Most people need sex to have meaning because the alternative is too frightening: being sexual in an existential vacuum. Sex without meaning would require participants to float freely in sexual experience, rather than being snugly anchored in a cognitive framework.

This is scary because of our indoctrination that sex is bad. We learn that we need protection from our sexuality: its non-linear, open-ended nature, its cacophony of impulses and feelings, its transcendent possibility of taking us away from ourselves. We might not, after all, make it back.

 Because sex is ultimately grounded in the body, it is a right-brain, non-linear experience, not a left-brain, cognitive one. Of course, sex can be analyzed, evaluated, and so on, but not as part of the experience.

Having sex and understanding sex are two separate activities, much like eating and understanding nutrition are two separate activities. Trying to understand nutrition or digestion while eating undermines the sensuality and enjoyment offered by the experience of dining.

Sex" is not limited to intercourse; not even limited, in fact, to genital activities.

In reality, "sex" describes a huge range of activities. This is half of a dialectic: many things can be sex because sex has whatever meaning we experience moment by moment; and sex has an infinite range of meanings because the scope of activities that can properly be called sexual is so vast.

 People who believe they know the objective meaning of sex can easily say what sex is and what it isn't. Their dichotomy is clear, the sexual side predictably narrow. That's one reason such people can be so self-righteous about what humans should and should not do sexually.

"Intimacy," for example, is a common rallying point for people who need sex to have Meaning. "Intimacy" (which, of course, means radically different things to different people) is fine. But setting it up as a standard for "healthy" sexuality creates a hierarchy of sexual experiences, downplaying or even excluding many of its most important aspects.

This must be true regardless of the particular meaning people decide sex "really" has. In this sense, Christianity and other sex-negative institutions are not the only source of sexual repression in our culture. Rigidity about sexual experience, meaning, and decision-making is the true culprit.

Organized Humanism, for example, stands opposed to religious concepts of sex being inherently evil. But to the extent that Humanism is attempting to discover some secular "true meaning" of sex, it colludes with society's conceptual rigidity. Ultimately, it is different from other sexual dogmas only in content.