Leaning Into Sexual Darkness

Source: Photo by Engin Akyurt from Pexels

Managing sexuality intelligently. Yes, it's a thing: All the cool kids are doing it. Just kidding, no one’s doing it. That is, no one who hasn't gone through state-of-the-art treatment for those convicted of sex crimes. And no, you don’t have to have this treatment to achieve intelligent management of your sexuality, but it’s weird when you think about it, right? We manage our finances, our careers, our diets, our vacation planning—really just about anything but our sexuality gets the intelligent management treatment.

The reason for this is that for the last million years of human history, sexuality seemed to take care of itself, versus something like say, hunting. But more recently, humans developed something we know as religion. This development allowed us to access the as yet untapped powerful resources of our belief system which, in turn, allowed us to wage a sort of psychological warfare on our biggest enemy: fear.

With religion came a great many rules: Some, like certain dietary rules, may have been quite helpful. There were a number of sexual rules that came about as well and most of them contributed to the maximum reproductive capacity of the human animal, sort of what we do with livestock on an industrial scale. This meant, first of all, no gay stuff because gays weren't particularly good at reproducing future farmers, warriors, or ladies to help make more farmers and warriors. There were lots of other rules as well that served the same end, such as no sex with the dead and no sex with animals.

The point here is that we developed codified rules to regulate human sexuality based on the survival needs of the time, which included the regulation of marital sex. Later rules helped establish a never-ending feedback loop: Awareness of the rules, rule-breaking, followed by guilt which then forced us to “try harder,” before the cycle inevitably began again.

We have inherited a world in which all information and what passed for training in the management of our sexuality was made the provenance of religion. Later, much later, we developed what we called the Enlightenment in the 17th century, which had a rather fancy reliance on reason, knowledge, and the valuing of human beings—a substitute for divine revelation. And wouldn't you know it, the more we thought about human sexuality, the more we seemed to benefit from thinking about it.

Sure, religion didn't appreciate the encroachment on its turf and regularly killed or imprisoned those (like Galileo) who suggested that there might just be better (that is, accurate) ideas for how the universe really worked. By the time Darwin dealt the death blow to the idea of a literal six-day creation, we had figured out we no longer wanted religion to stray from its inspirational lane into sciency stuff.

So, we've been drilling down into our ignorance for four or five centuries, starting with astronomy (Galileo) and then moving on to the biological theories of human origins (Darwin). And just when we were really hitting our stride in comprehending the world (Hello, 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial) and ourselves, we ran into the brick wall of which Richard Hofstader entitled his 1963 book: Anti-intellectualism in American Life. Like any modern influencer about to lose significance, religion grew livid with jealousy over the efforts of Alfred Kinsey in the late 1940s. He dared to actually compile data on human sexual behavior—that is, to tell us what we were doing instead of, as religion had always preferred, to tell us what we should be doing. Kinsey's was a bridge (and a truth) too far.

Kinsey didn't ever try to suggest how humans might manage their sexuality intelligently, at least, not overtly. But researchers kept investigating and thinking about human sexuality and we have come up with some ideas that are thought-provoking in terms of managing our sexuality intelligently. And we have benefited from looking at the darker side of human sexuality to discover truths about the sexuality of us all. Just like da Vinci benefited from looking at the dead to better understand the living, and just like modern researchers have looked closely at diseased humans to better facilitate human health, so too does looking at how those who committed sex crimes came to commit their crimes help us understand our own sexuality and tendencies to make poor decisions about sexuality. (For those who want to leap ahead in this discussion, listen to my true-crime podcast, Sex Crime Central, for deeper insight into what we can learn from debriefing the sex crimes that plague our society.)

We can understand sex crimes without minimizing them. We can understand how people came to make sexually criminal decisions and, in doing so, prevent sex crimes in the future, which seems like the greatest good of all. But the real pot of gold is the understanding we can give others and ourselves as we seek insight into our own sexual history. Are you ready?