phil shining
chapters
Sex Life Cultivation: Ars Erotica as an Alternative to Sex Education and Sex Therapy
In Sexuality and Eroticism in a Post-pandemic World: Beyond the Biopolitics of the New Normal (Brill, 2023)
Pages: 393–452
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004549388_014
While sexual abuse, sex addiction, sexual indifference, and sexual dissatisfaction remain present in our societies, people depend on medical/clinical treatments that don’t prevent any of its causes. Sex and sex life are much more a matter of art than a matter of science. The bodies, sexual performances, relationships, subjectivities: all things sexual can be refined and modelled, even sexual ethics—the use of sexual freedom. Living in the 21st century, the era of the biopolitics of self-regulation and self-management, when pornography replaces sex education and OnlyFans replaces relationships, sex life cultivation emerges as an alternative culture connecting the arts of sex with the knowledge on the health and well-being potential of a positive and active sex life. Dissimilate communities taking distance from patriarchal, egoist, toxic, and destructive approaches to sex and sexuality sprout these days all over the world. Sex life cultivation is an emerging phenomenon built on the practices of very different subcultures with different purposes, yet all sharing a common intent: try to make compatible sexual satisfaction with a healthy life.
Among the communities experimenting alternatives to the mainstream models of sex and sexuality there are practitioners searching inputs for the enhancement of their erotic skills; the exploration of pleasure techniques; the generation of vitality, health, and wellbeing in their bodies, minds, moods, and spirits; the emotional self-mastery required to manage their romantic relationships; the development of constructive and solidary sexual ethics for their intimate relationships; and, in many cases, they are looking for the awakening or the growth of spirituality in their lives through their sexual or erotic activities. In this multiple sense, the term “sex life cultivation” can be used to denominate three independent but complementary realities; sex life cultivation is, at the same time, an alternative culture of inner cultivation, an ars erotica field of practice, and a non-normative model of sexual self-directed learning.
Sex life cultivation is a global culture exploring sexual knowledge that combines ecstasy with well-being; sex life cultivation practitioners learn to generate vitality and health through sex and pleasure. Notably, this emerging culture recovers the sexual knowledge of both Eastern and Western millenary arts of living like Taoism, Yoga, Tantra, Buddhism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism, mixed with modern forms of erotic hedonism and contemporary non-normative sexual practices. Sex life cultivation is an alternative culture of inner cultivation focused on the exploration and experimentation of sexual practice; that’s what distinguishes it from any other present-day gender and sexuality culture or movement: it is not about identity or self-inquiry, but about refining sexual practice and enriching sex life. Of course, it can be used to improve sexual performance and improve sex life in general, but sex life cultivation is not a self-improvement program: it is not about reaffirming the self, it is about making life better; not only the life of the practitioner but also the life of everyone involved in a sex life—in all the romantic, erotic, and sexual relationships. All the orders of knowledge determining what can be learned about sex and sexuality in contemporary societies—a biology of reproduction, a medicine of sex, a psychology of self-esteem, a sexology of wellness, and the politics of gender—are examples of scientia sexualis: knowledges based on the discourses produced by people telling the truth about themselves; even critical approaches like psychoanalysis, queer theory, and feminism are also focused on self-exploration and self-referentiality. Both two of the main sexual knowledge technologies in contemporary societies, sex education and sex therapy, perpetuate the scientia sexualis model of self-examination.
The excess of self-centeredness reproduced by the scientia sexualis discourses about sex and sexuality reinforces individualism and egocentrism. There is need of developing sexuality self-learning frameworks grounded on ars erotica instead of scientia sexualis: focused on the knowledge about the sexual practice itself instead of talking about ourselves through self-examination. Sex life cultivation is an alternative to sex education and sex therapy—both of them centered on self-knowledge—since it focuses on developing a positive active sex life, refining sexual habits, enhancing erotic skills, generating health, well-being, vitality, and cultivating selflessness; it is more dietetic than therapeutic, and it is more self-formative than educational. While education consists in watching/listening, and therapy consists in talking about yourself, sex cultivation is based on practice. Sex can’t be subordinated to sexuality no more; people requires the “know-how” of sex instead of limiting to know about themselves. Otherwise, destructive mainstream pornography will continue as the main source of sex education and, because of the normalization of sexual indifference and sexual dissatisfaction in today’s post-hedonistic cultures, sexual abuse will remain embedded in our societies.
Those who cultivate their sex lives start immersing themselves into the arts of love and the arts of sex. Although eroticism and sexuality are two different experiences, the compendium of all the knowledge related with sex and intimate relationships is known today as ars erotica. Technically, sex life cultivation is a form of ars erotica because it is a type of knowledge about sex focused on the refinement of the sexual practice and the expansion of pleasure. However, sex life cultivation is distinguished from other forms of ars erotica in its ultimate purpose because, in addition to encourage the experimentation with sexual ecstasy, it also explores sexual activity also as a source of vitality, health, love, and well-being. In this sense, sex cultivation is closer to the Taoist roots of ars erotica, associated with preventive medicine and increasing longevity; it is based on the free creativity of sexual conduct, indeed, but it is integrally in function of an art of living. In synthesis, sex life cultivation is learning how to master desire and how to amplify pleasure; learning how to use pleasure to generate health and well-being; and learning how to harness the power of sex in benefit, not only of the direct practitioners, but of all people making part of their erotic, romantic, and sexual life.
This is how sex life cultivation constitutes a particular ars erotica field of practice focused on the health and well-being potential of love and sexual activity—including practices like menstrual self-care, cardio sex, meditative sex, or non-coital lovemaking, along with coitus reservatus, the transmutation of sexual arousal into vitality, and the transmutation of sexual biofluids into nutrients. Some of the benefits of a cultivated sex life include the strengthening of the immune system, cardiovascular fitness, decreasing depression and/or anxiety, better sleep, stress reduction, natural pain relief, and cell regeneration. Sex life cultivation is not a discipline, it is a transdisciplinary field of well-being practice. The fusion between the arts of sex and the arts of inner cultivation indicate the area of intersection between the fields of ars erotica and arts of existence distinguishing sex life cultivation’s own field of exploration.
And yet, sex life cultivation does not only designate a certain type of sexual knowledge with its respective set of erotic/sexual practices, or the field of erotic/sexual practice, but the form of accessing to the sexual knowledge too. Sex life cultivation is an alternative, non-normative model of sexual self-directed learning, where the practitioners determine at their own pace and under their own conditions what they want to learn, with whom they want to learn, where, how, and when they want to learn it. While sex education and sex therapy are always directed and designed by institutions, sex life cultivation is always a DIY initiative and an empirical learning process designed and directed by the practitioners themselves, who make use of the available erotic arts and the arts of living knowledge according to their necessities and their desires. In the new millennium gender equality, racial, and ethnic justice constitute a priority in most cultures and among most communities. That’s why the knowledge generated through the practice of sex life cultivation has to be complemented with cutting-edge critical thinking regarding gender equality and sexual orientation; the spiritual exercises of the arts of living can be assembled with contemporary knowledge coming from scientific research and cultural criticism, because there is always a political dimension at stake with every sustained practice.
Consequently, there’s also an ethical dimension intrinsic to sex life cultivation that demands from hedonist experimentation to be constantly contrasted with critical thinking approaches, critical consciousness, and a selfless commitment to the fulfillment of gender and ethnic, but also social equality in general. Sex life’s integral cultivation requires working on all human life’s dimensions: physiology, culture, politics, bonding, personality, ethics, and spirituality. Therefore, critically conscious sex life cultivators are aware of the biopolitics of inclusion and the processes of generalized sexualization that concentrate efforts in personal realization rather than mutual and/or collective well-being, so they inquire on models of sexual ethics created as an alternative to the self-centered ethical models of mainstream capitalist culture. Sex life cultivation as a selfless self-care program; critical selflessness and selfless sexuality as the keys for ethical sex life transformation: ecstasy as a strategy to decenter ourselves. A selfless sexuality constitutes an example of counter-hegemonical sexual ethics and a concrete alternative to the biopolitics of sexuality self-management; cosmic consciousness and critical selflessness are alternative habits to the self-regulation of the societies of self-control. Sex life cultivation is a crucial component in the processes of creation of alternative ways of life: nothing more revolutionary today than living outside of the ego and living in service without servitude. Bed as an essential territory for learning how to stop being egoist: sex as the best way to start our ethical transformation.
Keywords
ars erotica – arts of living – biopolitics – critical consciousness – health – inner cultivation – longevity – self-care – self-directed learning – sex education – sexual empowerment – sexual ethics – sexual knowledge – selflessness – vitality – well-being – spiritual exercises.
Introduction to the “New Normal:” Biopolitics, Sexuality, and Eroticism in a Post-pandemic World
In Sexuality and Eroticism in a Post-pandemic World: Beyond the Biopolitics of the New Normal (Brill, 2023)
Pages: 1–80
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004549388_002
Embodying “The Little Death” of Orgasm: An Interdisciplinary Research on Sexual Trance
In Exploring Sexuality and Spirituality: An Introduction to an Interdisciplinary Field (Brill, 2021)
Pages: 318–386
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004437869_012
Introduction to the Sexuality and Spirituality Field of Research: A History of the Intersections Between Sexuality and Spirituality
In Exploring Sexuality and Spirituality: An Introduction to an Interdisciplinary Field (Brill, 2021)
Pages: 1–54
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004437869_002