Why is sex taboo?

Humanity used to be very chill about this

Picture a Roman walking past a stone phallus carved into a street corner and doing absolutely nothing about it. No double take. No shielding the kids. Just a regular guy, running a regular errand, walking past a giant protective penis on the wall like it’s a fire hydrant.

None of this was weird or edgy at the time.

• The Venus of Willendorf, carved around 25,000 BCE, is basically a pocket-sized fertility goddess. All hips and breasts, zero embarrassment. She’s not an outlier either: there are over 200 similar figurines scattered across Europe and Siberia.
• Ancient Greeks planted herms at crossroads and front doors, stone pillars with a head on top and an erection in the middle, used as everyday good-luck markers. Romans had the fascinum, a divine phallus used ejaculation to ward off evil.
• In South Asian temples, the Shiva lingam, a cylindrical stone pillar representing Shiva’s generative power, has been a central object of devotion for millennia. Devotees pour milk and flowers over it daily, which is exactly the kind of sentence that would get flagged by a school email filter and yet describes a completely sincere religious practice.

Different continents, different centuries, same basic idea: sex was sacred, not shameful.

Then, at some point, sex became a problem.

Ancient humans: “Sex is cool, actually”

Think about what ancient humans were actually working with. Rain shows up, crops grow. Sex happens, babies appear. No chemistry textbooks, no biology class, no one explaining mechanisms. If you’re piecing together how existence works from scratch, landing on sex as the engine behind all creation is honestly pretty reasonable.

Across the ancient world, culture after culture landed on the same answer: sex is basically divine, let’s build a whole religion around it. Here are a few examples:

Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love, sex, and war, was worshipped for thousands of years. The hymns written in her honor include agricultural metaphors so explicit they would get flagged by Instagram’s content moderation today. Scholars refer to passages where Inanna asks someone to “plow her well-watered field” (side note: 🥵) as sacred poetry. Which, sure, it was. The oldest written love literature on Earth is also, depending on your personal threshold, extremely not safe for work.

Then there were the Dionysian mysteries, built around Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, chaos, and a genuinely good time. His worship involved wine, obviously, but also frenzied dancing, altered states, and groups of women called maenads who would head up into the hills and, by ancient accounts, completely lose themselves in divine possession (iykyk). This was considered religion. Perfectly normal religion. The idea was that you dissolved your individual self into something larger, which sounds either very spiritual or very much like a music festival, depending on your perspective.

When the rites traveled to Rome as Bacchanalia, they caught on fast, possibly because Romans also enjoyed wine and chaos. The Senate, alarmed by what had become a very popular and very unsupervised gathering of citizens in various states of ecstasy, banned them in 186 BCE. The point worth sitting with is that the Senate didn’t ban a party. They banned a religious practice, one that used pleasure, frenzy, and collective dissolution as a way of touching something divine. These people weren’t being depraved. They were doing theology.

The point is: sex used to be almost religious. It explained creation. It connected people to something bigger than themselves.

This was about to become very inconvenient for some people with ambitions.

The church: “Sex is NOT cool, actually”

Every time a new power center needed to consolidate control, regulating sex shot straight to the top of the agenda.

Control who reproduces with whom and you control inheritance, family lines, labor, and loyalty. Who owes what to whom. Who belongs and who doesn’t.

Leviticus 18 and 20 make this logic almost embarrassingly explicit: a detailed list of prohibited sexual combinations, delivered with the calm administrative thoroughness of a municipal zoning code.

• No sex with your sister.
• No sex with your half-sister.
• No sex with your father’s wife.
• No sex with your father’s sister.
• No sex with your mother’s sister.
• No sex with your brother’s wife.
• No sex with your neighbor’s wife.
• No sex with a woman and also her daughter.
• No sex with a woman and also her granddaughter.
• No sex with a woman during menstruation.
• No sex with an animal.
• No man lying with a man as with a woman.

The list goes on, covering a few other categories you probably weren’t considering anyway.

Leviticus wasn’t playing around.

Scholars who read the text as a purity code point out that the prohibitions map almost perfectly onto practices associated with neighboring cultures, the Egyptians and Canaanites Israel was in the process of leaving behind. The message wasn’t really “sex is evil.” It was “their sex makes you one of them, and you are not one of them.”

That was still fairly vanilla.

The religious nuclear option came later courtesy of Augustine of Hippo. In the early 5th century, he landed on an idea so effective it is still quietly running in the background of how Western culture thinks about bodies. Augustine’s argument was simple and devastating: original sin doesn’t pass down through bad behavior. It passes through the wanting. His theory was that, before the Fall, when Adam and Eve ruined everything for the rest of us, humans could have reproduced calmly and rationally. No messy longing, no irrational urges, just sensible reproduction like filing paperwork.

I imagine it like unironically sending a Google Calendar invite titled “Intercourse.”

After the Fall, the desire itself became the problem. He treated marriage as a damage-control institution: permitted for making children, but not something you were supposed to enjoy. The twist was genuinely radical. You didn’t have to do anything wrong. Feeling desire was already the problem. The wanting.

Augustine’s one rule: don’t even THINK about it.

Paul had already set the table for Augustine in 1 Corinthians 7. Celibacy was the ideal. Marriage was basically a concession to people who couldn’t handle themselves. “Better to marry than to burn,” he wrote, which is arguably the least romantic endorsement of marriage in human history.

The thing about the shame system is it only works if you talk about sex CONSTANTLY.

You can’t transmit shame about desire without first describing desire in exhausting detail, cataloguing it, naming every variant, building entire bureaucracies around catching it. Which is exactly what happened next.

God’s Sex Manual

The Church said sex was dangerous, then spent the next thousand years writing about almost nothing else.

Around 1008, a German bishop named Burchard of Worms sat down and wrote out a comprehensive guide to every possible sexual sin, sorted by category, with a matching punishment for each.

• Anal intercourse between men: ten years of fasting.
• Intercourse during menstruation: forty days of fasting.
• Intercourse during pregnancy: forty days of fasting.
• Intercourse with a woman in a non-standard position (i.e., from behind, in the manner of quadrupeds): three years of fasting.
• A woman who has baked bread using her own bodily fluids and fed it to her husband as a love charm, or as I like to call it Erotic Baking: two years of fasting.
• Use of contraceptive herbs or magical preparations to prevent conception: five years of fasting.
• Masturbation: twenty days of fasting for a layman; thirty for a cleric.
• Sexual relations with an animal: ten years of fasting; fifteen if the act was repeated.
• Sexual acts performed inside a church or on consecrated ground: three years of fasting.
• Same-sex acts between women: three years of fasting.
• Intercourse conducted with a nun or consecrated woman: fifteen years of fasting, distributed across alternating periods.
• A woman who performs oral sex on a man and swallows: seven years of fasting, with an additional period of forty days if she did so willingly.

Note: In this context, “fasting” means a formal religious penance: a period during which the sinner was required to abstain from certain foods (typically meat, wine, and rich foods) on set days of the week, usually Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. So “seven years of fasting” doesn’t mean starving for seven straight years. It means living on a restricted diet on designated fast days for seven years. Still a long time to eat sad bread over a blowjob, but not quite as dramatic as it first reads. Also, how many years did YOU get? 😏

The level of detail on that list implies a man who was, professionally speaking, thinking about this constantly. Which is kinda sus if you think about it.

Then in 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council essentially turned marriage into a government department. Every union needed a priest’s sign-off. Secret marriages were penalized. The Church had made reproduction an institutional process with official channels, required paperwork, and absolutely no shortcuts permitted.

The institution that declared sex spiritually ruinous also built the most exhaustive manual of sexual behavior medieval Europe ever produced.

Repression, it turns out, requires paperwork.

Eat your cereal or else you’ll be horny all day

The Church spent a thousand years making sex a spiritual problem. The Victorians secularized it and made it worse.

By the 19th century, God was mostly out of the loop. Shame had new management: medicine, law, and a bone-deep terror of seeming lower class. Respectable people didn’t talk about sex because respectable people had, you know, evolved past that.

“Sex was a poor-person activity.”

The separate spheres doctrine handed women the role of naturally pure, spiritually elevated creatures who presumably just didn’t think about any of that, while men’s sexuality was acknowledged as a dangerous force that needed managing before it ruined the furniture. Women got purity. Men got the problem. Nobody got much fun.

And the whole package got exported abroad by to the new world.

In America, John Harvey Kellogg was solving a problem nobody had asked him to solve, and he was solving it with his entire life. The man never consummated his marriage. He and his wife slept in separate bedrooms. He apparently spent his honeymoon writing a book about the dangers of sex.

(🚩🚩🚩 amirite?)

This was not a phase. This was a philosophy, a career, and apparently also a breakfast strategy.

Kellogg believed, with the full conviction of a man who had given the matter enormous personal thought, that sexual activity of any kind, including masturbation, drained the body, corrupted the spirit, and derailed a person from their higher purpose. The solution, naturally, was diet. Bland food, he reasoned, cooled the passions. Spicy food inflamed them.

In his 1877 book, he catalogued 39 symptoms he pinned on masturbation and prescribed, among other remedies, a deliberately dull, sugar-free cereal designed to make desire give up and go home. That cereal became Corn Flakes. His brother later added sugar. Kellogg was reportedly furious. A man organized his marriage, his medicine, and his menu around a single obsession, and the lasting legacy is a slightly sweet morning snack enjoyed by millions of children. History is something.

The next natural step was for governments to try to cock-block you as well.

The Comstock Act of 1873 made it a federal crime to mail contraceptives or information about them, which meant the U.S. government was now in the business of policing desire through the postal service. Repression had found a bureaucracy.

All of which raises a question: when you spend two centuries telling people to suppress something fundamental, where exactly does it go?

You are your own oppressor now

Into this bureaucratic mess walked Sigmund Freud, who looked at a civilization of sexually repressed, neurotic patients and made a genuinely useful observation: repression causes symptoms.

Push something unbearable into the unconscious and it comes back as anxiety, paralysis, or a very revealing slip of the tongue at dinner.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud argued that civilization only functions because we bottle up our sexual energy and redirect it into socially acceptable activities, things like making art, showing up to work, and asking your coworker how their weekend was. All that redirected desire keeps the lights on, but it also produces a steady background hum of guilt that never fully goes away.

The mechanism responsible is called the superego, which is less a conscience and more a cop you installed inside your own skull. It’s the part of your brain that makes you feel vaguely guilty about a thought before you’ve done anything at all, before you’ve even decided whether you want to do anything. No priest required. No law needed. Just you, judging yourself, preemptively.

And here’s the part that makes it genuinely diabolical: the more you comply with the superego, the STRICTER it gets. Obedience doesn’t satisfy the superego. It just raises its expectations.

The Church used guilt. Governments used laws. Freud just pointed out that at some point you start repressing your own sexual desires, which is cheaper and requires no clergy.

People have tried to break free of all of it.

In 1960, the FDA approved the oral contraceptive pill, which was, in practical terms, one of the most radical things that had ever happened to human sexuality. For the entirety of recorded history, sex and pregnancy had been a package deal. Now they weren’t. Women could, for the first time, separate the act from the consequence, which meant they could have sex on their own terms rather than on biology’s schedule. The pill didn’t just change behavior. It changed the PREMISE.

Then came Stonewall. In the early hours of June 28, 1969, police raided a gay bar in Greenwich Village called the Stonewall Inn, which was such a routine occurrence that nobody expected anything different to happen. What happened instead was that drag queens, gay men, and transgender women fought back, for hours, over multiple nights, and sparked a global movement that would spend the next several decades dismantling the legal and cultural machinery that had criminalized same-sex desire since, well, basically Augustine.

Second-wave feminism arrived around the same time and made a related argument: women’s sexuality belonged to women, not to husbands, not to doctors, not to the state. Roe v. Wade in 1973 put that principle into constitutional law. The same year, a film called “Deep Throat” played in regular movie theaters, not tucked away in raincoat-district adult cinemas, but in ordinary multiplexes, and people went to see it as a date activity.

By the mid-1970s, premarital sex had stopped being a scandal and started being a Tuesday. The revolution, by any reasonable measure, had occurred.

And yet.

The U.S. spent decades pumping federal money into abstinence-only programs that multiple rigorous evaluations found don’t delay sexual initiation by even a day. Instagram still enforces a nipple policy that treats female bodies as inherently more obscene than male ones. Teenagers still police each other with shame that no institution formally taught them.

That’s really the whole story. The official structures got dismantled. The shame just… didn’t leave. The shame machine that it kept running after everyone walked away from it. The priests retired. The inspectors went home. The superego just… stayed.

Now there’s just you, judging yourself.