I don't think I need to tell you that in a very special and peculiar way, Western man
 is hung up on sex.
 And the major reason for this is that he has a religious background quite unique among
 the religions of the world.
 I'm thinking specifically of Christianity and in a secondary way Judaism, in so far
 as Judaism in Europe and the United States is strongly influenced by Christianity.
 But Christianity is, of all religions in the world, the one uniquely preoccupied with sex.
 More so than priapism, more so than tantric yoga, more so than any kind of fertility cult
 which has ever existed on the face of the earth.
 There has never, never, never been a religion in which sexuality was so important.
 And there are certain very simple standards by which this can be judged.
 In popular speech when you say of a given person that he or she is living in sin, you
 know very well that you do not mean that they are engaged in a business to defraud the public
 by the sale of badly made bread or anything of that kind.
 You know that they're not setting up a check forgery business.
 No.
 People who are living in sin are people who have an irregular sexual partnership.
 In the same way when you say something is immoral, it pretty much means that it's something
 sexually irregular.
 I remember when I was a boy in school, we used to have a preacher.
 He came to us every year, the same man once a year, and he always talked on the subject
 of drink, gambling, and immorality.
 I remember the way he rolled it round his tongue and it was very clear what immorality
 was.
 And also, I might point out, that Present Company accepted the Unitarian Church being
 somewhat unusual.
 Most churches in America and in England and in other parts of the Western world are frankly
 sexual regulation societies.
 They occasionally get excited about other moral issues, but really not very much.
 In other words, when you ask what can people get kicked out of church for, let's suppose
 you consider important ministers, bishops, priests, and so on, they can live in envy,
 hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness and be in perfectly good standing.
 But the moment anything about their sexual life becomes a little unusual, out you go.
 And that's about the only thing you can go out for.
 You study, for example, a Roman Catholic manual of moral theology.
 These manuals of moral theology are technical books about sins of all kinds, just exactly
 what they are, how they're done, how grave they are, mostly for the advice of confessors.
 And they're always arranged according to the Ten Commandments.
 And when they get to the commandment, "Thou shalt not commit adultery," the volume expands
 like this.
 In fact, it occupies two-thirds of the whole book, all the details.
 So we have, in a very special way, got sex on the brain, which isn't exactly the right
 place for it.
 Now this needs going into, because it is not as simple as it looks.
 There are really two roots of the whole problem.
 One of them is the problem of why sexual pleasure of all pleasures, as a kind of really supreme
 pleasure, is singled out for religious people to be particularly afraid of.
 This is not only true in Christianity.
 I say Christianity emphasizes it in a certain way.
 But in Asian religions also, especially in India, there is a prevailing view that if
 you want to attain real heights of spirituality, the one thing you must give up is sexuality,
 in the ordinary sense of genital sexual relationships with man or woman, as the case may be.
 And this reflects in part, you see, an attitude to the physical world, because it is, after
 all, through sexuality that we have, along with eating, our most fundamental relationship
 to materiality, to nature, to the physical universe.
 And it is the point at which we can become most attached to the body, to the physical
 organism, to material life.
 That's one reason why it's problematic.
 The other reason why it's problematic is more subtle, and that is that sexuality is something
 which you cannot get rid of.
 Do what you may, life is sexual, in the sense, for example, that you are either male or female.
 There are various other gradations, but basically there are forms of maleness and femaleness.
 And also that every one of you is the result of sexual intercourse.
 And this feature of life can be looked at in one of two ways.
 You can say on the one hand that all man's higher ideals, his spirituality and so forth,
 is simply repressed sexuality.
 Or on the other hand, you can say that human sexuality is a manifestation, a particular
 form or expression of what is spiritual, metaphysical, divine, or whatever you want to call it.
 I hold to the latter view.
 I don't think that religion is repressed sexuality.
 I think, however, that sexuality is just one of the many forms in which whatever all this
 is expresses itself.
 But you see, if this thing is something you cannot get rid of, and if you realize that
 indeed a way of life in which sexuality is in some way put down or repressed is nonetheless
 an expression of sexuality, then we come to a view of a religion in which sex is a very
 special taboo, which is rather unusual.
 It's normally said, you see, yes, that Christianity is a religion in which sex is taboo.
 And this has simply no getting around it.
 I know up-to-date ministers today think sex is all right.
 It's perfectly OK if you're married and you've got a mature relationship with a woman.
 It's all right.
 They kind of damn it with faint praise.
 But if you read anything of Christian writings prior, shall we say, to 1850, to set a date
 rather arbitrarily, you will find that it's not all right, not at all.
 It's tolerated between married couples and strictly for the procreation of children.
 But on the whole, to do without it is best.
 As St. Paul put it, it's better to marry than to burn, to burn with the fire of lust and
 ultimately to burn in hell.
 But always, consistently, there is simply no getting away from it.
 In all the writings of the Church Fathers, from St. Paul himself right through to St.
 Ignatius Loyola or any of the great relatively modern leaders of Catholic spirituality, or
 you can look at Calvin, you can look at great Protestants, John Knox, on the whole, sex
 is sin and sex is dirt.
 And you can say very simply that this is all bad and something very wrong, but I want to
 point out that there is another side to all this.
 There is no way of making a hedge grow like pruning it.
 There is no way of making sex interesting like repressing it.
 And as a result of all these centuries of sexual repression and associating it with
 dirt, the West has developed a peculiar form of eroticism.
 But that is an aspect of this whole problem which I don't think is really very profitable
 to explore.
 I just want to mention it in passing, that the whole attitude of anti-sexuality in the
 Christian tradition is not as anti as it looks.
 It is simply a method of making sex prurient and exciting in a kind of dirty way.
 And I suppose it's to be recommended for people who are not feeling very frisky and need to
 be pepped up.
 The other side of the problem is much more interesting.
 That is to say, the first thing I mentioned, why it is that there has been a problem for
 human beings about pleasure.
 And we'll take sexual activity as a supreme pleasure, as a supreme involvement of oneself
 with the body and with the physical world.
 Why should there be a problem here?
 Well the point is simply, isn't it, that the physical world is transient, it's impermanent,
 it falls apart.
 And bodies that were once strong, smooth and lovely in youth begin to wither and become
 corrupt and turn at last into skeletons.
 And if you cling on to one of those and it suddenly turns into a skeleton in your hand,
 as it will if you speed up your sense of time a little, you feel cheated.
 And there has been for centuries a lament about this, that life is so short that all
 the beauties of this world fall apart.
 And therefore if you are wise, you don't set your heart on mortal beauty, but you set
 on heart, your heart on spiritual values that are imperishable.
 Even that supposed tipler and rake Omar Khayyam says that the worldly hope men set their hearts
 upon turns ashes or it prospers, and an on-like snow upon the desert's dusty face, lighting
 a little hour or two is gone.
 And so don't bet on that horse.
 And read any kind of spiritual literature you want to, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist,
 all of them seem to emphasize the importance of detachment from the body, from the physical
 world, so that you won't be engulfed in the stream of impermanence.
 The idea being, you see, that to the degree that you identify yourself with the body and
 with the pleasures of the body, to that degree you are simply going to be something that
 is sucked away in the course of transiency.
 So therefore hold yourself aloof.
 As in, for example, the advice of many Hindus in the practice of yoga, you are advised to
 look upon all sensory experiences as something out there, which you simply witness.
 View yourself, identify yourself with the eternal, spiritual, unchanging self, the witness
 of all that goes on, but who is no more involved in it than, say, the smoothness or the color
 of a mirror is affected by the things which it reflects.
 Keep your mind like a mirror, pure and clean, free from dust, free from flaws, free from
 stain, and just reflect everything that goes on, but don't be attached.
 You will find this all over the place.
 But it has always seemed to me that that attitude of essential detachment from the physical
 universe has underlying it a very serious problem, the problem being why a physical
 universe at all in that case?
 If God is in some way responsible for the existence of a creation, and if this creation
 is basically a snare, why did he do it?
 And of course, according to some theologies, the physical universe is looked upon as a
 mistake, as a fall from the divine state, as if something went wrong in the heavenly
 domain, and causing spirits such as we are to fall from their highest state and to become
 involved with animal bodies.
 And so there is an ancient analogy of man which runs right through to the present time,
 that your relationship to your body is that of a rider to a horse.
 Saint Francis called his body "brother ass."
 That you are a rational soul in charge of an animal body.
 And therefore, if you belong to the old-fashioned school, you beat it into submission, as St.
 Paul said, "I beat my body into submission."
 Or if you are a Freudian, you treat your horse not with a whip, but with lumps of sugar.
 Kindly.
 But still it's your horse.
 Even in Freud, there is a very, very strong element of Puritanism.
 Read Philip Rief's book on Freud, The Mind of the Moralist, and how he shows that Freud
 basically thought that sex was degrading, but nevertheless something biologically unavoidable,
 something terribly necessary, which couldn't just be swept aside.
 It had to be dealt with.
 But there is, you see, that heritage of thinking of ourselves as divided, the ego as the rational
 soul of spiritual origin, and the physical body as the animal component.
 And therefore, all success in life, spiritual success, requires the spiritualization of
 the animal component, the sublimation of its dirty and strange urges, so that it's thoroughly
 cleaned up.
 I suppose the ideal sexual relationship of such persons would be held on an operating
 table under disinfectant sprays.
 Now it is of course true that the physical world, its beauty, and so on, is transient.
 We are all falling apart in some way or another, especially after you pass the peak of youth.
 Well it's never struck me that that is something to gripe about, that the physical world is
 transient seems to me to be part of its splendor.
 I can imagine nothing more awful than, say, attaining to the age of thirty and suddenly
 being frozen in that age for always and always.
 You would become a kind of--we would all be a sort of animated waxworks.
 And you would discover, as a matter of fact, that people who had that physical permanence
 would feel like plastic.
 And that is, as a matter of fact, what is going to be done about us by technology in
 order to attain perpetual youth.
 All the parts of us that decay and fold up are going to be replaced by very skillfully
 manufactured plastic parts.
 So that in the end we will be entirely made of very, very sophisticated plastic.
 And everybody will feel like that.
 And everybody will be utterly bored with each other.
 Because the very fact, you see, that the world is always decaying and always falling away
 is the same thing as its vitality.
 Vitality is change.
 Life is death.
 It is always falling apart.
 And so there are certain supreme moments, you see, at which in the body we attain superb
 vitality.
 And that's the time.
 Make it then.
 That's the moment, just like when an orchestra is playing, the conductor wants to get a certain
 group of, say, violins to come in at a certain moment, and he's conducting, and he's got
 to now make it.
 And they all have to go "ffff" right now, you see?
 Of course.
 That's the whole art of life.
 To do it at the right time.
 To do it in time, like you dance or you play in time.
 And so in the same way, when it comes to love, sexuality, or equally so, in all the pleasures
 of gastronomy, timing is of the essence.
 And then it's happened, and you've had it.
 But that's not something that one should look upon with regret.
 It only is something regrettable if you didn't know how to take it when it was timely.
 And this is really the essence of what I want to talk to you about.
 Because you see, to be detached from the world, in the sense that Buddhists and Taoists and
 Hindus will often talk about detachment, does not mean to be non-participative.
 You can have a sexual life very rich and very full, and yet all the time be detached.
 By that I don't mean that you just go through it mechanically and have your thoughts elsewhere.
 I mean a complete participation, but still detached.
 And the difference of the two attitudes is this.
 On the one hand, there is a way of being so anxious about physical pleasure, so afraid
 that you won't make it, that you grab it too hard.
 That you just have to have that thing.
 And if you do that, you destroy it completely.
 And therefore, after every attempt to get it, you feel disappointed.
 You feel empty, you feel something was lost.
 And therefore you want it again.
 You have to keep repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, because you never really got there.
 And it's this that is the hang-up.
 This is what is meant by attachment to this world, in an evil sense.
 But on the other hand, pleasure in its fullness cannot be experienced when one is grasping
 it.
 I knew a little girl to whom someone gave a bunny rabbit.
 She was so delighted with the bunny rabbit and so afraid of losing it, that taking it
 home in the car, she squeezed it to death with love.
 And lots of parents do that to their children, and lots of spouses do it to each other.
 They hold on too hard.
 And so take the life out of this transient, beautifully fragile thing that life is.
 To have it, to have life, and to have its pleasure, you must at the same time let go
 of it.
 And then you can feel perfectly free to have that pleasure in the most gutsy, rollicking,
 earthy, lip-licking way.
 One's whole being taken over by a kind of undulative, convulsive ripple, which is like
 the very pulse of life itself.
 This can happen only if you let go.
 If you are willing to be abandoned.
 It's funny that word, "abandon."
 We speak of people who are dissolute as being abandoned, but we can also use "abandon" as
 the characteristic of a saint.
 A great spiritual book by a Jesuit father is called "Abandonment to the Divine Providence."
 There are people like that, who just aren't hung up.
 They are the poor in spirit.
 That is to say, they spiritually are poor in the sense they don't cling on to any property.
 They don't carry burdens around.
 They're free.
 Well just that sort of spiritual poverty, that let-go-ness, is quite essential for the
 enjoyment of any kind of pleasure at all, and particularly sexual pleasure.
 Now when I was a boy in school, I'll go back to this, because my experience may not be
 – I don't know how typical it would be of children brought up in the United States
 in a religious environment, but my experience in England was quite fascinating.
 You know, when one is baptized as a child, and you don't know anything about it, and
 your godfathers and godmothers are your sponsors, then there comes a time when you are about
 to enter into puberty, when you are confirmed.
 When you undertake for yourself your own baptismal vows that were made on behalf of you.
 And in England, confirmation into the Church of England, which is Episcopalian in this
 country, confirmation is preceded by instruction.
 And this instruction consisted very largely of lessons in Church history, because the
 British approach to religion is peculiarly archaeological.
 It is based on the great past, the great Christian saints and heroes.
 And it's really quite interesting, because it somehow associates you, puts you in the
 tradition of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and all that sort of thing.
 But the time comes when every candidate for confirmation has a private talk with a school
 chaplain.
 And obviously, in every process of initiation into mysteries, from time immemorial, there
 has been the passing on of a secret.
 And so there's a certain anticipation about this very private communication, because you
 would think if you are being initiated into a religion, what the secret consists of is
 some marvelous information about the nature of God, or the fundamental reason for being,
 and so on.
 But not so in this case.
 The initiatory secret talk was a serious lecture on the evils of masturbation.
 What these evils were were not clearly specified.
 But it was vaguely hinted that ghastly diseases would result.
 And so we used to, sort of in a perverse way, enjoy tormenting ourselves with imaginations
 as to what kind of terrible venereal diseases, epilepsy, tuberculosis, and the great Siberian
 itch, would result from this practice.
 Now the extraordinary thing about it is this, that the very chaplain who gave these lectures
 had in his own upbringing been given the same lecture by other chaplains, and this went
 back some distance in history, I imagine.
 And they all knew perfectly well that one of the characteristic behavior patterns of
 adolescence is ritual defiance of authority.
 But you have to make some protest against authority, and in this you are in league with
 all your contemporaries, your peer group.
 And nobody, of course, would dream of giving anybody else away, because that would be to
 be a tattletale, a skunk, definitely not one of the boys.
 And so therefore, quite obviously, masturbation provided the ideal outlet for this ritual
 defiance because it was fun, it was also an assertion of masculinity, and it was very,
 very wicked.
 So I meditated on this some time as to why the system continued, and I came to the realization
 that the Christian put-down of sex is an extremely mysterious thing.
 In the religious background of the Western world, we have in the main two traditions,
 one Semitic and one Greek.
 So far as the Semitic tradition is concerned, the material world and sexuality are definitely
 good things.
 Both Jews and Muslims think that God's creation of beautiful women was a grand idea.
 In the Arabic book, which is their Islamic version of the Kama Sutra, known as the Perfumed
 Garden, the book opens with a prayer to Allah, which is a thanksgiving, a very full, detailed
 thanksgiving for the loveliness of women, with which Allah has blessed mankind.
 And in the book of Proverbs, we are enjoined to enjoy our wives while they are young.
 But on the whole, it is the Semitic belief that sexuality is justified solely for purposes
 of reproduction of the species.
 This makes it good in the eyes of God, and sexual energy should not really be wasted
 for other purposes.
 That's the limitation put on it.
 Now on the other hand, we have a Greek tradition, which is peculiar in that it is strongly influenced
 by a dualistic view of the universe, in which material existence is conceived as a trap,
 as a fall into turgid, clogging matter, which is antagonistic to the lightness and freedom
 of the spirit.
 And therefore, for certain kinds of Greek religion, among which we must name the Orphic
 Mysteries, the Neoplatonic point of view, and the late Agnostic points of view, being
 saved means being delivered from material existence into a purely spiritual state.
 From this point of view, sexual involvement is the very archetype of material involvement.
 Martyr, mother, matter, matter, are really the same word.
 And so the love of woman is the great snare.
 This is incidentally a doctrine invented by men.
 And it goes back to the words of Adam, "The woman that thou gavest me, she tempted me,
 and I did eat."
 Now in the development of Christian theology, from approximately the time of St. Paul through
 the beginning of the Renaissance, it was universally held that sex was a bad thing.
 You should read St. Augustine on this.
 He said that in the Garden of Eden before the fall, reproduction took place in just
 the same way and with just the same lack of excitement as one excretes or passes water,
 and there was no shameful excitation of the sexual parts.
 And the whole attitude of the Church Fathers in those centuries was that the virgin state
 was immensely superior spiritually to the married state, and that sexual relationships
 were excusable only within the bonds of marriage and for the sole purposes of reproduction.
 And the manual, the moral penitentiaries of the theologians of the Middle Ages, list all
 sorts of penances that must be said even by married couples who performed sexual intercourse
 on the night before attending Mass, were still before receiving Holy Communion, and of course
 it must utterly be avoided on certain great Church festivals.
 So although in theory marriage is a sacrament which somehow blesses this peculiar relationship,
 there is a definite attitude that it is after all dirty and not very nice.
 Now you must realize too that in those days the institution of marriage was not what it
 is today.
 Marriage at the time of the rise and development of Christianity was a social institution for
 alliances between families.
 You did not marry the person of your own choice except under the most peculiar circumstances.
 You married the girl your family picked out for you, and they thought it over carefully
 from its political point of view as well as from the point of view of eugenics, and whether
 this was a good healthy girl and whether this was a good healthy man, and they had an economic
 bargaining about it, and you married this girl.
 You weren't necessarily in love with her.
 And it was perfectly well understood in the secular world that on the side you had other
 arrangements.
 You had, if you could afford them, concubines, or even second and third and fourth wives.
 And these subsidiary wives were—there was a somewhat more choice open to you in getting
 those than in the first one, the first one is definitely a family arrangement.
 Now that's the context of it, don't forget that.
 So what the Church was saying was only that woman should be your bedfellow whose marriage
 has been arranged by paternal authority.
 The idea of romantic love does not arise in connection with marriage until the troubadour
 cults of southern France, of Provence, in the late Middle Ages, when there begins to
 be this idea of the idealization of a woman as the inspiring goddess, almost, of the knight-errant.
 Dantes Beatrice is the inspiring woman who leads him to heaven.
 Now historians are not agreed as to whether the lady-loves of the chivalrous knights were
 in fact their mistresses, or whether they were simply idealized women.
 But the influence of the cult of romantic love on the West was profound.
 And it brought about a weird combination of ideas.
 One, the notion of the married state being the only licit relationship in which sexual
 play might be carried on.
 And two, the notion that the girl you marry should be the one you've fallen in love with.
 Two more ill-adjusted ideas would hardly be put together.
 Because naturally when you love someone very much indeed, in the enthusiasm and ardor of
 youth, you say things that are hardly logical or rational.
 You stand up before an altar and you say, "My darling, my sweetheart, my perfect pet,
 I adore you so much that I will live with you forever and ever until death do us part."
 And that's the way you feel at the time.
 In a rather similar mood, ancient peoples would hail their kings and say, "Oh king,
 live forever."
 Obviously, this was not literally meant.
 They were just wishing him a long life.
 But to live forever, no sir, no mortal does that.
 So the trouble was, you see, that when certain kinds of extravagant poetic expressions got
 in the hands of people like Augustine and Tertullian, who were rather influenced by
 Roman literalness, they wrote it into the law books.
 And so this amazing situation came about.
 But we still have not fully explored the subtlety of it.
 Let us consider certain periods when this attitude of prudism towards sexuality was
 in an ascendancy.
 Nearest to our times is the bourgeois revolution, you might call it, in Victorian England and
 the United States.
 We all say "Victorian" as an adjective to indicate grandi-ism, extreme monogamy, a definite
 disgust for all things sexual.
 And yet, when we really go into the history of the Victorian period, we find that it was
 an extremely lascivious epoch.
 One has only to look at the lushness of Victorian furniture to realize that chairs are disguised
 women, that the way even piano legs are shaped—I mean, this kind of thing is throughout Victorian
 art forms—and the conduct of the British aristocracy during that period beggared description.
 People like Freud and Havelock Ellis made a certain mistake.
 They said about the Church and about religion in general that it was nothing but a form
 of sublimated sex.
 They said these people, for curious reasons, suppress sex, and therefore it becomes a very
 powerful force for them.
 You must remember, of course, that they worked on a hydraulic analogy of human psychology,
 that they liken it all to a river—if you dammed it up, it would burst the dam.
 It doesn't actually follow that human psychology is hydraulic, but this is the metaphor they
 used.
 Now, they said the Church has repressed sex, but actually, if you look at its symbolism,
 it is nothing but an expression of sex.
 Nothing is reduced to libido as the fundamental reality.
 And the Church replied, "It's nothing of the kind.
 We deny this.
 We think that this reduction of everything to sex is just a way of attacking holy things,
 and on the contrary, we would say that people who are fascinated with sex and make it their
 god are repressing religion."
 Now the problem in this debate—everybody missed the boat.
 The Church should have been in a position to say to Freud, "Well, of course.
 Thank you very much.
 Yes, indeed, our symbolism is sexual.
 The steeples on our churches, the vesicle-shaped windows and heraldic shields on which we put
 images of the crucifix or the virgin mother of God—these are all quite plainly sexual.
 But you see, the sexual biology, in its turn, reveals the mysteries of the universe.
 Sex is not mere sex.
 Sex is a holy thing and is one of the most marvelous revelations of the divine."
 But imagine the Church just couldn't say that.
 If you look at Tibetan Buddhist iconography, their images, or you look in Hindu temples,
 you will find things that Europeans and Americans have never been able to understand.
 Here are images of Buddhas and of the gods engaged in amazing diversions with their female
 counterparts.
 And everybody thinks that these are kind of dirty sculptures.
 Now they're nothing of the kind.
 They are saying to the people who look at them, "The play of man and woman is on that
 level, on the level of biology, a reflection of the fundamental play of the cosmos.
 The play of the positive and negative principles, of the light and the dark, of the mental and
 the material, they all play together.
 And the function of sexual play is not merely the survival and utilitarian function of reproducing
 the species, as it is among animals to a very large extent.
 What peculiarly distinguishes human sexuality is that it brings the partners closer and
 closer to each other in an intense state of united feeling.
 In other words, it is a sacrament, the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual
 grace bringing about love.
 And so, if that is peculiar to human beings, it is perfect nonsense to degrade human sexuality
 by saying it should only be carried on in the way that the animals do theirs, because
 they have not yet, as it were, evolved to the place where sex is the sacramental expression
 of man and woman's love.
 And love, in that sense, is a kind of enthusiasm, which means a being possessed by the divine,
 falling in love, although considered by practical people to be a sort of madness, is actually
 the same sort of thing as the mystical vision, a grace.
 And in its light, we see people in their divine aspect, when, as the song says, "Every little
 breeze whispers Louise," there is a sort of extraordinary state of mystical intoxication
 in which the ideal woman has become the goddess, which is, from one point of view, what every
 woman is, if you see her with the scales of your eyes.
 And likewise, every man, seen with the scales of her eyes.
 So what happened then, as a result of this historical situation, was mutual name-calling
 between the proponents of religion and the proponents of scientific naturalism, such
 as Freud and Havelock Ellis, and in our own times Albert Ellis, and people of that kind.
 They've never got together, because they've never understood.
 Neither the Church, nor the opponents of the Church, have clearly understood that the secret
 or unconscious motivation of sexual repression is to make it all the more interesting.
 And on the other side, it has not been clearly understood that the sexual biology, and all
 that goes with it, is a figuring forth on the level of biology, of what the whole universe
 is about.
 Ecstatic play.
 So as a result, there has been a kind of compromise.
 Today in ecclesiastical circles, sex is being damned with faint praise.
 People are saying, after all, yes, sex was made by God, and we should remember the Jewish
 point of view, and it is perhaps for something more than reproduction, to bring about the
 cementing of the marriage ties between husband and wife.
 But, still in practice, it remains the frightening taboo.
 On the other hand, the opposition to Christian prudery goes overboard, and always moves in
 the direction of total license.
 You see, what's going on is a contest between the people who want the skirts pulled down
 to the floor, and the people who want them pulled up to the neck.
 And you know, you've got to draw the line somewhere.
 But the play between these forces is, where are we going to draw it?
 Well, that's very exciting.
 Provide neither side wins.
 I mean, imagine what it would be like if the Libertines won.
 And they took over the church, so that on Wednesday evenings, the young Presbyterian
 group would meet for prayer through sex.
 Every child would go to the school physician for a course in hygienics, and they would
 have classes, and they'd have plastic models, and all the children would do it in class,
 in very clean, hygienic circumstances, all sprayed with rubbing alcohol.
 Everything would be fine.
 Imagine how boring it would all become.
 So you see, the people who say, "No, modesty is important," have something right about
 them.
 But they mustn't be allowed to get away with it.
 But they mustn't be obliterated.
 You see, life works that way.
 Let's take an entirely different analogy.
 Let's take a given biological group, a species we'll call A. It has a natural enemy, B.
 Now one day, A gets furious at the natural enemy, B, and says, "Let's obliterate it."
 And they gather their forces, and they knock out their natural enemy.
 Well, suddenly, after a while, they begin to get weak.
 They get overpopulated.
 There's nobody around to eat up their surplus creatures, and they don't have to keep their
 muscles tensed against any enemy, and they begin to fall apart, because they destroyed
 their enemy.
 What they should do is cultivate the enemy.
 That's the real meaning of "love your enemy."
 There is such a thing as a beloved enemy.
 And if you don't have a beloved enemy—in other words, if the flies and the spiders
 don't go together, there's going to be too many spiders or too many flies.
 And these balances keep the course of nature going.
 Well, it's exactly the same thing as between the libertines and the prudes.
 They need each other.
 And you should thank—if you've got a prudish father and mother, you should be very grateful
 to them for having made sex so interesting.
 So don't defy them completely.
 Don't go around campus with placards bearing four-letter words, because that's going to
 spoil the show.
 But every generation must react to the one before, you see, to keep this tension going.
 And it is by this tension, this play of the opposites, that we have the love that makes
 the world go round.
 [laughter]
 [laughter]
 (audience laughing)


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