Perhaps because our sexuality always includes, at some level, its own internal psychological conflicts. There is an inevitable tension between, on one side, the pleasures of our bodily sensuality, together with the exuberance of our erotic imagination and, on the other side, the inherent necessity of the most fundamental taboo against incest, along with a myriad of additional, superfluous prohibitions and inhibitions imposed on us by religious beliefs, social pressures, and cultural constraints. At some level of analysis, most of life's stories operate around this central question. This basic conflict has been with us since our beginnings. But nowhere has it been more culturally dramatic than here at this millenium's ending.
Sex is paraded everywhere but only as a pervasive titillation.
The forces of sexual intolerance may appear to be receding as prurient material becomes more accessible in different media. But this is only because a more genuine eroticism has already been subverted. Sex on the cultural surface, along with all the condemnations it provokes, actually substitutes for, and deprives us of, the depths of our erotic potential, a more powerful and satisfying pursuit of our diverse bodily pleasures. The brouhaha over Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut illustrates this cultural plight. For it is a movie that inflames our fears of eroticism by presenting sexuality as a destructive force, generated only by the dark impulses of jealousy and the lust for power or possession.