Sex is the one appetite our culture discusses endlessly and seems to understand the least. We have pornography at a scale no previous civilisation could have imagined, dating apps that reduce courtship to logistics, and a wellness industry selling sacred sexuality weekends for the price of a holiday. All of it circles the same act. Very little of it touches what the act can become.
Begin with the most common entry point, because it shapes more adult sexuality than any other single influence. Pornography trains the nervous system to associate arousal with spectatorship rather than touch. The mechanism is simple and it acts directly on the nervous system: novelty produces dopamine, dopamine produces wanting, and wanting produces the next search. What gets conditioned is not desire for a person but desire for a state, and the state requires escalation to stay interesting. Anyone who has spent years inside that loop knows the trajectory. The material that once worked stops working, and the appetite grows in proportion to the emptiness it leaves behind. Even the more conscious platforms that emphasise ethics and consent still feed into the same mechanism—they refine the object of desire without altering the pursuit.
I'm writing about this territory not as someone outside it looking in, but as someone who's had to work through it from the inside. Like every other man, I've had to grapple with the intense sexual programming we've been conditioned with, and with the natural biological urge that lives within. For me as a man, it was hard not to feel shame around my sexuality and my sexual needs. That shame is particularly conditioned into the collective by thousands of years of indoctrination by religious institutions, and although those structures are no longer operational as they once were, the deep programming lingers in the unconscious and requires undoing. Part of my process was releasing these conditions around sexuality while simultaneously avoiding the pendulum swing into what we see today—sexuality as a free-for-all of intense experience without direction or deeper meaning. The task is not to reject the body or give in to it without reserve, but rather to hold the middle ground: no shame around the bodily function, and the capacity to express it in a creative way.
This is where the article is headed because understanding what's actually being sought in sex changes everything. If you don't know what you're seeking and if you don't understand the mechanism behind the charge, you'll keep running in circles.
What Fantasy Is Pointing At
Every erotic fantasy is effectively a message about something missing, and the message is rarely about the person in the fantasy.
Jung's account of the anima and animus supplies the mechanism. A person carries an unconscious opposite within them—the anima for men, the animus for women—and when that dimension goes unrecognised it seeks expression outside. It lands on a partner, a stranger, an image on a screen, and the charge it carries is enormous because it belongs to an unlived half of the psyche rather than to the actual person it appears to be about. This is projection, and it explains why fantasy intensifies in proportion to how much of the inner opposite has been disowned. The more disconnected a person is from their own feeling, receptivity, and capacity for surrender, the more extravagant the erotic image becomes. The fantasy compensates for an absence, and it inflates to fill the space.
The fantasy essentially acts as a compass. It points to a union that has to occur inwardly first, between the conscious self and the inner opposite it has exiled. Chase the image instead and the loop tightens. The projection lands on someone real, and she or he fails to be the archetype. Disappointment follows, and the search restarts with the charge undiminished. The alternative is slower and less glamorous. It means dismantling the projection deliberately, tolerating the deflation that comes with it, and meeting an actual person as an actual person rather than as the carrier of an inner figure. Genuine erotic contact requires two people, and projection only ever involves one.
Sex can also function as dissociation for women as well as men. When it's sought from a place of unprocessed pain, the intensity does the work that anaesthesia does, and the more charged the encounter, the less of oneself has to be present for it. For many women the appetite feels like vitality when what it's often doing is holding the door shut on grief or rage. Women are socialised to prioritise the partner's pleasure, to read sex as relational maintenance rather than personal desire, to equate availability with worth. That training makes sex a perfect vessel for avoidance. For men the incessant appetite feels like power when what it's often doing is numbing a deeper layer of shame and other complexed emotions. Both patterns lead to the same emptiness, and both use the same mechanism—seeking intensity that bypasses what needs to be felt.
What the Eastern Traditions Understood
This is where the traditions offer something the contemporary landscape cannot. Tantra is the tradition most invoked and least understood in the West. Its sexual practices belonged to a ritual technology embedded in initiation, lineage, vows, and years of preparation, and the aim was realisation of non-duality rather than pleasure or intimacy as such. Practitioners projected the divine feminine onto the consort and honoured her as the goddess, which sounds like the projection described above and differs from it in one crucial respect. It was undertaken knowingly, inside a container, with a teacher overseeing the process and a framework that gave the projection somewhere to go. The yogi was not mistaking his partner for a goddess. He was practising perceiving the divine through her, which is a different operation entirely.
Taoist sexual cultivation is more pragmatic and treats energy as a resource. The classical texts describe jing, essence, as something expended through loss of bodily fluids and conserved through practice. The Su Nü Jing, a text in dialogue form between the Yellow Emperor and his female advisers, sets out methods for regulating ejaculation, harmonising yin and yang, and drawing sexual energy upward for circulation through the body. It also insists that the woman be satisfied, since her pleasure was understood to generate essence the man could then absorb. Dual cultivation, in which two partners circulate energy together, developed from this base.
Two details matter for what follows. The classical tradition warned against abstinence rather than recommending it. One line from the Classic of Su Nu observes that by abstaining from intercourse the spirit has no opportunity for expansiveness and yin and yang are cut off from one another. And these arts were never universal. Some Taoist sects practised them and others disapproved, and they existed in many forms across many centuries rather than one coherent system. Much of the surviving material was written with male longevity as its primary concern, which is worth remembering whenever it gets presented as a ready-made template for mutual sacred union.
The internal correlate is the circulation practice I described in my article on the energetic body. Solo cultivation of the microcosmic orbit builds the capacity to move energy deliberately, and that capacity is what makes partnered circulation possible later. The order matters, and it matters now more than ever because the sequence has been scrambled by those who want the result without the training.
The East-West Split
This is where the borrowing gets complicated. The traditions that developed these practices did so inside psyches formed by very different conditions. Ours was shaped by a religion that split spirit from flesh and assigned the flesh to sin, by a philosophy that divided mind from body, and by a romantic tradition that turned love into an idealising religion of its own. The projective mechanism is not a defect we can correct. It's structural, and it's built into how we fall in love.
The yogi's method therefore doesn't transfer cleanly. He operated inside a cosmology where the goddess was real, the ritual was prescribed, and the teacher could tell him what he was experiencing. We operate inside a culture that offers no such frame, and a person who tries to simply stop projecting will find the projection relocating rather than dissolving. It resurfaces in the teacher, the practice, the attainment. I don't believe we overcome the projective mechanism. I believe we work with it, knowingly, over years, alongside a partner doing the same work from their side. That is the realistic path for the Western psyche, and it's the one I'm advocating.
The Modern Distortion
Because we lack the container those traditions assumed, the practices get extracted and sold as techniques. Without the cosmology, the ritual becomes materialistic. Contemporary masculinity and wellness culture has picked up the Taoist material and sold it as a shortcut. Semen retention, sexual transmutation, the promise of magnetism and boundless energy, all of it packaged for engagement. Some of the underlying observations are sound. Chronic compulsive ejaculation alongside porn consumption does flatten something, and people who stop do in fact notice a change. The distortion lies in what gets claimed for the practice.
Retention as a spiritual technique is legitimate within its original context, but it requires years of training under supervision and fails most people who try it without that foundation. Release as a biological function is healthy, and suppressing it in pursuit of activation mistakes a technique for an end. The problem isn't ejaculation itself but when it's driven by compulsion and porn rather than deeper authentic connection. Keep that distinction clear and you avoid the error of selling retention as universally superior or release as inherently damaging.
The online version of these teachings skips the sequence and promises the endpoint, and the results are predictable: chronic pelvic tension, obsessive preoccupation with the practice itself, frustration, and sometimes a rebound into the very compulsivity the person was trying to escape. What's being sold now is often the oldest error dressed anew: the individual maximising an experience, this time with spiritual vocabulary attached. Whether the pursuit is compulsive release or disciplined retention, both can become solitary fixations that mistake internal intensity for genuine depth.
Celibacy in relation to the cultivation of sexual energy deserves a place here as a legitimate path rather than a deficiency. Monastic traditions East and West have treated it as a serious route into the same territory, and the internal circulation practices are its natural energetic companion. It isn't my path and it isn't what I'd recommend to most people in the West. For someone with a genuine temperamental pull toward it, it's a real option, provided it's done with seriousness and the ability to sustain the internal work without collapsing into repression.
Cultivating Sacred Partnership
Everything above converges on a claim that runs against the grain of how most people approach relationships. The depth available between two people is manufactured, slowly, through work that looks nothing like romance. This is where projection exhausts itself and what's left is what actually matters.
Trust of the kind required here takes years. It's built through the unglamorous business of two people examining their own shadow in each other's presence, catching projections as they arise and naming them, working through the power dynamics every relationship carries and most never address, and repairing ruptures rather than patching them up. This is the hard part, and it's precisely the part that creates the opening. A depth of truth between two people produces a capacity for a depth of experience that otherwise stays entirely locked. Safety of that order rests on the ability to trust that what surfaces will be met consciously rather than exploited, and that trust is what allows the depth to be entered at all. This level of trust takes time.
This ins’t theoretical for me. After years of working through my trauma, my 12-year long relationship became the laboratory where theory met practice. It involved having children, but more importantly it involved working through very deep complexes that when they were active we wanted to have nothing to do with one another—the charge was so strong. However by patiently working through them we have broken through new ground and this has contributed massively to the relationship. What looked like incompatibility turned out to be two people using each other as mirrors for material neither could access alone. The work wasn't pretty. It required staying present when every instinct screamed to withdraw. But it produced something that wouldn't exist otherwise.
Projection dissolves in this process rather than being defeated by it. A person who has spent years being seen accurately by a partner, including in the places they'd rather not be seen, gradually loses the ability to treat that person as a screen. The other person becomes too differentiated. Once she or he is genuinely other, the erotic charge changes character. It stops being the inflation of an inner figure and becomes something existing between two actual people, which is a wholesome and more durable thing.
Both partners must do this work. A man integrating his anima is meaningless if the woman beside him hasn't integrated her animus, and vice versa. The dyad only opens when both sides have withdrawn enough projection to meet without needing the other to carry their unlived self. This is where sacred partnership becomes possible—not as a state of perfection but as a capacity for depth between two people.
Sacred Sexuality
As this work deepens, the subtle body comes online within the relationship. This is the development that changes the act itself. During intercourse the energy field becomes perceptible, and what was previously a physical event with emotional colouring becomes something you can feel moving. Circulation practices learned alone become available together, and the two fields begin to form a circuit rather than running in parallel. This is the territory the Taoists called dual cultivation and what contemporary couple tantra attempts to teach.
However, rather than following a strict discipline, I believe the modern individuated approach must lean towards an intuitive approach that honours the unknown. The relationship itself becomes the teacher. The work happens not through imposed technique but through presence, through the willingness to stay open when the experience moves in directions you didn't anticipate. The ancient forms were designed for people whose consciousness was shaped by different conditions. We need to translate those principles into a practice that respects our particular psychological formation while still allowing the body to lead where it wants to go. It means trusting the pause before movement, honouring when energy wants to circulate rather than culminate, allowing silence to hold more weight than technique.
Ejaculation belongs in this. I don't hold with retention as a goal. It's a healthy biological function, it serves the bond, and suppressing it in pursuit of activation mistakes a technique for an end. The classical texts themselves warned against cutting yin and yang off from one another. What changes at this level isn't the physiology but the context it occurs in. The act becomes a ritual of connection, and the mind stops running its loops of fantasy and comparison because there's nothing left to compensate for. What's present is a bond between two people who trust each other, and no amount of quantity approaches that quality.
From here the experience opens in directions a conventional frame simply cannot comprehend. It becomes multidimensional and sits in a level of intelligence far superior to our own. Something is being contacted that isn't reducible to bodies or emotions or even to the relationship itself, and people who reach this stage reach for the language of the sacred because nothing else fits. Spirit meets matter, and the crossing point is the body and soul of someone you love.
None of this can be studied or purchased. It's cultivated, and it deepens on its own schedule as the relationship matures and both people continue their individuation pathways. The practices help. The relationship is the work.
If this territory is one you're moving into and you'd like support with the psychological work that makes it possible, I offer therapeutic immersion for ongoing integration work (fortnightly sessions combining counselling with energy work), or one-off energy clearing sessions to assist with major transitions, acute episodes, or to begin opening into the energetic work. Book a consultation to discuss what your current process is asking for.