SEX HISTORY 101: WE ONCE WORSHIPED SEX, NOW WE HIDE IT

Did you know sex history can be traced back 50,000 years?

In episode 3 of the Pleasure Science Podcast Nadège gives you a yummy crash course in history!

She explains why today’s society thinks sex is taboo, and how differently we viewed sex for most of human history.

Honestly, this scholarship is fascinating. Especially if you've ever found yourself wondering: where did sexual shame come from and what can we do to heal this?

Nadège answers this question, plus she shares some scholarship on trans gods throughout history. 

Yes, you read that right! There are gods who were worshiped because they transitioned to a different gender.

Go listen to this juicy episode now! 

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Gods and goddesses that Nadège mentions:

• Isis
• Ishtar
• Mami Wata
• Tanit
• Bacchus/Dionysus
• Mercury/Hermes

Welcome to Pleasure Science, a podcast dedicated to helping you feel healthier and empowered in your sexuality. I am Nadège, sex scholar and bestselling author, and today we're going to talk about the history of sex. 

So what do we mean by the word history? Often, we're only thinking of the last 2,000 years, around the time Jesus was born. Or sometimes we include the ancient Egyptians, going back about 5,000 years. But humans have actually been creating intelligent communities for over 50,000 years. And I just want to take a moment to say, what do I mean by intelligent communities? These are communities that come together through a similar group intention, and form structures that allow humans to exist in harmony. Okay? 

So through archaeology, we find that spirituality is pretty much the main system of structure that intelligent and intentional communities have been forming around, again, for over 50,000 years. So, when we consider that human communities are about 50,000 years old, it makes our current religious systems seem kind of young, right? And even more so, our views on sex are extremely young. So, when you consider the whole of human history, what does this history tell us about how humans have viewed sex?

Well, let's go back to what historians and archaeologists know to be true. Humans used to worship sex. It was considered valuable to be sexually knowledgeable, and it was encouraged for humans of all genders to have sex.

We also worshiped sex and we worshiped birth. Now, something that's also really interesting is what's called the sacred union, which is sometimes referred to by historians in modern times as the ancient sacred marriage. Now, this word marriage, it does not mean what it does today. The sacred union happened when someone would have sex with a high priest or priestess. It had nothing to do with committing yourself to one person for the rest of your life. In fact, having sex with a priest or priestess was how people in the community would become anointed as leaders. This is how ancient kings and queens, emperors and empresses, and holy figures were anointed through sex.

Additionally, for regular lay people in a community, you could actually go to a temple and have sexual relations with a priest or priestess to achieve enlightenment, to gain more wisdom, or to gain more value in your culture and society.

So, what's so fascinating is for the most part of human history, the overwhelming majority of human history, sex was an essential part of spirituality, culture, and society. Sex was celebrated and goddesses were revered. And in fact, the role of the goddess and the fertility goddess specifically were pretty much the cornerstone of most ancient societies.

Some of the oldest representations of the goddess, we can think of goddesses like Isis, for example, or Ishtar or Mami Wata. They were always represented as serpents, fishes, and mermaids. Now, this is really important to consider because when we look at modern religions, we see a little bit of spiritual plagiarism. For example, Jesus is now the fish, not the goddess, not the holy mother.

We also see a lot of spiritual manipulation, specifically with the imagery of the serpent. Whereas for most of human history, the serpent was seen as a divine, psychic, and feminine part of divinity, now it's considered evil. Think about that for a second.

And just a quick and very loving disclaimer. I myself am a deeply spiritual person. My mother was raised Jewish. My father was raised Roman Catholic. I went to a Catholic high school. I've been surrounded by religion my whole life and I am deeply spiritual. I actually love religion and I love spirituality.

However, it's so important if we're going to talk about the history of sex to critically think about spirituality, because sex and spirituality have been connected for as long as we can go back in human history. So when we look at the history of sex and we look at the evolution of spirituality, again, it's really important to look at what has happened in the last 2,000 years.

One of the biggest trends that we have seen is that human cultures have gone from polytheistic, where a religion or spiritual practice will have many gods, right? A common example is the Greek gods, the Roman gods, Aphrodite, Zeus. Listen, I grew up loving all of that folklore.

And of course, we still have some polytheistic religions today. Hinduism is a great example. But for the most part, our global society went from polytheism, many gods, which again included goddesses and fertility goddesses as major divine archetypes. We went from this polytheistic model to monotheism. Monotheism is a fancy word for a religion where one God is the divine, all-powerful being. And that divine, all-powerful being has turned into the divine daddy, all right? Whatever major religion you are following today, nine times out of 10, the main head divine archetype of that religion is a male divine figure.

Now, that isn't a bad thing, but it is a discouraging thing to see that the divine mother has no longer been seen as holy and powerful for thousands of years and think about how that has influenced society. 

So with the rise of monotheism versus polytheism, we have seen a lot of trends that have but are really directly linked to controlling sexuality. First, we saw a total decline in the celebration of queerness. Gay people and queer people have always existed, and in fact, for much of human history, were considered divine. I'm actually going to be going into some really cool examples at the end of this episode of queer and trans gods that you actually probably already heard of and didn't realize that they were trans.

Now, we also saw that there was a very large rise in the need for gender roles. Women must be one way, men must be another way, these two ways must complement each other and we can have nothing in between. With the rise of the divine daddy and the rise of monotheism, we saw a very strict need for gender roles in order to keep that system in place, and in order to make sure that the divine mother did not have the same type of holy and divine leadership status as the divine daddy. 

And also, by the way, I hope you're loving my divine mommy and daddy because I just made that up and I'm kind of living for it. 

But anyway, other trends that we saw over the last 2000 years as we have changed from a polytheistic society to a monotheistic society was a complete lack of sexual freedom. How do you control birth and gender and sex? By changing spirituality to fear the feminine and to make sex taboo. This is how we saw the rise of slut shaming and even the creation of the slut. Think about it. We literally went from a society where we worshiped sex, where it was considered valuable and intelligent to be a sexual being. You were encouraged to have sex. And now we live in a society where the best thing to be is a virgin.

It is not considered worthy to be slutty. It's not considered intelligent. Now, I'm someone who doesn't believe any of those things to be true. Also, as a sex scholar, it is so important for you to be knowledgeable and have sexual experience that only makes sex better. But we're going to be going into that in later episodes. Don't you worry. 

But thinking again of the history of sexuality, if you want to control sex, if you want to control birth, if you want to control gender, you have to create fear and taboo around sex itself. You have to establish gender roles. And basically, we got into a system. And just so you know, like I've been studying this history for a long time. I hear from a lot of people this idea that, oh, there must have been some big event, you know, there was a big patriarch, a big event. Someone is to blame for how things shifted. Actually, no one is to blame. We just saw over the span of several thousand years, society just slowly shifted. It slowly changed and things started to become this way.

And again, everybody, I am not saying that modern spirituality is evil. I'm just hoping that you do the research for yourself and that you don't use spirituality to justify telling people who to love, how to fuck, or how to experience pleasure.

So now let's talk a little bit about this change from matriarchal cultures to patriarchal cultures. When we look at all of these polytheistic religions and when we look at these ancient and intelligent societies that cultivated around spirituality and sex and birth, we see that not only was the goddess celebrated and in some cultures the goddess was at the top of the hierarchy, but we also saw that there were a lot of divine patriarchal figures as well. And this is so important for us to understand, because I think in our modern society right now, it's so easy for us to look at patriarchy, use this buzzword, and assign blame.

But everything that I have seen and that I have researched has actually shown me that patriarchy isn't evil. We're just doing patriarchy incorrectly. So what's really interesting is we've gone from what is called a partnership model. This is where ancient societies and predominantly matriarchal societies existed in partnership with one another. There were no specific hierarchies, but more so a community type of setting. We went from this partnership model of community to what is called a dominator model. And this is where this imbalance literally started killing all of us. When patriarchy is in its toxic and unhealthy form, it looks like a dominator model. But when patriarchy and matriarchy can work together, we now go into a partnership model that is a lot healthier and a lot more sustainable. 

So earlier in this episode, I talked about how queer and trans people have always existed and have even been leaders in society. And I just want to give a few examples of some divine gods slash goddesses who are queer and trans.

So, let's start with the god Bacchus because this is a great example. So, originally, this was a divine African god called Tanit. Tanit is depicted as a woman wearing a beard, which showcases her divine nature of being both masculine and feminine. And this imagery was extremely important, and we would actually see kings and queens like Hatshepsut of ancient Egypt doing the same exact type of imagery to establish divinity, showcasing someone who's both feminine and masculine, playing with gender, right? 

So later, the god Tanit, which was a very, very large god, was reimagined as Bacchus. And then after that, it was reimagined as Dionysus, a Greek or Roman god of wine and pleasure. And I bet you've probably heard of Dionysus, but you had no idea that this was actually a queer and trans god that dates all the way back to ancient Africa as the god Tanit.

Another amazing example of this is the God Mercury or Hermes. Now, when we look at the symbol for the God Mercury, we can see all of the example of trans and queer divinity. First off, the symbol of Mercury has the symbol of a crescent moon, which symbolizes femininity. 

Next, that crescent moon is sitting on top of a cross, and that cross is a symbol of divine masculinity.

Then we have the symbol of the circle, which represents the self. So the god Mercury is literally a god that has no gender and every gender and is the self all at the same time.

So, these are just a couple of examples, I could jump into so many more, of queer and trans divinity throughout history and how these queer and trans gods have been repurposed time and time again simply to fit into modern culture.

So, how did we get to where we are today? We just walked through kind of a crash course in sexual history, right? And I actually have a theory as to why we switched as a society to patriarchy and to these staunch gender roles. And my theory is that things changed very slightly and changed over time as new generations created new normals for society.

A perfect example of this is language. Did you know that in English, the word thou stopped being used because of teenage girls? It was teenage girls who literally changed the cultural norms around language and the habits around language. And this is just a perfect example of how we can see that it wasn't some huge event that made us suddenly go from these matriarchal and partnership models of society to dominate our styles of society, right? They were small shifts over time. And a big reason why that is, is because of how we have to teach our next generation how to survive in a society. So hear me out on this.

I often get asked the question, why didn't we do something earlier about patriarchy? Why haven't women or queer people or other marginalized groups banded together before now to create change? Now, one, I would argue that people have always been coming together. There have always been activists. We've always been doing this work. But I'd also say a reason why change is so slow and empowerment is so slow to catch on is because when humans have children, we want our children to survive in a society. So as patriarchy and dominator cultures started to take over, human societies would have to teach their children how to survive. And how do you survive? You assimilate.

So what ended up happening is as matriarchy started to fall away and patriarchy dominator models started to take rise was we now started to teach our children how to assimilate into a culture in order to survive. And it was through this process of generation by generation assimilating to the status quo in order to survive that we stopped questioning, wait, why is it that we're feeling shame about sex when sex is so natural? 

Why is it that we are not educated about birth when humans are all created from birth and it's something we should all really know about? Why did we switch to these kind of dominating and oppressive ways of creating a society and why didn't something change sooner? 

Well, it's because of survival and it's because of the need to assimilate in order to survive. Now, I do believe that we also don't need to assimilate to survive. We can band together. We can call for change, and we can be the change we want to see in the world. In fact, that's really what this podcast and what Pleasure Science is all about. I want to make you think about the society we live in, and I want you to make intelligent choices about your pleasure, about sex, about your relationships so that we can all be the change that we want to see in the world. 

So that is it for this week's episode of Pleasure Science. I hope you enjoyed your little crash course of sex history. Please join us next week where we're going to be talking to Dr. Tara, a practicing Buddhist and religious sex expert.

In the meantime, you can follow me on Instagram and TikTok at Pleasure Science. And please remember to subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen and leave a rating or review to help us reach more listeners and to help show this world that we want to learn more about pleasure, science, sex, relationships, right? It's so important.

And you can also watch these episodes on the Pleasure Science YouTube channel. You do not want to miss it because I always wear something cute and I love fashion and I know you want to see my pretty face. And finally, don't forget to check out the Pleasure Science courses. They're linked in the show notes below and listeners of the podcast get 10% off all courses using pleasuresciencepod. And again, the Pleasure Science courses are truly incredible. You get access to my unique framework that shows you how to trust, love, and learn sex using your natural strengths because you have natural strengths when it comes to sex. So, why not use them and why not structure your sex life around them? 

Thank you so much for joining us this week. And before we go, just a quick reminder for you to do something that will help you experience pleasure in the next 24 hours, okay? Go and tell someone you think that they're cute. Go hug an animal. Go hug your best friend. Eat the donut, okay, or the cake, or the cupcake, or the cookie. Have some pleasure today because you deserve it. I'll see you next time.

This podcast is a Pleasure Science production hosted by me, Nadège, your resident sex scholar. The Pleasure Science podcast is produced by Laura Moore and edited by Camille Furman-Cullot. Our music is by Octosound and is licensed under the Pixabay content license. 

To find out more about Pleasure Science and to sign up for our online courses, please visit www.pleasurescience.com.