Vachon Imagined

The do’s and don’ts, the religion of sexuality, have in many ways erased its pleasure. Rather than learning to be in sexuality, to be in pleasure, we learn to become self-conscious about it: self-conscious about our bodies, what we are doing, and whether what we are doing is “right,” as though sexuality were an examination and someone were grading our performance.

That self-consciousness can remain even between two people who are deeply intimate. If the mind is not actually entered into, but merely observed as something happening to us, we remain two separate people using one another for an experience or a goal. Sexuality becomes something we use rather than something we enter.

It is used for marriage, to withhold, to control, to secure another person, to prove desirability, to escape loneliness, to obtain validation. Even pleasure can become an objective. We pursue an experience rather than entering the experience itself.

But sexuality cannot be separated from the whole person.

If a person is insecure in their body, their nature, or their physical or mental space, that insecurity is not something outside sexuality that must first be corrected. It is part of the movement of sexuality. Nothing needs to be hidden from the encounter. Nothing is disqualified from being shared.

This is what can make intimacy infinitely more valuable, intense, and profound than the way popular culture sells and exploits sex. Pop culture turns sexuality into an image, a commodity, a performance; something to be owned, displayed, or declared as mine, as though we are meant to bow to it, or worse, to the person performing it.

This can be especially true for women who have felt their sexuality suppressed. The temptation to go to the other extreme can be powerful: to reclaim the body, the desire, the sensuality, and finally declare, This is mine.

But even this can be manipulated.

A woman can move from being told that her sexuality is something to hide to being told that it is something to display, sell, perform, and capitalize upon. If other people profit from her body, her image, her desirability, or her willingness to expose herself for attention, she may have traded one form of control for another.

People are still using her. They are simply calling it empowerment.

That isn’t necessarily being sexual. It can be being used for notoriety, fame, validation, money, and attention.

There is nothing inherently liberating about being desired by everyone. There is something liberating about knowing that your sexuality belongs to you and that you do not have to perform it for anyone.

When sexuality becomes an image of the self, we construct it, protect it, advertise it, and ask others to recognize it. What was once an intimate expression of being becomes something to possess. And when we confuse the image with the person, we worship the surface and call it identity.

Two people become bodies to be used rather than human beings to be encountered. Sex becomes something to talk about, display, consume, and exploit rather than something two people actually enter together.

Tantra begins somewhere else.

Tantra is not primarily about learning more things to do with the body. It is about entering sexuality so completely that the separation between the experience and the person experiencing it begins to disappear. It asks for presence rather than performance, communication rather than assumption, surrender rather than control.

When sexuality is truly entered, self-consciousness begins to fall away. The constant observer asking, Am I doing this correctly? How do I look? Am I desirable enough? Am I giving the other person what they want? begins to disappear.

There is simply the encounter.

And in that encounter, there is room for everything: insecurity, vulnerability, desire, fear, tenderness, hesitation, excitement, even the things we have learned to be ashamed of. They do not have to be concealed for intimacy to happen. They can become part of intimacy.

This is why open communication is not something separate from sexuality. It is sexuality.

To say what is happening within you, to reveal uncertainty without fearing that it will destroy desire, to speak without protecting the other person’s ego or your own, is already a profound form of intimacy.

The maturity Tantra asks for, then, is not merely sexual maturity. It is the maturity to surrender the need to control the experience.

Two people meet not as performers trying to produce pleasure, and not as consumers using one another’s bodies, but as human beings willing to be present to what is actually happening between them.

That is the difference between using sexuality and entering sexuality.

And perhaps that is where Tantra stops being something we study like a biology book of the next best steps, or a Vogue list of the ten best things to do to your partner.

It becomes something we enter.