The Physical Side of Things
We must become our own sexual gods—and goddesses—creating new sacred frameworks that can return casual sex to its initial cradle as genuine liberation
The Physical Side of Things
"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him," declared Friedrich Nietzsche in *The Gay Science*. What was holiest and mightiest has bled to death under our knives. And spirituality, like Queen Puabi buried alongside her king, has been ransacked—its carcass split alongside its spine, Viking-style blood-eagled. The materialists gather in wake, scattering rose petals resignedly over what remains.
When God died and secular feminism rejected both organized religion's sexual repression and the nuclear family's confining structures, the material future appeared as liberation itself, paving the way for the free love revolution. We scattered festive marigolds instead of rose remnants, adorned our parted hair with buds, donned bell-bottom jeans, and walked barefoot with kohl-lined eyes, convinced we had finally awoken from conventional constraints. But burn God and burn the family, and what rises from ashes is not some utopian tribal commune of grape-eating slumber under sunny ferns.
Linda Gordon proclaimed: "The nuclear family must be destroyed, and people must find better ways of living together... Families will be finally destroyed only when a revolutionary social and economic organization permits people's needs for love and security to be met in ways that do not impose divisions of labor, or any external roles, at all." Yet from Woodstock's promise of liberation, we arrived at a time when even our most intimate exchanges became commodities where bodies are consumed rather than souls encountered—transforming sex from sacred union into casual transaction.
Materialism provides men with the perfect philosophical shield to ignore the sacred energetic bonds that form through sexual intimacy, since these exchanges occur beyond empirical measurement and can't be quantified in laboratories or balance sheets. While neurological research now reveals the tangible reality of nervous system synchronization and the measurable rewiring that occurs through consistent sexual connection, materialism allows men to sidestep these inconvenient biological truths by reframing sexuality purely through the lens of personal pleasure, hedonistic gratification, and individualistic survival-of-the-fittest competition. This worldview strips away the moral and spiritual frameworks that once provided some protection for women by recognizing the profound responsibility that comes with accessing another person's deepest vulnerabilities and bonding mechanisms.
What emerges isn't the "free love" emancipation that promised mutual liberation and authentic connection, but rather free love consumerism—a system where women's capacity for sacred exchange becomes just another resource to be harvested for male pleasure, with materialism providing the intellectual justification for treating biological bonding as irrelevant sentiment rather than sacred responsibility.
Soul, therefore, need not be dualistic, vague, or related to anything other than the picture one's deeds paint when taken out of temporal, chronological ambiguity and stacked all together into the geometry of what a life's resonance has been, in sum. You don't have to believe in separate realms or mystical abstractions to live soulfully—you simply need to recognize that your actions create a coherent pattern of energy and impact that extends beyond immediate gratification. However, materialism has become a convenient excuse to avoid contemplating these consequences entirely, reducing existence to a nihilistic free-for-all where only immediate self-interest matters.
Philosophy can be conceptualized as "a practice and set of techniques and exercises to be performed on the self that are seen as capable of a kind of transformation which can change the subject and her own self-understanding—a hermeneutics of the self." This concept represents a crucial bridge beyond postmodernism's endless deconstruction toward active self-creation. Rather than remaining trapped in the postmodern "incredulity toward metanarratives," hermeneutics of the self offers a constructive path where individuals engage in deliberate practices of self-transformation and meaning-making. It moves from postmodernism's critique of existing structures toward actively creating new ones through philosophical practice and self-examination. It is an antidote to myopic materialism and the dangers of postmodernism, which pose themselves as something that can't be trumped, something you can't escape.
This philosophical framework becomes especially urgent when examining how both materialism and postmodern relativism have enabled the commodification of our most sacred exchanges. Consumer culture has weaponized sexuality into a marketplace where women's bodies become products for male consumption, with pornography serving as the primary training ground for this commodification. The statistics reveal the scale of this programming: 58% of Americans have consumed pornography, with 91.5% of men and 60.2% of women reporting usage in the past month when all modalities are considered. This isn't merely entertainment—it's consciousness conditioning that teaches men to view women as objects for sexual gratification rather than full human beings.
Research consistently shows that pornography consumption correlates with increased sexual objectification, with studies finding that "women in pornographic material are more likely to be depicted in a reductive sense" and that "frequent pornography consumption may convey the acceptability of treating people, namely women, as sexual objects." The neurological evidence is particularly damning: when shown images of sexualized women, men's brains failed to activate the regions responsible for recognizing human faces and personhood, suggesting they literally perceived these women as objects rather than people.
This commodification has been brilliantly rebranded as liberation. Capitalism and individualism have taken casual sex branded as free love and empowerment for women and turned it into women-as-pleasure-and-consumables where women are so liberated to be fucked and discarded in the name of freedom. What masquerades as sexual freedom is actually a system that serves male convenience while exploiting women's biological vulnerability to attachment and bonding—a perfect expression of materialist values that reduce human connection to transactional exchange. The cruel irony is that this "liberation" requires women to suppress their natural responses to intimate connection, essentially asking them to participate in their own objectification.
The biological reality that materialist consumer culture refuses to acknowledge is that sexuality creates profound neurochemical bonds that can't be wished away through ideological frameworks. Consistent sex with recurring partners creates primal bonding that changes fundamental biological wirings to orient people around one another—bonds that can't be easily broken. Men often don't understand how much this impacts women. When women engage in sexual intimacy, their nervous systems undergo measurable changes that orient them toward their partner as a primary attachment figure. This isn't weakness or outdated thinking—it's evolutionary biology designed to facilitate pair bonding and cooperative child-rearing. Materialist culture's insistence that women should override these responses serves male interests while causing genuine neurological distress to women whose bodies are literally rewiring for connection with partners who remain emotionally unavailable.
Perhaps most insidiously, the materialist consumer model convinces men that mutual physical pleasure equals equitable exchange, ignoring the vast disparity in emotional investment and vulnerability. Mutual pleasure or even synchronized orgasms doesn't mean it isn't using a woman for pleasure when you get her nervous system to completely regulate to your own but still aren't actually emotionally present with such a deep rewriting of her being to orient towards you. The fact that she has an orgasm—which is a display of giving over trust—doesn't mean she's so satisfied with her sensation of pleasure that treating her as a vehicle for your own pleasure primarily and not making room for her emotional needs in your life is somehow justifiable or mature behaviour. This materialist logic reduces the profound complexity of human bonding to a simple pleasure transaction. An orgasm becomes evidence of consent to emotional abandonment, when in reality it often represents the deepest form of trust and surrender—a biological signal that the woman's nervous system has accepted this person as safe and primary.
The post-COVID landscape has intensified these materialist dynamics, creating perfect conditions for exploitation. Rising disparities between vulnerable, isolated people in crisis times means elite and empowered men can prey more easily on women energetically. Economic and social instability has made women even more susceptible to arrangements that serve male convenience while leaving them emotionally and energetically depleted. When basic security is uncertain, the luxury of holding out for genuine partnership becomes a privilege many cannot afford—a brutal expression of how materialist society reduces even intimate connection to economic transactions. Meanwhile the cocaine epidemic reveals the same pleasure-driven, ego-centered mentality that materialist culture promotes in sexual exchange—both represent the pursuit of neurochemical highs divorced from meaningful connection or consequence. This impulse toward escapism becomes understandable when we consider how exhausting, draining, and genuinely horrific much of modern life has become—the relentless economic pressure, social isolation, and spiritual emptiness that materialist society creates.
Some form of transcendence is not just desirable but necessary for human psychological survival; we need the void filled of oneness to more than self, a connection to something larger than our individual existence. As Jules Evans notes, "'Ecstasy' would be the word for this, but only if you are willing to acknowledge that ecstasy does not occupy the same spectrum as happiness or euphoria, that it participates in the anguish of loss and can resemble an outbreak of violence." This profound need for transcendent experience—to feel more "at home in the universe," more connected to other beings—was once fulfilled through spiritual practice and community ritual, but died alongside God and traditional spirituality. Healthy sexual connection can offer an avenue to this transcendence, a genuine dissolving of self into sacred communion with another. But the desire to lose self in the transcendence of skin and powder is not a healthy avenue for it—these substances promise connection while delivering only chemical simulation of the very oneness they destroy. Just as cocaine floods the brain's reward pathways while destroying the user's capacity for genuine satisfaction, the materialist orgasm-as-transaction model floods sexual encounters with physical pleasure while systematically eroding the capacity for sacred exchange. Both addictions thrive in materialist cultures that have lost the ability to distinguish between sensation and meaning, between chemical reaction and sacred communion, offering temporary relief that ultimately deepens the very isolation and disconnection that drove people toward escape in the first place.
If the god of tribal community who once upheld sexual relations grounded in fairness and mutual respect is dead, then we must become our own sexual gods—and goddesses—creating new sacred frameworks that can return casual sex to its initial cradle as genuine liberation rather than consumption, where freedom means the right to honoured exchange rather than the right to be discarded. Throughout human history, sexual behaviour was regulated by powerful community structures that prioritized collective wellbeing over individual gratification. In tribal societies, sexual relations were woven into complex webs of kinship obligations, resource sharing, and mutual protection—ensuring that intimate bonds served the broader community's survival and flourishing. When religious frameworks emerged, they provided another layer of accountability through moral consequence and divine oversight, where sexual behavior was understood to have spiritual dimensions that extended far beyond personal pleasure.
But now we inhabit a zeitgeist where both tribal community and religious consequence have been stripped away, leaving nothing but individual desire and market forces to govern our most intimate exchanges. Without these protective frameworks, "casual sex" has been perverted from its potential as liberated sacred exchange into a brutal marketplace where the economically and emotionally powerful prey upon the vulnerable. True liberation requires creating new sacred frameworks that honour the biological and energetic realities of sexual bonding while rejecting both patriarchal ownership models and consumerist exploitation. What emerges from this cultural landscape is the perverse expectation that women should be "mature" enough to participate in casual sex without attachment, emotional needs, or consequences—essentially asking them to override their biological wiring and energetic reality for male convenience. This supposed maturity is actually a profound immaturity disguised as sophistication, demanding that women suppress their natural responses to intimate connection in service of a system that benefits male pleasure while leaving them neurologically dysregulated and emotionally depleted.
We have traced a direct line from Nietzsche's warning about the death of God through the commodification of spirituality and sexuality, revealing how materialism provides intellectual cover for the exploitation of sacred energies. When traditional meaning structures collapsed, instead of creating new frameworks that honour the profound realities of human bonding and energetic exchange, we allowed consumer capitalism to fill the void—turning both spiritual seeking and sexual intimacy into products for individual consumption. Pornography has trained men to view women as objects for gratification, while the myth of casual sex as liberation has convinced women to participate in their own energetic exploitation.
The future, however, need not be trapped between the Scylla of patriarchal religious control and the Charybdis of materialist consumption. Both organized religion and nuclear family structures provided protective elements—accountability, consequence, containers for vulnerability—but also imposed limiting hierarchies and restrictive roles that constrained human potential. What emerges now is the possibility of conscious individuals creating new forms of sacred exchange that honour biological realities without demanding submission to institutional authority. This requires moving beyond the materialist obsession with maximizing personal pleasure toward recognition that our individual evolution depends on the quality of our connections and the integrity of our energetic exchanges. While materialist, hedonistic capitalism may make pleasure-seeking feasible and tenable in the short term, it represents a fundamentally unsophisticated approach that shoots society in the foot evolutionarily—creating isolated consumers rather than conscious creators of meaning. The truly evolved individual recognizes that sustainable fulfilment emerges not from what we can extract from others, but from what we can create together when vulnerability is met with presence, when pleasure serves connection rather than ego, and when the sacred responsibility of touching another's life force is honoured rather than exploited. In this rebirth of the sacred—grounded not in dogma but in the recognition of our profound interdependence—lies the possibility of a sexual ethics worthy of our actual complexity as conscious beings capable of transformation.