On this day in 1927, the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her diary:

“In the brilliant sunshine I felt the desire to take walks in muslin dresses completely soaked with my sweat, to stretch myself out in the grass without a thought, to take refuge in this sensual pleasure, in my body which doesn’t need to depend on anybody.”

“When a parent takes a child in her arms and comforts her when she is upset, or physically hurt, that parent is teaching the child a fundamental positive ingredient of sexuality. When a father wakes up a child in the morning by quietly talking to him and rubbing his back, he is teaching him about sexuality. When parents, with watchful eyes, encourage a child to jump on a trampoline, or to climb and swing on a jungle gym, you could even make the case that these parents are teaching the child about sexuality. From a young age, all these children associate touch with love and soothing, and they associate their own bodies with play, delight, relaxation, excitement, love, fun, competence, pleasure.”
- excerpt from Sex Smart: How Your Childhood Shaped Your Sexual Life and What To Do About It by Aline P. Zoldbrod, Ph.D.

Read more about The Importance of Touch

Excerpt from The Soul of Sex: Cultivating Life as an Act of Love by Thomas Moore

The phallus is not an image of the male ego; it is a representation of the earth’s potency and life’s capacity for creativity and pleasure. Ancient and primitive celebrations of the phallus were carried out with joy, laughter, comedy, and celebration. This phallus is not exactly symbolized by the ancient images of trees, bulls, and lightning that are associated with it. Rather it represents the power of life we encounter in these overwhelming revelations of nature. The phallus is in fact that power coursing through us, men and women, and in that spring of vitality we can find the creativity and energy we need to get along, survive, and thrive. Ancient humans knew that the ego is insufficient for making a truly creative life. They knew through their ideas of magic, in which the phallus is profoundly implicated, that we need nature’s power in us, and that there is no better example of nature dwelling in us effectively than our sexuality, with its autonomous responses and its ineffable capacity to generate new human life.  

The penis we see in pornography is not the true phallus; it is rather a poor attempt to restore the phallic dimension to the penis. Pornographic penises are symptomatic of our need to rediscover the phallus and with it a religious appreciation for life’s mysterious potency. Like the ancients carrying huge penises in their processions, we fantasize penises of unusual dimension and photograph them in ways that make them seem huge and detached from individual personality. But we don’t yet have a religious appreciation for the penis as the presentation of life’s almighty power. Religious institutions remain close to pornography, sometimes in their art and sometimes in their ingenious means of repression, because ultimately both are concerned with life’s deepest meaning and mystery. Like Isis in search of her brother Osiris’s lost organ, we are in search of the penis that cannot be imagined by medicine, the penis that leads us deep into life in all its procreativity and dynamic pleasure.

Abraham Maslow says that self-actualizing people are fascinated by mystery. They do not avoid it in favor of clarity and certainty. This is another feature of personal depth. Mystery honors the incomprehensible depth that resides in every finite reality. We can feel drawn to the mystery of how the world works, to what underlies what we see, and to what comes next in history, ours and the world’s. This is an attraction to what is emerging. Teilhard de Chardin spoke admiringly of a “mysterious sense of the future … an attraction to the future as an organism progressing to the unknown.” We feel drawn to emergent properties of earth and ourselves that fit no categories yet discovered. We futurists may find that we are upstarts not quite at home in structures, institutions, or limited worldviews. We feel immortal evolutionary longings in the midst of change and end. Perhaps those longings are the wake of the ferry called Divine Plan.

- David Richo, The Five Things We Cannot Change: And the Happiness We Find by Embracing Them

Most of us have unrelenting longings for whatever was missing from our childhood. Every intimate bond will resurrect these archaic yearnings, along with the terrors and frustrations that accompany chronically unmet needs. But this puts us in an ideal position to revisit those thwarted needs, to revive our energy, and to reconstruct our inner world in accord with life-affirming principles. A solid bond in a relationship — as in religious faith — endures despite the impact of events, so our resistance is the only obstacle to the growth that can emerge from pain. As we mend the broken fabric of ourselves, what was arrested in the past is released. We are back in touch with who we really are and can live in accord with that rediscovered essence.

- David Richo, How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving

The Christian sexual tradition uses scripture and theological tradition as supports for a code of behavior which developed out of mistaken, pre-scientific understandings of human anatomy, physiology, and reproduction, as well as out of now abandoned and discredited models of the human person and human relationships. The churches are still today teaching theological conclusions originally based in ignorance of women’s genetic contribution to offspring, ignorance of the processes of gender identity and of sexual orientation, and of the difference between them – ignorance which has allowed and supported patriarchy, misogyny, and heterosexism, the assumption that heterosexuality is normative. We are still teaching a sexual code based in fear of the body and of sexuality, in understandings of sexual virtue as the repression of bodily desires by the force of the rational will, on physicality, especially sexuality, as an obstacle to spirituality, and on women as lacking reason and only possessing the image of God through connection to men. The churches have disowned the Mosaic law’s assumption of male ownership of women and children, Luther’s understanding that women are like nails in a wall, prohibited by their nature from moving outside their domestic situation, and Aquinas’ teaching that females are misbegotten males, produced from male embryos by physical or mental debility in the father, or by moist winds off the Mediterranean. But we continue to teach most of the sexual moral code which was founded upon such thinking.

- Christine E. Gudorf, Body, Sex, and Pleasure: Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics

Clearly, we cannot take our daughters into a space where we have never been. We cannot provide healing for them in areas in which we’re still deeply wounded ourselves. If we still carry generations of shame about the processes of our female bodies, we cannot hope to pass on to our daughters a sense of love for their own bodies. We need new ways of thinking about this whole area. Each of us must create new ceremonies and new rites of passage for our own daughters. But before we can hope to do this effectively, we must own our own experiences, however unsupportive and painful, and work through them.
- Christiane Northrup, MD Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom

Love from another adult does more than justify us in the present. It ripples back in time for us repairing, restoring, and renovating an inadequate past. Sincere love also sets off a forward-moving ripple and a resultant shift inside us. We get to the point where we can think: “Now I don’t need quite so much. Now I don’t have to blame my parents quite so much. Now I can receive love without craving more and more. I can have and be enough.” Only the person whose journey has progressed to that point can love someone intimately.

- David Richo, How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving

We can reclaim the wisdom of the menstrual cycle by tuning in to our cyclic nature and celebrating it as a source of our female power. The ebb and flow of dreams, creativity, and hormones associated with different parts of the cycle offer us a profound opportunity to deepen our connection with our inner knowing. This is a gradual process for most women, one that involves unearthing our personal history and then, day by day, thinking differently about our cycles and living with them in a new way.

- Christiane Northrup MD, Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom

For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.

-Audre Lorde , Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power