For those who wish to read an earlier rant on this subject, I wrote at high speed in 2013:

Why I don't Find Jokes about Sex Entertaining (And why Promiscuity, Pornography and Public Nudity are Boring and Unerotic)

I don't find most jokes about sex to be entertaining and believe them to be the nervous and compulsive byproducts of ignorance. I'm not an absolutist about this. I occasionally find such jokes amusing and make such jokes myself. My objection does not come from moralistic or religious grounds or because I long for a Victorian sense of decorum.

To me, sexual joking seems embarrassingly ignorant. Typically, it's delivered in a glib, careless mode, and the jokester seems to assume a smug, cynical knowingness about an aspect of life that is actually veiled in many layers of mystery and that also burns with the potent fires of tragic magic.

First, sex is not this trifling plaything. Scan any collection of news headlines, and you'll inevitably find them splattered with examples of the tragic outcomes of our ignorance about sex. Scan your own life, and you will probably see innumerable instances in which this drive has burned you and others. Can you explain why most of us seem so fatefully, ineluctably, and intensely drawn toward a particular body type and not others? I can't explain that, and I have yet to meet anyone in person or in writing who can fully explain it. Sexuality is a powerful engine driving us toward all sorts of things, often toward harmful means and ends, and rather than joking about it, I want to look under the hood and see how this engine works. The design of the engine, however, seems to be so deep in the source code that it eludes anything but the most intensive, prolonged, relentless probing, and even then, we gain only fragmentary glimpses of how it works.

When people joke about this mysterious, magical, and potently dangerous, frequently fatal force, they seem to me to be coming from a smug and cynical knowingness about it, and what they seem to know about it is a bunch of slapstick cartoons, a caricature of sexuality's grosser presentations. I find the grosser aspects of sexuality — sex on the level of the genitalia, sex seen through the garish pornographer or jokester lens — to be mildly horrific rather than entertaining. When most of us contemplate having sex with or between body types of the sort we are not attracted to, it seems weird and gross. Yikes, who would want to do that? We imagine (or are forced to imagine via jokes) sex between body types we don't covet, and it's like, ouu, gross, why would they even want to do that? But if you look at all sex on the level of the genitalia with beginner's mind, including sex with or between hotties of the sort we covet, and it's all gross. As Yeats so memorably put it,

"Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement."

It is a grotesque and embarrassing aspect of humanity that people will do the most ill-advised things, use the most unscrupulous means ("all's fair in love and war"), and often incur tragic and even fatal consequences to achieve slippery contact with a very tiny piece of meaty real estate, the unsanitary orifice of another body, for example. And yet, rather than feeling humbled that they're driven by a fateful, ineluctable irrational drive, the origins and nature of which are almost entirely veiled in ignorance, they joke about it with a smug, cynical knowingness as if the locker room were the place to graduate into a state of total sophistication about a subject that, as Churchill once said about Russia, is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Fools rush in (and joke about) where angels fear to tread. The ignorant make jokey and overconfident pronouncements about sex, like the malignant narcissism of gangsta' rap lyrics telling us with testosterone-infused psychopathic self-confidence what "bitches" are like. The ignorant seem to know all about sex, while the wise tend to be awed by their vast ignorance of this potent part of our human core. The aware person may look out toward the horizon line of human consciousness and wonder what governs our drive toward one kind of person and not another. For example, Emily Dickinson writes,

The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.

Unmoved, she notes the chariot's pausing
At her low gate;
Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling
Upon her mat.

I've known her from an ample nation
Choose one;

Then close the valves of her attention
Like stone.

Can you explain the openings and closings of this valve? If so, explain it to me. Meanwhile, maybe people should think twice before joking about the workings of such a nuclear engine about which they and I know so very little.

Another thing that repulses me about sexual jokes is that they reduce and reinforce sex to a series of slapstick meat-puppet cartoons. They degrade the mystery and potential for beauty, soulful Eros, intimacy, and love. The jokes are worse than unerotic; they are anti-erotic if you accept the definition of Eros as an oceanic merger with another. The characters in the jokes are interchangeable stereotypes and caricatures rather than individualized people. Also, promiscuity, the current reigning norm in Western culture, is reinforced. People who joke about sex tend to think that explicit talk is daring or avant-garde, as if they were daring to rebel from Victorian convention, when actually it is the same old, same old, scratchy, golden oldie that has been playing monotonously in the background for many decades.

Promiscuity does not just mean careless sex with multiple partners, it also, at least for me, means careless explicit sex talk, sharing intimate details about even long-term partnerships in group settings, public displays of affection*, jokey homoerotic photos posted to Facebook,** etc. It means that you thoughtlessly act out this mysterious, dangerous drive in public in any of a number of banal and stereotyped ways.

* PDA (public display of affection) is often an unconsciously cruel display. I found it troubling when I worked at a Long Island public high school that none of the adults saw a problem with kids basically making out in the hallways. In most cases, these would be the best-looking and most popular kids in school, and one sensed an element of trophy showcasing going on — it was a display of status partly meant to evoke envy. Uncoupled kids would have to stream past them, and no doubt there were some who had crushes on one or the other of this good-looking, high-status couple. From the POV of adolescent emotions, this likely felt like a knife in the heart while they were just trying to get to class. To LGBTQ kids (of that place and era), it probably felt like a case of heteronormative entitlement and arrogance since if they had partners, such a public display would not have been so easily tolerated. I left public school teaching in 1995, but when I checked with a high school kid in 2024, he told me PDA was pervasive in his New Mexico high school.

It would have been inappropriate for me to object, as other staff accepted this as a high school norm, just as the administration sanctioned having seniors vote on most popular, best looking, and homecoming king and queen. As if the less popular and good-looking kids needed further reminders of their lower status. No one seemed to think twice about these cruel customs that are the norm in American high schools. I saved my perspective for the Model Congress debating club, where I was the adviser, introducing PDA as a topic worthy of ethical debate. Students found the subject, and the ethics of it, highly interesting and relevant, but as far as I know, no one else in the school ever brought it up as worthy of discussion. In any aspect of life where there are haves and have-nots, I find the flaunting of have to be highly distasteful, if not grossly unethical. My parents were originally socialists and were always against conspicuous consumption. They grew up during The Depression, well aware that though they had enough to eat, many didn't. My mom was very strict about my bringing food or drink outside the house, "Do not bring anything to eat or drink outside the house unless you have enough to share with everyone!" I agreed with this rule, even though the kids in my immediate neighborhood in the Bronx were not food deprived.

When it comes to PDA, that's more than a friendly greeting, people can find private spaces. When they publically flaunt physical intimacy, they may intentionally or unintentionally create suffering in those who lack such opportunities. At the very least, they should have some awareness of the social context — are there rejected suitors present or others who might be jealous? Are they merely expressing affection, or are they flaunting it and acting as status-seeking exhibitionists, causing suffering to peers?

**(see: Anti-homophobic Homoerotic Joking — a Positive Mutation of the Millennial Generation? for an instance where I take a more positive view of a particular kind of sex jokes that have recently erupted on Facebook and elsewhere.)

When I was a high school English teacher in the 80s and 90s, I would often find myself in a faculty lounge where colleagues, middle-aged teachers, were drinking coffee and bantering back and forth with these off-color jokes, which were often lazily flirtatious and embarrassingly self-disclosing. They seemed to find what they were doing amusing and witty, but to me it was like walking into what I thought was a fairly neutral space where I might do some paperwork only to find that a series of gruesome autopsies were being performed by drunken comedians. To anyone with an ounce of psychological discernment, people were disclosing the gross workings of their sexual neuroses. To my perception, these were like shadow X-rays of their inner malignancies displayed as a series of garishly colored cartoons, with gross, anatomically correct cartoon characters. The teachers' view of sex was not in the slightest degree more elevated from that of the hormone-driven high school kids.

Freud and others have noticed that we tend to make jokes about sources of anxiety. In the repressive days of the U.S.S.R., for example, Russians made more jokes about politics. People may be seeking to depotentiate the degree to which sexuality intimidates and makes them anxious by joking about it. Perhaps if we make light of the monsters under the bed, they will dissipate. Advocates of promiscuity, a number of Burning Man attendees, for example, will say that they are trying to "push their boundaries" and "let go of inhibitions." They say such things as though relaxing boundaries and letting go of inhibitions were always a good thing. From their perspective, people who prefer to keep intimate matters private are uptight, repressed and in need of orgy therapy.

As I discuss in Pushing the Envelope — Boundary Expansion in Personal and Evolutionary Contexts the creation of boundary was the beginning of life. Also, boundaries were crucial to the development of more intelligent and self-aware life. Inhibition is often a way to conserve power. As Goethe said, "A master first reveals himself in his ability to hold back." The Zen archer hits the mark when she holds the arrow back until just the right moment. The I Ching continually emphasizes reticence as a virtue. If in doubt, don't act and don't speak. Better to be silent and thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt. Many crucial neurological functions are inhibitory; ask someone with Tourette's how empowering they find their lack of inhibition.

Jokes tend to thoughtlessly vent into public spaces a variety of neurotic tensions and obsessions when it would be better if we contained them. It would be better if we worked on our anxious, messy content within rather than spilling it out. We need inward tension to be creative and dynamic.
Our promiscuous spillage is not just via jokes, it is also the American cult of confession that has celebrities disclosing their private affairs on Oprah's couch, and noncelebrities pursuing embarrassing self-disclosure on social media.

Promiscuous spillage may create a brief buzz, but ultimately leads to a deadening of feeling like the ever-diminishing stimulation of a series of hits from the crack pipe. One of the most deadening aspects of promiscuous spillage mode is that it tends to severe the connection between the heart and sexuality.

In 1940, Anïas Nin and some of her bohemian friends, who were all struggling to survive financially, got paid work writing explicit erotica. Eventually, she and her friends became sickened by the work and came to despise their employer. Finally, she wrote him the following:

We hate you. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities…

The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation.
Sex does not thrive on monotony. Without feeling, inventions, moods, no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine…

There are so many minor senses, all running like tributaries into the mainstream of sex, nourishing it. Only the united best of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.

In Brave New World, published in 1932, Aldous Huxley foresees a future in which promiscuity replaces eroticism and sex becomes dreary and commonplace:

Lenina shook her head, "Somehow," she mused, "I haven't been feeling very keen on promiscuity lately. There are times when one doesn't. Haven't you found that too, Fanny?"

Fanny nodded her sympathy and understanding,

"But one's got to make the effort," she said sententiously, "one's got to play the game. After all, every one belongs to every one else."

"Yes, every one belongs to every one else," Lenina repeated slowly and, sighing, was silent for a moment: then, taking Fanny's hand, gave it a little squeeze. "You're quite right, Fanny. As usual. I'll make the effort."

Another depotentiator of sexuality is public nudity, which some people at Burning Man and other festivals and venues seem to think is daring, liberating, and sexy. As George Leonard points out in his 1983 book that deserves to be better known, The End of Sex — Erotic Love After the Sexual Revolution:

Nudists are right in claiming their practice is nonsexual… Here is ideology again. According to the ideologists, public nudity is supposed to be natural and freeing. It isn't. Far from being natural, in fact, nonerotic nudity in large mixed groups is quite unnatural. Few indeed are the cultures, no matter how primitive, in which there is no clothing whatever. Body covering is not merely an ornament or a protection from the elements, but rather a metaphor of the mystery of generation. Uncovering is discovering; unveiling the body stands for all unveiling. To reserve full nakedness of the personal erotic encounter is to enhance both nakedness and the erotic, as poets and lovers have always known… Row upon row of naked bodies denies the mystery and serves ultimately as yet another depersonalization. In the mass, bodies become increasingly abstract and general. Distinctions become merely anatomical.

Leonard incisively points out that our present, promiscuous era is actually just the flip side of the Victorian:

Love, desire, longing, and lust have always existed, but it was only under the repressive Victorians, ironically, that "sex" as a separate, highly charged entity really came into its own. In the very act of constraining erotic expression, the Victorians extracted sex from the matrix of social relations, made it lurid, then held it up to view as something alien, an abstraction. During Victoria's reign, as French philosopher Michel Foucault has pointed out, "Sex was driven out of hiding and forced to lead a discursive life." We are still engaged in that discourse, and indeed it might be said the modern Sexual Revolution is essentially a continuation of Victorian dynamics. Prescription has replaced proscription, liberation has replaced repression, but the preoccupation and the context in which the preoccupation occurs remains the same: "sex" as a well-defined, highly charged entity that dominates much of our thoughts, feelings, and actions. — George Leonard

The jokster, pornographer and promiscuous person continues the Victorian obsession with sex and uses familiarity to breed contempt for sex being anything more than an anatomical event. It takes what could be soulful, heartfelt relations (the sort Martin Buber referred to as "I-Thou") and reduces them to the degraded monotony of "I-It" relations. The purveyors of promiscuity think they are being sexy in excitingly dangerous ways, but actually what they are doing is turning sex into a boring set of meat puppet transactions. They take what could be alchemical gold, and turn it into something as dull as dishwater. An I-Thou sexual encounter, an encounter in which sexuality is individualized rather than promiscuously stereotyped, is an alchemical combination that is unique in all the universe.

10/21/2013 This is the next day, and I've been getting feedback on Facebook that is changing my view of the subject and showing a bit of one-sidedness in my attitude, and an insufficient consideration of generational differences. One of the commentators gave me insights about how my personal history (which he sensed intuitively) colored my attitude.

Ben: Good Read!!! ahem "people were disclosing the gross workings of their sexual neuroses, and to my perception these were like X-rays of their inner malignancies being displayed as a series of garishly colored cartoons, with gross, anatomically correct cartoon characters. The teachers' view of sex was not in the slightest degree more elevated from that of the hormone-driven high school kids." How are these malignancies? I strongly disagree, I knew a young man with extremely kinky sexuality who is no longer here, and his christian upbringing demonized any expression… If he could have laughed about what he liked… If that dialogue about our anxiety can't happen in humor it can't happen anywhere… why did some of the most potent racial commentary of the last 70 years come from the mouths of stand up comedians? Joking is a way of opening the doors to communication… and yes a way of insulation, but sometimes we need that… I don't want to share the depths of my sexual experience with everyone, but it can feel nurturting and freeing to feel like I am in a safe world where other people have sexuality (vulnerable, hungry, sexuality) and that this is something which can be talked about, something that can be fun… I'm curious if your sexuality is less malignant? Do you not enjoy the mechanical and sensuous aspects of sexuality? What of the sensuousness of the clown, the coyote, zeus, the wild dumb energy is universal, and hilarious. Is there an aspect of your sexuality which you have "corrected" and now you expect others to do so?

Geoff and I joke about sex frequently with our other sexually frustrated and confused and exploratory 20 somethings… I also agree about a lot of your points, but that is less interesting to type about.

Jonathan Zap: Those are fantastic insights, and a great counterbalance to what I wrote. With your permission, I'd like to add them as an epilogue to the article.

Will: It's definitely a worthwhile subject to discuss, since sex jokes are quite widespread. I find myself mildly irritated by the x-rated sex jokes of my straight friends. The typical bitches and pussy variety. They often use ironic gay jokes as well, but they aren't always anti-homophobic. I definitely appreciate the comedy of people like Louis CK, who is very popular with the millennials, and his material is almost exclusively sexually vulgar. But he uses tons of the anti-homophobic homoerotic jokes, as does many popular comedy shows like SNL. I think the irony is the most hilarious part, and it is essentially good natured and doesn't discriminate against anyone. So I appreciate those ones, but then again I am myself gay, so that isn't entirely surprising. If you were to ask an intellectual lesbian about jokes coming from good-looking straight young men with above average social standing, ones like: "now that i let some dude finish in my mouth i want in the butt." - she might comment that it reflects a smug, cynical knowingness that is boring and embarrassing! lol - Just sayin'… To Each Their Own, I guess. Unfortunately, most young people of the world have grown up with easy access to hardcore porn. I myself learned about the birds and the bees that way. So vulgar sex talk and thinking is quite rampant, even more so in the younger generation. I think it is a fairly significant generation gap - one that is quite confusing and perhaps frustrating…

Many related writings can be found in the Eros, Love, and Sexuality category of this site.