Music of the Body: A Moral Defense of Sex As Beauty
by Jonathan Quince
Monday, February 9, 2004 20:57:20
A Moral Defense of Sex As Beauty
Today, I picked up my violin for the first time in many months. As I brushed my fingers lovingly against the polished wood, an ache of need burned through me like the naked hunger of animal lust. I lifted the instrument to my shoulder and, wielding the bow like the sword of a dancing warrior, I brought it to life.
Music coursed through my body, carrying with it a flood of energy and emotion. Waves of harmonious vibration flowed through my being, carried up through my jawbone to fill me with the humming liquid light of beauteous sound. Joy, it carried, and sorrow; pleasure and pain, yearning and fulfillment, lusts forbidden and stories of unspeakable wonder.
Carried away on the indescribable thrills of music’s sensual delight, I surrendered myself to an orgasmic euphoria that belayed any possibility for or need of rational thought. Separate from the woes and worries of humanity, standing lonely and untouchable in a sacred space between worlds, I took flight into a nameless place where every desire is fulfilled and every fulfillment, a new desire. Heaven hath no rewards to human imagination but beauty’s purest touch; and it was to Heaven’s sister realm that I travelled with each stroke of my bow across the strings. Vibrant with beauty’s glow, o’erflowing with sweet life and voluptuous ecstasy, I reached a space beyond all worlds and beyond all words where I could lay down my head in peace and float blissfully, exultant tears of unbearable ecstasy falling from eyes seared shut by the blinding light of God’s own shadow.
Freed from the chains of the world, at last I worshipped beauty.
Beauty as an the Absolute of Nature
“Beauty.” The word falls so easily from the lips of those who have neither grasped its meaning nor earned the right to speculate on it. And yet, those very frauds who verily commit sacrilege through unjust judgment of beauty’s worldly avatars are often vested with the sacred trust of being both arbiter and ambassador for beauty and holiness in human society.
No relativist am I, no hack pretender, no twentieth-century nihilist passing off untalent as genius and ugly discord as the avant garde. Abject false prophets who seek to negate their base inadequacies by undermining the realm of angels shall share their comeuppance with blasphemers of every ignoble stripe; for deniers of beauty and worshippers of its antithesis commit the same treachery as the false judges who pretend to moral supremacy. No, relativism and subjective praise of poor taste are to be condemned, not uplifted to the status of a dung-smeared museum piece. The days when uncontrolled excrement shares the same gallery with the works of classical visionaries are ominous indeed.
I know beauty. Beauty is an absolute. Like life itself, it is set in motion by a higher power and is not to be gainsaid by mere mortals.
That higher power is my master, and I its faithful soldier. I serve beauty, beauty the universal constant, beauty the untouchable and unknowable. In as much, I am indeed a zealot. And as a true believer in beauty as an irreducible moral primary, I do not take kindly to the prating of ignorant charlatans who contradict what I know to be right and good and holy. False judgment being a loathsome sin compounding all other wrongs, worse yet are those dilettantes and hypocrites who invert the principle of beauty and condemn the beautiful as ugly and as obscene.
Sex as Beauty
Sex is beautiful. Not only mere “eroticism”; not just “sensuality”; not so-called “tasteful art” alone; and not a sacred bond of intimacy between a man and a woman, but fucking—raw, hardcore, animal fucking, that violently bestial act which brings us back to our primal roots—is the essence of a beauty unique among Nature’s multitude of gracious gifts to our temporal lives.
As such, sex needs no justification beyond itself. Sex per se is a redeeming value, and it shines forth its unique beauty whether or not it is peripherally connected to other scientific, literary, or artistic qualities. Whether connected to other values or taken alone, the prurient interest is to be appreciated for the richness of its beauty, rather than condemned as the dirty or the sinful.
Certainly, the inclusion of sex in life’s repertoire does not guarantee beauty any more than the use of oil paints assures a masterpiece. Neither medium nor subject matter may ever automatically excuse its bearer of the need for competence, and the mere act of rubbing two bodies together does not create beauty any more than random bumping of a bow across the strings of a violin creates music. Taken cheaply, nothing indeed can be redeemed by its mere definition; but in moral appraisal, sex brought to perfection needs not further adornments to be made dear.
Thus does it rankle my sense of better judgment when false priests and petty demagogues condemn sex to be the handmaiden only of less controversial values rather than a prime star of its own show.
Historic Corroboration
While the approval of tradition is by no means essential to the sound and self-standing judgment of moral clarity, it is unwise to ignore precedent when the judgments of our forefathers have not been invalidated by other means. Tradition, thus, is to be neither ignored nor worshipped at its word. While a full search of historical linkage between sex and beauty falls beyond the scope of this exegesis, it its thus quite worthwhile to highlight a few paradigms from the classics of the past.
In search therefor, we shall turn first to one of the most widely respected works of moral guidance among the repertoire of all mankind: The holy Bible. Among many examples of prurience therein, we shall choose but one specimen for examination: The Song of Songs, שיר השירים, which speaks of the lusts that by night fueled Solomon’s reign over the ancient kingdom of glory.
Descriptive as it is in its original and uncorrupted Hebrew, it is actually quite explicit for a work of its times. Poetic in the flow of its words as a timeless classic must be, it is a brief yet poignant narration of that fascinated devotion singularly begat by the magnetism of opposites. It speaks of love and of lewdness, hints of yearning and fulfillment, and throughout, plays the drama of human affections over a backdrop of pure, carnal, beauteous sex.
Beyond the Bible, we have an entire world of art. Millennia of depictions have drawn sensual eroticism as integral to the course of human existence. Few will dare argue, indeed, that sex is one of the foremost motives driving life at all levels; and such acceptance of sex’s primacy is drawn forth in artistic endeavor, just as art in general is by design the utmost purification of life’s axioms and life’s subtleties.
While none of the above have held prurience as a primary and intrinsic value, neither does it contradict anything herein postulated.
Moral Assertion
With the intrinsic value established of sex as beauty, little more needs be said in its defense. Pure, wholesome prurience ought, then, to be accepted on its own accord.
Version History:
2004-02-09: First publication. While this version holds the kernel of what I mean to say, it is too condensed and too brief to be considered final.