Let’s face it, sex is pretty ugly.

This is not in reference to the emotional disembowelment—the spiritual evisceration—that comes along with ill-fated choice of sexual partnership or continued exposure to a malnourishing union.

No, we’re talking about the nitty gritty mechanics of knockin’ boots; and where making the beast with two backs is concerned, never was there coined a more appropriate term than “bumping uglies.”

Sex is not the softly lit HBO slow-jam of pristine, smooth skinned bodies devoid of foreplay and pubic hair. Nor is sex the garish coitus carnival that porn might have us believe.

The truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle.

Sex in a nutshell normally amounts to two (or more) highly imperfect, (usually) sweaty persons mashing their respective genitals/holes/organs/objects/orifices together while the parties in question contend with or entertain their respective fetishes, fears and desires (while perhaps some un-erasable concerns for the washing up or the bills darts to and fro in the fray), in hopes of eventually conjoining with ecstasy for a brief iota of time. Code of conduct thereafter is dealers choice, and we’re not going to touch that with a ten-foot pole.

Our focus is the act, the deed.
The doing and being done.
And the deed is an ugly one, make no mistake about that.

This is not to imply, however, that sex is obscene.
Far from it.

Sex can sometimes be a vehicle for spiritual enlightenment like no other. Sure it makes you feel good, and brushes you up against the other for a short while, but the true potential of sex is in the very contradictory act of doing. It teaches us to unwrap spiritual elevation lying dormant in the ugly and foolishly wonderful aspects of life. It teaches us, from an objective standpoint, to find nourishment and divinity in the most unassuming of places.

That is, after all, best part about sex. Usually when you’re doing it, you’re not really thinking about how you look in whatever pose, position or transition you may be in. You’re sailing buckskinned and blissful through the Now. But when you think about it objectively, sex is rather unbecoming and highly ridiculous.

But you don’t care about that in the moment.

You’re riding the ugly and that ugly is beautiful and so is your partner and by fuck the moment is but a solitary blot of ink on the essay of the universe but it shines in your heart with so much unbridled wonder and pleasure and life that it feels like the twenty minutes you’ve been at it have been centuries that will ring with golden echoes throughout the ages—all as you flop and wriggle and bounce and bump and thump and hump in the sweaty, stinky sea of sex.

Sex can drive home the same point as yoga and meditation, before yoga and meditation were yoga and meditation. Best believe people were knockin’ boots and extracting some spiritual sustenance from that devilish folly long before people started bending and twisting and humming and OMing.

Sex is not the end all and be all—just as yoga, meditation, magic and so forth are not the whole and everything for everyone. Many elect to omit sex from their lives. The why and for what is their business, just as is their choice, and one worthy of respect.

Sex can be, however, the alpha of self realization.
It’s the tangible soil from which so much else sprouted.
The ugly seed from which beauty grows.

Even sexual organs themselves, in all their unaltered vicissitude, are ruddy, engorged, flushed and full roots and flowers whose capacity for giving and receiving are rivaled perhaps only by their purported unsightliness.

Which naturally begs the question:
Do we think sexual organs are attractive in their inherent shape, or is it due to their pleasure giving properties that we infer their beauty?

The truth lies somewhere in the middle.

At some point along the line, however, people seem to have forgotten that the muddy and ruddy and messy and ugly are beautiful and blissful and amazing. Society merged ugliness with obscenity and media backed corporations harangued the holiness right out of the ugliness of bumping uglies and people by and large have been left feeling wholly inadequate and truly unappealing for a very long time.

Sex has been sterilized by media and society.

Made palatable.
Made safe and unthreatening.
And sex is very threatening.

If we can find the divine, the beautiful and enchanting, in the ugly, goofy and incredibly awesome act of sex, and extract from those lolloping throes, a means by which to sustain ourselves through all of the ugly and absurd times in life, what power do all those money hungry corporations really have?

If we can find the joy and beauty in a sweaty, hairy nut-sack or the sex-slicked ruffle of a labia minora, what could they possibly sell us to make us happy?

If sex teaches us to truly and sincerely laugh at our absurd selves and find nourishment in its wild contradiction, what can ever possibly prevent us from achieving our highest potential?

What manner of product, purchasable or holy pardon, could ever outrank the divine lucidity inferred by this goatly rutting?

Sex strikes fear into the hearts of those who covet power, for it gives so much power to so many so easily.

It is as potent as it is inane.
A spiritual starship of higher purpose, and a means of entertainment when the internet is down.

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Editor: Rachel Nussbaum