Bloggy Psychoanalysis

By Patrick Appel
Freddie DeBoer crosses party lines and gets all Freudian on us:

I think the idea that social or cultural conservatives are generally people who are afraid of sex is little more than a gross caricature. As I’ve tried to demonstrate, I equally think a lot of self-professed "sexually liberated" people are, in fact, the ones most likely to feel actual fear for sex, because their attempts to make sex mundane are usually about removing the danger, immediacy and emotionality of sex– that is, the things that make sex so special in the first place.

When I hear someone talking about a naked party, sometimes, they may just think that’s a way to have a good time, although frankly I think the average naked human, even a particularly attractive one, isn’t something you’d like to look at in most social contexts. Very often, though, I think people who are interested in naked parties or the like are people who are paradoxically terrified of sex. They’re attempting to de-eroticize shared nakedness. That’s not liberating sex from anything, it’s robbing sex of its power.