A widespread feature of Christianity is hardly ever spoken of. Entire cultural groups are yet to recover from this malignant, distorted, misshapen evaluation of human sexuality. Perhaps you’ve the wrestled with a haunting of shame, the guilt-goblin that obstructs, persists, impeding a natural expression of your mammalian self?

Hauntings are concealed, never spoken of and are double the misery.  That’s what Nietzsche had to say…

What is to be done?!

Let’s declare a carnival! Invite everyone. Let’s upend the tables, to transform this ancient hooey into a celebration of the sensual, a tribute to the imagination. Children know how to allow the imagination to run riot. Children especially are invited to our fest of liberation!

Shakespeare is not the only one to illuminate this gloomy goblin.  Enjoy Sharon Old’s fine poem which follows this quotation from Nietzsche.

The passions
become evil and malignant
when regarded with evil and malignant eyes.

It is in this way that Christianity has succeeded
in transforming Eros and Aphrodite
—sublime powers, capable of idealization
—into hellish genii and phantom goblins,

by means of the pangs
which every sexual impulse
was made to raise in the conscience of the believers.

Is it not a dreadful thing
to transform necessary and regular sensations
into a source of inward misery,
and thus arbitrarily
to render interior misery
necessary and regular
in the case of every man!

Furthermore,
this misery remains secret
with the result that it is all the more deeply rooted,
for it is not all men who have the courage,
which Shakespeare shows
in his sonnets,
of making public
their Christian gloom
on this point.

The Dawn Of Day by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by J. M. Kennedy, aphorism 76

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Ode to the Condom*

by Sharon Olds

Rubber; safe; French letter; sleeve;
protector of the young so young
they do not yet exist; separator
of male and female; bundling board down the
middle of a Shaker bed; mechitzah
down the aisle of an Orthodox synagogue;
veil between the matters which create
spirits; Trojan; trumpet mute;
latex; superfine; reservoir tip;
Ramses, Fourex – some actually
made of sheep intestine, sparkling
with mammalian life — I never liked you.
Of course I’d hardly recognize
you now, what with your flavors, your Ribbed
for Her, your cap and bells, but bless you,
separator of women and men
from abortion; separator of health
from death; separator of male
from male, of well from ill – costume of the
life force, best friend of the earth.

*Odes by Sharon Olds, 2016 by pub. Alfred A. Knopf  (winner of the Pulitzer Prize)