Sexual Health and Erotic Freedom
by Dr. Barnaby B. Barratt
Published by Xlibris
Available now through major retailers
What professionals are saying:
"It is rare for a renowned sexologist to speak honestly as a sexual being. Dr. Barnaby Barratt has summoned the courage to tell us brilliantly not only about sex per se but about his own sexual journey because he has a mission: He wants to liberate us intellectually, emotionally, spiritually and even politically by restoring our birthright the right to embodied sexual pleasure. This is the most stunningly provocative, subversive and touching book I have read in a long time. It is compulsory reading for anyone who longs to feel more richly alive in his/her own skin!"
Peggy J. Kleinplatz, Ph.D.
School of Psychology, University of Ottawa
Editor of New Directions in Sex Therapy
"A brave and important book! Everyone who plans to be sexually active should read it!"
Candida Royalle
Erotic Film Director
Author of How to Tell a Naked Man What To Do
"Dr. Barratt has another winner! Sexual Health and Erotic Freedom is an explosive book that cuts to the core of the divisiveness that is tearing at the fabric of contemporary American religious institutions, and of our culture in general. It is incisive, insightful, and helpful in its vision of health, spirituality, and erotic liberation."
William R. Stayton, ThD, PhD
Past President, American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists
"Dr. Barratt has written a provocative and courageous expose, laying bare the societal forces that inhibit our sexuality and crush our capacity for unbridled joy. Sexual Health and Erotic Freedom will stimulate, challenge, and inspire readers to examine long held assumptions about intimate pleasure in ways that may seem foreign even shocking to some yet are inescapably enlightening. Best of all, Dr. Barratt opens doors to help readers reach a depth of erotic connection that may have seemed barely imaginable before."
Joy Davidson, PhD
Certified Sex Therapist and Author of Fearless Sex
"Barnaby Barratt offers us a strong manifesto for sexual liberation. If we are indeed in a culture war where sex and exotic desire are primary targets, Dr. Barratt issues a clarion call for honesty and integrity in our sexual discourse. Sexual Health and Erotic Freedom confronts the sex fascism and shame-based sex paranoia that seem to grip our politics and personal relationships, with a radical, courageous and reasoned case for freely and openly liberating our desires and expressing our true sexual selves."
Jeffrey Montgomery
Executive Director, Triangle Foundation
Vice President, Woodhull Freedom Foundation
How to Order
This book is also available through major online retailers.
Excerpt from the Introduction
I believe passionately that humanity needs a more loving world, and that a more loving world can only be achieved if we humans are free to enjoy the pleasures of our bodies. I believe that, at the heart of our natural being, we humans are a living embodiment of the energies of the divine. So a more loving world cannot be achieved if we suppress or repress our natural erotic nature, just as it cannot be achieved by the oppression and persecution of one group by another.
Simply stated, the creation of a more loving world requires sexual health and erotic freedom. We know this because all the evidence in front of us points to the fact that human malice arises when our natural erotic exuberance is coercively constrained, curbed or curtailed.
The health and freedom of our erotic enjoyment in life are inherently connected, and they are the wellspring of our human potential for happiness.
In the name of countless religious and political ideologies, many people try to avoid these fundamental truths by simply denying them, by deliberating over them, or by qualifying them into oblivion. However, as this book will elaborate, both scientific investigation and spiritual analysis point to these conclusions. Indeed, they are self-evident. We know that, when we humans are deprived of the sensual and sexual enjoyment of our bodies, we react with spite, vindictiveness, hostility and anger. In sum, we are malicious, and malice arises precisely from sensual and sexual inhibition.
Lovemaking is humanity's saving grace, and most of the ailments from which the human race suffers could be averted if we allowed ourselves to lovemake more freely.
I know this from over thirty years in which I have been engaged in four kinds of professional experience: as a scholar and university professor, studying psychology, anthropology and philosophy; as a clinician, practicing psychoanalytic healing as well as offering sex therapy; as a sexuality educator, working in many different settings, from lecture halls to neighborhood meetings; and as a tantric facilitator, offering guidance on the sacred path that is delineated by our sexual-spiritual lives. I also know this from my own personal experience from my own emotional and spiritual journey since childhood.
Life provides humanity with plenty of hardship and adversity. Many of us experience terrifying natural disasters, and we all face the inevitability of disease, decay and death. However, beyond these life experiences of pain and loss, we humans have a remarkable capacity to make life unnecessarily miserable for each other and for ourselves. We exploit, bully and abuse each other. We commit violence and warfare, and we engage in all kinds of prejudicial and hurtful acts against our own human brethren. We institute multiple systems of social domination institutions whereby the many become impoverished, subjugated, malnourished, ill housed, and disempowered, so that the few may become richer, more powerful, and more wasteful. We bargain with weapons of mass destruction and we are, as a race, rapidly destroying the planet we inhabit committing ecological suicide in our own home. Whatever humanity's virtues, it is surely true that we humans are distinctive because, unlike any other living species, we are tragically, and uniquely, capable of hatred. We are distinct in our capacity for malice.
However, although we would seem to have a unique potential to be malicious, we humans also have a remarkable potential for love. Unlike other animals, we are able to engage in self-reflection, to consider the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of our lives, to experience a certain freedom of choice over how we think and feel, and we are capable of living life in Love.
So why don't we? Why, when we know what Love is, do we so frequently choose to exploit and abuse other humans, to impose our beliefs on others, to destroy the planet, and to make war with each other? What is at the root of our discontent? What lies behind our avarice and our apparent need to dominate others? What activates our judgmentalism and our propensity for hostility and violence?
Obviously, my answer that human malice arises when our freedom to enjoy the sensuality of life is constrained or curtailed may be an oversimplification. But the fact that it may be oversimplified must not lead us to avoid its essential truth. Because this is a major truth, a truth that has been systematically avoided through the ages and that is still the best available answer we have to remedy the tragedies of being human.
If we were raised without fear and ignorance of our sensual and sexual selves, if we were accustomed to the enjoyment of our embodiment, if we were erotically free, our capacity for malice would be eradicated. Fearfulness and frustration in relation to our sensual and sexual selves produce our capacity for malice, and the energies of our erotic nature are the spiritual source of our healing.
Somewhere in our imagination, almost all of us hold a vision of life replete with erotic happiness a life in which our sensual and sexual enjoyment is engaged with freedom, spontaneity and ethicality in a way that is entirely natural. This vision could be realized except for the fact that, as I will explain, our addiction to the forces of anti sexuality keeps us locked in our own imprisonment.
This book offers some suggestions as to why this is so, and how we might set ourselves free. It consists of a set of brief essays essayettes one might say that are intended as a challenge to the preconceived and received ideas that many of us have about sex. I intend to write in a way that is provocative and unsettling, because I believe we live in such a sexually insane culture that our ideas about sexuality need to be reconsidered radically. In a modest way, this small book is intended to help us rethink our vision of humankind's erotic nature and to realize our spiritual potential for happiness.
The sooner we can all be open with our sexual selves, the happier our planet will be. It is my hope that, in some modest way, Sexual Health and Erotic Freedom will contribute to our liberation.