“AFTER THE ORGY”

I have a vision for the future where all the necessary sex education will be available for everyone. . . . No one will ever go hungry for sex because there will be sex kitchens all over town serving sex instead of soup. . . . We will learn how to use orgasm to cure disease as some of the ancient Tantrics and Taoists did. . . . In the future, everybody will be so sexually satisfied, there’ll be an end to violence, rape and war. We will establish contact with extra-terrestrials and they will be very sexy. - Annie Sprinkle, (1996) an American sex educator, former sex worker, feminist stripper, pornographic actress, cable television host, porn magazine editor, writer, sex film producer, and sex-positive feminist, which now identifies as ecosexual.

If it were necessary to characterize the state of things I would say that it is after the orgy. The orgy is . . . the explosive moment of modernity, that of liberation in all domains. Political liberation, sexual liberation, liberation of productive forces, liberation of destructive forces. . . . Today everything is liberated . . . we find ourselves before the question: what are we to do AFTER THE ORGY? - Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer in The Transparency of Evil (1993)

This chapter has only scratched the surface of contemporary appropriations of Tantra in the popular imagination. If space allowed, I could have explored a variety of other neo-Tantric phenomena, such as Robert Svoboda’s popular series based on the life and teachings of a modern Aghorī; firsthand accounts by Westerners who have “gone Tantric,” like June Campbell and Daniel Odier; Tantra-practicing rock stars (and even bands, in both India and the United States, who call themselves “Tantric” the rapidly expanding realms of S&M Tantra and gay Tantra (that even claim as advocates respected Tantric scholars like Jeffrey Hopkins); not to mention the various attempts to wed Tantra with Native American, neopagan, and even Christian spiritual practices.

But even from this brief overview, it is not difficult to see why Tantra has become so popular in contemporary popular culture. Nor is it hard to imagine why Tantra has been celebrated as what Nik Douglas calls the “Science of the Future,” and even as the “Engine of Political Change” that will reunite humankind during this millennium in a “new spiritual democracy”: “The Future of Tantra is like Woman’s best Orgasm. . . . It is without limits. . . . Tantra is a vast spiritual experience, oceanic, wondrous and unpredictable.”

Tantra is a brand of spirituality that can magically unite hedonism and transcendence, self-realization and this-worldly prosperity. As the most radical and transgressive form of spirituality, Tantra (not unlike capitalism itself) oversteps every taboo and shatters every social restriction. Thus performance artists like the notorious Annie Sprinkle—a self-proclaimed “post-porn modernist”—uses her live performances of Tantric sex as a vehicle for liberation from all forms of sexual containment or social taboo.

As one Indian American author, Hakim Bey, explains, Tantra is thus the most appropriate path for our own age of radical sexuality, violence, transgression, and power in the Kali yuga of modernity:

Her age must contain horrors. . . . To go thru chaos, to ride it like a tiger, to embrace it (even sexually) & absorb its shakti . . . this is the faith of the Kali yuga. Creative nihilism. For those who follow it she promises enlightenment & even wealth, a share of her temporal power. The sexuality & violence serve as metaphors in a poem which acts directly on consciousness. . . . [T]hey can be openly deployed & imbued with a sense of the holiness of every thing from ecstasy & wine to garbage & corpses.

As such, this new image of Tantra also fits in well with contemporary attitudes toward sexuality and its liberation—what Jean Baudrillard has aptly dubbed the “culture of premature ejaculation.” This is a culture rooted in an imagined dialectic of “repression” and “liberation,” or the belief that our sexuality has been suppressed and denied by prudish Victorian values and that we must now free our sexuality through hedonistic enjoyment:

Ours is a culture of premature ejaculation. More and more, all seduction . . . disappears behind the naturalized sexual imperative calling for an immediate relation of a desire. . . . Nowadays one no longer says: “You’ve got a soul and you must save it,” but “You’ve got a sexual nature and you must learn how to use it well.” . . . “You’ve got a libido and you must learn how to spend it.”

Yet this leaves us with the troubling question of just what is there left to do “after the orgy”—after every taboo has been violated, every prohibition transgressed, and every desire satiated.

I would suggest that the investigation of the contemporary imagining of Tantra has much broader comparative implications. The popular appropriations of Tantra give us some important insights into the many ways in which traditional religions are being adapted, transformed, and exploited in the strange new world of late capitalism. We might also compare, for example, the appropriations of Native American spirituality, Afro-Brazilian movements like Santeria, and even traditional Jewish traditions like Kabbalah (which now claims popular entertainers like Roseanne Barr among its disciples).

In each of these cases, we find ancient religious traditions entering more and more into the ever expanding web of global capitalism and consumerism. This process could, of course, be seen as a good and healthy phenomenon, contributing to our awareness of other cultures and leading the way to a more diverse, pluralistic, and tolerant global community. But it could also be seen as quite negative, and even as a form of neocolonialism and cultural imperialism, yet another example of the West’s exploitation of the sacred artifacts of other peoples.

As Torgovnick points out in her discussion of the fascination with the “primitive” in modern culture, the popular celebration of globalism and pluralism as a carnivalesque liberation is rather naive, to say the least. For it masks the deeper socioeconomic disparity that continues to structure relations between East and West, between First World and Third World; it ignores the forces of neocolonialism and cultural exploitation that continue to rule much of the late-capitalist global marketplace:

There is a common problematic view in discussions of global culture. . . . The problem is one of carnivalesque rejoicing . . . of believing that contact and polyphony are inherently liberating. . . . But carnivals do not last. . . . Behind the festivities are social and economic facts we should not forget. The problem with the carnival idea . . . is that it ignores the real social and economic cost of the global village. . . . It may sound a discordant note at the carnival, but that note is still heard—daily—in the ghettos and shantytowns of the urban jungle.

However we wish to interpret this phenomenon, it would seem that in this age of increasing pluralism in the late-capitalist world order, we need to practice relentless self-consciousness and self-criticism. We need always to ask ourselves whether we are working toward a genuinely postimperial, pluralistic global community, or whether we are merely absorbing all other, even previously uncolonized, peoples’ cultures into the ever expanding network of global capitalism (which some would describe as an even more insidious form of neocolonialism). In other words, to quote Chogyam Trungpa in his work on the widespread disease of “spiritual materialism,” we need to ask whether or not “we have simply created a shop, an antique shop.”

― Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion (2003)