Sex, Maturity, and the End of Civilizational Shame

By Geoffrey Holland

On a planet of more than eight billion human beings, sexuality is not an exception. It is a background condition of life.

Every day, in every culture, in every nation, in every social class, human beings fall in love, touch, imagine, long, bond, self-soothe, reproduce, and seek pleasure and intimacy. By even the most conservative estimates, well over a billion acts of sexual expression—partnered and solitary—take place on Earth every single day. Sexuality is not a marginal human activity. It is one of the main things our species is doing.

And yet, few aspects of human life are so persistently burdened with shame, fear, moral panic, and institutional anxiety.

This tension—between the universality of sexuality and the cultural impulse to demonize it—reveals something important about where our civilization still struggles to grow up.

Before anything else, one boundary must be stated clearly and without ambiguity:

Children must be protected.

Any sexual activity involving minors and adults is exploitation and abuse. Full stop. There is no ethical gray zone here. A mature society draws this line clearly, enforces it firmly, and organizes its laws, norms, and institutions to defend the young from harm, coercion, and premature sexualization.

That boundary is not in tension with sexual freedom. It is a precondition for a morally coherent sexual culture.

But protecting children does not require turning adult sexuality into something dirty, dangerous, or unspeakable. In fact, confusing those two things—child protection and adult sexual repression—has historically produced not healthier societies, but more hypocritical, more secretive, and often more abusive ones.

To understand how strange our modern sexual anxiety really is, it helps to step back and look at the long arc of human history.

For roughly 95% of our species’ existence, human beings lived as hunter-gatherers in small, communal bands. There was no agriculture, no stored surplus, no inherited property, no rigid class hierarchies, and no centralized religious institutions. Life was difficult, often precarious—but it was also immediate, embodied, and social.

In those worlds, sexuality was not a theological problem. It was simply part of life.

Anthropology suggests that many early human societies were far more relaxed, open, and pragmatic about sex than later agricultural civilizations became. Pair bonds existed, long-term relationships existed, and families existed—but sexuality itself was not yet wrapped in the heavy machinery of shame, guilt, and metaphysical anxiety.

Pleasure was not suspicious. The body was not an enemy. In fact, for most of human history, sex was not only how children were conceived. It was one of the primary sources of joy, comfort, bonding, and relief in lives that were otherwise physically demanding and uncertain. There were no cinemas, no novels, no concerts, no digital worlds. There was storytelling, dancing, touch, play—and sexuality.

Even among our closest evolutionary relatives, we see something instructive. Bonobos, for example, use sexual behavior not only for reproduction, but for social bonding, conflict reduction, reassurance, and play. Sexuality, in that context, is not a moral problem. It is a social glue.

Human beings did not evolve for hundreds of thousands of years in a state of chronic sexual shame. That shame is a cultural development, not a biological inheritance.

So where did it come from?

The great shift occurred with agriculture, property, inheritance, and rigid social hierarchies. Once land, wealth, and lineage had to be controlled, sexuality—especially women’s sexuality—became politically and economically sensitive. Certainty of paternity suddenly mattered. Bloodlines mattered. Ownership mattered.

Over time, religions and legal systems grew around these concerns, and sexuality slowly transformed from a shared human capacity into a discipline problem.

Shame became a technology of social control.

Desire became suspicious.

The body became something to police.

This was not primarily about spiritual purity. It was about order, inheritance, and power.

A psychologically healthy civilization learns to distinguish three different things:

• The existence of sexual feelings and desires (which are natural, universal, and morally neutral)

• The ethical framework that governs behavior (consent, dignity, mutual respect, and non-harm)

• The absolute protection of those who cannot consent

When these are collapsed into one—when desire itself is treated as guilt—cultures do not become more moral. They become more dishonest.

Sexuality does not suddenly appear at some arbitrary legal age. Human beings are embodied creatures. Hormones, curiosity, imagination, and attraction emerge as part of biological development. A wise society responds to this reality with education, boundaries, and protection, not denial and panic.

But adulthood brings something else: moral agency.

Among consenting adults, sexuality becomes a domain not of sin, but of ethical relationship. The real moral questions are not:

“Is this desire allowed?”but rather:“Is there consent?”“Is there respect?”“Is there coercion, manipulation, or power abuse?”“Is anyone being harmed?”

This is what sexual maturity actually looks like.

A mature civilization does not try to erase desire. It tries to civilize it.

The tragedy of many sexually repressive cultures is that they do not actually reduce sexuality. They simply drive it underground—where it becomes more distorted, more obsessive, more dishonest, and often more dangerous.

The result is familiar: societies that publicly condemn sex while privately fixating on it; institutions that preach purity while quietly protecting abusers; moral systems that punish honest desire but often fail to prevent real harm.

Repressed cultures are not less sexual. They are simply less truthful.

There is a deep irony here. On a living planet, sexuality is as constant as breathing or eating. It is how bonds form. It is how families begin. It is how stress is relieved. It is how affection is expressed. It is how pleasure, comfort, and closeness are shared. It is also, quite simply, how the species continues.

To treat this force as inherently dirty is to declare war on human nature itself.

But the alternative is not chaos or hedonism. The alternative is adult ethics.

A humane sexual culture is built on a few simple, demanding principles:

• Consent is absolute.

• Power must never be abused.

• No one is used as an object.

• No one is coerced, manipulated, or diminished.

• Children are always protected.

• Adults own their bodies, their identities, and their choices.

Within those boundaries, there is room for enormous diversity of expression, orientation, identity, relationship styles, and personal meaning. There is no single “correct” way to be a sexual human being. There is only the question of whether one’s sexuality is lived with integrity and care.

One of the most damaging ideas inherited from older moral systems is the notion that even thinking about sex is somehow a moral failure. This trains people to distrust their own minds, split their inner lives, and live in chronic low-grade shame. It does not produce virtue. It produces anxiety, secrecy, and performative righteousness.

A mature civilization understands something simpler and more compassionate:

Desire is energy.Ethics is how we relate to others with it.

The long arc of human development—psychological, cultural, and moral—points away from repression and toward integration. Not indulgence without limits, and not denial without honesty, but conscious, responsible, embodied adulthood.

This is what civilizational maturity looks like.

It does not fear the body.It does not need shame as a tool of control.It protects the vulnerable.It honors consent.It tells the truth about human nature.

And humanity, finally, at last, grows up.

___________________________