"The Millennial Classicist" on sex and death
We in America would be hard-pressed to describe our funerary mourning practices as erotic, but this is surprisingly more common than you might imagine.
Two examples of “sexy” mourning practices, from modern-day Taiwan and ancient Greece, require even secular members in Western societies to reexamine seemingly fundamental ideas about a community’s ritual debt to the dead.
In some communities in rural Taiwan, strippers perform at funerals and festivals commemorating the dead. The stated purpose of this ritual is to entertain passing spirits of the dead. The ritual is neither new nor unorthodox, though there has been an upsurge of criticism from middle and upper class men that the practice is harmful to public morality.
Thus, it has become less common in urban areas. According to one report, local supporters said that the practice is a “traditional folk culture lacking in the sharp separation of sex and religion often seen in other parts of the world.”
Now to go back in time and consider another sexualized mourning practice: the ancient Greeks. In, for example, Homer’s "Iliad," women would rend their clothes and let down their hair.
Both of these actions, especially the latter, were X-rated, according to renowned Homer scholar Gregory Nagy. Women would in no other circumstances let down their hair. And the themes of sex and death occurred together elsewhere.
For example, in the lost "Song of the Ethiopians," Achilles and Amazon warrior Penthesilea, presented in many ways as lovers, dueled to Penthesilea’s death.
Much more could be said about this literary theme, but it is perhaps more productive to ask why these themes, to modern Westerners so distinct, are intertwined in other cultural worldviews.
One answer is that sex — insofar as it is reproduction — stands in opposition to death.
Perhaps, where our primary association with sex is pleasure, for other societies, the primary association is fertility, so the distinction makes more sense. It is the result of Christian morality or modern psychology that removed sex from a social context (i.e., as an act that benefits the society as a whole) into, at least initially, a personal context.
It is in light of this that Foucault sighed at “the image of the imperial prude ... emblazoned on our restrained, mute and hypocritical sexuality.”
Perhaps, we would do well not to forget the notion from our polytheistic past that sex and death are parts of the vicissitudes of life. They are not to be feared or painted with moral tar.