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| Cheerleaders: the aesthetic nexus of the wholesome and the wanton |
by Andy Nowicki
(The following is an excerpt from Andy Nowicki's upcoming collection of essays, Welcome Back, Chaos.)
For man, the realm of the sensual is not limited to
physicality alone. If it were so, we would merely behave like animals during
mating season, prompted to seize upon and violate the nearest female with
automatic efficiency, feeling little the worse for wear afterwards. Instead,
sex for us possesses an interior component as well; it occupies us in a way that
involves the mind and the spirit at least as much as it does the body. Little
wonder, then, that fertility rituals of ancient cults often involved ritualized
orgies; in addition to sex being the origin of life, it also (to human minds)
necessarily entails the harnessing of a mysterious psychic force that, in the
words of the poet, “beckons as it baffles.”
