More on Ernest Becker’s “The Denial of Death”:
(See also here, here and here.)
(Yes, I'm reading slowly.)
“But now the rub for man. If sex is a fulfillment of his role as an animal in the species, it reminds him that he is nothing himself but a link in the chain of being, exchangeable with any other and completely expendable in himself. Sex represents, then, species consciousness and, as such, the defeat of individuality, of personality. But it is just this personality that man wants to develop: the idea of himself as a special cosmic hero with special gifts for the universe. He doesn’t want to be a mere fornicating animal like any other – this is not a truly human meaning, a truly distinctive contribution to world life. Form the very beginning, then, the sexual act represents a double negation: by physical death and of distinctive personal gifts. This point is crucial because it explains why sexual taboos have been at the heart of human society since the very beginning. They affirm the triumph of human personality over animal sameness. With the complex codes for sexual self-denial, man was able to impose the cultural map for personal immortality over the animal body. He brought sexual taboos into being because he needed to triumph over the body, and he sacrificed the pleasures of the body to the highest pleasure of all: self-perpetuation as a spiritual being though all eternity.”

Becker confirms this eloquently: all human problems are bodily problems, or to be more precise the problem is that we have a body with a specific consciousness. If I remember Milan Kundera well in his “Testaments Betrayed” he argued that the novel (Cervantes, Rabelais, Kafka) didn’t deny the fact that man is a creature that wants to overcome his body (unlike all other animals) with all tragic, absurd and comical consequences, the novel was and is all about this hapless endeavor: how to be a God who has to use the bathroom? Or: can God have diarrhea and still be God? Yes, see Cervantes and Rabelais, to name just two.
We sacrificed bodily pleasures for higher (cultural) pleasures but it seems to me that many are unhappy about this sacrifice. Eternity and traditional spirituality have disappointed us highly. (The so-called comeback of religion appears to be a bodily not to say bloody fiesta. Spiritual? Mostly not.)