The truth behind Sting’s infamous tantric sex odysseys
Former Police frontman Sting is often regarded as one of the most widely ridiculed figures in rock, perhaps second only to U2’s Bono. Despite being an accomplished artist, certain pretentious elements in his music and media personality have attracted significant criticism. However, to his credit, Sting has faced it all with a sense of good humour.
Songs such as ‘Englishman in New York’ and ‘Fields of Gold’ have gone a significant way in securing Sting as the butt of jokes from sneering hipsters the world over. While much of The Police’s material is equally as questionable, there is an extra-musical moment in his career that is more notorious than any.
It is the 1993 conversation Sting had alongside Bob Geldof in Q. In the most notable juncture of the chat, he claimed that one of the benefits of yoga is that it helps him have hours-long lovemaking sessions. In a haze of multiple Irish coffees and glasses of wine, Sting was asked how practising yoga was working for him, to which he surprisingly responded: “It can take you to higher levels, yeah. I’ve started to use it in sex now where you don’t spill your seed.”
He continued: “In yoga, sex is a spiritual focus of energy. It ends when you choose it to. If you’ve gone on for four or five hours, you don’t really want to come.” Later in the chat, referring to another specific benefit of tantric sex, Sting comically added: “It involves this muscle a lot of men aren’t trained to control.” It would later be reported that the former Police leader claimed the sessions lasted up to seven hours.
After years of mockery for his comments regarding the odysseys of tantric lovemaking he supposedly embarked upon with his wife, Trudie Styler, the 1998 biography Demolition Man by Christopher Sandford delved further into his famed aspect of Sting’s life. This only served to cement the myth in the public consciousness further.
Then, in 2014, on Inside the Actor’s Studio, Sting was forced to debunk his historical claims. “If we had seven hours, I would demonstrate,” he said. “Maybe not. But there is some truth to it. The idea of tantric sex is a spiritual act. I don’t know any purer and better way of expressing a love for another individual than sharing that wonderful, I call it, ‘sacrament.’ I would stand by it. Not seven hours, but the idea.”
He also clarified: “Seven hours includes a movie and dinner.”
Years before Sting put the age-old rumour to bed, it had made its way into his music. The title track of his 2003 album Sacred Love addresses the notorious comment that he said in Lyrics By Sting had “sped around the world like a digital virus and continues to reverberate even now.”
In the book, Sting declared that the basic notion that tantra has anything to do with “staying power” is absurd but took the opportunity for a shot at the media, asserting that the idea that sex could be sacred is too much for them, as they are too obsessed with trivial topics. To them, sex is either scandalous, in instances such as when a politician is caught red-handed in the act, or used for commercial means to sell products. In a pertinent point, the musician concluded: “In both cases, eroticism, the most powerful force in our human nature, is devalued to the point of worthlessness.”
Listen to ‘Sacred Love’ below.
