The idea of sexual transgression as sin is in the founding article of Christianity, Eve eating the forbidden fruit. It’s also embedded within our contemporary secular culture –shame is often accompanied in acknowledging our sexual kinks. And yet, nothing quite fuels sexual desire like the idea of breaking taboo. Interrogating those taboos can reveal that society’s limits on sexual behaviour can be arbitrary and oppressive – if no one is being harmed, why shouldn’t we give in to desire? The safe breaking of taboo, as in BDSM, can be a way to own our desires, push shame aside, while still knowing that what we’re doing is considered naughty, and therefore hot. Good taboo sex is liberating, writes Victoria Brooks.

The question is as old as time – why do we find it so hard to resist the delicious allure of the forbidden when it comes to sex? Why do we want to bed that married person; or to ravish that particular body that we’ve been warned against touching; why have we always coveted that threesome; why do we want to do that kinky thing we suspect others will think is weird; why are we inclined to edge ourselves closer and closer to (and sometimes completely across) the line and revel in the debauched delights of taboo?

Transgression as an act means to ‘cross-over’ from being on the ‘right’ side, where we maintain moral order, into the wrong side, or to be specific – into an immoral state of chaos. Transgression means to overstep the line that keeps us all, basically, in line. So what is it about transgressing into an immoral state of sexual chaos that’s so irresistible to us? The answer is not because we’re irredeemably bad, but because we’re searching.