We live in a culture that teaches us to control ourselves, hold back and behave like mature, civilized, measured adults.
But what happens when the body begins longing for something else? Something older, less polite and far less controlled?
Some sexual experiences are not about romance or technique. They are about presence, intensity and reconnecting with something more primal and animalistic.
That is the idea behind primal sex, a style of intimacy centered on instinctive, unfiltered physical experience. It responds to the body, smell, touch, bodily fluids, sound and attraction before the mind has time to analyze what is happening.
It does not necessarily mean aggressive, violent or especially extreme sex. Rather, advocates describe it as a sensual encounter in which people temporarily stop managing themselves and allow the body to take the lead.
Zohara Tristman, a sex and relationship therapist who teaches and writes about sexuality, is one of them.
On an episode of Ynet's Sex Appeal podcast devoted to primal sexuality, she described it this way:
"Wild sex is sex without style, beauty or aesthetics. You don't need leather clothes, and it isn't necessarily aggressive. The idea is to move toward play, presence, sensuality, bodily fluids, sounds, sex that has not been domesticated.
"Wild sexuality is regressive, animalistic and instinctive. And above all, it is beautiful, for both men and women."
Asked whether she sees it as a total experience, one that involves the entire body, Tristman said totality does not have to mean abandoning ordinary life or identity.
"I can be a mother and still be a total woman," she said. "Wild sexuality is simply a psychological quality that all of us have the right to visit. It is another space in life that I invite anyone listening to explore. You can be a feminist woman, a high-tech worker, a father or anything else."
‘We are also creatures of the body’
"We are not only rational beings. We are creatures of the body, and we are part of the natural world," Tristman said.
For years, she said, she imagined wild sexuality largely as performance.
"I pictured myself almost hunting my man," she said.
Her understanding changed after giving birth.
Tristman has four sons and has been pregnant five times, including one pregnancy that ended in miscarriage. Her deliveries, she said, were extremely fast and physically overwhelming.
"That was where I experienced, with unbelievable intensity, what it means to be a primal force of nature," she said.
What did that feel like?
"They were loud. I roared. I cried. I got angry. I wasn't spiritual. I didn't meet God. I wasn't orgasmic, I wasn't holy, I wasn't giving blessings. I was simply, and I'll use a difficult word, an animal.
"It was very radical and very raw. At a certain point I felt that I, Zohara, was unraveling. I was now simply a vagina giving birth, and my body knew what to do."
She described it as a psychological experience in which her ordinary identity seemed to dissolve.
"I open up and become a primal creature, and it is amazing and frightening. Very frightening," she said.
Years later, she began thinking about whether that same sense of total physical surrender could exist inside a long-term relationship, precisely because familiarity and trust can create a protected environment.
"Sexuality is a space that pushes reality away, but it also exceeds reality because I discover something more inside it," she said.
"For me, primal sexuality is the perfect example of that. In that moment, I am not trying to be analytical, smart, beautiful or aesthetic. For a moment, I am beyond time and place.
"That is the magic of sexuality, beyond orgasm or release. It lets me encounter new sides of myself."
What does primal sexuality actually look like?
Tristman says primal intimacy can take very different forms.
It might involve someone curling up on a bed in a fetal position and asking a partner simply to protect them. The experience may end in tears.
"It is a wild moment and a primal one because she has gone backward," Tristman said.
Another scenario might involve a man allowing himself to feel physically powerful, sweating, breathing heavily and expressing intense desire for his partner.
"And that is allowed," she said.
Oral sex, she said, can also become a primal experience when attention shifts away from appearance and toward sensation and exploration.
"She isn't smart, she isn't beautiful. She is simply mouth, senses and discovery," Tristman said.
What links the experiences, in her view, is less the specific sexual act than the feeling of bodily totality and psychological unraveling.
That also means letting go of the expectation that sex, particularly female sexuality, should remain visually attractive.
"I think wild sexuality gives us permission not to be aesthetic," she said.
"There is a kind of double game in sexuality, certainly when it comes to women. Socially, it is constantly important for us to look beautiful. It matters to me too.
"But when women are told, 'Be wild, be a sex kitten,' they are still expected to remain put together."
She points to sexual accessories designed to evoke animal imagery while remaining deliberately pretty and polished.
"The message is, 'You can be animalistic and instinctive, we've even given you a tail, but make sure it is pink and furry and that you still look beautiful,'" she said.
"No. Wild sexuality unravels you, and through it you can encounter anything."
Primal sexuality, she said, may involve adventure, power, penetration, sweat and bodily fluids. But it can also be gentle.
A partner might slowly rub oil over the other's body, for example, creating an experience centered less on conventional erotic performance and more on touch, care and sensory memory.
The point, she said, is the temporary return to something more basic and bodily.
"Wild sexuality is really the ability to wander a little into places that culture considers dangerous, to loosen and break through the boundaries of the self," she said.
"When that happens inside a protected and safe relationship, I can unravel without disappearing. I unravel, but I remain alive."
‘As you get older, nature tells you to let go’
Tristman, 40, is a mother of four and has been in a long-term relationship with her partner, Adam.
She grew up in Israel's ultra-Orthodox community, in a Lithuanian-Ashkenazi environment that she remembers as highly restrained.
"I grew up somewhere very proper, polite and structured. Everything was collected and controlled, and I was the dark-skinned girl," she said.
Her mother's family is Yemenite, and as a child she had curly hair.
At one point, she recalled, teachers suggested to her mother that she straighten it because it was blocking other students' view of the blackboard.
"Today, as an adult who studies sexuality, culture, the body and feminist thought, I hear that differently," she said.
"What they were really saying was that my curly hair was creating disorder. These curls don't work for us. They are too dramatic. They are frightening."
For Tristman, the memory became connected to her thinking about primal sexuality.
"It took me many years to peel away different layers of domestication so I could encounter myself and my body," she said.
"And I love totality, even though I am a mother and a religious woman who covers her hair."
At 40, she says her body is also beginning to speak to her differently.
She has not reached menopause, she said, but aging has already started changing her relationship with appearance.
"If all your life you felt you needed to walk around with your breasts upright and no belly, suddenly nature says, 'Sister, let go. None of that is relevant anymore,'" she said.
For her, that physical loosening is connected to the same broader idea of letting go of control.
Why try it?
Tristman believes people often retain a deep longing to surrender and receive affection without limits, while also wanting moments in which they can stop controlling themselves.
"People look for that in psychedelic experiences and in all kinds of extreme experiences," she said.
"Many of us are also hungry for primal places because we are primal creatures too."
Human beings, she said, live with both sides simultaneously.
"We are both body and culture. I am a career woman, I am a mother and I am also an animal. In this kind of sexuality, suddenly all of it connects."
For Tristman, that can feel like reclaiming parts of herself that were previously hidden.
"I am taking sovereignty over parts of myself that until now were in the shadows and that I concealed," she said.
"And I am allowed to do that with my partner, with the father of my children, with someone I have known for a long time. I can do it in our own bed.
"It is extraordinary to be in those total experiences when someone who loves you is there with you."
How do you begin?
Tristman recommends starting with the body rather than with an attempt to perform a particular sexual role.
She associates the pelvis with instinct, desire and physical awareness, and suggests movement as one way to become more conscious of it.
That might include twisting, shaking, swaying or movements drawn from belly dancing.
"The idea is to awaken that area to sensation and life," she said.
She also views the breasts as an area that connects desire and eroticism with nourishment, protection and the fact that humans are mammals.
For breastfeeding women who feel comfortable doing so, she suggests that breast milk can become part of consensual intimacy between adults, treating it simply as another bodily sensation rather than something that must remain outside sexual life.
She also suggests forms of physical closeness in which one partner simply rests against the other's chest or body, allowing intimacy to shift between comfort, sensuality and excitement.
But she stresses that primal sexuality does not require anything extreme.
"My main invitation to everyone is simply to dare to be ourselves with all of our different parts," Tristman said.
"Wild sexuality does not necessarily mean going to extremes or doing something incredibly daring.
"For me, it is the right to bring more parts of our bodies and our inner lives into sexuality, including parts we were taught to leave outside."