I got this question on another sub, and thought I would share my answer here:

It's definitely not a lost art. My partner and I have been practicing it regularly for 25 years, and I've interviewed several dozen other long-term tantric couples in that time. There's surprisingly strong agreement among them about the essential physical and emotional characteristics that define it.

But it may seem like a lost art if you listen to all the people who try to divorce it from its physical roots. Using sex for magical or spiritual purposes is a very ancient practice, but the mistake too many people make is that they then try to downgrade or eliminate the sex to make it somehow more pure and "spiritual."

It doesn't work that way. All you end up doing is converting it into a kind of passionless yoga or meditation, stripped of its energy.

Real tantric sex is, first and foremost, incredibly great sex, passionate, messy, earthy, powerful, and orgasmic. Done right, it can produce profound altered states of consciousness, including intense feelings of union with your partner and oneness with the universe. But it begins with the raw physical power of human sexuality, one of the most potent of all sources of mental and emotional energy.

The problem we have in the West is that the people who introduced Westerners to the ideas behind tantric sex all came from severely prudish, sex-negative cultures, particularly Victorian Britain and Victorian India, so in many cases they were writing and talking about something they had only heard about and had never practiced.

Whether they had experienced it or not, they typically talked about it only in mystical metaphors. They never described in any detail the nuts and bolts, the physical processes for extending sex and achieving the heightened orgasms and altered states that tantric sex is known for. That's like asking people to become artists without ever showing them the tools of their craft or explaining how to use them.

Tantric sex can be approached from a completely secular point of view, as a vehicle for creating experiences that seem magical, whether or not they really are. Or it can be the basis for a spiritual quest that is grounded in those physical practices and uses those altered states to achieve some higher goal. But when you ignore or skimp on the physical practices needed to produce those effects, you end up with something weak, limp, and devoid of power, a pale shadow of the real thing.

You can master and practice a craft for its own sake. You can master a craft for the sake of creating great art. But you can't be either a craftsman or a real artist if you aren't willing to learn the technical basis of your craft.

Too many people want the results of tantric sex without making the effort to acquire the skills that make it possible. It's like those people who want to be world-class pianists without ever touching a piano. It happens only in their fantasies.

Tantric sex is alive and well, even flourishing, in its secular form. It has been part of many different religious traditions over the last few thousand years, and all of them have tried to channel it and explain it and use it in their own ways. The problem comes when the prudish types in these religious traditions try to take control of it and redefine it in purely spiritual terms, because then they destroy its fundamental power.