I wouldn’t have thought that out of all the things we have seen thus far I would have the most to say about the erotic art section of the Museo Larco, but alas, here we are. In this exhibit awash with Moche sexual effigies, functional as pots and expressive as sculptures, adorned with sex acts ranging from realistic representations to borderline body horror, myself and others noticed commonalities and trends among these pieces that got the ol’ gears turning in my head. A particularly interesting trend was that despite the depictions of all kinds of wild ways the Moche may have engaged in sex, a remarkably small number of these pieces were representations of sex acts that would actually be conducive to reproduction (ie: PIV sex), which was confusing given that we learned that much of this art represented fertility. Instead, the vast majority of these artifacts depicted some kind of variation of oral sex, anal sex, mutual masturbation or some questionable mix of all of the above. Assuming this was an actual trend and not just a *ahem* preference of the collector, I spent quite some time pondering why the Moche people put such an emphasis on butt-stuff and whatnot. In this moment  I remembered reading about the notion of Inverted fertility within various different Andean cultures at some point during my undergrad. As we learned in the tour, the worldview of many pre-incan indigenous peoples including the Moche was deeply rooted in the concept of duality. They believed that the universe was composed of complementary forces… life and death, fertility and barrenness, male and female, light and dark. Given this understanding,  Non-reproductive sexual acts, like anal sex, oral sex etc represent an inverted fertility, where sexual energy is transformed and redirected. This inversion is not seen as some kind of anti-fertility per se but as a necessary counterpart to reproductive acts. Just as death is a necessary counterpart to life, non-reproductive acts balance the act of procreation, ensuring a holistic approach to the management of vital forces in the greater cosmos. The transformation of sexual energy, whether through reproductive or non-reproductive means, is crucial for the continuity of life. Moreover, consider the use of these ceramics in funerary rituals, these depictions of a deliberate inversion of terrestrial notions of reproduction would have played a huge role in ensuring the deceased’s vitality and influence continued in the afterlife. Ultimately, the reason I decided to write about this topic is because it got me thinking about how this aspect of art runs counter to the Modern post-colonial tendency to compartmentalize life into distinct, typically disconnected categories. More specifically I am referring to how this compartmentalization typically separates the physical, spiritual, and cultural aspects of existence, more often than not overlooking the interdependent nature of said aspects. The Moche emphasis on sex acts that are not necessarily reproductive in the most literal and their broader cosmological implications provide a contrast to this Western outlook that has got me making more and more and more connections in other aspects of all the indigenous art we got the opportunity to see.