Exciting!
Then there is this social undercurrent that sex is fun!
Wait.
That's no longer an undercurrent.
Sex sells.
It's a cheap way to shore up your sagging sales performance rating or sagging locker-room reputation, or, well, any sagging image problem.
So everybody and their dog is selling it.
Except--
It's not cheap.
And it doesn't really shore up anything.
Unclean, forbidden, dangerous, exciting, fun, it's all the same -- lies by partial truth.
Sex is fun! For a moment.
It releases those endorphins in the brain, and those endorphins are what recreational drugs and rock-n-roll and romance novels and fast cars and so forth are all about.
But when used as a drug, it's just like the rest of the list. When you are done, it lets you down.
Now, it doesn't let you down if you are doing it the right way for the right reasons. Using it as a safe drug is not a right reason, and it isn't safe, no matter what the people who like the easy sell tell you.
What's the right reason to have sex with someone? Well, it's a lot easier to talk about a bunch of the wrong reasons, and I'm in rant mode, so I'll talk about those first.
Sex is dangerous!
But they also tell you we have conquered syphilis, scabies, and herpes. And then they'll say condoms! And try to tell you herpes and scabies really aren't that bad anyway, and "we" are going to conquer HIV/AIDS real soon now, ...
Even if condoms never developed pin-prick holes and such, and all the talk about conquering all the sexually transmitted diseases were for real, there is still the problem of the heat of the moment.
In the middle of the endorphin rush, you tend to do stupid things -- like taking the condom off, or convincing yourself the pill also protects against diseases, or ...
So sex really is dangerous, and not just the exciting kind of dangerous.
That's why you should keep it within marriage. Then it's not so dangerous. (It's still dangerous enough to be an adventure, though.)
Sex is forbidden!
Well, yeah. Random sex really is forbidden if you understand the dangers. And doing things just because they are forbidden has always been a bit brain-dead, anyway.
Now, there is a class of philosophy that forbids sex except for making children, and even (in certain perversions) wants to forbid it then. Make your babies in test-tube, and use man-made drugs to get the endorphin rush, etc.
It ain't going to work. Not anywhere in the near future, and, if experimental results don't change, we really can't expect that it will ever work well enough to replace the natural way of making babies.
Sure, we can use the test-tube to help sometimes, and it's important to understand endorphins, but the whole idea of the endorphin rush is to help us overcome all the psycho-emotional mechanicalities that we tend to pile on ourselves, whether we call them "the law of Moses" or "rational behavior" or "tradition!" or whatever.
Well, not the whole idea, but a major part of it.
Whether you appeal to mother nature or God for your purpose, making babies is one of the purposes of sex.
Sex is unclean.
Whether it's solitary masturbation or sex between properly married partners or sex and masturbation in a group orgy, it's unclean.
This isn't just about micro-organisms and physical dirt. When you have sex, you share some intangibles, too, emotional things and intellectual things and spiritual things and social things and economic things. You share them in ways that aren't clean, and I don't mean ritually clean. But no one seems to want to talk about that, because sex sells!
Now it can be (relatively) clean, even sacred, (if still a bit stinky -- funky -- between partners properly and legally committed to each other and consenting to it.
But it's still not perfectly safe and clean within marriage. That is, even between properly married, consenting spouses, sex can be done in ways that are unnecessarily harmful to the health of one or both partners.
And it leaves stuff behind that, if not taken care of, just get messier. Even in the best of cases, it's hard to have sex without leaving body fluids on the sheets, underwear, and various other places. If you fail to clean things up, they get sticky and smelly and moldy, and people can get sick from the funk. And if you let things go too long, it can cause real, serious disease. And, hey, you know this is not hygienic.
And the shared excitement leaves both partners with expectations that need to be fulfilled. Not taking care of those expectations tends to be emotionally non-hygienic.
Babies? Yeah, condoms do slip, or develop crease cracks and holes. Pregnancy is always a possibility between partners of the opposite gender.
Babies are messy, too, but we don't complain about them because it's obvious they have to be messy to grow up. And we were babies once, no matter how hard we pretend we were never that uncool.
(Well, there have been, and still are, some who say children should be seen and not heard. And mean that they don't want to be bothered. This is another blind sort of philosophy.)
But the fact that babies are wonderful in spite of being messy does not mean that we should ignore the possibility of making babies when we do the sex thing. Maybe it's not a danger like getting sick, but bringing a baby into this world without even the promise of support is something we should avoid when possible. And if the burden naturally falls on the mother, it should be obvious that the father should be willing to commit to shouldering his part of the burden. And there we are back to marriage.
Oh. Pregnancy definitely can have adverse effects on health, in spite of all the wonderful medical stuff we have in our "modern" world. And all the wonderful modern contraceptives don't always prevent it happening.
Pregnancy is also a danger of sex.
Because of those endorphins, many people want to pretend that sex should be free and easy, with or without marriage.
But we really don't need to pretend such things.
You can get endorphin rush in lots of ways besides sex. Interacting with people gives us lots of opportunities to be nice to others, and being nice to them makes them feel good (even though they may pretend they don't like to feel good), and it also makes us feel good.
Mutual appreciation is not mutual masturbation no matter how many cynics say it is. Masturbation requires getting one's hands on the sex organ, whether literally or metaphorically. Appreciation does not.
There are plenty of ways to make each other feel good without getting into sex.
Anyway, the mutual agreement of support and exclusion made in marriage may not be perfectly iron-clad, but it's a whole lot better than the assumption that your partner-of-the-moment has probably come from some other messy tryst without bothering to clean up and is probably going to leave you without bothering to help you clean up, too.
There may be some need to talk about doing marriage the wrong way, since marriage is sometimes used as a tool of oppression.
The act of having sex itself implies commitment. You trust the other person not to bring a disease with him or her. And if there is a pregnancy, you trust the other person not to leave the one person with all the responsibility of the pregnancy.
That's one of the reasons many states in the USA used to have laws such that "living together as a married couple" would bring about a legal condition called common-law marriage.
Random sex is extremely messy. And it's so unnecessary.
So how can sex be a good thing?
Clearly, it's primarily a good thing between people who are truly committed to each other, at times when both are agreed about doing it.
That's when it can be fun and not let you down. That's when it can be an adventure without usually killing you.
Yeah, childbirth is still dangerous, but spouses are supposed to help each other, okay?
Marriage isn't iron-clad safe. Life isn't iron-clad safe, either. But both can be a bit better than the alternatives.
(On reflection the morning after I posted this, I'm still being being too oblique about the most current topic on sex. So,)
What of LGBQT?
LGT sex inherently does not lead to childbirth. Female humans cannot spontaneously conceive. Whether by the design of evolution or of God, the human female body has safety mechanisms to prevent that, with at least two results I can think of. One, if getting pregnant as soon as a woman has recovered from the previous childbirth wears a woman's health out, spontaneously conception is going to wear all women out all the faster. Another, human DNA is so complex it needs the fresh recombination from a disparate source on conception, for the offspring's health.
The current state of the art relative to transexuality can only alter bodies relative to the overt sex act, and it's apparently just as well that that is all it can do.
We cannot actually invert sex relative to conception with our present or near-future technology.
So LGT sex is great for preventing unwanted pregnancies, right?
But it's still dangerous. And to the extent that it is promiscuous, it spreads disease.
I'm pretty sure, from what I understand of history, that society should keep its nose out of homosexual and transsexual relationships that are not promiscuous.
Bisexuality is different. You cannot be practicing bisexual and have just one partner.
I'm not sure what society should do about closed bisexual relationships, but open bisexuality tends overwhelmingly to be non-restrictive. That means promiscuous. That means it spreads disease.
(Sometimes I think the whole point of bisexuality seems to be that some people don't know how to love without having sex.)
I don't know how heavily society should suppress that, but I know society should not promote it.
Queer sex? If it isn't promiscuous, it still may have a problem with being too abusive -- too quick to do things that are dangerous to the health. Again, I'm not sure how much society should be involved in private decisions when promiscuity is not involved, but there are cases of queer sex where the abusive element is too much. Partner abuse becomes a social problem whether the relationship is normal or queer.
When the rainbow banner encourages us to care for and love each other in non-sexual ways, it is raised in a good cause. But when it is raised as an excuse for sexual promiscuity, it is raised in a bad cause.
(Maybe that clarifies what I'm trying to say.)
Marriage is when being forbidden really means, yes, you can -- with this one person with whom you have made the mutual (and sexually exclusive) commitments of marriage. That's when it is sacred, and not unclean.
Sex is not just for fun.
But just because sex is not for fun doesn't mean it can't be fun -- with your properly married spouse.
(I posted the original version of this rant back in May of 2106 in
a blog behind a mature-content wall. Current conditions in the world
make that wall irrelevant for this post, so I'm posting it here now,
edited, to make it a little less oblique. The original, if you want to read it for some reason, can be found here, still behind that wall.)
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