Sex!

Now that I have your attention let me advise you that this post is not going to be specifically about sex.  There is going to be here nothing pornographic, arousing, titillating or even vaguely suggestive.  So you may leave your fourteen year old selves in the schoolyard where they belong and attempt to engage this little essay like the sobre minded responsible adults I already know you to be.

First a word on what has prompted me to write about this.  I was in a café today putting the final touches on a drawing while sucking back an iced Americano (decaf if you have to know) when a song came on the airwaves that mentioned the line, 'Tonight you're going to be mine."  This kind of language always bothers me somewhat.  Simultaneously, I am reading an essay by Mexican poet, thinker and philosopher Octavio Paz, in the original Spanish, that touches on tantric Buddhism and all the carnal excesses inherent.  Let me tell you that this does make for rather weird, and even slightly creepy, reading on a crowded bus while a young woman is seated next to me texting her little heart out.  Oh well, what she doesn't know... and on the other hand I have no idea what she might have been texting about so what I don't know...

But this business of possession, which is rather a form of experiencing sex or romantic love, and this always creeps me out a bit.  Not that I have much in the way of experience in the area and even if I did you my gentle readers would be the last to read or hear about it because really these matters are none of your goddamn business.  Still, I have long felt troubled by the possessive or ownership element in intimate human relations.  It is as if one person makes food of the other.  Or they feed off of each other without really feeding each other?  But I also suppose that when there is real love involved it can become a mutual offering of love.

But sex for sex's sake?  Count me out.  All this business of sexting and hook-ups and friends with benefits and Ef-You-See-Kay buddies to me only disgraces the ultimate purpose of the sexual union.  I don't specifically mean procreation though I still tend to believe that the Catholics have some credibility here but also the whole business of matrimony and mutual fidelity and so on and so forth.

I suppose the Sexual Revolution of the sixties and seventies was a kind of necessary evil, though it really began in the Belle Epoch or the Gay Nineties or the Fin de Siecle of the 1890's, the time of Oscar Wilde and the fashionability of late Victorian and Edwardian (soon to come) decadence.  I just think it's unfortunate that along with the hypocrisy and the repression going out the window, so did all decorum and respect get flushed down the toilet.

I am reminded here of when it really began to dawn on me that both my parents were sexual beings.  They were already just divorced from each other and suddenly Mom had a boyfriend and Dad had a girlfriend and my fourteen year old self knew, but didn't want to know, that they weren't just having pillow fights in the bedroom.  They were also products of the Sexual Revolution.  None of this abstinence for the sake of the children or for appearances' sake and this was during the late sixties and early seventies when our neighbourhood was still full of bitter old ladies who loved to disapprove.

My parents, like any teenagers, also exposed themselves to a lot of hurt and pain that comes with casual and extra-marital sex.  Even though in their forties they still seemed to lack the emotional maturity to handle their relationships in a way that I would have found appropriate and mature.  But there is something about free and open sex that diminishes people and before you know it everyone turns into at best superannuated  teenagers and at worse, rutting dogs and cats.

I think it's especially dreadful for teenagers because society and the media have become so supersaturated with sex that there really seems to be no way out.  The sick joke about the ugly eleven year old virgin has become a little too close to reality.  So, with lust, desire, emotional need and a need for love thrown into the mixture, from a very early age our children learn to treat their and each other's bodies like items of trade and barter.  The emotional damage they accrue is enormous, with sexting and putting compromising images of themselves on the internet and we already know where that all leads.

I really don't care if some of you are atheists or not.  Our bodies, as well as our very lives, are given to us in trust by God.  We badly need to recover a sense of the sacred in life, in all aspects and details of our lives, including our bodies and including our sexuality.  Even if some of us don't believe or find it hard or unnecessary to believe in God, at least try to grasp some sense of the sacred and some sense of the inviolable integrity of the self, the soul and the body, be it yours or your partner's or the young hottie looking your way.  If we really begin to learn this, to do this I think we are going to see some very powerful changes in our lives and in our human community.