Bet that title got some attention.
I used to be a regular reader of liberal and leftist sites like Salon and Alternet. But, as my rightward conversion progressed, I began to find them rather annoying. The main thing that annoyed me was the obsession with sex. Now I like sex as much as the next girl, but, after reading or hearing too much about it, there’s a point at which I will say, “well go f*** somebody, and come back when you want to talk about something interesting.”
(About the time Salon was starting to make me regularly yawn, the site’s proprietors started charging for the privilege of reading their offerings. That was the end of that.)
Back to sex. Some Jewish and Christian commentators, like Dennis Prager, have great takes on the subject, which, of course, is couched in Jewish/Christian teachings. If God made us higher than the other beings on the Earth, made us in His image, gave us the ability to be like Him, then He gave us the ability to control our lower instincts with our higher, God-given reasoning.
Even separating this teaching from its moorings, this ability is undeniably present, in greater or lesser degree, in individual cases. However, when this ability is ignored, underdeveloped or scorned, chaos reigns. Exhibit A: the Catholic priest scandal. Exhibit B: the treatment of women in Islamic cultures. Exhibit C: the high percentage of illegitimate children born to black American women. And there are exhibits D through Z and back again through the alphabet too many times to mention here.
Now I could quote some biblical scholar or some social psychologist here but I’d just be skirting around my point: sexual obsession turns us into animals. It causes us to “sexualize everything” as Prager puts it in the article Judaism’s Sexual Revolution…, listed on the right side of this blog. We become dogs in heat or fish who have to swim upstream and spawn or die. And you know what? A lot of us are already there.
Sexual obsession suppresses higher reasoning functions. Don’t think so?
How else would you explain those who get involved with the spouse of a cherished friend?
What about pedophiles? Do they know that if/when they act on their urges that they will all but destroy a given child?
With HIV and other STDs rampant, why would anyone, especially homosexuals, have anonymous, unprotected sex?
Why would a guy like Kobe Bryant, a man with a beautiful wife, risk everything for a quick one with some girl he’d never seen before? (One could ask the same thing about King David.)
I had a friend of mine--one who claimed to be a Christian--tell me that it was unnatural to go without sex, even when one is single. Not very Christian of him, obviously. (And, yes, he was trying to get laid.) I countered that it was unnatural to relieve one's self in the receptacles that are generally used for that purpose and that the ‘natural’ thing to do would be to ‘go’ right where we sit or stand. He had no answer to that observation—and he didn’t get laid, at least not by me.
It’s as if sex were just invented during the so-called Sexual Revolution. This ‘new’ invention now has focus groups, lobbies, organizations, etc., for whatever way one wants to blow one’s socks off. I screw, therefore, I am.
Prude I may be, but it’s boring and tiresome to endlessly obsess over that which is a part of life. When it’s good, it’s very good, but it is not the be-all end-all of life, and, by itself, without a mental, emotional and spiritual connection to the other person involved, it’s a mere bodily function.
Yes, you too, can occasionally keep your pants on.
