Assorted thoughts on sexuality and sex education.

A heavily edited assemblage of comments I made about sexuality a while back, edited to include the new information I have about fertility awareness and also a bit for cogence. I apologise in advance for any lack of focus, since many of these ‘grafs were responses to others’. But I want the general record of the thought process here, so, uh, enjoy.

I don’t agree with the stereotyped religious right notion of sexuality, not least because it tends to be held up as the only possible Christian interpretation of sexuality. Except the Bible is more egalitarian than any of that stuff.

However, that said, I do wonder in discussions of sexuality and sexual education why the discussion is always framed in terms of how people can have sex in ’safer’ fashion rather than in terms of how people can just…not have sex. I mean, to me, the extreme Christian-culture view that sex is dirty and wrong is misleading and not ultimately helpful or useful. Concurrently, the progressive liberal view that everyone ought to be having sex if they feel the urges (so to speak) so long as it’s consensual and involves barrier methods is problematic for completely different reasons.

The progressivist view makes no allowance for restraint or demureness on the part of men or women, nor honestly for patience in relationships. Though one can SAY abstinence is ok, or waiting until marriage to have sex is ok, etc, focusing so much on how to implicitly and explicitly encourage teens and young adults to ‘just do it’ really shows that such advocates don’t have, er, faith that anyone would ever exercise restraint or discipline when it comes to sex.

Part of the problem with a harm-reduction philosophy towards sex is that assuming folk’ll do it anyway leads folk to think they ought to do it and that NOT doing it is ‘weird’ or ‘freaky’ or ‘abnormal’. It takes fortitude and discipline to not have sex, much as it does to not max out one’s credit. The doctrine of self-indulgence is a root from which springs both kinds of behaviors.

Of course, the flipside, demonising sex and saying ‘omg you will BURN if you evar touch another’s genitals and btw, you can’t even enjoy sex when married!!!!’ doesn’t really cover the discipline and restraint side of things. It just makes people feel bad for having felt good when they explored sexual feelings instead of offering ways to direct sexual energy away from indulgence for its own sake. Also, there is a subtext of extreme focus on sexual sin or misconduct to the exclusion of other sins in right wing Christian culture.

It’s inaccurate to say ‘abstinence education FAILS’ when it’s done in a way almost calculated to not work in the real world. i mean, poor teaching methodologies for non-sex things are critiqued but not dismissed. And abstinence education could be done in a viable way, particularly if it brought fertility awareness methods into the teaching.

Another issue with sectarian Christian culture among right-wing people is that pro-life and pro-choice views within the rest of the Christian community get zero play. Lots of Christians support in word and deed caring for single mothers, making adoption easier, supplying women with good prenatal care and even birth control. But they aren’t sectarians, or right wing, or part of the machine that now has become associated with Christianity despite openly advocating non-Christian beliefs and practices. They’re mostly small local groups or individuals doing what they can to help those in need in a way that is useful to those in need.

But a greater problem is the surrounding culture. You cannot have a culture of endless indulgence and then be shocked that some people turn sectarian. You also can’t be surprised that kids are having sex younger and younger.

Nabokov wrote of upper-middle class preteens having sex at 12 or so. Now it’s not just the richies being decadent, but everyone else too, and unlike Paris Hilton, the consequences are a lot worse for the indulger when one isn’t well-off.

Also, in a world where people are encouraged to just do what makes them “happy” (indulgence of every whim at that instant one has the whim), one cannot be shocked that boys and girls are growing up having trouble respecting each other. Girls see guys as objects that exist to give them attention and validation and possibly material goods. Guys see girls as objects offering unlimited consequence- free sex. If one girl won’t put out, it’s not so hard to find another who will. And if a girl or girls won’t do the acts you want done, there’s always a bunch of women doing them on the easily accessible porn that permeates the culture.

And interestingly, the increasing social approval of being sexual without restraint has actually led to women just commoditizing other women. Strip clubs are full of lesbians behaving as piggishly as male customers, and also bisexual and straight women both behaving piggishly and also trying to appeal to the male gaze through simulating interest in the dancers. And yet, because women still expect to not pay for sex even if they expect to act like men about it, they cost the girls who will explicitly sell their sexuality more and more money each shift.

It is fairly obvious to me that the sectarians who hate sex so much nobody’s supposed to like it ever are not so far removed from the people who advocate overt sexuality so much that other options become socially unacceptable. In this culture you have to pick either an extreme sectarian sex-negative viewpoint or pick a hyper-sexualised, ultra-indulgent sex-positive viewpoint (as the MSM will have us believe). That’s a difficult place for kids to be in, for women to be in, for men to be in.

I don’t think teen and young adults should NEVER have sex, ever. But they could NOT have sex until, you know, long-term relationship time rolled around. I mean, the idea of emphasizing celibacy for a period of time until one enters into a long-term relationship is honestly never a part of any sex education i’ve seen advocated by either right-wing people or left-wing people.

Altogether too many liberals find it being problematic that sectarians focus on sexual sin to the exclusion of other sins. But it’s problematic to err in the other direction and think that always choosing the option to have sex is ‘better’, which is the subtext you get from the other side. Plenty of people who are given to natural celibacy or asexuality, or even people who do want to wait and only have one partner for their own reasons often, often, often are considered strange and weird for not choosing the option to have sex.

Also, and this is key, we now live in a society that does not understand why the aggressively anti-gay whatnot is just as much a symptom of endless indulgence as aggessively pro-gay. People feel free in this culture to indulge it all, be it tolerant support or intolerant dislike or outright hatred. It is an unintended consequence, but there it is.

Ultimately, the extreme camps themselves aren’t so much the core problem as the fact that they are the operant ‘faces’ of each view to others. There are women who think they aren’t supposed to orgasm even in marriage (waaaay unChristian); there are women who think that they have to be extra freaky sexually and do a wide range of sexual acts with lots of different guys to be properly liberated. These women aren’t deriving this stuff from out of thin air. And there are women and men who are affected to lesser extents by the extreme and binary breakdown. Something as tiny as watching a porno you don’t like with your husband or boyfriend, or having sex with your girlfriend when you’d rather wait a few months on it but you are worried she will think you’re ‘weird’ or don’t find her sexually attractive.

Or conversely, trying to isolate yourself so totally from sexual expression that you really do end up unable to enjoy it. Or getting so caught up in the presumed ‘dirtyness’ of sex that you express sexual desire only through extreme fetishes.

The Puritans were so much more rational about it all. Wives and husbands were to please each other in bed and premarital sex was strongly discouraged, but you weren’t reviled if you had sinned that way because everyone sins and sexual sin wasn’t broken out and considered ‘worse’ than other sins and specific sexual sins weren’t judged as uniquely awful (like the current sectarian gay-hate– Puritans would have recognised that behavior as distinctly unChristian and rebuked it accordingly). But history is written by those who overthrew them, so the word has come to mean almost the opposite of what Puritans actually thought and believed, especially (though not limited to) sex.