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This website is being renovated throughout 2008. Pages and the content of pages will continue to change until the end of the year and there may be some inconsistencies and missing links. Please do not quote from or link to specific pages (apart from the home page) without contacting the webmaster first. Your reason or mine? Why people have sex By © Martin Foreman Word Count: 796 words Publication date: July 3, 2005 Ask ten people why they have sex and you’ll get thirty answers, from the predictably obscene through the cloyingly romantic to the downright weird. And if you listen carefully, you’ll hear the confusion between reality and idealism – between why people think they have sex and why they think they should do so. I’ve been sexually active for over thirty years and I have spent twenty years studying sexuality. There is very little I haven’t seen, experienced or heard, and I am still learning. Last week in Papua New Guinea I discovered a new phenomenon – effeminate gay men who call themselves “palopa”, the local pronunciation of the last three syllables of Jennifer Lopez’s name. Nothing is certain in sex. From culture to culture and century to century, people’s concepts of themselves as sexual beings change, as do the acts they perform or allow to be performed with their bodies. Ideas such as gay and straight are not constant, but roles that we invent to give meaning and structure to our lives and desires. Two quick examples. In ancient Greece and many other cultures, society told adult men and young teenage boys to seek each other as sexual partners, to the presumed benefit of all concerned; in modern America such behavior often ends in psychological trauma and years in jail. Or mainstream heterosexuality in the United States. Today’s twenty-somethings are comfortable with oral sex; their parents would be embarrassed by the idea and their grandparents shocked by it. Those same grandparents probably saw each other naked with no more impact than some embarrassment, while their own grandparents probably undressed in the dark to avoid nudity and considered oral sex inconceivable. Patterns of sexual behavior change, but what remains constant is the complexity of motives underlying that behavior. People have sex for many different reasons. They do it because their hormones are active, because they want to receive pleasure or to give it, because they want to be loved or to express love, because they want to stave off loneliness, boost their ego, to express their anger, to assert their dominance over their partner. Men and women have sex for money, out of pity, from jealousy, boredom, excitement. They have sex to feel young, to feel adult, to feel alive. They have sex because society tells them to – or because society tells them not to. They have sex involuntarily, when an older, stronger, richer, more dominant partner – usually, but not always, male – violates them. Did I forget to mention children? True, some people have sex in order to conceive, but I guesstimate that less than one in a thousand sexual acts take place because the uppermost thought in both partners’ minds is the hope that they are creating a child. I suspect that most people who have sex would be surprised or shocked if the result was pregnancy – and in at least a quarter of all sexual acts any pregnancy should be considered a miracle. Sex drives each of us in different ways. Some of us are obsessed by it, some of us treat it as routine, others have no interest in it at all. Many of us are ignorant about it - from the basic plumbing of our reproductive systems to the way in which diseases are transmitted. We are often unaware of our own motivations and we often rationalize our own and our partner’s behavior - “I do it because I love him” or “he does it because he loves me”. Against this background of a complex psychosocial phenomenon comes the myth, propagated by religious leaders and repeated by the ignorant, that sex is simple and can be easily controlled. That we can decide when to be sexually aroused and that we can resist arousal when the object of our desire is prohibited by custom or law. Religion uses its false morality to control sex. It determines that sex is good not when it makes you and your partner happy but when society approves of it, and that sex is bad, not when it hurts you, but when society disapproves. It is the arrogance of religious leaders that appals me when they pronounce upon sex. As I have written before, responsible sexual behavior of course requires rules, but people who are, or who claim to be, sexually inactive are the last people who should be granted any authority in creating these rules. In America, ignorance and bigotry have led to sex education programs that encourage abstinence rather than understanding and to attempts to outlaw rather than encourage gay marriage. But the malign influence of the sexual Taliban spreads far beyond these shores. Next week we’ll see how the Bush administration seeks to impose its limited and harmful vision of appropriate sexual behavior on other countries.
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If God existed, he would... admire the beauty of a universe that he did not create recognize that eternity is meaningless deny both heaven and hell disown all men and women who speak in his name denounce the harm caused by religious "morality" help the human race to thrive without him If God existed, he would be an atheist. |