Naked and Afraid

 

Illustration for Song of Songs: Jesus and the individual soul.

My gauche chum Xerxes has decided there is not enough sex in the culture. Why don’t we speak more of sex in church? 

“Is this a taboo from Victorian times, when even piano legs had to be covered lest they excite irrepressible lust?”

Victorian times ended in 1901.

“Face it – we are both sensual and sexual beings. Four of our five senses are in our heads. When we reject sexuality/sensuality, we deny the largest sense organ of our bodies -- our skins.”

The comment suggests we are already giving too much importance to sex. It implies that our sense of touch, and our physical body from the neck down, is entirely concerned with sex.

I wrote back:

“I disagree with you that our society needs to be more concerned with sex. We are already more concerned with sex than any other culture in history.

When I taught in China, students listed to me their traditional five necessities of life, and pointed out that sex was not one of them. It was meant as an implicit criticism of the West and its obsessions. We foreign experts were required to sign a declaration that we would respect the purity of Chinese womanhood.

My Pakistani acquaintances used to refer to “the wicked West.” Which I was then supposed to justify to them. They were thinking of sexual libertinage.

Cambodians and Filipinas have complained to me about how “casual” Westerners are about sex.

I think we got this way initially because of the strong tradition of Medieval romance, which, like the Song of Songs, used sexual love as a metaphor for our relationship with God. These passages are stunningly beautiful, but many people took and take them literally, and decide that sex is love and even somehow sacred. More recently, the whole thing has been exacerbated by Freud and psychology, which proposed a century and more ago that all mental illness was caused by frustrated sexual urges. It began in Victorian times with the pervasive theory that mental illness was caused by masturbation, and Freud and the rest ran with it from there.

Is sex central to life? No; reproduction is. Interestingly, the more interested we become in sex, the less interested we become in reproduction.”

It is perhaps significant that he then declared he would never again print any of my responses to his columns. 

The reader responses he did print all agreed with him.

“Xerxes, you need to get laid!”

“Why such beauty, of the most potent & lively drive, would be denigrated to the shadows is beyond me. I wish it weren’t so. I feel impoverished as a result.”

“It is our White Anglo Saxon heritage that evolved and came to this country and this continent.”

This one flies in the face of reality. Has she never heard of the hijab? Of honour killings? But it might explain the current hatred towards anything “white” or “Anglo-Saxon.” It is seen as killing a fun evening.

“Creation is a wonderful act and expression of our love and sexuality.  It needs to be celebrated.”

If sex is so wonderful, why the euphemism? Why does he say “creation,” instead of coitus?

We all know this is a load of cattle manure. 

It is a fine example of deliberate delusion, of the sort narcissists are always guilty of. It is telling each other alibis, as one sees in a dysfunctional culture or a dysfunctional family. Like most delusions, it allows us to think we can get away with something we know is wrong. 

And like any delusion, it is inevitably going to demand to be celebrated in church. The sense of guilt demands it. Just as children must be forced to affirm drag queens.

There is nothing wrong with sex. It is nature’s way to encourage propagation, and God’s little reward for passing on the human project to a new generation. It is a natural instinct, like hunger or thirst. When used for other purposes, it is lust. Compare food and gluttony, or thirst and alcoholism.

All is created for good. All evil comes from placing too much value on a thing.

“The sins which cause most souls to go to hell are the sins of the flesh.” – Jacinta of Fatima.