Orgasm! [A Highly Sexualized Culture]
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
Why don’t we have more sex?
Why isn’t it our primary pastime? You could blame it on modern Capitalism, as Wordsworth put it, “lays waste our powers” by hypnotizing us into endless “getting and spending.”
Then there’s that Foucaultian thing called the Rationalization of Sex.
This puts sex under the disciplinary pressures of modern science, reason and morality and squeezes the juice right out of it. In a nutshell, we’re still a bunch of repressed Christians.
It would probably take an army of psychiatrists and historians to pinpoint all the reasons why Western religion developed such antagonism toward human sexuality. More important is the question:
Is this attitude justified? Are there ethical, rational reasons to support the religious condemnations of normal human desires?
Perhaps the most detailed and insightful answer came from none other than humanist Bertrand Russell, who said a “morbid and unnatural” attitude toward sex is “the worst feature of the Christian religion.”
And much of what he said applies with equal force to the other Western religions. He asserted that church aversion to sex is not only unfounded but harmful.
Against the prevailing anti-sex views of religion, he argued that sexual pleasure is a positive good, and that religious objections are based not on reason but on dogma.
But perhaps his most important argument was that religious anti-sexuality attitudes inflict untold human misery, especially on women. He observed:
“Monks have always regarded Woman primarily as the temptress. They have thought of her mainly as the inspirer of impure lusts.”
So the church has done “what it could to secure that the only form of sex which it permitted should involve very little pleasure and great deal of pain. The opposition to birth control has, in fact, the same motive.” Continue reading
Comments(4)
