Sex

Obviously I am not one to shy away from big or difficult subjects on my blog, and of course given that this piece is coming hard on the heels of a piece on the subject of porn, you may be forgiven for detecting a certain, erm, obsession here. Although of course if anyone were to accuse me of being obsessed with sex, I would have to point out that they are as well, and any protestations to the contrary would be interpreted as denial.
Because I have been thinking about sex recently, and in my INFJ way, trying to create a union between a number of experiences which perhaps it is best I lay out here. I actually don't have a synthesis, except for a rather flippant one, to the big question of the role sex plays in human life and the way it is actually such a big problem to us.
My first experience is of a conservative evangelical Christian telling me (in a context of disapproving of homosexuality) that she held the Biblical position that sex is a gift. Well, I personally have read all the way through the bible once (which is more than many Christians ever do) and am unable to see how this is a biblical position on sex, but more like the way Christians tend to take a position and then use the bible to prop it up. It seems to me that actually sex is approached in several ways in the bible, and only one of them is the gift thing. Another one is actually as a punishment for Eve's disobedience to a rule she was never told about!
Of course the Christian tradition's problem with the body, with women, and with all things to do with sex and other human urges, is well known and way too big a subject even for me to try to deal with in one blog post. And so my second witness is an experience of living a celibate life myself for a time in my younger years, when I was a Benedictine monk. Was I actually celibate? Well, no, not strictly by the letter of the law, in which the only sexual thing which ought to occur would probably be limited to nocturnal emissions, but I wasn't actively having sex with other people, as were some of the 'celibates' in that community - and be wary of crossing the Hound, kids, because the major problem there has recently had aspects of his personal like splashed over the media! It took twenty years, but it's happened.
I commented in my post on porn that the police counted the number of visits to a Birmingham brothel during their sting operation, and counted an 'incredible' 99 visits. I fail to understand how this is incredible. People have been paying for it since the dawn of time, and this is merely indicative for the purposes of this post, that all attempts to contain sex are doomed to failure.
Nor is the attempt to control sex confined to Western society and religion. I have been reading Jeffrey Masson's wonderful memoir of his rather bizarre upbringing in a household dominated by an English guru who had gone East and got religion. It would be easy to laugh at the fact that this guru is very plainly a fraud, going by Masson's account, but then I am overly sensitised to some of the ways religions control people. The guru was very plain that the ideal was no sex at all, not even between married couples (even the Catholics don't expect that) and Masson, who later became a psychoanalyst before also rejecting psychoanalysis, has some very interesting things to say on the subject of burying sex. He is talking about his overly-young initiation into the myseries of sex by their maid:
'I now believe that this kind of abuse is inevitable in an atmosphere where physical desire is either denied, ridiculed, or feared, while power is worshiped and physical access unquestioned. The fact that these thoughts - not to mention deeds - were in such context with the spiritual life the disciple was supposed to be living made it even sexier, or led to intolerable tensions, depending on your point of view. The "sexiness" could not even be thought about, and the tensions could neither be acknowledged nor discussed. Such "temptations," including the temptation to pursue the only sexual outlet the prohibitions allowed - abuse in secret - seemed so foreign to P[aul] B[runton - the guru], so far removed from his life. At a conscious level, this is no doubt true.
'It also seems possible that the abuse was one factor that made the spirituality so appealing. With sexual abuse, authority is all that matters, power is all that is real. Spirituality offered a nonintrusive authority and a seemingly benevolent power. With sexual abuse, secrecy must be maintained. Our spiritual life was an exciting secret, one of charged, shared meanings. Both sexuality and spirituality offer transcendence of the mundane. But spirituality offers a child dignity and control that sexual abuse takes away. It even promises a replacement for, and an end to, sex itself.' (Jeffrey Masson: My Father's Guru. HarperCollins, London, 1994, p.43)
In my humble opinion there are two things lurking on the surface here, both of which Masson touches on. One of the question of power, and the other is the question of spirituality as oppsed to physicality. Personality I came to the conclusion many years ago that spirituality divorced from the physical was not real. Perhaps this is one of the reasons I eventually found my way to the witchcraft movement, whose founder, Gerald Gardner, set out to create a religion which far from denying sex, made polarity and conjunction, and their chief expression in sex, a central mystery of his religion.
The other question is one of power. Masson rightly highlights the way that sex and spirituality can both be misused in powerful ways, but I have a feeling that again there is something else going on here. And that is that sex is a power in itself, it is a power of nature as frightening to humans as lightning, fire and flood. And yet in common with other dangerous natural forces, it is also one which gives us great pleasure and which we literally cannot live without.
My personal opinion is that the sex drive works on both a negative and positive feedback loop. If you try to suppress it, it bounces back in all sorts of strange ways. Similarly, I think that if you were to attempt to continue with sexual activity to exhaustion, in the hope that it would leave you alone for a bit, the sheer arousal of the activity and thoughts necessary to do so would result in you being more interested in sex rather than less. I am deliberately neglecting a discussion of all the functions that sex plays in human life, since it would get way too complicated and as will become clear below, I believe it to underly so much of our lives.
My provision synthesis among all these aspects of sex is this, and I am aware that it will sound flippant: it is as if the universe is having a great big joke on us. When we are young and first sexually awake, we have a tendency to think that nobody else knows about it, and can be quite surprised to find that other people actually do it - I am of course talking about a normal sexual awakening without any abusive elements. Then sex can be an intensely dominant force in our twenties and thirties. It's not even as if it is kept secret - people who are couples are essentially proclaiming that they are in a sexual relationship, people who have children are proclaiming that they have had sex, and so on.
And yet there remains the power and mystery of sex, which cannot be tamed. All of our sexual interests and activities are only part of a huge drive towards...well, something. Of course I am a notorious homosexual, sitting here writing these ramblings on the nature of sex in human life. And so, as a final illustration of how nature is having a jolly good joke at humans' expense, I would like to present...myself!

Image: the guru with his own guru. Source: http://selfdefinition.org/brunton/