Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: henning@acsu.buffalo.edu (Karl Malaysia Henning) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: sex, marriage, sin Message-ID: Date: 1 Apr 91 06:23:07 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: SUNY Buffalo Lines: 141 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu Richard A. O'Keefe writes: >[karl henning writes]: >> You may put off learning how to discuss sex (itself, how it applies to >> your own sensory experience, how it affects the other ways people interact >> socially), or even (gasp) put off Applied (as well as Theoretical) Sex, >> until some "marriage" with Mr or Ms Right; but the "growing pains" >> involved in learning one's way in such a relationship are no more >> intrinsically soul-rarefying than riding a bicycle. >I'd like to point out something else. There is no need to *perform* sex >in order to learn how to *discuss* sex. In a certain sense, I suppose you are right. But you must concede that a person who discusses sex, without ever having experienced sex, /may/ be talking out the back of his neck. And indeed, no person who has not experienced sex can be considered to speak definitively about it. He can discuss the second-hand reports with which he is familiar, but cannot avouch for any of it from his own direct experience. Two parallel illustrations: Of the two opposing viewpoints regarding the sphericity of the earth, who was more likely to be correct: the clerics who insisted on the "biblical" flatness of the earth, and who had never seen a drop of seawater, and who had never seen headlands emerge gradually taller on the horizon; or the navigators and sailors whose practical experience and reason gave them to postulate a spherical earth [okay, maybe this is an unfair example, as we know by hindsight whose opinion was more correct] Who understands Troy better, historically: a classics scholar who has read the Iliad and the Aeneid in the original languages, or von Schliemann, who excavated there? The former understands a "literary Troy"; the latter, an "applied Troy". I will provide also an odious counter-example (which I do not, by the way, propose as being applicable to Mr O'Keefe's case). There is sometimes a tendency among some of the noisier xians, not only to cultivate an ignorance of something, but to claim such ignorance proudly, as some sort of virtue or asset. One such example is, Jerry Falwell's boneheaded retort, when asked how he could criticize /The Last Temptation of Christ/ sight unseen: "You don't need to take the lid off a sewer to know that it stinks." This says volumes about Falwell's ignorance, and prejudicial attitude, and says nothing whatsoever about either Kazantsakis' book or Scorsese's film. >... as of the 17th of this month, I'm engaged again, this time to a >Church of Christ woman who has the same view of sex outside marriage as >I have and has lived it. It seems to me that the experiences you recount concerning your two fiancees, is more directly illustrative of the question of two people in such a relationship needing to agree substantially on questions of sexuality, than of the question of firsthand experiential authority. >The moral of the story is that "Applied Sex" is neither necessary in >all cases nor sufficient in all cases to prepare someone for a relationship. Since most such relationships function on levels other than sexuality, it is mistaken to assert that sexual experience is "sufficient" preparation for a relationship. Of course, relationships are not homework assignments -- one doesn't "prepare" for them, one learns by doing. "necessary in all cases" ... of what? I think I have created some confusion in my original posting [above] by conflating two distinct issues (as I see them): First: that someone (anyone?) who has "tested" and adapted his theoretical knowledge of sexuality "in the field", as it were, in a relationship which functions more than merely sexually, will make observations about sexuality which should be accorded more respect and authoritative weight, than speculations offered by someone with no such experience, specifically someone who claims to understand sexuality in the late 20th century according to bits and pieces gleaned from a disparate collection of moralizing texts no more recent than the first century of the Common Era (i.e., the bible). Second: that by making sexuality into a moral issue disembodied from the broader (and, IMHO, merely sociological) context of relationships, xianity calls into play the Conditioned Guilt- reflex. Simply stated, my objection to this is, that in this moralizing environment, boys and girls are brought up to suspect the stirrings of sexuality as impure manifestations of bestial sinfulness, instead of as being par for the biological course. This does not contribute to understanding one's sexuality, but creates destructive conflicts between natural impulses, and a repressive framework of behavioral interpretation. And it can corrupt one's development in terms of learning about relationships, as one is forbidden to explore sexuality, save from within the sanctioned contract of matrimony; there is no lack of examples of marriage between young people inexperienced in the niceties of interpersonal relationships, whose motivation in getting married may largely have proven (and not necessarily dishonorably) sexual. "Society will not permit me to have sex unless I'm married; now, whom can I marry?" -- this may seem a cynical and blunt phrasing, but I have known a number of couples (whose marriages are successful in different degrees) who seem to have been at least partly motivated on some level by this reasoning. This atmosphere does not contribute to frank and unpressured dialogue about sexuality. It fosters "cognitive dissonance", and therefore repression and avoidance of sexuality as a human issue. Society cannot destroy behavioral (and, in this case, partly biological) impulses merely by imposing awful taboos; and nascent sexuality during adolescence is of such striking novelty and wonder, that there is something intrinsically awesome about it. Quashing it, and saying "it's WRONG WRONG WRONG except in this highly specialized and divinely sanctioned environment", is at the heart of a great many sexual problems -- when one's exploration of sexuality is restricted to such a furtive level, there is no cando ...s and at the least contributes to a view of members of the opposite sex at least partially as "sex objects" rather than as partners in a species of communication. And if the "partners" cannot talk between themselves about sex, certainly neither is going to volunteer to discuss this issue in an educative manner with their children. kph -- Doris: But without God, the universe is meaningless. Life is meaningless. We're meaningless. (/Deadly pause/) I have a sudden and overpowering urge to get laid. -- Woody Allen, "God (A Play)"