TWENTY years ago, to be "for sex" was to be against tradition,
the family, and the church-comparable to swearing at one's
mother or wearing blue jeans to church.
Times have indeed
changed. Now we endorse gourmet eroticism with a spouse,
although as a topic sex is still banned from polite conversation.
Today, superstars announce bisexuality, and sex-change
operations become an issue on the tennis court. Somehow,
promoting children's eroticism is the worst yet. How far is
too far?
There is a vast difference between foresight and hindsight.
Things that were murky are clearer in the retrospectoscope.
Every one of the men who engendered sociosexual
change was perceived as an iconoclast at the time.
Yet every
one of these men was religious. For instance, Freud was condemned
as prurient. Yet Hunt described him as a "rather
puritanical, romantic, and inhibited young man...chaste
before marriage, devoutly monogamous after it."
Freud supported
religion; he felt that it promoted refinement and was
the best foundation for education.
The works of Alfred Kinsey provoked a similar furor. Yet in
1954 he wrote:
This is the season [Christmas] in which many persons are
reexamining their faith. I should, therefore, like to say again
that my faith in men and women has steadily grown as I have
learned more about their history.
Even though some of these
histories have included things which did no good to anyone, and
occasionally things which may have done outright damage to
someone, most of the things which I have seen in the histories
have increased my faith in the basic decency, the basic honesty,
and the basic reasonableness of human behavior. ...
I have found that the sexual behavior of most men and
women, including even their most cantankerous and socially
impossible behavior, makes sense when one learns about the
handicaps, the difficulties, the disappointments, the losses, and
the tragedies which have led them into such behavior.
I believe
that most people would exercise greater Christian tolerance of
all types of sexual behavior, if they understood, as I have begun
to understand, why people do what they do sexually.
Faith in God was not incompatible with the acceptance of
human sexual behavior.
Masters and Johnson exploded the secrecy of sex when
they recorded and analyzed the act itself under the glaring
lights and cameras of their laboratory. This approach was
shockingly antiesthetic. Sex was pragmatic rather than
romantic, and again there were cries of sacrilege. Yet in
1975, Masters and Johnson wrote:
When a man and a woman first commit themselves to each
other sexually they do so for reasons that have been impressed
upon them by society since childhood.
They have been led to
believe that on the basis of their union they will find physical,
emotional and social fulfillment-and some people would
include spiritual fulfillment as well.
These are dimensions of human needs that have been intricately woven into "patterns"
for commitment; woven and rewoven by successive generations
from concepts of love and sex which reflected prevailing religious
and cultural philosophies. ... Sex functions best when it is
lived rather than performed and it can be lived best in a deep
continuing commitment which is still most commonly a marriage.