Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Consequent-Free Sex Whenever You Want it

This column was rejected from the Iowa State Daily. Do you think that it is "weak as hell."? Or that it "It sounds like a throwaway philosophical diatribe ghost-written by the girls at Cosmopolitan."?

Alexander S. Anderson

Column

Sex is beautiful. During sex, you give your whole self, both physically and spiritually, to your partner. Even better, you allow for the creation of new life—a new human being that can love, create, think, and dream just as well as you can, or even better. However, the grand things that are involved in the act of sex are today often divided, repackaged, consumerized for convenience or, worst of all, cheapened. There is a lot of effort on the part of many today to separate those grand ideas of the unitive and procreative roles of sex from the pleasure which we get from sex. Along these lines, we are told that sex is good, but none of its consequences are. We are told that we can, nay, we should have sex as often as possible, so long as we do it “safely”. We have sterilized ourselves, not only physically, but emotionally.

I can barely step out of my door in the morning without seeing one of the many colorful signs, most of them provided to us by Planned Parenthood, advertising condoms or some other form of birth control. When I look at them, I can’t help thinking that they look bright, cheery, friendly, and very, very fake. Behind the cheery faces and bright graphic design, these ads push something very inauthentic. They certainly push something sterile, that’s the whole point of the product, of course, but it also seems industrial, almost inhuman. Lots of advertisements fail to recognize that their targets are living, breathing humans, but few have a subject that is so close and intimate to our own bodies and minds. There’s something inauthentic about condoms themselves—like someone refusing to touch their significant other unless they’re wearing rubber gloves. And this authenticity spreads to those advocating them.

It is even easier to see the cheapening of sex today in an average party in Ames during any weekend. Go to them, and you will hear both men and women talking about the other sex as instruments; they are treated as nothing but tools which help achieve pleasure. There’s an odd prevailing mentality that women or men are simply tools for our enjoyment, to be used up and thrown away when they stop performing that function. It’s remarkably selfish, but the idea has been treated as somehow “enlightened” by many of the educated and their educators. Women are often told that, somehow, they can be empowered if they can use men for pleasure and then toss them to the curb as effectively as some men use and toss away women. The rejection of the unitive aspect of sex is not just cruel, it’s also a horrible distortion of the act. It deconstructs a complex and beautiful act into power relations or the accumulation of pleasure, and it leaves behind the horrible casualties of hollowed-out souls in its wake.

Sure, most people today are not so forceful in their rejection of the unitive and procreative aspects of sex, but they grow up and are nurtured in a culture so hostile to both that many people do not realize that there are other options. The modern twisting of sex is not a semantics issue, or a vague, philosophical issue. It is an issue that affects all of us. When we fail to respect our own bodies, we fail to respect ourselves and we fail to respect life itself. Sex is beautiful, and we only hurt ourselves when we cheapen it.

Update: I cut this column down to 450 words, and it will be run as a Letter to the Editor. Look for it