 "Photo: Joe Mignanc")
Sexuality has by cultural notion become a divisive factor between people and within them. Along with religion and politics, it is a topic avoided during dinner conversation in order to keep civil company. The intersection of sexuality with politics and religion – on subjects such as gay marriage, abortion, purity pledges and the question of homosexuality in “God’s plan” – provides for heated arguments.
Furthermore, repartee over personal sexuality is blushed at and frowned upon. Open and comfortable chats about sex seldom take place within the family, and many people even feel uncomfortable speaking with doctors about their sexual activity.
We invent a code language to speak of “unmentionables.” Menstruation is “that special time of month,” genitals are your “private parts” and sex is “sleeping together.” The last thing you should do during sex is fall asleep!
As amusing as it may be to invent sex slang, by doing so, one avoids taking the topic seriously. Instead, we discuss sex in a stoic textbook manner or we degrade it to something carnally sinister.
Because our culture has artificially cleaved the sexually unified person in two, we are both undersexed and oversexed. The puritanical origins of this nation laid the foundation for a lifestyle of self-denial and a conviction that sexual urges and sensuality are unnatural and evil. Although these ideas have certainly softened, they have seeped too far into the bedrock of social conscience for society to build up a positive attitude toward sexuality.
In order to set things right, we overcompensate by dousing everything in stark sex – sex without personality or without a soul. This stark sex is used as a marketing tool for soda, toothpaste, cars, or to pressure people to recycle, drink milk, to smoke and to not smoke. All this makes America appear far more hypersexed than it is in actuality. But the sex that confronts us every day is completely lacking in substance – there is no savory crust, no creamy center for its layers of excessive frosting.
Cultures that are more sexually open shock us as travelers – grand displays of public affection surprised me when I visited southern Spain. And yet there was no sense of furtive guilt to the couples necking in the cafe, nor did any bystanders treat it as such. No one shouted, “Get a room” in Spanish. Moreover, a joy of life exuded from everyone, in which all people flirted with each other, with intention or out of a mere affection for humanity. I encountered more persons with well-integrated sexual selves. The bare-breasted woman on the beach is only of squeamish excitement to the American tourists snapping photos from afar.
In its “natural state,” a beach ball floats placidly upon the surface of the water. It can be held forcibly under the surface, but take the restraining hand away and it thrusts into the air. I see the first image of the ball as sexuality in cultures where it is seen as an essential part of being, cultures where sexuality is accepted as totally natural and holistically present in a person. The second image represents sexuality that has been forced away from the whole person into some repressed side compartment, but as part of its nature, it fights to rise back into the consciousness, but overshoots and oversexes.
The individual must centralize sexuality within the self. Sexuality is not only a tool for procreation, nor is it immoral and dirty. It’s not something that can be put on and taken off like Jekyll drinking his potion to morph into Hyde and then return to his respectable, powder-fresh other false self once more.
You are your own sexuality. The body, mind and emotions are unified in one being through sexuality. I feel I don’t know someone until I hear something of his or her sexual story, principles or some anecdote that reveals his or her intimate character.
Sexuality connects all aspects of the personality; it runs parallel to the person, as either an enlightened mirror revealing the psyche, or a burial ground for problems and insecurities.
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