Posted on April 15th 1988
Liberal Sex Mores Debase
By Alex Linder
[ The following is from a forum thread posting. ]
[opinion published in Pomona College's The Student Life, Friday, April 15, 1988]
Liberal Sex Mores Debase
Sex is the Everest in the mountain range of human experience. Sex, however, is treated much too casually in the post-fifties world.
One major slogan of the sixties was: If it feels good, do it! The lack of self-restraint implicit in this lifestyle typifies the childishness of the age of the hippie; a childishness defined by George Will as an "inability to imagine an incompatibility between one's appetites and the world."
Attitudes like this, along with advances in medical technology, combined to change mores. With the Pill, men and women could have sex without worrying about pregnancy.
But, from the standpoint of 1988, the new-found sexual freedom came with a high price. the consequences of the prevailing attitude toward sex -- I will do anything I want with my body and trust medical science to find a cure -- resulted in record numbers of sexually transmitted diseases. And then came AIDS.
The lethality of AIDS brought sexual behavior into sharper focus. The balance of discussions excluded the moral questions and focused on the technical aspects. Why was this? Primarily, because enlightened opinion is that any sex between consenting people (including minors) is a good thing.
Look at the approach to sex education. Who will deny that the message to high schoolers is that if you are going to have sex, then use contraceptives to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases? Occasionally the educational establishment makes a bow toward pre-marital abstinence, but its heart is not in it. Secretary of Education William Bennett is the only major public figure directly concerned with education who adamantly supports emphasizing the morality of abstinence as the basis of sex education.
So how does Pomona fit into this? Basically, we Pomonans have easy access to birth control, educational materials, etc., and, as opposed to high school students, are adults with presumed abilities to run our lives. The problem is that we treat sex as a toy. Sex is just another way of plugging into something pleasurable -- like a Walkman. This approach to sex cheapens it, trivializes it, and debases the participants.
The point of life is to be a good citizen. This traditionally involves marriage and raising a family. The real pleasure in life comes from living out your allotted tiem with your one faithful partner. With the person you marry you are free to reveal your innermost self, the part inside the shell that protects you from an often hostile world. Sex is the deepest and most emotionally and spiritually fundamental way to relate to another person; accordingly, within marriage it is most natural and fitting.
If sex were only a physical thing, it would hardly be such a divisive question. If it were easy to deal with, every culture on earth would hardly have created intricate customs and taboos surrounding it. But the emotional, physical, and spiritual fusion that makes sex the most fulfilling human activity also make it the most dangerous, and when we reduce sex to the purely physical, we demoralize ourselves.
It is a fast world with much pressure to conform. In relation to sex, conform means losing virginity around seventeen. Maturity -- that is, self-restraint -- requires that we step back and slow down.
The upshot of the sixties is that some men and women tend to use one another as mere tools for their own physical gratification. Marriage, the basic institution of society, is weakened, seemingly pointless and detrimental because it gets in the way of any new sexual experience. The high divorce rate attests to this assertion. In conclusion, sexual mores do not change overnight, but over a generation. I call on my peers to help contribute to a renewed societal respect for the proper role of sex (inside a marriage), and conduct themselves as responsible citizens.//