Cedric Mayson
Spirit Level
Let us hope we hear plenty about sex from our pulpits this weekend. Next week is National Sexually Transmitted Disease and Condom Week, and understanding about controlling sexually transmitted diseases (STD) and HIV/Aids is needed in every sector of society.
Many of our friends are HIV-positive and we may be ourselves. You can get it from blood, needles or unprotected sex.
In addition, one in 10 pregnant women have syphilis; one in 10 South Africans picks up a new STD each year (four million people) and can be cured with pills or injections. Without treatment they are much more likely to contract HIV/Aids.
Getting it talked about everywhere from the bedroom to the boardroom and classroom is a crucial part of removing the stigma of sexual problems.
Sex is a marvellous part of life, but like all parts of life it can go wrong, and nudge-wink secrecy plays the devil with it. People need information, respect, and encouragement to discuss it openly.
Listening to a partner with patience and sympathy, tramping on reactions that lead us to judge people harshly; replacing discrimination by caring: these are the things that matter.
Many religions have had hang-ups about sex, but then who hasn’t? Some misled men developed the incredible idea that sex was wrong, and sexual attraction was a bad thing to be blamed on women, but the idea of a celibate clergy did not come from Jesus, Mohammed or the great Jewish and Hindu sages.
The apostles and most priests married normally for more than 1?000 years. Celibacy was imposed on priests in 1074 by Pope Gregory, causing havoc that lasted for centuries, and has little to teach teenagers who know that sex is good.
All religions know that people are physically capable of making love long before they are socially or emotionally capable of making families, and advocate virginity as a highly attractive and satisfying aspect of early development. But what happens after the virgin phase?
Sex is a most complicated part of being human. At one level it is simple: an irrational overwhelming instinct that perpetuates the species and does not give a damn about romance or love or responsibility. The sperm must be blasted into the egg and the future can look after itself.
Like food and drink, sex demands self-gratification, but sex dresses its passion in romantic dreams and the music of emotion.
The whole process is linked to powerful feelings that lift people to a new level of experience capable of making poetry, music and philosophy, which are out of this world. I love you and you love me and therefore we do this wonderful thing together. But when the passion is spent and the concert is over does the love and romance have the responsibility to handle the silence?
A major factor in today’s culture is the attempt to remove the romantic emotional aspect altogether, and accept sex between humans on the same basis as between dogs and cats, with no love or emotional commitment.
The coupling couple in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four expressed it: “You like doing this? I don’t mean simply me: I mean the thing in itself?” “I adore it the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire.”
Sex becomes an end in itself, something to do for amusement or comfort or titillation, just bonking or shagging some person or other, neither expecting any commitment, but just a passing pleasure like a casual kiss or a cream cake to end a party hooked to the passion, booze or drugs culture. This is the type of sex encouraged by the beat and bang and artificial voices of so much modern music, the in thing which the media say you must buy as one of the major globalised industries.
It is in this situation of instant irresponsible gratification that most religious leaders like Chief Rabbi Cyril Harris and Desmond Tutu advocate condoms. Bishop David Beetge upholds the Christian discipline of abstinence outside marriage, but says: “We have to accept that not everyone is committed to this Christian way of life, and we must encourage safer sex and the use of condoms.”
Religion has a responsibility to all people, which demands the encouragement of safe sex.
Under the frenetic pace and noise with which modern capitalistic culture is destroying humanity some observers believe we are experiencing the upheaval of transition to a new society.
Sex like politics, economics, education, the media, ecology and religion itself is working out a renaissance of being human. Moral regeneration no longer limits goodness to individual behaviour but to social experience. So let’s hope the pulpits go beyond personal morality to social responsibility and condoms.