Let’s talk about sex
I’m still thinking about sexuality and would love to talk more with anyone likewise interested. Specifically, I’d love to talk more about the “about sex” part of it. I was raised as an evangelical Christian, and formed my early views on sex in family and faith communities deeply shaped by that tradition. As a child and adolescent and young adult, I trusted that sex was a special thing that God invented for husbands and wives to share – for procreation, of course, but also for pleasure. Glue was the metaphor used for sex a lot in my childhood – a special kind of glue that keeps marriages together. Having sex outside of marriage makes the stickiness of sex inside marriage less so.
Sex was also compared with the relationship between God and humanity, a gift God has given us to more tangibly experience the ecstasy of union with God’s very self. And as such, something to be protected in the same way relationship with God was to be protected. Sharing sex with multiple partners would be like two-timing (or three or four-timing) God. Shameful and hurtful to God.
I no longer live in religious or evangelical Christian contexts, and so would like to work more consciously through what I think about sex today, as the me of this context. My intuition and experience say it is AND isn’t magic glue. But beyond that, things get fuzzy. How does sex affect relationships? What changes between people when they make love? What are arguments for saving sex for committed relationships and, conversely, for being more sexually free? My hunch is that more clarity on such things could benefit all of us, whether or not we’re religious or sexually active or monogamous or have children with whom we want to talk about such things.