Americans often have trouble talking openly and honestly and
in a healthy way about sex because they don’t know how to deal with the
realities of human sexuality. Listen to
the sexual humor on television, to the treatment of sex in movies and in TV
dramas. Look at sex in marketing and advertising. It’s really just fantasy and glorified
titillation, Puritanism still alive and kicking. It’s adolescent lust warmed
over and over. It’s romance that never grows up. And it’s all crafted to work
on our basic instincts and desires.
Beautiful people peel down and go at it, wake up the next
morning in love forever or maybe just tired of one another already.
Cheerleaders for professional football teams work for pennies in scanty
outfits. Preteens express their emerging femininity by doing bump and grind
routines in public performance. Having sex is a key sign of manhood, even if
such men are teens still living at home. The sexual mentors of young people are
young people…or celebrities. Sexting turns a teen into a high school porn star.
Sex is put to work to sell auto products, toothpaste and
mouthwash, clothing, laundry products and even sex. Sexual allure sells, even
if it’s constructed from silicone, botox, cosmetic surgery, eating disorders
and airbrushing.
The spectrum of human sexuality goes from pure lust to the most
intimate sexual experience by which two persons seek to become physically and
spiritually one. A sexual experience can fall anywhere on this spectrum. And in
a human life, will likely fall in many places on this spectrum. And here is
where it becomes essential to understand sex in terms of human sexuality. Not
encounters, but mature growth.
And only in this context can sex learn to become love.
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