Culture, Marriage, and Sex for Fun
In my last entry I made a brief foray into a discussion of marriage. After a discussion of the subject with my grown son on the same day it seems appropriate to expand on that a little.
You may recall I stated that marriage should not be considered a social environment for sexual relationships. Well, this is news to a lot of people.
Technology has revolutionized sex.
Woooh, let that soak in for a minute. A lot of what has passed for social revolutions in the last forty-five years has really been the product of technological methods of birth contol. Sexuality has been freed of one of its major consequences, at least for the well organized, by these technologies. This has placed a highly intoxicating, deeply coercive, even disabling, human interaction very much in the forefront of the social structure of our times, particularly for the very people least able to comprehend and prepare themselves for the emotional consequences of sexuality - the young.
Such seeming freedom has made sex society's drug of choice, the thing like Coca-Cola's cocaine of the 1890s, that could tickle our fancies and give us a thrill and still keep us coming back for more-and more-and more... A good deal of this is predicated on the fact that the changes of which I speak happened much more swiftly than the social structures that dealt with the old, consequential, paradigm of sexuality could adapt to the new reality. When sex meant babies as one and one equaled two social logic could deal with sex-the-drug and sex-the-procreation function in the same societal device; marriage.
Marriage was, in the old paradigm, society's way of putting a burden of social expectation on the decision to engage in sexual activity. Sex made babies. Fatherless babies were a huge burden on any society so society instituted marriage as the legitimate environment for sexual activity. Both the problem of sex as a drug and babies as a consequence were dealt with. The trouble is that only for the organized is the connection between sex and babies broken. So the freedom modern society claims to freely flout inconsequential sexuality for its coercive and intoxicating qualities is creating an intense burden on the poorest and least organized portions of society (and their unexpected/unwanted children)- exactly the parts of society marriage did the most to help.
The trouble today is that society is slow to come to grips with the power of sex-the-drug and accept that some new paradigm must be found for dealing with the fact this drug is being peddled to our children as harmless while they are yet too young to make rational decisions about how they will use the drug. Sex is not inconsequential, not even when one eliminates the baby issue. Study after study shows it has consequences for personality and for emotional development. It is particularly disabling to young women, often coercing them into relationships that expose them to abuse. Furthermore, the specter of "inconsequential" sex entices young men into viewing women and girls as little more than masterbation fantasy toys, fit to be tossed away when they are no longer novel enough to be interesting.
Marriage is what it always was: the proper environment for consequential sexual activity and the raising of the children resulting from that activity. It exists to ensure children the stability they must have to learn trust, a crucial social skill in a survivable society. If we allow marriage to crumble the society must eventually collapse as well for the lack of that capacity to forge trusting relationships.
But if we continue to insist that sex without offspring is a legitmate recreation society must come to grips with how that recreation affects us all. Like deer hunting with high-powered weapons or organized team sports it is not without dangers. We need to accept that those dangers and their very real consequences place a burden on the whole fabric of the culture and start to create a legal environment for and train our young people in this new, consequential, "socially acceptable" recreation.
