No matter how much the evangelical church might try to ignore or pretend that it doesn’t exist and in other ways silence the conversation, sex is still a foundational, central part of the humnan experience. Sometimes I think the religious movement hopes that if we just ignore or oppose it strongly enough it will dissapear or just fade out of existance.
Sex has not disappeared. The religions have made it only more poisoned; it is still there, in a poisoned form. Yes, guilt has arisen in man, but sex has not disappeared. (Osho)
Instead of removing the topic from the churches, the avoidance tactics have led to a poisoning of our sexuality by shame and guilt. The discourse has moved out from the temples and churches into the secular sphere where instead of celebrating the sacredness of sexuality the qualities of sacredness and love often gets lost.
We are at war with our eroticism. We battle our hungers, expectations, and disappointments. Religion, politics, and even science square off against biology and millions of years of evolved appetites. (Christopher Ryan)
Even out in the secular sphere the discourse is tainted with public norm, commercial and political agendas. As we try to push away our shame, insecurities and fears the only voice weighing in is the voice of commercialism and the voracious porn industry twisting sex and sexuality more and more out of shape into something unrecogniseable.
So we battle on, it’s not the battle of the sexes, mascilune against feminine, it is a battle against our sexuality. The societal forces try to restrict and restrain our sexual expression as sexual freedom leads to true freedom. When we become secure in our sexuality, we become powerful, we become liberated from much of our shame and we become freer in each area in our lives. As we struggle on trapped in religous or normative webs people suffer from repression and relationships and marriages in particular crumble under the immense weight of the unspoken and ignored. If sexuality was merely a peripheral issue governed by social norm, we would probably still be alright but it is so much more. The issue goes so much deeper as our sexual desires and needs are hardwired into our beings, it is hardcoded in our DNA, it is our firmware. When societal norm becomes missaligned with our biological foundation it creates a deep inner conflict.
Deep conflicts rage at the heart of modern sexuality. Our cultivated ignorance is devastating. The campaign to obscure the true nature of our species’ sexuality leaves half our marriages collapsing under an unstoppable tide of swirling sexual frustration, libido-killing boredom, impulsive betrayal, dysfunction, confusion, and shame. Serial monogamy stretches before (and behind) many of us like an archipelago of failure: isolated islands of transitory happiness in a cold, dark sea of disappointment. And how many of the couples who manage to stay together for the long haul have done so by resigning themselves to sacrificing their eroticism on the altar of three of life’s irreplaceable joys: family stability, companionship, and emotional, if not sexual, intimacy? Are those who innocently aspire to these joys cursed by nature to preside over the slow strangulation of their partner’s libido? (Christopher Ryan)
For most men and many women, sexual monogamy leads inexorably to monotomy. It’s important to understand this process has nothing to do with the attractiveness of the long-term partner or the depth and sincerity of the love felt for him or her. (Christopher Ryan)
I don’t know about you or your story, what roads you have travveled or not when it comes to discovering and befriending your own sexuality but when I started struggling with falling libido and attraction in my own marriage there was no one to talk to, and if there was, how do you even begin to phrase such a sensitive (infected) topic. It seemed that all my thoughts where forbidden, un-normal, heretical even. Spiraling dowen the same drain as I perceived most couples around me, still everyone hold up a nice facade and a bracve face, ignoring or denying the problem. The poison slowly spreading from the bedroom and into all areas of our lives.
Whether we like it or not, our partners’ sexual needs do not disappear just because ours do. Everyone has the right to decide not to have sex, for whatever reason. But we don’t get to decide on behalf of our partners, too. Surely it’s better to explore different formats for our relationships, than to indulge in this brutal rejection? (Betty Herbert)
Do we dare to even open that long forgotten closet door? For us, once we opened that can of worms, when we started talking about it without having the answers or cookie cutter truths, everything got better, easier, and most importantly completely honest. Acknowleding the elephant and the entire menagerie of unspoken subjects that where always present with us transformed our marriage and our view of sexuality from something shameful, dirty and sinful to something sacred, powerful, joyful, and a vibrant central piece of our marriage.
Love is fun! Make love to your woman when you are feeling happy, joyous, when you are at the top of the world. Share that energy. Love your man when you have that quality of dance and song and joy (Osho)
Let’s celebrate our sexuality, let’s bring it back into the centre, let’s bring back the sacred! Let’s talk about it with humour and joy but also with reverance and most importantly infused with love, acceptance, appreciation and grace. It is when we bring sex out from the closet, out of the hidden and dark corners, into the light that it becomes, in my oppinion exactly what the divine intended it to be: A celebration of love and life.