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Printer-Friendly Mode'Puritan' attitudes toward sex antiquated, unfair
February 26, 2007 —
The drunken booty call. You are all probably aware of it. Many of you have probably engaged in it, whether or not you remember (or wish to remember) it. Hopefully your drunken lust hasn't led to any unwanted diseases, but perhaps it has - nature's way of saying you chose incorrectly.
If you read last week's Vanguard, you probably read an opinion article by my colleague, Mary Oakley, wherein she argued that young people should abstain from sex until marriage.
I respect Oakley and her right to abstain from sex, but I must disagree with her and posit my own argument: people should not cling to the antiquated notion of waiting for marriage. Sorry, this simply isn't realistic.
Many claim that the media pressures people to have sex, a claim Oakley refers to where "life imitates art." But this claim brings about the conundrum of the chicken and the egg, for which came first: the media pressuring youths to have sex, or the media emulating youths already having sex?
Obviously, casual sex isn't for everyone, nor should it be. In fact, frequent, random sexual encounters occupy a much smaller percentage amongst students than commonly perceived. According to the 2006 National College Health Assessment Data published by the SVSU Student Counseling Center, under 11 percent of SVSU students have had sex with more than two partners in the past year.
U.S. Census reports show that the average age for one's first marriage is over 27 for men, and nearly 26 for women. In the Middle Ages, that would put the average peasant - that is, us - close to the end of their life expectancy. You would die knowing that the many children you sired would go on to pass your genes on to the next generation - or die from an outbreak of the plague - before succumbing to old age in your mid-30s.
Yet people continue to adhere to Middle Age-era beliefs about marriage. Assuming our ancestors waited until marriage - a faulty assumption, based on what history tells us - to have sex, most of them were far too busy trying to eke out survival to engage in random, spontaneous sex.
Should someone be forced into a lifetime of forced, awkward sex simply because they waited until marriage to discover that their partner has the sexual spontaneity of a dry sponge? After all, you wouldn't - or shouldn't - purchase a car without first taking it for a test drive. I do not advocate viewing potential sexual partners as automobiles; however, I do recommend that you give the same amount of forethought in a life partner as you would your Cougar.
You want to know the major pressure that forces people to have sex? It's biology. Moral codes only work so well up against the unyielding hormones our bodies spit out from the age of 10 or so. The media isn't telling us something we don't already know: humans are designed to seek out partners and procreate from the onset of puberty. How do we reconcile our body's innate desire to have oodles of children with our own desires to not become destitute?
We have condoms. And birth control pills. And, like it or not, abortion. The real reason the conservative movement in our nation fears these devices is because of their underlying disgust toward sex. Puritan attitudes toward sex have never gone away from many Americans. We see them every time the news reports on a rape victim who refused the morning-after pill by a crusading pharmacist. We see them every time a congresswoman cries because her young daughter may have caught a microsecond peek at Janet Jackson's nipple. We see them every time someone suggests people cannot have meaningful, yet meaningless sex outside the context of marriage.
If you're going to have sex, as you probably will, play it safe. The real goal is to remain healthy, not trapped behind antiquated moral codes that deprive you of life's joys.