Then there is this social
Wait.
That's no longer an undercurrent.
Sex sells.
It's a cheap way to shore up your sagging sales performance rating or sagging locker-room reputation, or, well, any sagging image problem.
So everybody and their dog is selling it.
Except.
It's not cheap.
And it doesn't really shore up anything.
UNCLEAN, FORBIDDEN, DANGEROUS, FUN, it's all the same -- lies by partial truth.
Sex is fun! For a moment.
It releases those endorphins in the brain, and those endorphins are what recreational drugs and rock-n-roll and romance novels and fast cars and so forth are all about.
But when used as a drug, it's just like the rest of the list. When you are done, it lets you down.
Now, it doesn't let you down if you are doing it for the right reasons. Using it as a safe drug is not a right reason, and it isn't safe, no matter what the people who like the easy sell tell you.
What's the right reason to have sex with someone? Well, it's a lot easier to talk about a bunch of the wrong reasons, and I'm in rant mode, so I'll talk about those first.
Sex is dangerous! They tell you we have conquered syphilis, scabies, and herpes, and then they'll say herpes and scabies really aren't that bad anyway, and "we" are going to conquer HIV/AIDS real soon now, ...
Even if all of that talk about conquering all the sexually transmitted diseases were for real, there is still the problem of the heat of the moment.
In the middle of the endorphin rush, you tend to do stupid things.
So sex is dangerous. That's why you should keep it within marriage. Then it's not so dangerous. (It's still dangerous enough to be an adventure, though.)
Sex is forbidden!
Well, yeah. Random sex really is forbidden to anyone who understands the dangers. And doing things just because they are forbidden has always been a bit brain-dead, anyway.
Now, there is a class of philosophy that forbids sex except for making children, and even wants to forbid it then. Test-tube babies, and man-made drugs to get the endorphin rush.
(It ain't going to work. Sure, we can use the test-tube to help sometimes, and it's important to understand endorphins, but the whole idea of the endorphin rush is to help us overcome all the mechanicalities that we tend to pile on ourselves, whether we call them "the law of Moses" or "rational behavior" or "tradition!" or whatever. Well, not the whole idea, but one major part of it.
Sex is unclean.
Whether solitary masturbation or between properly married partners or in large group orgy, it's unclean.
This isn't just about micro-organisms and dirt. When you have sex, you share some intangibles, too, emotional things and intellectual things and spiritual things and social things and economic things. But no one seems to want to talk about those, because sex sells!
Now it can be clean, and sacred, if still a bit stinky (funky?), between partners properly married to each other and consenting to it.
But it's still not perfectly safe and clean within marriage. That is, even between properly married, consenting spouses, sex leaves things behind that, if not taken care of, just get messier. In the best of cases, it's hard to have sex without leaving body fluids on the sheets or underwear or various places where they can get sticky and smelly and moldy and make people sick and, hey, you know this is not clean.
Babies? Babies are messy, too, but we don't complain about them because it's obvious they have to be messy to grow up. And we were babies once, no matter how hard we pretend we were never that uncool.
(Well, there have been, and still are, some who say children should be seen and not heard. And mean that they don't want to be bothered. This is another bad sort of philosophy.)
But the fact that babies are wonderful in spite of being messy does not mean that we should ignore the possibility of making babies when we do the sex thing. Maybe it's not a danger like getting sick, but bringing a baby into this world without even the promise of support is something we should avoid when possible. And if the burden naturally falls on the mother, it should be obvious that the father should be willing to commit to shouldering his part. And there we are back to marriage.
Oh. Pregnancy definitely can have adverse effects on health, in spite of all the wonderful medical stuff we have in our "modern" world. And all the wonderful modern contraceptives don't always prevent it happening.
Because of those endorphins, many people want to pretend that sex should be free and easy without marriage.
But you can get that endorphin rush in lots of ways besides sex. Interacting with people gives us lots of opportunities to be nice to others, and being nice to them makes them feel good (even though they may pretend they don't like to feel good), and it also makes us feel good.
Mutual appreciation is not mutual masturbation no matter how many cynics say it is. Masturbation requires getting one's hands on the sex organ, whether literally or metaphorically. And there are plenty of ways to make each other feel good without getting into sex.
Anyway, the mutual agreement of support and exclusion made in marriage may not be perfectly iron-clad, but it's a whole lot better than the assumption that your partner-of-the-moment has probably come from some other messy tryst without bothering to clean up and is probably going to leave you without bothering to help you clean up, too.
Random sex is extremely messy. And it's so unnecessary.
So how can sex be a good thing?
Clearly, it's primarily a good thing between people who are married to each other, when they are both agreed to it.
That's when it can be fun and not let you down. That's when it can be an adventure without (usually) killing you. (Yeah, childbirth is still dangerous, but spouses are supposed to help each other, okay?) That's when being forbidden really means, yes, you can -- with this one person with whom you have made the mutual commitments of marriage. That's when it is sacred, and not unclean.
Just because sex is not for fun doesn't mean it can't be fun. With your properly married spouse.
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