Thank you for your patience during my absence; glad to be back online! I stumbled across a quote today that reall resonated with me. For several years now, I have spoken to young people about how important sex is to the world we want to create. I'm not talking sex as a category here; I am talking about actual sexual intercourse. It is the most intimate physical connection between two children of God outside of biological motherhood. Yet our culture views sex as anything but an intimate connection. Such a worldview unplugs the power that sex has to shape our society for the better. How we have sex, how we view sex, how we treat sex is an incandescently powerful force.
Consider, then, this quote by Aaron Kheriaty, Professor of Psychiatry at UCI (UC-Irvine) School of Medicine and Director of the Medical Ethics Program at UCI Health:
"Before making decisions about our sexual behaviors, we need to ask ourselves some questions about what we want to be doing to our brain and our body—what kind of neural tracks and networks do we want to be reinforcing through these behaviors? Do we want to be fusing sex and love? Sex and security? Sex and attachment or commitment? Sex and fidelity? Sex and trust? Sex and unselfishness? Or do we want to be fusing in our brain and in our experiences sex and violence? Sex and dominance? Sex and submission? Sex and control? We shape our brain by our choices. And we develop increasingly automatic and ingrained habits by our repeated choices. But the initial choice of which path we embark upon is up to us."
While Kheriaty is speaking about personal choices, I believe that the aggregation of personal choices leads to some pretty powerful societal effects as well. If the most intimate physical connection between two adults is sex, what sex means becomes the horizon for the society (I also think the quality of motherhood sets that horizon as well, but let's stick with sex in this post). If sex means love, then love is possible in the society. If sex means trust, then trust is possible in the society.
Conversely, of course, if sex means control or violence or dominance or even indifference, then those things are all that is possible within your society. Pace what porn-soaked individuals might think, you cannot build a healthy society on violent, controlling, domineering, indifferent sex.
Kheriaty is right that we have agency in this. With every sex act we engage in, we either create a world that has the possibility of love, trust, and respect--or we create a world where those things are impossible.
Want to change the world? Change the kind of sex you are choosing to have.