“Love is something far
more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape
from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater
part of their lives.” Bertrand
Russell
By Alex P. Vidal
IS sex dirty?
Sex for procreation good.
For health good also?
Sexual behavior is often judged by clergymen whose
qualifications include their solemn renunciation of sexual intercourse.
“Tragically,” protests Dr. David Reuben in Beyond the Birds and Trees, “those who
undertake to control our sexual destinies are often sexually sick themselves.
The decency league dedicated to abridging sexual behavior—except on their terms—are
simply trying to deprive others of the reasonable use of their sexual orgasms.”
Reuben adds: “Every one of us has made that
seven-inch journey through the penis into the vagina to meet the other half of
our future protoplasm, and has then settled in the uterus for the 280-day wait.
There is no reason now to be ashamed of how we traveled and where we grew—there
is no more suitable place.”
In Any Woman
Can, Reuben, 81, a psychiatrist and sex expert who now lives in California,
says sex started with the crocodile.
“This scaly cold-blooded distant relative of man was
the first animal to develop a penis. Before then, life was much simpler. All
the earth’s inhabitants had about the same type of sexual equipment and used it
about the same way.”
This was how Reuben explained further:
The male and female simply backed up to each other,
wiggled their sexual equipment into contact, and oozed primitive sperm into
contact with primitive eggs.
There wasn’t much to see, hardly anything to feel, and
in many species if a couple turned on like this once a year, it was sufficient.
Twice a year was oversexed and many animals copulated only once in a lifetime.
VISIBLE
For one thing penis was visible. Secondly, it
revolutionized sex by fitting inside the female body. In those days there was
no such thing as a vagina. The female sexual equipment was a cloaca consisting
of a common channel for urine, feces, and semi-annual eggs. (Things have
improved a lot for women since then.)
Obviously, the crocodile penis too has undergone
major design modifications as it was handed down over the years to homo sapiens. From the evolutionary
point of view the modern American male sports the latest in phallic equipment.
But problem still remained.
Men equipped with this wonderful organ quickly
developed a lively interest in the female sexual apparatus, by then improved
and expanded into a closely-coupled vagina, labia, and clitoris.
Like the crocodiles before them men and women
discovered that combining their sexual resources resulted in immense pleasure
for both contributors.
For the next 50,000 years all went well. Sex was a
normal psychological function as routine as swimming had been to the crocodile
and as essential and enjoyable as eating was to early man. Then came the Dark
Ages.
About 400 A.D. Western civilization abruptly lurched
in a different direction. Suddenly sex was out and guilt was in.
As some long-forgotten genius in the field of medieval
motivational psychology discovered, men and women are unbelievably responsive to
the liking up of sex and guilt.
From that moment on, the fate of society (and most
of its members) was sealed. The most efficient means of controlling human
behavior had been put into effect: focus on an activity which everybody must
engage in—sex; select its most joyable aspect—copulation; finally provide the
threat of severe and relentless punishment for its enjoyment.
As the machinery of sexual repression creaked into
action, the power and influence of those in control grew enormously. There
were, to be sure, a few hitches at first but all resistance finally yielded to
the crushing force of sexual repression.
PROBLEMS
One of the major early problems was that the
moralists actually underestimated the potential of their new weapon to change
the destiny of the Western world.
Apparently the original idea was to make sex only a
minor transgression. However all levels of society almost immediately succumbed
to the irresistible urge to feel guilty about perfectly normal sexual feelings.
In effect this was the “new morality,” Dark Ages version.
In some ways a most frightening form. Sex rapidly
became an emotional commodity to be consumed under the strictest prohibitions,
if at all.
Like the famous insurance policy that pays off is
the insured is killed by a cable car on the Fourth of July while carrying an
Easter bunny, sexual relations came to be allowed only under the most rigid
restrictions.
According to these forerunners of our modern moral
guardians, sex was to be limited to married couples in bed, in the dark, fully
clothed, ideally involving an important man and a frigid woman with just enough
sperm dripping onto the lady’s private parts to bring on a joyless
impregnation.
That was another challenge for the moral reformers.
Since it sets a liberal tone toward sex, a major hatchet job was in order.
The Good Book was extensively distorted and
misinterpreted to make it appear to endorse sexual repression.
Genesis was reinterpreted to make Adam and Eve seem
like sinners who were evicted from the Garden of Eden for daring to engage in
sexual intercourse.
SANITIZED
Later versions were further sanitized and Adam’s
penis was replaced by the ever-present serpent hovering greedily around Eve’s
pubic fig leaf.
The sexual purifiers smugly ignored reality: if God
had not intended His first man and woman to copulate He would simply have
molded their mortal clay a bit differently and left them nothing to work with.
Some of the changes were downright silly. In the
Revised Version of the Bible of 1881, the word “whore” was changed to “harlot”
and the term, “whoremonger” was replaced by “fornicator.” No exact figures are
available to the number of souls saved by these semantic gymnastics.
The Bible was only the beginning. After emasculating
this once lusty and vital Scripture, every other possible work of man, artistic
and literary, were purged and distorted to eliminate any mention of rational
human sexuality.
Fifteen hundred years ago the single most enduring
principle of Western society was forged: SEX IS BAD.
From that moment to the present, hundreds of millions
of innocent people have been brainwashed into believing a silly bit nonsense:
sex is synonymous with sin.
Regrettably, no force on earth has been able to turn
back the emotional calendar and the misconception goes on, constantly
reinforced.
For more than a dozen centuries every persuasive
force available has been harnessed to desexualize the most highly-sexed animal
this planet has ever known—the human being. Their message is always the same
and always untrue: sex, except under nearly impossible circumstances, is
wicked.
One of the real tragedies of recent times is the
attempted corruption of the human body. A small group of moral crusaders,
working with that fevered devotion seen only in the mentally deranged, has been
trying to convince everyone that the perfectly synchronized beautifully
designed, elegantly planned mechanisms of their bodies are nasty, filthy, and
horrid.
That psychological masterpiece which makes human
reproduction unique has been distorted by those who should know better into a
curse and a sickness.
MENSTRUATION
In reality menstruation signifies perfect health.
The ounce or two of blood that is passed each month is the banner of a normal
reproductive system. If blood is unclean, imagine what the moral crusaders can
make of a nosebleed.
When it comes to sexual intercourse, the guerrilla
fighters for purity bring on their big guns. Their favorite word is “dirty”—and
they are wrong again.
By every test, sexual intercourse is probably the
purest and daintiest activity that a man and woman can engage in, aside from
being the most enjoyable.
The genitals themselves are normally free of harmful
bacteria, the secretions are perfectly sterile, and the penis and vagina were
obviously designed to be brought together in their own inimitable style.
By contrast, the throat of every person, including
the anti-sex orators, is crammed with a dozen varieties of lethal bacteria.
These include the bugs that cause diphtheria,
gonorrhea, strep throat, and rheumatic fever. If they want to start a crusade,
it should probably begin in their own noses and mouths.
Actually the sexual reformers are on the wrong
track. If they really hope to make men and women afraid of themselves, they
might devote their attention to other organ systems.
Breathing offers a good opportunity. We take in good
clean air and pervert it into bad breath! Only a few cynical mouthwash salesmen
have jumped on that one, but there is plenty of room for moral education about
how the body ruins God-given oxygen.
Sweating is another good area. Fifty thousand years
ago human beings used their noses as much as their eyes. They could identify a
stranger by his smell and could distinguish approaching animals and men by
their specific odors.
The need for that talent has diminished somewhat but
the human aroma still clings to man. It is now known as “body odor” and must be
eliminated at all costs.
A human who smells like a human is headed for social
and occupational disaster. In order to be accepted by the rest of his race, his
breath must reek of carbolic acid, his armpits give off the scent of gardenias,
and his skin exude hexachlorophene.
A few years ago chlorophyll tablets were developed
to expunge once and for all every trace of human smells. (As a tribute to man’s
sanity, they were tried and quickly discarded by all except fugitives wishing
to avoid the bloodhounds.)
FRONTIER
Perhaps the last frontier for those reformers who
want to protect us against ourselves is the digestive system. If they really concentrated
they might be able to spoil the pleasure of eating for a hundred million or so
fellow citizens. All they would need to do would be to explain, “When you take
that beautiful food, provided for you by Heaven’s bounty, and put it into your
body, it is attacked by filthy chemicals and changed into a green stinking mass.
Do you know what that food finally becomes? Do you know what it is turned into?”
The lecture would have to stop at this point because
the devoted moralists couldn’t say the word.
Every organ, every secretion, every cell of the
human body was put there by nature, by the Creator, for a purpose.
The respiratory system, the digestive system, the
sweat glands, all have a vital function in the preservation of the body. The
sexual organs are no exception. For the past few hundred years, not more than a
fleeting moment in the history of mankind, a strange collection of misguided
do-gooders and moralizing misfits have tried to make us forget how we all
arrived in this world. They miss the point. Ever since the beginning of the
human race, sexual intercourse has been the most noble and wholesome of all man’s
activities.
In spite of the shrill protests of those
self-appointed moral guardians, nothing is going to change that.
Every woman, married or not, deserves the freedom to
enjoy the ultimate expression of her sexual potential. With knowledge and determination
and courage, that achievement is within her grasp.
