dwasifar's daily gripe

A conversation with a friend got me to thinking about sex, secrets, and religion today.

We all know that religion is hostile to sex. Most religions don’t seem to like sex very much, and have lots and lots of rules about what God supposedly wants you to do (or, more often, not do) with your sex organs and other various erogenous parts. The conventional explanation for this is that sex is strong and basic, which threatens religion’s dominance, so religion retaliates by trying to suborn and control sex, turning it around on itself and using it as a guilt generator, the better to control its adherents.

Maybe that’s not it at all.

Maybe it isn’t that people are knotted up about sex because religion told them to be. Maybe it’s the other way around; people turn to religion because they fear sex.

Think about it. We are all sexual creatures, to greater or lesser degree, from that first rush of hormones in the early teens until we wither with senescence. Aside from air and food, it’s our strongest drive, and we are constantly being pushed around by it. Everyone (well, almost everyone, but for practical purposes it’s everyone) has sexual urges, and they’re strong and animal and mysterious and hard to control. Where do they come from? We don’t know precisely, just as we don’t know where ideas come from or where consciousness comes from. And because it’s such a strong force, it makes us uncomfortable to be faced with too much of it from others; so we maintain a carefully PG-13 rated outer appearance (used to be G, but that was a while ago) and we all pretend, in public, that we’re not sexual animals at all, to keep things orderly and make the wheels of civilization keep turning. There is some logic to that, because sex is more or less completely distracting, and if we were all staring at tits and dicks all day, nothing would get done. But it has the effect of isolating every person’s inner sexual life inside his own head, and with no external frame of reference, each person can start to feel as if he or she is the only X-rated person in this PG-13 world. And that’s disturbing to a lot of people. I’ll bet it makes the sex urge seem that much more wild and uncontrollable and scary.

Okay, I didn’t forget religion; I was just setting the stage. Among religion’s claims are the power to give you peace and solve your worldly problems; to resolve your inner conflicts by turning them over to Jesus or Allah or the Flying Spaghetti Monster or what have you. Well, if you’re afraid of sex, you’re basically afraid of what you are. You’re afraid you’re defective. And if that’s the case, who better to “fix” you than the people who set themselves up as factory service representatives for the establishment that created you? Their answer, of course, is basically just misdirection; refocusing your attention on the religion delusion to distract you from your discomfort with sex, and reinforcing the habit by adding more discomfort with sex, further increasing your dependence on religious anodyne.

The problem with that is that God is imaginary, but sex is real. Sooner or later the real urges overwhelm the imaginary gatekeeper you put in their path, and the sex bursts free for a while. And of course, this is taken as evidence that sex really IS bad and evil and scary, and must be the work of Satan (or whoever your particular anti-God is) because who else would be able to create something that even God can’t help you with consistently? And the cycle starts again, with added intensity. Religion always offers to “help” with sexual problems; it’s fascinated with them, and why shouldn’t it be? It’s good for business, and all the better if the cure is never entirely successful.

One of the most troublesome parts of human nature is the ability to self-delude. We may be unique on the planet in this, and I think it is a fundamental flaw of the brain. It’s self-evidently maladaptive. I can’t imagine what evolutionary benefit it would confer. And there is no more fully-formed artifact of human self-deception than religion. Take christianity for example, and consider that a conversion to christianity requires what they refer to as a “leap of faith,” which is a pretty way to say that the convert has made a rational decision to suspend rationality; he has consciously decided to believe the unbelievable, which is the foundation upon which the whole fantastical looming structure of religion rests. So I don’t think it’s a stretch to surmise that the same people who are most eager to indulge that self-delusion are also willing to delude themselves about their own sexual natures and try to bend them into something they’re not. Christian fundamentalists natter on about how sexual orientation can be “cured,” as if sex were some casual accessory that you could change like a pair of shoes, and not something deep in ourselves. I think it’s possible for people’s sexual tastes to change over time – all sorts of things about people change. But I don’t think you can get a new sexual identity like you might get a new haircut. That’s clear self-delusion at work, and you can see the evidence of it with every new evangelist sex scandal or headline about pedophile priests. I’m sure millions of people read those headlines and ask themselves what could be going through the minds of those clergy. Whatever it is, you can bet it has a healthy dose of self-deception about the nature, the causes, and the effects of what they do.

Up until recently people couldn’t admit to being homosexual, and there are still a lot of places where it’s dangerous to do so. Now gays can “come out,” meaning out of the closet, and we see this and we imagine we are sexually liberated now, open minded and accepting and tolerant. Nonsense. We are all closeted inside our own minds. We do it for the reasons I described at the beginning, but the fact is that if any of us – even the most vanilla – were fully open about our sexual tastes, urges, and desires, it would be social and professional death. A lot of people would risk being locked up even if they just talked about it in the wrong venue. A co-worker once confided in me that his ultimate sexual fantasy was to have a small-breasted Asian woman with a bob haircut pee on his head. What if he said that in a job interview? Your personal fantasies and practices may be much tamer than that, or they may be much wilder, but we all know we have to keep it secret, so we all think we’re the only pervert in a world full of vanillas. And that makes us think there’s something wrong with us, and it gives self-hate and self-delusion a foothold, which leaves us open to exploitation and manipulation.

I don’t have any suggestions about what to do about this. I would like to see people be more open about sexuality; it would be more difficult to manipulate people with sex if it were not so taboo. And I’m not just talking about religion doing it, but media and marketing too. But for that to happen we would need to stop kidding ourselves, not only about imaginary friends in the sky, but also about what and who we really are.

And that’s not likely to happen any time soon.