our sexual religions
If you make pornography for a living, you don’t have to worry that your videos are repetitive, long and if they have a plotline, it’s just an excuse to get to the sex. Driven by our primal desires, we don’t just love to watch it anyways, we’ll also eagerly watch shows and documentaries about how it’s made. Humans, just like all creatures that reproduce sexually, live for the enjoyment and rush of sex. Art, hairstyles, makeup, fashion, nightclubs… most of our modern culture is built on the anticipation and opportunity of sex.
But over the last 1,600 years or so, we’ve been doing strange things with our sex drives. As Christianity and Islam exploded across the world (and with them, Judaism), we’ve been told to deny our urges as much as possible unless we meet some very strict rules. Our schools are not supposed to talk about it in any serious detail, we’re supposed to discourage young adults from sex regardless of how safe or responsible it is and we have to be married before we do it. Of course we don’t really follow any of these rules since our biology can easily overpower our logic. Unlike priests, clerics and rabbis want to believe, humans are still biologically hardwired for lust and no amount of shaming will slow them down in their pursuit of sexual release. In fact, our religious leaders are just as sex obsessed as we are.
Note the vocal opposition to birth control across the three major religions and the downright Darwinian notes about reproduction in their holy texts. Judaism and Christianity constantly mention one of the most famous verses from the Bible and the Torah, Genesis 1:28; “be fruitful and multiply.” Islam allows a man to have up to four wives, a perfect example of promoting genetic variety in evolution. Four wives means four different genetic contributions to a family’s gene pool. Right there in a religion the representatives of which will often deny evolution, we have a prescription for speeding it up. In America, fundamentalist Christian groups developed the Quiverful movement which encourages couples to grow their families as much as they can, an indirect way of boosting genetic variety by increasing the size of the gene pool.
Even in their quests to censor our television sets and cleanse our culture of anything they see as lewd, the contradictory nature of religious activists shows itself. They analyze any offensive content from every episode of Desperate Housewives to every frame of a hardcore flick buried in an old, crusty collection of a local adult bookstore. They swarm to read vastly overblown, overhyped tales of oversexed, attractive youth spending nights in orgies of carnal excess. (I’ve read a few such stories and my God, I wish they were true… College would’ve been amazing.) Their obsession with tracking down sex in anything and everything has even lead an extreme few like James Dobson to parse children’s cartoons. Of course, when you start looking for lewdness in Spongebob Squarepants, you’ve entered a whole new level of obsession with sex.
Supposedly when writing his odes to chastity and piety, St. Augustine (a notorious hedonist in his youth) said “God, give me the strength to overcome my desires. But not now!” Perhaps he wasn’t far off about God taking his sweet time in making humans chaste and pure. For a deity that’s repulsed by displays of lust, he spent a lot of effort hardwiring us for sex, lust and pleasure and the books said to carry his word ask us to uphold basic evolutionary principles through copious procreation.
