Photo: flickr.com user Argenberg
Sex is an obsession. As Americans, it is soaked into every fiber of our national consciousness. It’s in the music, in the window displays at the mall. It’s the 8-year-olds in child size bikinis on the beach. Fuck baseball, sex is the national pastime. Whether you’re doing it or thinking about doing it, trying to get it or have already resigned yourself to beating off with Miss Michigan, it’s an obsession.
Simultaneously intriguing and vaguely repulsive (if you don’t believe it, check out some amateur porn), from it springs life and sometimes love and affection and sometimes awkward infections and serious diseases. It’s the thing that gets your heart pumping and makes you sweat. It’s the thing that thrilled you as a child as you watched mostly naked movie stars, late at night when the babysitter fell asleep on the couch. It’s what makes the Internet so damn interesting and college like a four-year trip to Vegas.
Everybody has a sex life. From 40-year-old virgins to bedpost-notching frat boys, from girls who wear chastity rings right on down to girls that wear NuvaRings. Even your parents have a sex life. Humans are, by definition, sexual beings. Even asexuality is not synonymous with celibacy; lacking the desire to have sex doesn’t mean one doesn’t have it anyway. However, for the vast majority of individuals the opposite seems to be true; the incorrigible, overwhelming desire to have sex doesn’t mean you get to.
Sexual behaviors are as diverse and distinct as the individuals who carry them out. They run the gamut from innocent and vanilla to deviant and downright dangerous. A person’s sexuality is just as complex as their personal identity, and plays a significant role in it. Infatuation is an adrenaline rush; combine it with sex and watch it explode. In a superficial society, people are judged based on their attractiveness to the point that “sexy” people make more money, are more successful and are healthier than people considered unattractive. This kind of relationship between sexual attractiveness and social fitness makes sexuality an evolutionarily viable trait in a much more complex way than just making babies.
Society wants sex to be private because so many things can happen; it means opening oneself up to the possibilities of awkwardness and humiliation as well as mind-blowing orgasms and fairy tale endings. Beyond the physical, the desire for sex stems from a desire for intimacy- a craving for vulnerability. Putting yourself at the mercy and under the control of another individual, literally (think bondage) or simply by spreading your legs and saying go is as much an act of will as it is an act of surrender, recalling innocence even as innocence is lost. This vulnerability is where intimacy is born. True intimacy is not simply nakedness and shared bodily fluids, but the belief and trust that your other will actively make a choice not to abuse your vulnerability.
Sex is universal and deeply embedded in our personal consciousness and culture. Infatuation and passion, however, ultimately trivialize intercourse. The universal and personal obsession with sex takes away the intimacy; the thing that makes it special and important is lost somewhere in between the child size string bikinis and the Hollywood Nights ($7.99 lingerie, $5.00 stripper heels) next to the Christian Middle School.
