Atheism and Sex

Sex is one of my favourite topics. I spend a great deal of time thinking about it and I don't just mean in the sense of erotic fantasies, although I can't deny that a I do do that too. If you read the newspapers and the billboards you might think that Australian society generally is quite comfortable with the topic of sex... but my experience has generally been the opposite.

Sure, I can sit down with most men and have a discussion over which women are the most attractive, which quickly turns into an argument in my case because I'm quite comfortable pointing out that my tastes in women are not conventional, but if I wanted to bring up a more emotional topic like how I feel at the point of ejaculation then no way! Australian men quickly turn into prudes far too uncomfortable to talk about sexuality with any degree of insight or seriousness.

Strangely, Australians will often criticise foreigners, such as muslims, for being sexually repressed. Yet some of the 'sexiest' people I know are muslims. 'Sexiest' is in parenthesis because really, I don't think many people seriously think about what sexy is... I will get to this in more detail shortly. What I want to make clear at this juncture is that when it comes to talking about emotions and sex Australians are as repressed as that undifferentiated mass of muslims they like to contrast themselves against.

I can see that comment upsetting a lot of people already... good that's part of what I do here. :)

Where religion comes in for me, well I was raised catholic and I was left without any doubt that sex was a disgusting thing. Sure no one ever said explicitly to me that sex was disgusting. But at the same time no one talked about it except in awkward and uncomfortable tones... or in jokes as a rude topic. When ones only exposure to sex (because it is a taboo subject) is from dirty school yard jokes one starts to think that sex is just as unspiritual and dirty as those jokes.

But as a teenager, deeply interested in sex, I came across wicca and paganism. They treat sex in a completely different way... sex is a beautiful, sublime and spiritual experience. Both men and women are encouraged to think of their sexuality as divine and a beautiful aspect of themselves. Whereas catholicism was bent on convincing me that my sexuality was sinful and the pathway to the devil.

Although I am an atheist now I learned a great deal from my reading of wiccan texts on sex. Far more than I ever learned from the Bible... which seems to focus on the proverbial sexual appetite of King David to the point of ridicule and the justification for Lot's multiple acts of incest with his underage daughters. Jesus is a sexless or homosexual figure whom I never felt connected to as a sage on sexuality.

I feel that dogma has deeply harmed our sense of sexuality... because there is no aspect of humanity more involved in creativity and imagination than sex. Dogma stifles creativity and for this reason I feel the religious dogma is usually doomed to be sexophobic in the long run.

Why is sex a creative act? Firstly, the best sex is in ones head. Sure, 1 in 50 people have a face and body that just screams "great sex" but often they have a personality that screams "get stuffed" too. No, for most of us the key to great sex is in our imaginations: in love letters, poems, stories, pillow talk, sexting and erotic fantasy. When I first read about some of the testimony from the witch trials I vividly recall being in the school library feeling profoundly uncomfortable. I was reading about accused witches describing sexual encounters with the devil in graphically detailed confessions, after being tortured of course, and it was giving me powerful erections. I never told anyone this because I felt embarrassed and disgusted with myself. But clearly, there was something in those sexual fantasies created by these poor sexually repressed women that was exciting. Yes, sex with the devil must have been a lot of fun: dangerous, forbidden, exciting and unrepressed.

This brings me to one of the biggest problems of relationships today is keeping sex interesting. Think about this, we as a species have relationship problems because we don't know how to keep sex interesting. If you think this doesn't sound absurd then you've probably been living in a sexually repressed culture all your life. We are surrounded by a huge variety of entertainment forms and we don't ever get so bored of them as we do with our sexual partners. We can keep ourselves going to movies all through our lives, because although our tastes in films might change as we get older we never get bored of new movies so long as they're different, creative, dramatic and interesting.

And yet we get bored of sex? Something that we actually have an orgasm over? Something in my head just screams *crisis* whenever someone hints to me that they aren't satisfied with their sex life.

Again, we don't talk about it, we don't ask about it, we don't give each other practical advice on how to make sex better. Instead we suggest people modify their bodies artificially or through diets and exercise to achieve a sexiness that will rescue us from our woeful sex lives.

In church, no one asks for a genuine prayer from the heart like:
"Dear God, please relieve our poor humble sex lives of their boredom. Send me and my friends passionate sexy and considerate lovers who are not clingy yet deeply respectful. Make sure they are free of STDs and no unwanted pregnancies result. Teach them to touch us in just the right way to maximise the pleasure of our orgasms and find happiness through the bodily means you so generously bestowed on us for this purpose,"

No one would feel comfortable saying that out loud in a church and nor would anyone in the audience likely feel comfortable listening to it... but really... who doesn't secretly wish for a prayer like that to come true?

And as exciting as that prayer is, it still misses the point. Sexiness, like happiness, is all in the mind. If we want great sex we shouldn't be spending so much time worrying about the body. Instead we should be worrying about the heart.

For me, some of the biggest impediments I've had to enjoying sex is worry, fear and guilt. Worry because I'm terrified of disappointing my sexual partner, mostly because no one told me some really important information... like how to have sex - yes, some of you may laugh and say it just comes naturally, but when you've never seen a vagina before, much less felt the inside of one then it's a pretty nerve wracking experience. The kind of nerve wracking experience that gives a man temporary impotence from worry. Just briefly on that point, generally the best cure for impotence is to slow down, relax but not to give up. Instead we tend to ridicule and laugh at men brave enough to admit to having this problem making it much worse... to me that sounds like a psychological strategy to make other men infertile. Interesting, yes? Men can be bitchy too, although they're probably far less aware of what their psychological blows are meant to achieve.

So yes, the how to have sex was never adequately described and in my catholic sexual education, mostly given by female teachers (who obviously felt awkward talking about it to classrooms full of teenage boys), and I graduated with an absurd idea that the vagina was two squiggles of ink on a caricature of a woman. I wonder what the girls imagined a penis to be like? Although a penis is probably more self-explanatory than a vagina which is still a mystery to me to this day and I'm sure it is a mystery to many many women too.

But the secret to great sex is not where you put and touch the various genitals. The secret is being receptive to the experience of having sex. And being receptive is about being comfortable, feeling sexy and excited all at once - all things that happen in the imagination (and with the devil, apparently). The words one says to ones lover leading up to sex are as important, if not more so, than the places and ways you touch them.

I've come to the conclusion that if you can play make believe comfortably with someone as though you were still very young children, then your potential for awesome sex with that person is very high. Strangely, we discourage day dreamers and imaginative children... do we want to make our sex lives boring? Do we want to stomp out the divine spark of creativity in our bodies?

One final illustration.

When experiencing orgasm inside a woman I used to feel guilty and dirty for it, because I felt like a parasite trying to infect an innocent woman with my seed. I've heard couples fighting and women say things to hurt their partners to encourage this perception: that men are parasites just trying to spread their genetic disease to women then run away. Let me tell you as a man nothing is more deeply troubling to my soul to think of myself like that. Instead, when I orgasm now I think about how I'm potentially physically merging with this woman whom I love and admire. Part of me, merging with part of her to create a new life made from the two of us accepting each other.

I think the catholics have it all wrong. I think they actively encourage sexual perversion and the cheapening of sexual experience. I think they're very good at telling themselves that they hate sex because they love it so much. In any field of study, anyone who is proud of being ignorant is generally considered a shameful fool, so why are catholics so proud to be ignorant about sex?

I don't know about how most other religions regard sex, because they don't talk about it either... or maybe they just don't talk about it to prudish catholics, I just don't know. But being conscious and knowledgeable of ones sexuality is a spiritual and divine element to a human being in my opinion.