Sex and Hangups

This all started from a comment that somebody I know thought it was "unholy" to have sex on Easter, the Church's supposedly most holy holiday. "Why on Earth should you not have sex on Easter?" I asked. Well, the response I got was a complete Boomhauer moment, which is to say it included a bunch of mumbling and made no sense whatsoever.

So that got me to thinking, why do people have so many weird ideas and hangups over something that is so completely natural and absolutely necessary to the continuation of life? And why do religious institutions care so much what we do in our own homes and our own beds?

A psychologist named Abraham Maslow published a paper about the hierarchy of human needs. The short explanation is, all people have needs, which can be ordered by importance. If you think of all the things people need to be physically and psychologically healthy, you can arrange those things in a pyramid shape, with the most basic needs (food, shelter, and so forth) as the base and more esoteric notions like self-actualization at the pinnacle. Well, guess what? Sex, as you might have guessed, is right down there in the base with food, water, and air. It's just a basic need. But interestingly, it is the only basic need that you can, physically, live without.

Although Maslow did not put this on paper until 1954, I think the Church has known it for eons. (By "the Church," I mean the Christian institution that came to power as Christianity outgrew its beginnings as a grassroots movement, and all its various branches and splits from the days of Martin Luther onward.) And they have figured out what a powerful means sex can be to motivate and manipulate people. The Church decided to label this natural, normal process as "evil."

They knew that people can't go their whole lives without wanting to have sex, but that they can go a very long time not actually having it. So the Church set up a catch-22 situation to establish control over the masses. They decided to make sex outside of marriage a sin. (The Church has its own reasons for wanting people to be married, but that is a separate discussion. For now, let it suffice to say, there was a lot of money involved, in a lot of ways.) Then they attempted to institute a little thought control, making even thinking about sex a sin. Masturbation, naturally, was forbidden, because blowing off a little steam from all the sex you could not have and were forbidden to think about, was also a sin. And since nobody can go very long in life without wanting sex, then everybody was a sinner.

But wait, there's more. The evil diabolical genius of this plan goes even further. People who did not conform to the Church's celibacy rules were labeled freaks and perverts, and made into social outcasts, which denied them the safety and community of the Church, around which so much of social life was and still is built. By by labeling any and every sexual thought and impulse (even random erections) as filthy and vile, the Church taught people to think of themselves as worthless sinners, having no self control and unworthy of love, especially God's love. By naming all sexual impulses as unnatural and immoral, the Church denied everyone the right to consider himself or herself as a basically moral and good person. Have a peek at that pyramid, will you? Tell me if the Church missed anything.

What did the church get out of all this? Money, for one thing. Marriage licenses, clerical fees, indulgences (The now almost-defunct practice of paying other people to pray for you, to help mitigate your sins), penances (the practice of giving time, money, or prayer to make up for your own sins) , and so forth. And they got control of peoples lives, even of their thoughts. They taught parents to pass on these rules to their kids, in effect deputizing the parents and making them partners in the Church's quest for control. They even forbid birth control, divorce, and any other practice that might limit the number of children (future Church members) born to any given couple. More church goers meant more money for the church, more labor to exploit, and more expendable minions for holy wars. The Church needed people, and they needed to control them.

And the people needed their Church, too. They needed it for all the valid, natural reasons like the social aspect and wanting to get in touch with the divine. And then they also needed it for the perverse reason that the Church set up, in it's own self-replicating cycle. The needed it to cleanse them of their "unholy" desire for the most natural of things.

In my opinion, most sexual hangups (I don't mean real problems like pedophilia; I just mean the weird little things people worry about, like whether it is OK to have sex on Easter, or whether sex is supposed to be fun, or whether casual sex is cool) are the result of people being unable to resolve the need for social acceptance and the safety of family and community, with the need for sex. Like that joke about stress being the result when the brain overrides the body's desire to slap somebody who desperately needs it, those odd little fears are the result of years of conditioning. So the next time you wonder if it's really OK to have a quickie on Sunday morning before church, wonder instead, who told you to worry about that? And why do they care?