SEX ADVICE FROM A CELIBATE

Probably since the beginning of time, but particularly in America, sex is entangled with race. Both concepts have been radically changed over the last decades but behavior has not kept up, particularly when it pertains to people of high status. Considering the wife of the leader of Northern Ireland and the chaos her sexual behavior has triggered, being female is not an exemption.

Let me give race a karate chop first. Now that we can get down into the DNA of people, it becomes clear that “race” is a bogus category that belongs to sailors of two centuries ago, who had no way to judge people except by appearance and culture. Those last two matter a great deal and their interaction create the illusion of a circumscribed “species” of person, but investigation reveals that the actual inheritance within such groups is of enormous variability and feathers out at the edges, merging with the edges of other groups. Where barriers like mountains or deserts or seas that have created an illusion of sameness are removed, the group dissolves. The youngsters among us largely ignore race -- they care about music. This is not enough to say, but it’s a start.

Sexual behavior is driven by physical forces but shaped by culture and opportunity. When people were grouped into “races” they could develop standardized norms of what to do, but now that we’re in a period of chaos that needs “re-norming,” confusion reigns. One way to do morality, ethics, propriety -- and that latter counts more than one might think unless you read Miss Manners and Dear Abby who force a realization of large consequences from small behavior -- is by working from principles. Here are some good ones:

Sexual behavior should not be controlled by fertility, but IF babies are wanted, sex should lead to healthy babies who can be raised happily with all the resources they need. The gender and number of the parents or siblings, the location, the prosperity and status, should all be judged according to THIS principle and not according to conventional patterns.

I include under this the experimental technologies that create premature babies who will fight deficits all their lives or families with too many children to support or babies for parents who have become obsessive about passing on their own genes or “having the experience of giving birth.” My standards are much affected by working in an animal shelter where people let their pets give birth “so the children can see the miracle” and then bring the unwanted pups or kittens to be killed, which they pretend doesn’t happen or blame on the shelter. I grant that this is nature’s way -- to produce far more individuals in each generation than can survive -- but consider the consequences when this was also true of human beings and men married a sequence of women because they died in childbirth. The pill was not invented as a political lever -- it was meant to save lives, just as good prenatal care means healthy surviving babies.

Health is more than physical. Emotional maturity counts big. My newspaper daily runs stories of fathers (often very young) who shake, strike, or fling their babies. Babies who grow up in a household where people shout, threaten, leave, smash things, are damaged for life as surely as if one hand were severed.

Sex is variable. It is NOT one-size fits all, though the media wants it that way. It may NOT be accompanied by intimacy (feeling very close to someone else) or bonding (wanting to force a lasting relationship) but confused people try to use sex as a trigger. Sometimes it works.

Sex too often becomes a marker of privilege which means the rich and powerful want it the way they want Gucci loafers or name wristwatches. Boredom can lead to more and more unconventional and extreme sex, until the danger zone is entered. The giveaway that it’s not personal is when all the partners are a type about whom there are media (racial) assumptions: tall, blonde, Swedish women with big breasts or well-muscled black athletes who are presumably well-hung. I suspect that a lot of pretending goes on, especially if much alcohol is involved. The effect of steroids on one’s sex life is not well publicized.

Illicit sex leads to secrecy and then the games begin: who knows what, how much proof they have, how prominent one partner is versus how debased the other partner is, and what the illusions of the constituencies might be. A voter base dedicated to the illusion of irreproachability (right-wing Repubs and evangelicals) is ideal for blackmail and extortion. Warren Beatty, discreet but avid, can allow it to be put about that he’s slept with nearly every woman on the planet because his fans and his business think that is a marker of success. The puzzlement and difficulty comes when he does NOT sleep with a specific woman. (Vanity Fair suggests Elaine May.) If a minister sleeps with several of his parishioners, all the rest of them will be angry that they were left out -- even if they would not have accepted a proposition.

Before I became a minister, I thought that only Elmer Gantry went out behind the revival tent with the pretty girls, but when I was initiated, I discovered that way too many ministers -- for various reasons -- were not confining sex to marriage. Both men and women. A minister once told me that early on he accepted a few opportunities for intimacy and ego stroking (hard to counsel without those), but that it was so very painful for all concerned that he decided never to do it again. That’s the bottom line to this principle: do not do anything that will twist and confuse your emotional life. Even if you are careful NOT to produce a child, even if you are careful to only make love voluntarily to grownup people (even if it’s a commercial transaction) and even if you not a minister of supposed elevated standards and even if you have no intention of ever running for office, do not expose yourself to emotional anguish and scarring.

Useless advice, since you probably will go ahead and make mistakes anyway -- some of them pretty bad. Are you better than Tiger? Better than MLK, Jr? Better than a Kennedy? (I hope you’re better than Warren Beatty -- well, maybe not.) So it would be a good idea to devote some time to an awareness/healing/recovery plan. Your culture might have some good ideas. Or your religion, if you have one.