28 January 2013
SEX: America’s sexual repression is a malady disguised as a remedy.
By Kayla Chang, Copy Editor
You’re waiting in line at the grocery store. There’s a guy with a toilet-brush mustache standing too close behind you. The lady in front of you is arranging her items into some kind of weird gastronomic conga line, and you hate her for not making more efficient use of space. You figure you’re going to be there a while, so you glance over the magazine racks, fighting the urge to tip her cart over.
But you notice there’s something off about the magazines: right next to a cover advertising “101 Inspirational Cupcake Recipes” (what makes a cupcake recipe inspirational, anyway?) is one advertising “Flat Abs Fast!” Somehow, Americans are overfed, yet starving.
It’s the same way with sex. Any survey of the cultural landscape reveals that sex has never been more prevalent in American life, yet lawmakers with vaginas are banned for saying “vagina” in a debate about vaginas. Sex and politics have become so entangled that you can almost hear Rush Limbaugh hiss “Slut!” when you walk past the condom aisle.
40 years have passed since Roe v. Wade, yet there are literally hundreds of abortion restrictions still in place across the country. 70 percent of Americans now oppose overturning Roe, yet 87 percent of U.S. counties don’t have an abortion clinic. The conservative wing of the Republican Party has power far beyond its numbers and a voice louder than a more silent majority. These people are militants and ideologues that use religion as a ready-made vehicle for campaigning on sexual mores. They force their way into mainstream politics and into our bedrooms, voices trembling with crusading zeal, because they genuinely believe that they’re the only things keeping civilization intact. I mean, say what you will, but these people have more enthusiasm for preventing sex than most people do for having it.
Which brings me to a bigger point: America is sexually repressed. It’s what makes us so determined to undo decades of advancement in sex and women’s rights. It’s what’s made us all but institutionalize homophobia. And it’s what makes sexual violence a regular feature of the daily American news diet.
By wrapping normal sexual urges in a cloak of repressive shame, the human psyche tends to distort into perversions of desire. Nothing inspires murderous mayhem in human beings more reliably than the thwarting of sexual expression. America seems to have a higher tolerance for violence than it does for sex, even though violence is often accompanied by the release of sexual tension. This attitude is rooted in our fear of sex—the outward manifestation of societal sexual repression. That fear makes us feel weak, our anger over that weakness breeds hate and we use that hate to victimize the helpless.
Moreover, our general aversion to open and frank discussion of sex has left us clueless about our feelings, our bodies and our sexuality. In America, men can find pole dancers like there’s a trail of bread crumbs leading to them but can’t find a clitoris in broad daylight. We don’t see women simply as creatures of anatomy. Bikini-clad girls adorn the pages of gun magazines, armed to the teeth like they’re about to fight a band of Turkish rebels. By excessively sexualizing the human body, we’ve dehumanized it. Remember that there’s two ways to dehumanize people: dismissing them and idolizing them.
The problem starts with how we treat our youth. Teenagers are a sexually repressed minority. The government singles this group out and actively denies it information, health care services and the right to consensual sexual activity. Half of American schools don’t even allow teachers to answer simple questions about anal sex. We regard teen sex as something so dangerous that any means of discouraging it is justified: lying, fear mongering and jailing.
That being said, you should never have sex unless you truly want to and are able to responsibly. Movies make it seem as though sex is almost curricular in American high schools, but it’s not. Teenagers are the awkward walking wounded of humanity, not its sexual apex.
But maybe you meet someone. Maybe it’s her loud piano-bang laugh, or his busy, penetrating eyes. Maybe it’s the way she looks as though she’s always thinking about five things at once, one of them dirty. Maybe it’s the way he smells good even when he doesn’t. Maybe she says something that jars you, makes you feel as if you’ve just had a shot of tequila. Maybe you catch him quietly reading Kierkegaard under his desk.
Who knows? Point is, you’ve met someone, and this someone has cracked you like a spine. It’s important to remember that despite all the politics and sanctimonious diatribe, this feeling is a fundamental part of our nature. Sex has nothing to do with morality. And when you strip away the pretense of guilt and shame and ignorant pride, you find that at the heart of sex lies something vitally pure: human beauty.