Contemporary sexuality

Now there's a post title that will put me on top of the search engines!

Seriously, though, the topic of human sexuality is frequently at the surface among the students at my campus ministry. Not because they're having wanton sex (I hope!) but rather because of the university culture in which we live. I will definitely be posting, from time to time, on particular aspects as they happen.

Abortion, adult 'toys' and such, homosexuality, date rape, 'hooking up', etc. These subjects regularly appear in articles in the campus newspaper and stir up discussion with my students. If pastors and parents had firsthand knowledge of what students face when they come to college, I believe they would prepare them much more carefully. While I don't think you should be watching dirty movies with your youth group, sexuality should not be taboo. Parents should want their children to learn about this from themselves, not from their son/daughter's new boy/girlfriend. Not everybody has the same beliefs when it comes to sexuality, so if you want your children to share your beliefs, you should openly (and regularly) talk to them about it.

A case in point of divergent views of sexuality can be found here. The Pope has received quite a bit of criticism for stating that condoms will worsen, and not improve, the AIDS problem in Africa. His detractors see condoms as a (relatively) cheap, convenient means of protection against AIDS, not to mention birth control. I agree with the Pope on this one for several reasons. First, condoms do reduce the risk of AIDS transmission but they are not 100% effective - there are complications that come about because of improper use, and the latex itself is not an impermeable barrier to a virus. The failure rate of condoms based on average use is about 10% - that means that if you have 10 sexually active couples, all using condoms every time they engage in sexual intercourse, odds are the one of those couples will be pregnant by the end of the year. The same can be said for the transmission of AIDS. Condoms might slow it down, but it is like putting a balloon on the end of a leaky faucet - it's an incomplete solution. More troubling to me, however, is the apparent connection people see between condoms and what I like to call sex without consequences.

Sex without consequences does not exist, no matter how folks try to rationalize it, de-humanize it, and industrialize it. The surest way to contract a sexually transmitted disease is to engage in sexual intercourse. The surest way to become a parent is to engage in sexual intercourse. The surest way to bind yourself to another for life is to engage in sexual intercourse.

The first two of those - about disease and pregnancy - should make logical sense to anyone. The last point - about binding yourself to another for life through sexual intercourse - is something I believe has been lost in this culture. Now, I'm not talking about the commercials I saw in the 1980s about 'when you sleep with someone, you're sleeping with everyone they've ever slept with'. What I'm talking about, however, is that we have been created in such a way that men and women both desire physical intimacy with one another. You could say that we were 'wired' for one another.

Our 'wiring' is not so simple, however, that all we desire is physical. We were also created for community - a relationship is never purely physical; it is more than a meeting of the flesh for mutual pleasure - the meeting of the flesh produces a union between two people, and the consequences of the loss of this understanding of sexuality are immense. Ignorance of the emotional component of relationships wreaks a havoc on people that I see regularly. The collateral damage is serious. It forms a pattern for future relationships believed to be meaningless, but with every so-called meaningless encounter comes new wounds, unfulfilled hopes and needs, and a lonely suffering that turns people in on themselves. Men become angry, and it forms a pattern for how he treats women. I can't speak for what it does for women, but I would imagine they suffer as much or more than men from 'no-strings' liaisons. Broken relationships, now and in the future, are the inevitable result.

This is relevant to the discussion of methods for fighting the transmission of AIDS in Africa because the problem is not that people aren't using condoms. That would be like saying that wearing a seat belt makes it safe for you to crash your car. When you drive your car, you do so defensively and carefully, and you wear a seat belt just in case something bad happens. A seat belt is a preventative measure that drastically reduces your risk of injury or death in the unlikely event of an accident. Giving away condoms is like encouraging people to drive dangerously, but giving them a false sense of safety by telling them to buckle up first. The fact is that in a crash, a seat belt gives you a statistically better chance at survival, but it is no guarantee that you will not die.

The real solution to the AIDS problem is not the elimination of unprotected sexual intercourse (again, who believes that auto fatalities will disappear when nobody drives without a seat belt?), rather, it lies in a shift in the cultural understanding of humanity and how we relate to one another. The solution is not abstinence either (true, nobody will die from car accidents if nobody drives, but it's a little ridiculous to think that nobody will drive). Human sexuality needs to exist within the proper context - marriage. Pregnancy creates all kinds of questions and difficulties for the unmarried, but for the married it is (mostly) a joyful thing. The emotional component of sex brings husband and wife together in a unique way - only they know each other so intimately. The disease component could clearly be spread within marriage, but the spread of disease would be limited to spouses and children - vastly reducing those rates while cultivating a more healthy understanding of the relationships between men and women.

Condoms may slow the transmission of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, but it does nothing to help the people suffering in the midst of these epidemics to experience sex with the best consequences - as God intends it.