The One Year Monk has two pieces he'd like to put in front of folks today. I found both of these through the magic of social networking. People I know posted them and I ended up following the links. One really blew my mind. One seemed to deal with the same phenomenon with a lot less sympathy. Still, it's worth reflecting on.
The first one has, undoubtedly, been read by thousands and thousands around the world. New York Magazine has been running this on-line feature for about three years now. The One Year Monk didn't know about it until he saw this essay. In it, each Monday, a New Yorker will blog their sex life for a week and then post it up all at once on the magazine's website. The magazine assigned a freelancer to read all the posts and all the comments and see if he could discern some themes. The Sex Diaries - A Critical Reading of New Yorkers’ Sexual Habits & Anxieties -- New York Magazine, by Wesley Yang.
Similarly, in The Daily Nebraskan, Jake Meador observes that Americans may not be that well served by all their sexual options and has an answer for us all: get married. Sexual culture proves addiction, not liberation. Meador's tone is know-it-all, simplistic and completely unsatisfying. On the other hand, he didn't depress The One Year Monk, I just felt a little embarrassed for him. He should really read his columns aloud to himself before going to print.
Yang, on the other hand, is not judgmental. He does not have answers. He has observations. He has a journey that he's taken, and some well chosen slides to bring back and show you. It's just that the slides will break your heart. Folks are out there leaving themselves on the backburners of other people's romantic priorities, looking at people like they are dishes on a menu and guarding themselves against any real sincerity. Clearly sex and its self-righteous big brother, love, are what everyone wants. It is the subject that's easiest to get people talking about. It's the subject that became a sensation on this blog. It's the news we most like to read.
But be careful about admitting it.
Meador's piece begins to lure you in a little at the beginning by pointing out that Conservatives have been wrong to patrionize sexuality by treating it as dirty or shameful. Instead, he goes on to patronize sex by mystifying it.
For Christians, then, the point about sex is not that it’s evil – despite the fact Focus on the Family and every traumatizing daddy-daughter purity ball says, “Sex is bad and shameful… so save it for someone you love.” Rather, the point is that the beautiful image given to us through sex is cosmic in scope, and so it should be revered and adored and, therefore, guarded.
Cosmic in scope? Oh do fuck off. Are you kidding? Cosmic. The One Year Monk may not have had the best sex life in the world, but he's reasonably certain that his various acts have never suggested anything that would ever yield any "cosmic" revelations. In fact, The One Year Monk has never felt quite so un-cosmic as he has in time spent rutting.
Cosmic.
Bloody hell.
But it's not like this is Conservative balderdash exclusively. Hardly. In fact, the liberals have really cornered the market on sex as a window into greater spiritual richness. Geishas. Tantra. Sex therapists. Kama Sutra. All that gobbledygook. We are, as you might have guessed, a bit given to the mystical here at The One Year Monk. There is a certain mystical logic in the idea that in a universe with an omnipresent God, he might be revealed in anything. Sex, could, perhaps, be as good a way as any to find Him.
But it sure as hell isn't any better. In fact, it seems like a lot more bother.
The point where Yang and Meador meet, tho, is here. We have entered an age of sexual ambivalence brought on by overstimulation. This seems to me to be true. Yang doesn't offer a judgement. It's just one of his observations. For Meador, the only sexual arrangement that Christians can embrace is marriage. Only in marriage can sex have real meaning.
The One Year Monk suspects that we'd all be better off if we quit looking for meaning in sex or the meaning of sex. The One Year Monk suspects that sex is a bad place to look for any sort of answers. It is certainly no place to look for fulfillment.
Sex is a very persistent yearning. It's an itch that we must scratch as few of us have the will to resist that urge. We need a companion (or two, or three). Without it, we may not be able to focus enough to be fulfilled. In that way, it seems plausible that sex is necessary for fulfillment.
But Yang's befuddled informants and Meador both seem to believe that sex>romance>love, with the right alchemy along the way, are both necessary and sufficient for fulfillment. The One Year Monk suspects this is wrong. This experiment is testing the proposition that love isn't a blessing to attain but a burden to cope with. It's not a place to journey to, it's a place to start from.
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