SEX IS OVERRATED. You’ve heard that one before; it’s the “contrarian” mantra. Not that it’s altogether false. I’ve been through a marriage and a couple of other relationships in my life, and like everything else in life, there are many disappointments. For most young guys, though, that idea would come as a surprise, even a shock. I can’t speak for young women, having not been one, but I can say that a young fellow’s mind and body are full of hormones that convince him that sex is the biggest show on earth. To tell a young dude that some day he’s gonna look back on his sexual escapades and say, hmmmm, there were good days and bad, it just wouldn’t make any sense to him. At the age of 18 and maybe even 23, sex is like trumpets blowing in his ears and klieg lights flashing in his eyes.

I think that the following statement is closer to the truth: Sex is overly depended upon. Depended upon for what? For meaning in life. What is the meaning of life? Some say “chocolate”. But here in America, the most honest answer would seem to be sex (with chocolate perhaps a close second; both depend upon complex brain chemistry as part of their lure). I was in Target today buying some windshield wiper blades, and at the check out line I was looking at the magazine rack. The word “sex” appears quite frequently upon the magazine covers. And even when it doesn’t it still does, via all the flesh and muscles and T&A; displayed in rotogravure color.

Side point: I also noticed in Target that the women’s clothes section is much bigger than the men’s. Interesting commentary upon the mating habits of our species. With birds and certain animals, it’s the male that is bright and colorful, whereby the female is mostly brown and gray. With humans, it’s the female that takes on the plumage.

The Target check out line is not necessarily the bellwether of American cultural trends, but with regard to sex, you don’t need to look much farther for confirmation. Popular music is full of it, advertisements lure you with it, and television shows and movies can’t give you enough of it, at least on an innuendo basis. If you want the hard-core stuff, you used to have to venture into an underworld of dark little corner stores in the wrong part of town; but today all you need is an Internet connection and a credit card. I read somewhere that Google classifies and counts the search requests you sent it (maybe not all of them, but a representative sample anyway), and that sex is by far the leading category.

Cultural wisdom seems to say that sex is our primary reason for living. Mother Nature appears to say the same thing. Just as with rats and mice and roaches and pigeons and other successful species, the critters that have a lot of sex have a lot of progeny. But wait, we’re humans, not rats or mice or roaches or pigeons — that’s the knee-jerk response to such a comparison. So maybe that knee-jerk is saying that sex isn’t our primary reason for being after all?

The ancient Greek writers had some interesting views regarding sex. Yea, they get a bad rap these days for being misogynistic child molesters. For whatever reason, a lot of educated Greek men looked at 13 year old boys with lust back in 400 BCE. But most of them knew it was wrong. When they were good, those Greeks from the old days were very good, very wise. With regard to sex in general, they knew that sex was ultimately a mental quality and was not really tied to body features, shapes and textures. And they knew that if sex was about being human, and if being human was about being related, then sex was ultimately about human relations. They had the good sense to ponder the question of whether sex was the reason for the relationship, or was the relationship the reason for sex.

Again, when you’re guy in your teens or twenties, it seems obvious that maintaining a relationship with a woman — which, as you soon find out, isn’t so easy (and I’m sure this applies vice versa) — is mainly what you do as the price of sex. No young guy will say that out loud, for fear of getting cut off from the sweet pleasures; but put a bunch of guys together with some beer, and the topic inevitably turns to the struggle of keeping the woman in their lives satisfied.

The educated Greeks who wrote those wise and witty books and plays in ancient Athens were a little more idealistic about male-female relationships, however. They felt that it was possible for men and women to relate on the basis of character and values, to agree regarding their innermost values and visions. They believed that sex is more of a side-dish, and not the main course. I never read Homer’s Odyssey, but supposedly the story of Penelope and Odysseus exposes this viewpoint. The two of them are really made for one another. Fate separates them and they both have no idea where the other has gone; but since they are soul-mates, they never give up hope and thus never fool around on the side. They are re-united under dangerous and uncertain circumstances in a manner that exposes their one-mindedness. Only after that happens do they get to do the horizontal bop. The sex follows the romance and virtue. Modern American mythology (TV shows, movies, novels) is usually are set up the other way around.

From what I can tell, sex sometimes leads to a temporary state of mental transcendence (“when it’s good”, as they say). For a few seconds, the world seems to drop away, including all the interesting frills and flesh that seemed so exciting just a few minutes ago. You seem to be floating in a bodiless world where everything is all right. It’s something like music (again, good music, not the crummy stuff). Time doesn’t seem to matter; nothing is moving because everything is moving. Very nice. But then time comes back and the vision ends. You’re back where you started, back in the real world all sweaty and disheveled; it’s time to clean up and do whatever you’ve got to do to get along with whomever you might be with (you want to avoid that insect stuff where the female kills the male after mating).

I’m told that this transcendent sensation is basically what you’re shooting for when you shoot heroin. I can say from experience that in meditation you can also approach such a mental state (but it ain’t easy or reliable). And there are other non-sexual experiences, however rare, that bring people to the edge of transcendence, e.g. moments of great accomplishment and achievement, moments of fulfillment.

Back to sex …. when you’re young and full of hormones, it’s generally easy to achieve this level of transcendence. You might not even need someone else to participate, not at first anyway. Even after you get beyond that stage, however, you still don’t need to know all that much about whomever you convince to rub flesh with you. Love is nice, but lust is the main event. However, as you get into your 30s and 40s, the hormones start to recede. Mother Nature is leaving you on the side of the road; after the age of 30 or so, you’re not as good a prospect for getting a woman pregnant and then helping raise and protect the offspring as a 20 year old is. So, it just ain’t as much fun anymore, and you spend increasing amounts of time watching football versus chasing a member of the opposite sex around.

If you’re lucky, you eventually find out that love is important after all. For some odd reason, being in love is in an aphrodisiac. Even if the person you love isn’t quite as soft and curvy and attractive as it once took to turn you on, that person will still be sexy to you if you can somehow find reasons to love that person. (The biggest problem here in America is that most guys fall in love based on a woman’s initial sexiness; eventually that initial sexiness fades away with age, and then what have you got left?)

The human mind is a very flexible thing. It is programmed by nature to make you feel sexually attracted to members of the opposite sex whose bodies signal good reproductive qualities: i.e., youth, curvy hips for easy child delivery, and large breasts for good nutrition. (For now, let’s not consider the 4% or so who are programmed to be gay). Those are the mind’s default settings. But like a computer, the default settings can be changed. Even if a woman is no longer young and curvy and soft and thin and unwrinkled, she can still turn a guy on if she and that guy are soul-mates. After 20 years apart, Odysseus had the right to look at Penelope and say, hey babe, you’ve changed … you ain’t the fox that I once knew. But love and passion were still there after all, because the two of them saw the world in the same way.

Moral of the story: Sex may not be overrated, but it is over-depended upon. Here in the US, we depend upon sex as the reason for marriage and ultimately for life. Homer seemed to know that set-up wouldn’t work. There are other reasons for life, and they should be the ultimate reasons for marriage — and sex. Only if marriage is based on those reasons, and not on sex, will the sex remain good for the long haul. Yea, that’s one of those Zen-like paradoxes.

And just what are those “other reasons for life”? Well, they vary from person to person. For some people it’s science. You read about those wonderful lifelong marriages between scientists, where husband and wife were partners in their research (e.g., the Curies). For some, it’s art (yea, I know that artists are temperamental and marriages between writers or actors or painters or musicians often don’t do well; but you have some examples like Paul Newman). For many, it’s homemaking; the man likes to fix up the house and the woman likes to decorate; their lovely home is their mutual creation. And also childrearing; a tough project, but when it goes right, I suspect that it becomes the glue that keeps a lot of marriages together. And you do hear about those humanitarian-instinct couples, e.g. who go in the Peace Corps together.

Bottom line: Opposites may attract, but ultimately, birds of a feather stick together. If marriage is going to work over the long haul, then the couple has to believe in the same ultimate values and life goals. Looks are important, as is “liking the same things.” But both of these things are overwhelmed by the question of values and directions in life. Finding a soul-mate ain’t easy; believe me, I know. And it’s awfully hard sometimes to decide who is on the same wavelength with you on the “soulmate” level. If everyone waited until they were sure of that before getting married, there would be far fewer divorces, but there would also be far fewer marriages! Still, I think that people need to get away from the illusion that sex will make marriage and life alright (and that Viagra will keep things going once you hit 45), and put more focus on finding whatever it was that Homer envisioned between Penelope and Odysseus.

Once upon a time, a lot of people thought of America as a sociological “melting pot”, a place where everyone could easily gave up the language and heritage of their ancestors and became red-blooded Americans. This really isn’t (or wasn’t) such a new idea. As with many things about America, this was tried many centuries ago in the Roman Empire. Back in the second and third centuries, you could relinquish your past, whether as an Egyptian, a Syrian, a Turk, a Greek, an Algerian, a Spaniard, a Brit, or even a Frenchman, and simply be a Roman. Even though you’d still look like someone from Africa or England or the Middle East, the powers that be in Rome would treat you like one of them, so long as you wanted to be one of them, and would speak their language (good old Latin).

Of course, most Americans today don’t have much regard for the Roman Empire or Greek Civilization, even though those things are the blueprints for America, like it or not. Until the late 1950s, the education system made sure that everyone knew something about the ancient Romans and Greeks. However, by 1960, the focus in the schools shifted to math and science. Why teach kids about the past, when America’s future lies in the miracle of science and technology?

Yea, we now see how far that idea got us; we have a world with plenty of information technology, but not much wisdom. I think it’s time to start learning something about the ancient Romans and Greeks again. Those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it. We sure seem to be going down the road of repetition these days.

Nevertheless, let’s go back to the American melting pot theory. A lot of immigrant groups have gone along with the cultural melting process, but some just didn’t. Or not to the same degree, anyway. Perhaps the biggest example is the African-American culture. Despite the fact that many or perhaps even most African-Americans today just want to live normal American middle-class lives, African-Americans are still recognized as a very distinctive component of American culture. And yes, I know that there is a long history of oppression and injustice involved with that. But for now, I’m just looking at the surface. If you came from Pluto as an interplanetary Alexis de Tocqueville to do a study on America in the early 21st Century, you’d keep hearing a lot about “blacks” or African Americans. You’d get more buzz about them more than about Irish-Americans or Chinese-Americans or German-Americans or even Hispanic-Americans (although Hispanics also maintain a distinct and noticeable cultural identity).

In a lot of ways, the continuing cultural distinctiveness of Black America reflects continued injustice and closed-mindedness on the part of the majority cultures. And that’s something to be regretted. Having said that, let me say that I myself rather enjoy the ongoing cultural distinctiveness that African-Americans maintain. Sure, it’s too bad about all the frictions and bad feelings that result sometimes because of this, but there’s something about being black that’s just too good to be melted away into the American soup. I have heard stories about white people (like myself) who have left the highly integrated east coast urban areas to live out in Indiana or Wyoming, so that they won’t have any blacks around them. That makes me cringe. No African-Americans around? Sounds extremely bland.

Yes, I know that certain African-American leaders might criticize what I say here as a form of plantation mentality, like the old notion that “darkies are very entertaining, just so long as we keep them in their place”. Sort of an Amos and Andy thing. To which I reply, I think that blacks have just as much of a place at Yale, Princeton, Microsoft, the Senate and the Space Shuttle as anyone of my ancestral culture. But despite continuing progress and achievement, the African-American culture is still maintaining a cultural distinctiveness, and I like it.

Here’s an example. This past week I went to a funeral service for the father of an African-American executive from my workplace. The deceased was an attorney who served as a municipal judge, worked for several years with Thurgood Marshall (first black US Supreme Court Judge) in desegregation efforts, and was generally a pillar of his community. The officiates of the funeral were, not surprisingly, black. And actually, most of the service wasn’t all that different from any of the white funerals I’ve been to. But at one point, actually two, a handsome man with a good voice went to the podium to sing a gospel song (one was Amazing Grace, I forget the other). He did it with a mixture of flair and dignity, adding an occasional smile and even a gesture at the decedent lying there in the coffin. Perhaps the Rev. Al Green got started like that. But hey, I thought, there’s an interesting idea — a bit of entertainment during a funeral. It made the whole thing, well, not so funereal. It was just another one of those little ways that blacks sometimes and somehow touch something fundamental about life, in a way that no one else seems able to.

Let me offer one more funeral-based example, courtesy of Flannery O’Connor, the southern short story writer from the 1950s. O’Connor was very white, and strangely enough for a southerner, a Roman Catholic. You’d wonder how a Roman Catholic could touch the essence of the American South such as Faulkner could. And yet she did. Part of her charm was her Roman Catholicness and the odd contrast between her spirituality and the Baptist and Pentecostal spirit of those around her. But what really made her stories effective were blacks. Here’s a quick taste from “You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead”, one of O’Connor’s typically weird plots about a teenage white boy who lived out in some southern tarshack with his uncle. The uncle dies one hot day, and the kid didn’t want to dig the hole to properly bury his uncle; instead he went to a still and got drunk. An old black man who happened along the way saw this and finished the internment. The man later confronted the drunken kid, saying: “This ain’t no way for you to act. Old man don’t deserve this … he was deep in this life, he was deep in Jesus’ misery.”

Am I saying that whites should uncritically embrace all that is “black”, including 50 Cent and other expressions of irresponsible sexuality and violence? No, I’m not. Probably more than 50% of blacks don’t embrace that stuff either. Am I saying that informed and concerned whites should practice a form of hyper-political correctness and never bring up statistics about continuing problems within the African-American culture, e.g. high rates of male incarceration and one-parent families despite much government assistance over the past 40 years? No, the truth must be dealt with. But I am promoting open-mindedness, and I am saying that my own open-mindedness to the African-American culture (which is very imperfect and late-blooming) has been mostly a good thing, something I’d heartily recommend to all my fellow Americans of European heritage (or any heritage, for that matter).

Two weeks ago, the press gave a lot of attention to Sherry Murphy, a middle-aged go-go dancer in Newark, NJ who was starving three of her young nephews in her basement, one of whom died before being rescued. While I feel the same shock and grief that most everyone feels for Faheem, the boy who died, and for his brothers Raheem and Tyrone, who will live, I’ve been noticing some adjacent tragedies in the stories of the other characters in the case. One of them is Fuquan Williams, the 11-year old brother of the victims, who was no longer living with his aunt; another is Wesley Thomas, the 16 year old son of Murphy, who recently told authorities about his involvement in the death of Faheem (he claims to have unintentionally knocked Faheem out while wrestling with him, from which the 7-year old never recovered).

Both Fuquan and Wesley experienced the same pattern of neglect and abuse that eventually killed Faheem: parents and guardians with criminal records and substance abuse habits, inadequate attention, physical and mental abuse from family and visitors, lack of health care, shuffled frequently between various relatives and caretakers, fathers either unknown (in Fuquan’s case) or infamously known (a registered sex offender, in Wesley’s case), intermittent schooling at best, and a broken-down child protection agency that prematurely closed their case. In sum, a highly chaotic nightmare for an adult, hell to a child (recall the Pat Benatar song, Hell is For Children).

Unfortunately, this is a story of urban poverty, even if Sherry Murphy and her cousin (Melissa Williams, the fugitive mother of the children) did hold jobs and lived in relatively pleasant surroundings (they were not welfare queens living in the projects). They were people that could have made it in the working world, but some sort of psychological and emotional instability, the kind too often found amidst the inner-city poor (and many other groups, of course), infected their lives and found its way to their children. This is the cycle of poverty hard at work, reaching even those who seemingly have the resources to escape it — although one must admit, the aunt and the mother were not simply innocent victims of forces beyond their control. They must stand accountable for what happened. They are not poster-children for the urban poor, most of whom are honest, hard-working and conscientious caregivers; nevertheless, this is a repetitious social infection that is still too common in the city. And the results are young criminals in the making.

Wesley has already graduated; at age 16, he has a police record involving weapons and drugs, and now faces assault charges regarding Faheem. (And yes, he is a parent). As to 11 year old Fuquan, his life could go either way. Not surprisingly, he has severe emotional and learning problems, and exhibits angry and erratic behavior. However, he is now in the legal custody of a seemingly stable, regularly employed uncle who has him enrolled in a special institution. With enough stability and guidance, and in the company of a male role model, Fuquan might have a chance to pull himself out. But then again, most of the special programs for troubled youth like him tend to “graduate” their participants at age 16, due to limited resources. Fuquan may not be ready at age 16 to face the world, even with his uncle’s well-intended help. He may never be able to go back to a regular high school, and would probably have little chance of succeeding in the typical “non-professional” career tracks of today, which require either technical acumen (e.g., an office equipment repairman) or a flair for customer relations (e.g., a bank teller). The call of the gangs and the streets may be too much for him. Along with Wesley, Fuquan may be another Native Son. Another American tragedy slowly unfolding itself in the city.