SEX IS OVERRATED. You\u2019ve heard that one before; it\u2019s the \u201ccontrarian\u201d mantra. Not that it\u2019s altogether false. I\u2019ve 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\u2019t speak for young women, having not been one, but I can say that a young fellow\u2019s 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\u2019s gonna look back on his sexual escapades and say, hmmmm, there were good days and bad, it just wouldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
I think that the following statement is closer to the truth: Sex is overly depended upon.<\/b> Depended upon for what? For meaning in life. What is the meaning of life? Some say \u201cchocolate\u201d. 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 \u201csex\u201d appears quite frequently upon the magazine covers. And even when it doesn\u2019t it still does, via all the flesh and muscles and T&A; displayed in rotogravure color.<\/p>\n
Side point: I also noticed in Target that the women\u2019s clothes section is much bigger than the men\u2019s. Interesting commentary upon the mating habits of our species. With birds and certain animals, it\u2019s the male that is bright and colorful, whereby the female is mostly brown and gray. With humans, it\u2019s the female that takes on the plumage.<\/p>\n
The Target check out line is not necessarily the bellwether of American cultural trends, but with regard to sex, you don\u2019t need to look much farther for confirmation. Popular music is full of it, advertisements lure you with it, and television shows and movies can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019re humans, not rats or mice or roaches or pigeons — that\u2019s the knee-jerk response to such a comparison. So maybe that knee-jerk is saying that sex isn\u2019t our primary reason for being after all?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Again, when you\u2019re guy in your teens or twenties, it seems obvious that maintaining a relationship with a woman — which, as you soon find out, isn\u2019t so easy (and I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
From what I can tell, sex sometimes leads to a temporary state of mental transcendence (\u201cwhen it\u2019s good\u201d, 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\u2019s something like music (again, good music, not the crummy stuff). Time doesn\u2019t seem to matter; nothing is moving because everything is moving. Very nice. But then time comes back and the vision ends. You\u2019re back where you started, back in the real world all sweaty and disheveled; it\u2019s time to clean up and do whatever you\u2019ve 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).<\/p>\n
I\u2019m told that this transcendent sensation is basically what you\u2019re 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Back to sex …. when you\u2019re young and full of hormones, it\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019re 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\u2019t as much fun anymore, and you spend increasing amounts of time watching football versus chasing a member of the opposite sex around.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re 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\u2019t 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\u2019s initial sexiness; eventually that initial sexiness fades away with age, and then what have you got left?)<\/p>\n
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\u2019s not consider the 4% or so who are programmed to be gay). Those are the mind\u2019s 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\u2019ve changed … you ain\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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\u2019s one of those Zen-like paradoxes.<\/p>\n
And just what are those \u201cother reasons for life\u201d? Well, they vary from person to person. For some people it\u2019s 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\u2019s art (yea, I know that artists are temperamental and marriages between writers or actors or painters or musicians often don\u2019t do well; but you have some examples like Paul Newman). For many, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cliking the same things.\u201d But both of these things are overwhelmed by the question of values and directions in life. Finding a soul-mate ain\u2019t easy<\/b>; believe me, I know. And it\u2019s awfully hard sometimes to decide who is on the same wavelength with you on the \u201csoulmate\u201d 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
SEX IS OVERRATED. You\u2019ve heard that one before; it\u2019s the \u201ccontrarian\u201d mantra. Not that it\u2019s altogether false. I\u2019ve 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=675"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2751,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675\/revisions\/2751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}