Pleasure (part one)

John R. Ballew, M.S., L.P.C.

How we think about sexuality is strongly influenced by our culture. Among of the “custodians” of cultural values in the US are our national church bodies. A few years ago I served on the Task Force on Human Sexuality of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). The ELCA is a relatively progressive denomination, as churches go. The other members of the Task Force were easily more interested in and enlightened about sexuality than the typical church member--or typical American, for that matter.

At one meeting I tried to get a conversation going about sex and pleasure. Could we let go of the sex-for-procreation thing for a little while and just talk about sex feeling good? The members, all of ‘em, shifted uncomfortably in their chairs. How about a brief conversation, maybe 10 minutes, about how it feels to have good sex. Silence. Finally, an irritated voice spoke out: Yes, sex is pleasurable, but human beings have corrupted the divine gift of human sexuality through our sinfulness. OK, I said. But could we talk about sex for 5 minutes without talking about sin? Voices became agitated. 1 minute, said I? Now there was real hostility in the room. I backed off, bemused. Pleasure--a radical concept. Heresy?

In my research with the Task Force, I found two basic Christian attitudes towards sex. Down beneath the rhetoric of theology they were:

Ÿ “Sex is filthy and disgusting, and you should save it for the one you love.”

Ÿ “Sex is God’s great gift to humankind--but we shouldn’t talk about it or notice that it feels good.”

We grow up in a culture that has been heavily influenced by the Puritans who founded our nation. These were men and women who were thrown out of Europe because they were moralistic troublemakers! Puritanism remains with us, even if in contemporary America it goes by other names. Remember the firing of Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders by Bill Clinton for discussing masturbation in public? (Of course, with recent news of his sexual escapades, Bill may now wish he had taken her advice!)

This cultural bias comes from confusing pleasure with hedonism. We fear that if we value pleasure for it’s own sake, we will lose our capacity for intimacy, become degenerates and generally go to hell, literally or figuratively.

The Gay community shares our common cultural heritage. As a community which has defined itself as much by what we do as by who we are, a certain amount of our behavior has been shaped in reaction to our Puritanical roots. We are not prisoners of your tired, old morality, we shout! We are proud, we have style, and we are sexy as hell! We imagine ourselves enlightened and freed from the anti-sexual ties that bind.

Despite what we might think, it’s rarely so easy for us to escape our culture. We carry old assumptions that are with us still. We carry them with us to our circuit parties, our bedrooms and every place else. Sometimes we hear those voices clearly, feeding our internalized homophobia. Other times they are more subtle. We find sex less fulfilling than we think it should be. Maybe we can’t put our finger on it, but there is something that keeps us from claiming our birthright.

As Gay folk, our love making is not procreative in the traditional sense. If your partner is someone of the same gender, lovemaking and parenthood are generally separated. Our sexuality is useful growing in intimacy with one another and for cultivating delight and pleasure in our lives. At our best, there is a message for the world in our lovemaking.

Sex, I think, is much more pleasurable than necessary if it were only useful for procreation. I think it is in that pleasure that we can find the spark of a gift from the Divine.