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Sex Is the Commodity That Makes Things Happen Armstrong Williams Whenever we turn on the TV, take a look at the newspaper or browse the Internet, we are confronted with cheerful star-studded elite. But have you ever wondered how all these superstars, media elite celebrities, corporate sensations and talking heads made it to the top? Trust me, sex usually plays a role.
Same story with politics. Do you believe the decisions made in the marbled halls of Congress are informed by reasoned democratic deliberation? Guess again. That's just a bunch of pabulum that they put out to solicit knee-jerk reactions from the electorate, their constituency, fans and admirers. The real commodity that makes things happen is sex.
Trust me, your elected representatives and those you hold in highest esteem are often lying down on the job in order to get the job. It happens more often than you can imagine. Ever see an aggressively incompetent person whose success seems to violate all the laws of nature? And I am not just talking about political appointees, entertainers and celebrities here. More often than not, sex played a role in their getting a job or a promotion.
It's the oldest story in the book. We are still living in the same world as Cleopatra and Marc Anthony. Sex is the commodity that makes things happen in all facets of life.
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And it's not just at the highest reaches. There is a trickle-down effect. From the president's intern to the coat-check girl who gets to leave early instead of working the midnight shift, raw sexuality informs the way people treat us.
I recently read an interesting study about some scientists who introduced a monetary system into a group of orangutans, then watched what happened. Almost immediately the female apes began prostituting themselves. They quickly accumulated all the money. Game over.
Ever feel your tailbone? We're only a few genes removed from being orangutans. We, too, swing from bar A to bar B, hawking our sexuality like so many orangutans.
And while sex dictates the rules, its aftermath often turns out to have unpleasant consequences. Just think of Bill Clinton or former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey. And what about all these clergy abuse scandals? Sex can be a terrible destroyer. Adultery is the number one reason why so many marriages break down and families fall apart.
These rousing points are not lost on television executives, who increasingly deal with sexual issues viscerally, in terms of images designed to shock people into paying attention. Lacking comment or context, they bombard us with sexual images merely for the sake of titillation. Throughout the popular culture, bodies simply collide like runaway railway cars.
And it works. We pay attention. You know why? Because at bottom we really are just a bunch of sex-happy imbeciles.
The more liberal element in our society tends to see nothing wrong with this. After all, sex is bound up with our most deeply ingrained instincts: survive, procreate, survive, and procreate. To deny these basic instincts would be to deny very real parts of our identity (not to mention countless Barry White hits).
Just one thing: Our culture tends now to treat sex in such simplistic form that I worry that we risk confusing it with love. I'm not saying sex is bad. I'm just saying that we really do ourselves a disservice when we disconnect sex from the truly beautiful possibilities of love.
Perhaps, then, our society should do a better job of informing young adults about love. Beyond the ubiquitous plumbing lessons (Dr. Jocelyn Elder's metaphor) in human anatomy that most children receive, parents should also focus on the psychological components of relationships. Though frank and honest discussion on this topic may be uncomfortable for some parents, they must be careful not to slam the door on their children's burgeoning sexual identity.
By the same token, it is not enough to simply tell a child to abstain, for the simple reason that children do not grow up in a vacuum. Adolescents will move beyond the advice of their parents and construct new social meanings based upon their environment.
Should this rousing fact cause parents to simply threaten their children (e.g., don't have sex because I said so), then the parents' warnings will be regarded as little more than a means and proof of power. In which case the message is accepted only in symbolic terms, and the child focuses more on how to avoid getting caught than on making an informed decision about a relationship.
A wiser approach would have the parents balancing refusal strategies with an understanding about the truly beautiful possibilities of human interconnectedness, the act of two people watching over each other, body and soul. By stressing how this sort of interconnectedness is a sacred state that is worth waiting for, parents can provide their children with a meaningful perspective with which to navigate the powerful and often confusing realm of companionship.
The not-very-satisfying alternative is to let them loose with the rest of the sex-happy imbeciles, which for too many leads only to sexual depression, unwanted children and misery. Trust me, it's ugly out there.
Editor's note:
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