There I was, looking forward to the entirely secular box of chocolates I fully expect to receive on Valentine's Day, when a malicious cupid from "On Faith" asked me to speculate about why sex is sacred in some religions and sinful in others.One might as well ask why our commercial culture uses words like "sinful" or "guilty pleasure" to describe chocolate.
Assigning sex to a single moral category is every bit as silly as attributing moral significance to food. If there is one aspect of traditional religion that infuriates me more than any other, it is its insistence on making sex either sinful or sacred.
Sex is simply (and, for humans, not so simply) a part of the natural world. It is good and pleasurable insofar as it is engaged in by partners who wish other other well, bad and painful insofar as it is an instrument of power and domination rather than a source of mutual joy.
There is no stronger indictment of the three great monotheistic religions than the fact that Christian, Jewish and Muslim sages have devoted a disproportionate amount of time to telling people precisely what they may do and with whom, at which times of the month, and with which particular horrendous consequences should they violate the rules. Rules laid down by men, I might add.
Religions that consider sex sacred belong to cultures that do not have a theological and philosophical tradition positing a mind/body dichotomy. "On Faith" panelist Wendy Doniger is one of the leading authorities in the world on this subject, and readers with a particular interest in non-montheistic religious views about sex should carefully consider whatever she has to say this week.
Punitive monotheistic religious attitudes toward sex have changed only to the extent that they have been modified by secular knowledge--and by women who refuse to bow their heads and accept the notion that their enticing bodies are also hopelessly impure vessels designed to tempt men. In the monotheistic religions, sexual rules have been framed to control women, and clerics have gotten away with this by pretending that the rules are only meant to provide protection for "the weaker sex."
One of the great tragedies attached to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism is the re-enchainment of women who had achieved gains under secular Muslim governments. Among the most depressing news stories in recent weeks was an account of the pressure on Egyptian women not only to cover their heads with scarves but to enshroud their entire faces.
This is how it begins.
It ends with women not being able to attend school with men, not being allowed any right to divorce if their husbands object, and facing the death penalty for adultery.
Ostensibly about modesty, the demand that women cover themselves is really about turning females into the sexual and physical property of their husbands.
There are of course differences among the montheistic religions. Judaism has historically taken a less hostile attitude toward bodily pleasure (male and female) than Christianity, although Orthodox Judaism's "laws of family purity" certainly render women "impure" for a good deal of their reproductive lives.
But I have to say that Christianity, beginning with Paul, takes the prize for irrational, anti-female atttitudes toward sex. And among Christian denominations in America, the Roman Catholic Church was the worst.
I attended Catholic parochial schools for eight years in the 1950s, and one of the main differences between my friends and me was that I was the only child who didn't have eight or nine siblings. My parents, bless them, undoubtedly used their common sense about birth control instead of following the dictates of the Church.
One of the main differences between my mother and most of my friends' mothers was that my mom looked much younger. I realize now that the real difference was that she had only two children and most of my friends' mothers were worn out by continuous childbearing. I remember the faces of those prematurely aged women.
I also remember overhearing whispered conversations about a particular Catholic gynecologist who would perform a hysterectomy after he had delivered your eighth or ninth child and defend the procedure by saying that it was required to preserve the mother's life.
Catholic doctrine permitted a hysterectomy for medical reasons, and the woman could actually continue to have sex with her husband without fear of pregnancy. That gynecologist must have been a man of mercy.
Actually, it was not until the 50s that the Pope got around to saying it was all right for married couples to enjoy sex even if they were unable to procreate--as long as they continued to have unprotected intercourse just in case a sperm might defy the odds and reach its target.
I do not believe that anyone raised in a religion with a more rational view of sexuality can fully grasp the depth of the misery that this male dictatorship created for both men and women who wanted to be loyal Catholics but who also wanted a normal sex life.
Perhaps the only people today who can truly appreciate the deadening effect of these ideas are homosexuals. I have always thought that homophobia, although rationalized with biblical citations, is in large measure an expression of the orthodox, religiously inspired insistence that men must be on top and women on the bottom--literally and metaphorically.
What is really disgusting to homophobes is the thought that one partner in a gay male couple must be the "woman." (For whatever twisted reason, the idea of a lesbian playing the role of the "man" does not seem so repugnant to anti-gay crusaders.)
Turning sex into a sacred act hasn't always worked so well for women either. Virgin sacrifices were, after all, practiced in many early polytheistic cultures. It always makes me laugh to hear right-wing Christian apologists talk about what an advance the Virgin Mary was in the history of women's rights. Yes indeed--it was so important for the Son of God to be born in a "pure" way that the taint of sex was removed from his mother by a supernatural power.
All of this religious hogwash about the high value of chastity and virginity, though not entirely discarded (as evinced by the "purity rings" worn by some unmarried Christian fundamentalists) ) has thankfully become much less common in the West.
So (unless some dedicated Christian wants to put the "Saint" back in "Valentine's Day") let us all celebrate the freedom to love without the approval of men who claim to speak for God.
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Sotto Voce