Editorial from The Guide	Editorials Archive

Sexual liberation has launched enormous changes in sexual behavior in the last three decades. But old sexual "morality" has proved hard to shed. Sex remains judged by how closely it resembles the "ideal": a husband's penis in his wife's vagina attempting to conceive a child. The more sex deviates from this hallowed model, the more suspect and condemned it is. But we live in an increasingly overpopulated world, most definitely not in need of more mouths to feed. For the planet's well-being, we must complete the sexual revolution by chucking out the erroneous notion that "dirty" sex needs the excuse of "sacred" reproduction. We must proclaim a morality that celebrates sex for sex's sake.

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Our courtrooms and talk shows are clogged with those accused of deviating from the sex-for-reproduction ideal. Fornication and adultery, wherein the goal is pleasure-- not babies, are illegal. Prostitution exchanges sex for cash-- not babies-- and is illegal. Anal and oral sex don't bring babies-- and are illegal.

Because contraception signals sex can be enjoyed for fun, not just endured for baby-making, condom ads are banned from prime time as immoral. Acknowledging masturbation as a (disease-risk-free) sexual alternative got the nation's top health official fired for being immoral. Pornography, an aid to "self-abuse" (i.e., non-reproductive sexual expression), is suppressed as immoral.

And consider the sexual options open to a 14-year-old girl-- the only kind of sex she can have that isn't judged illegal is the last kind of sex we should be encouraging 14-year-old girls to have: intercourse as a wife anticipating a child.

The fundamental problem is as old as western creation myths. Sex is to be shunned except as necessary to reproduce (and even then the pain of childbirth is to be a reminder to women that their sexual allure is rooted in evil). Any sex not aimed at reproduction is branded against "God's plan" (still the phrase invoked by many to condemn homosexual expression).

Religious and secular authorities have claimed exclusive rights to recognize and sanction marriage and "legitimize" births. Clerics and kings eager for more subjects threaten those who "waste" any sexual energy on acts that don't make babies, and they have claimed that God damns all sex except reproductive sex within marriage. While encouraging procreation may have made sense at some point in history, such erroneous theology has also been, not incidentally, a way to control all permissible sexual expression, an enormous tool for social control.

But, of course, such thinking is predicated on a lie. The damnation of sex doesn't come from God, but from power-hungry humans. And now with the world undeniably over-populated, sexual ethics meant to guarantee huge families are exposed as antiquated in origin and pernicious in effect.

The advent of effective contraception, women's increasing ability to chart their own destinies (reproductive and otherwise), and gay people's challenge to anti-gay sexual attitudes have prompted more people to question old pronouncements about sex and sin. More and more people understand that human sexual potential and global realities can and must lead us to a new sexual ethic.

We need to renounce old, fearful condemnations, not just because they've been abused for political ambitions, but because they are terribly at odds with what our over-populated world needs: more non-procreative sexual expression. Oral sex, anal sex, masturbation-- sex completely liberated from family-making pair-bonds-- is moral sex on a planet already burdened with too many people. Instead of tolerating sex because it can generate babies, let us proclaim a sexual ethic that makes reproduction always a choice and celebrates sex for its own wonderful, non-reproductive, sake.