Posted on 01/15/2007 8:04:12 AM PST by shrinkermd
The Sixties generation thought everything should be free. But only a few decades later the hippies were selling water at rock festivals for $5 a bottle. But for me the price of “free love” was even higher.
I sacrificed what should have been the best years of my life for the black lie of free love. All the sex I ever had — and I had more than my fair share — far from bringing me the lasting relationship I sought, only made marriage a more distant prospect...
And I am not alone. Count me among the dissatisfied daughters of the sexual revolution, a new counterculture of women who are realising that casual sex is a con and are choosing to remain chaste instead.
I am 37, and like millions of other girls, was born into a world which encouraged young women to explore their sexuality. It was almost presented to us as a feminist act. In the 1960s the future Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown famously asked: Can a woman have sex like a man? Yes, she answered because “like a man, [a woman] is a sexual creature”. Her insight launched a million “100 new sex tricks” features in women’s magazines. And then that sex-loving feminist icon Germaine Greer enthused that “groupies are important because they demystify sex; they accept it as physical, and they aren’t possessive about their conquests”.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
I can't disagree with you.
I call it like it is. ;-)
Sad. And there are people beginning the same life every day, thanks to our culture.
One can handle things at 18-30 that cannot be readily dealt with later, in bitter retrospect.
Well, you might want to remind her that the devil is the accuser, not God. All God asks for is repentence.
She will never be able to turn the clock back, but God will give her the grace to get through.
Feminists pushed the Sex Positive agenda, which seeks to end all moral judgements over sexual pairings regardless of age, sex, relation, marital status, number, or species, of partner(s).
If it feels good, do it. Do as thou will shall be the law of the land.
The culture was torn down as was the goal. Now it is time to sort out the victims. We saw the acid casualties of the sixties who are still struggling to cope, now we see the wonders it's done for divorce, relationships, and the family.
The self-centered "Me" generation never scoped the bigger picture, except when it came to socialist funding of a welfare state.
"Christianity is not repressive, but it's true, the Catholic religion is pretty sexually repressive"
Now, just why do you think that? Maybe it's because Catholics believe that sex outside of marriage is a sin; and we have the belief that we should confess our sins in a confessional to a priest? Actually any good Christian knows that commiting sins of any sort are harmful to the soul and to the relationship we ought to be nourishing with our Savior, Jesus Christ.
I'm getting tired of ignorant statements about the Catholic faith
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It's really far worse than we think =
In FONDA's Footsteps: MURTHA, KUCINICH, and the Antiwar Movement's Economic War
http://www.Freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1767820/posts
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Sex education is not about abstinence. It has moved beyond reproduction, puberty, and disease to include various fetishes and positions, alternate sexual activities besides intercourse, which by mechanics can only be performed by 1 man and 1 woman.
The sex positive agenda seeks to see everyone sexually active at every age. They consider sex a birthright and abstinence an unhealthy supression of sexual desires.
Bela Pelosi attacking Condi Rice over not having a husband or children shows that feminism was a lie. They do not support women in the workplace as they claimed. They support socialism and challenging the Western establishment. Your sex or skin color only matter if you are Politically Correct in your thoughts.
Martin Luther railed against masturbation? What a hard-a$$!
In effect, you are saying that you know that it is objectively true that each and every person should make decisions regarding sexual activity subjectively. This is called a contradiction.
I can't think of a response to that, so will concede you the point. I guess I'm a bit too dogmatic about what I define as freedom.
But her psychological motivation for writing this book has no bearing on the strength of her arguments.
So, if we reach the right conclusions for the wrong reasons, it's all good? I submit that her psychological motivation in this case makes it more likely that she has made an incorrect choice. How often does panic or despair cause us to pick the right alternative from a set of possibilities?
The primary purpose, hence the name. The pleasurable nature of intercourse is ordered primarily to bringing the act about. In other words, if intercourse wasn't pleasurable, none of us would be here today.
Primary, in terms of it being the way that we all got here, but the vast majority of human sexual activity, even within a marriage, is not going to lead directly to reproduction. That could be said of other mammals that have a "heat" season, during the time of maximum fertility. And such mammals seem to be able to reproduce without the need for mutual pleasure. Of course, they do it by their instincts, and while humans have instincts, we are the creature that is able to control our instincts through reason and education.
And science has made it possible for us to blow up innocent people with remote controlled bombs. What's your point? That all things which are possible are permissible?
Certainly not. But science gives us possibilities that were not conceivable back when the religious texts were written. We have the opportunity to have sexual relations without them leading inevitably to offspring, and those ways could not have been dealt with in a pre-industrial society. Anyone from two thousand years ago that could be whisked to our era would consider a lot of what we do to be some sort of witchcraft, magic, or other product of evil.
Has science discovered a new purpose for the reproductive system?
No, but it has extended the possible uses of that system. I have a set of feet and legs with which to walk places, but science developed a way for me to use them to control gasoline and brake pedals, and go much further than I otherwise would be able to. The separation of sexual expression from reproduction allows people the possibility of utilizing the pleasurable nature of the system.
Modern anesthesia allows me the possibility of having surgery to repair my body, without suffering excruciating pain during the procedure. When anesthesia was introduced, it was questioned as morally suspect, since it was believed that suffering pain had a grace-giving effect. All that was, was a way to rationalize a world that was filled with pain, and reconcile the idea of a merciful supreme being with the fact that most people lived painful lives.
4) Two people who engage in intercourse without professing a lifetime commitment to each other are acting without a proper understanding of intercourse, or are failing by ommission to fulfill the responsibilities that naturally come with engaging in intercourse (i.e., a lifetime commitement to each other for the purpose of bringing forth and rearing children and the mutual care of the spouses).
What you're saying is that the only purpose of marriage and sexuality is to have children, all that "proper understanding of intercourse" thing. So--if an older couple meet, and she is past her childbearing years, they should not be allowed to marry and have sexual activity, since it's imposible for them to make babies? Or, is it OK because "God did that" rather than "human beings decided to control their fertility"?
I believe that we make progress to advance humanity, and even though not all science advances humanity, the majority of it does. As more and more people perceive change as positive, they either leave the old beliefs, or the old set of beliefs tries to catch up to the people, after a period of intense resistance.
You do a credible job of maintaining that resistance!
I suppose it's also important that if there IS one "right" belief system, that your choice of the one you have is the correct one, among the many possible alternatives.
Saying "it's dangerous" would be pretty accurate relative to other "normal" activities. You don't have to have experience with it to even guess at that.
No, cliff-jumping is not the same, but it's the same principle as the sky-diving. It doesn't take a genius to figure out it's not a good thing. Neither does it take "experience" to know it.
Perhaps I should say "generally MORE true of men than of women".
I'm not exactly sure what your point was, but I'm going to take a stab at it, sorry if I didn't get it substantially right.
I believe that the nature of the sexual urge is programmed into us, to varying degrees, and at a time when sex and reproduction were NOT connected (animals don't connect them, if you believe in evolved humans, there must have been a time when we didn't connect them), sex was just engaged in because it was what someone (probably usually male) wanted to do.
When it was discovered that not only were they related (which, like I said before, was probably when animals were domesticated and penned up, and could be separated from each other) but that there was a paternal line of inheritance, as well as a maternal line, those facts became the reason for controlling sexuality. We finally have relatively fool-proof means of separating the two. Now, the sexual urge is subject to other considerations, not the least of which is finding a suitable partner that adequately meets one's other needs.
Being a slutty groupie is not going to gain anyone very much more than accidental pregnancy, disease, and a feeling of being used, but between that extreme, and the extreme of shutting off one's sexual expression 100%, there are some happy mediums that do NOT involve making babies inside of a marriage.
From my perspective, I find faith in God to be neither oppressive nor cloistering. In fact, I have never felt more free in my life. I am not free from trials or hardship, but rather free from wrath. I can still choose for myself what I will do, but my choices are now predicated on the knowledge that I am no longer a slave to the things that used to rule my life; I am now a servant of Christ. Mind you, I am a flawed and quite fallible servant- sometimes embarrassingly so- but a servant nonetheless.
I think that this is the primary difference between a person who seeks comfort in mere religion and a person who obtains reconciliation with the God of all comfort: The former represents man's effort to reach God; the latter represents man ceasing to struggle with God and at last accept His free gift of grace and peace.
This is of course my perspective; yours may diverge. God, being the ultimate and final judge, will of course have the ultimate and final word.
That's because they spring from an era where it is important to establish parentage. I suppose the "wives and concubines" stuff from the Old Testament can be rationalized away somehow, just about any part of that text has been severely questioned by some flavor of Christianity.
There are a lot of things not addressed by the old religions that we face choices on today. Sexuality without reproduction is one of them.
I'm not bothered by her life. Her putting that lifestyle into a book that she stands atop, preaching from, is what makes her lifestyle discussable.
My point was trying to define what is nature, and what is not. You kept saying that human nature changes, yet you never gave any good example. In fact, you kept pointing at things having nothing to do with basic human instinct.
I would also point out, both for this post and others you've been posting, that the pleasure comes TO facilitate the need/want. I've already posted this as has Aquinasfan, but you seem to want to think that pleasure came after utility. Not so.
You don't think animals have pleasure eating and having sex? Oh they do. Why would your dog prefer real beef over his processed kibble? Why would any "entire" animal try to have sex during cycles? It's not "simply instinct". It's the awareness that it would be pleasurable that's planted in there. The animals wouldn't do this stuff if it wasn't "fun".
"Since the advent of 'romantic love'"
Actually, the idea of romantic love has been around a long time.
In the Song of Solomon in the Old Testament there is a description of a couple who have great desire for each other, which differs greatly from your description of marriage merely as an "economic relationship".
My suggestion to her is to spend more time involved in church projects with single men and less time at the old salt mill.
She will be surprised at what happens.
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