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YOUR MARITAL HEALTH/SEXUALITY FROM ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE: THE FOURTH PERSPECTIVE: SUPER SEX FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
18 May 2009
by
admin
Filed under
General health
The first perspective was a new sexual theology. Ellis was a moralist, and much of his work grew from his attempts to free us from the fear of the consequences of our “unnatural_sex.” He was a romanticist, helping free us from a fear of punishment and insensitive religiosity, replacing that fear with understanding of the basic humanness of our sexual needs. He would have agreed with the idea of love maps.
The second perspective was of the “contraceptive” period, when a new freedom was emerging that allowed sex without inevitable consequences. Kinsey taught us what could and was being done, and the romantic emphasis evolved to a naturalistic focus, the categorization of behaviors that fit a time when people wanted to know if they were doing what everyone else seemed to be doing, to be free to enjoy what they were doing anyway.
The third perspective was a time-focus perspective, following the direction of a society that was moving faster and faster, developing a type-A sexual pattern, enjoying their “natural” sex. Masters and Johnson added a medical emphasis to the romantic and naturalistic focus of the first two perspectives, a fix-it, more egalitarian sexuality that fit the emerging feminism of their time. They attempted to replace dysfunction with sexual functioning.
Each of these perspectives emerged from a time, an ecology, as much as it emerged from the creativity of each of these scientists. Now, I suggest, we are responding to a new time, a time that requires a worldview, a systems view of sex, one that heals the disconnection that has taken place, the loss of intimacy in this era of choice.
We have gone full cycle. We are back to fear, the fear of sexually transmissible disease. AIDS has changed everything, and it, too, is a product of our time. We must learn not to think of the “AIDS virus that is transmitted through sexual intimacy.” There is a human immunodeficiency virus, an AIDS-related virus (ARV) that is transmitted through some forms of sexual interaction and through other and some as yet unknown means of transmission. We do not
The virus is not the disease. To blame a virus or a specific group of “carriers” is to return to a Victorian fear orientation, that is, the fear of punishment for our sexuality. We must learn that AIDS and all sexually transmissible diseases are diseases of a world system, related to how we all interact and live, to our holistic health. We must learn to cure a system, not a disease, and this is the lesson of the fourth perspective. It is a lesson of hope, not a return to fear and punishment and alienation to avoid divine retribution. It is a hope that we will be able to connect now more than ever and move toward an elective intimacy, an intimacy of faith in loving, not an intimacy of default to disease. Super marital sex is a hope, not a surrender, and the fourth perspective that underlies this form of relating is based on the rules of new physics, of rules that govern all living systems, the rules that come from all four perspectives: Sex is not immoral, sex is natural, sexual problems can be solved, and prolonged and enduring intimacy is the most important of all health-maintenance systems.
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