Sexual exploration goes mainstream

Brian Alexander • E-mail

When I set out more than six months ago to begin researching MSNBC.com's special series America Unzipped, I suspected that America’s sexual landscape was more peaceful than Pat “9-11-is-God’s-wrath” Robertson and other combatants in the wars over “values” (whatever that means) would have us believe.

In fact, Americans of all persuasions are experimenting on a grand scale.

Take, for instance, a young couple I met at a fetish convention in Florida, where they were attending a seminar aimed at teaching women how to tie up men. Neither of them knew much about bondage or the fetish world, but they had heard about the convention and thought it might be a fun way to spend a weekend afternoon. And so there they were, young newlyweds, raised in Tennessee and Texas, with strong religious backgrounds, learning how to get kinky the way other young, upscale couples might spend a Saturday learning how to tell the difference between 18^th and 19^th century sideboards.

Some of us have always experimented, of course. But now it can sometimes seem as if you’re a total loser if you’re not a dildo aficionado (“Oh, surgical silicone is just sooo much better than rubber!”) or don’t know the first name of the bartender at your local “underground” sex club.

Your bedroom, your business
While it's true that not everyone is experimenting, even those of us who aren't seem much more tolerant of the adventurous. As a woman in Missouri said, “Don’t pressure me, I won’t pressure you.”

Most of the people I have spoken to so far (and keep in mind I have deliberately spoken to those people who seem to be on sexual quests of their own) have no problem with access to adult porn for adults, sex toys, group sex, gay sex, fetish, bondage, you name it, so long as they are not forced to be exposed to it or pressured to take part. Another woman I spoke to said she disapproved of many sexual options, but then quickly added, “That’s just for me and my own standards. I don’t want to tell anybody else what to do.”

So why the sex wars?

America Unzipped     |   FULL COVERAGE L. Kleinhenz/Docuvitae A sizzling sex life is no sin MSNBC.com Adult superstores seduce a new crowd MSNBC.com Sex and the suburbs Bob Croslin All dressed up – in latex and dog collars Getty Images file The thrill of putting it all out there  MSNBC.com Are we satisfied yet?

Well, America is famous for its guilt. You have to go back, way back, to pinpoint the source of this guilt, but here is one, written by a man who probably has had more influence on American sex lives than Hugh Hefner:

“Freedom from all sexual intercourse is … angelic exercise … But I am aware of some that murmur: ‘What say they, if all men should abstain from all sexual intercourse, whence will the human race exist?’ Would that all would this, only in ‘charity out of a pure heart, and good conscience, and faith unfeigned’ much more speedily would the City of God be filled, and the end of the world hastened.”

That was St. Augustine, perhaps the most important “father” of the early Christian church. Augustine didn’t like sex, believing that it inflamed lust and prevented mankind from following the discipline of reason, the path to God. He felt, as expressed in these words, that the truly charitable, the truly holy would forgo sex altogether and, in an apocalyptic vision, thus hasten the end of the world. His thinking was so dominant that the Catholic church eventually overturned a thousand years of tradition and barred priests from being married so they could focus their minds more fully on God.

Lust was a source of shame. Sex, even in the marriage bed, was a sin unless its sole purpose was the begetting of children. Even then, those who remained abstinent, though married, were holier than those who were not.

Now look at what we expect from politicians and other leaders. They have to appear as paragons of rectitude, practically asexual beings. We want to see them in church, with a prim wife or buttoned-up husband, and we expect to hear lip service paid to, yes, "values." Then, when one slips up (yes, you, Bill), we’re all expected to be shocked at the hypocrisy.

For example, I spoke to several civic officials and public employees when I worked at the adult store in Tempe, Ariz. They were all shopping there, but most of them told me that they could never, would never, stand up in support of such a store being allowed to open if it were being protested by, say, a local church group.

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