Northern State Universitya talk by Jon Schaff, a man about town
There was heavy irony involved
in this newspaper distributing condoms with the edition released the day before
Valentine’s Day. Although this
was a coincidence, it is indicative of rampant confusion regarding the issues of
love and sex.
I heard a radio ad once about a
feminine version of Viagra. In the
ad a woman says that this product saved her marriage because now she and her
husband have sex more often. The
name of this product: “Eros, the Greek word for love.”
Did the love die without constant whoopee? This reduction of love to mere sex ignores what is at the
heart of the Greek word eros, namely the longing for another.
Both Sigmund Freud and Alfred Kinsey reduced this longing to a mere
animal attraction, the drive to satisfy the lowest primal urge.
Yet, while animals have sex, human have eros.
Physical attraction begins in sexual desire, but has as its end love.
What does the condom says to a
“lover”? “I want all of you, except your ability to reproduce”?
Or “I want you, but I am worried about what diseases you might have”?
These do not strike one as being the most romantic of all advances.
A better sexual education would be as concerned with the development of
taste as it would the prevention of disease or pregnancy.
The reduction of eros to sex has had the effect of killing any concept of
romance, as people simply bump into one another like train cars, bodies
colliding with no real meaning. The
excitement of romance is the mystery of discovering the humanity of the other
person. Casual sexual encounters
are actually the antithesis of romance. It’s
like when a friend tells you how a really suspenseful movie ends.
The thrill of discovery is destroyed.
You know the ending, but you don’t know the story.
In his work Hooking Up
Tom Wolfe describes the unromantic dating scene at the end of the 20th
Century. “Girls and boys” head
out in packs “hoping to meet each other fortuitously.
She would give him a nod, or he would give her the nod, and the two of
them would retire to a halfway private room and ‘hook up. ’ ”
Hooking up, Wolfe writes, has caused a retooling of the old baseball
terminology. “In the era of
hooking up, first base meant deep kissing, groping or fondling,, second base
meant oral sex, third base meant going all the way, and home plate meant
learning each other’s names.”
Women have gotten the worse of the death of romance.
In the past, sex had a potentially high cost for women, as absent
contraception and abortion they were more likely to get “stuck” with the
consequences, i.e. children. Withholding
of sexual favors until a man showed himself responsible enough to be a father
was one influence women had over men. With
this clout now gone, males can claim to have that which they always desired: sex
without consequences. The movie
“Say Anything” makes a distinction between guys and men.
There are lots of guys, but very few men.
Take note of the “Man Show” on Comedy Central and its celebration of
beer drinking and pornography. The
show has much to do with adolescent “guyness,” but very little to do with
manhood. Denis De Rougemont
argues that love ultimately means, “It is you I choose to share my life with
me, and that is the only evidence there can be that I love you.”
How many guys say that?
Allan Bloom writes, “If
someone tells you that sex is pleasant, that there is a wonderful variety of
ways to have it, that there is no rational basis for inhibition, and practically
everybody does it, what implications do you suppose follow?”
One of the implications is evidently a widespread STD problem at NSU.
Another is the inability for men and women to romantically communicate.
What is needed far more than condoms, although they may serve a purpose,
is recapturing a language of love that suggests our sexuality is not something
to be passed around like the pretzel bag.
Aside from religion, total love of another human being is the most
profound way in which the longing for another is satisfied.
Everything else is just “hooking up.”
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