Censorship is sometimes the answer
Nathaniel Hannan
junior
Most of the students reading this will be familiar with a pop song played regularly on the radio only few short months ago: "You and me, baby, we ain't nothin' but mammals/Doin' what they do on the Discovery Channel."
Let's think about what those mammals do: those females, of course, also have vaginas. Most often, males see that females are in heat, sometimes by the females' special attention to their hindquarters. Noticing this, the males tend to use various means of seduction to grab the females, often violently, and proceed to have their good pleasure — usually at the expense of the females, who rarely derive much satisfaction from the encounter and are stuck with raising the offspring from such experiences, often alone.
A young man walks into a bar one night. Here he finds many delights, scantily clad women ranked high among them. Judging by their movements and preening, he proceeds to choose one and dance vigorously with her, pressuring her to accept the drinks he offers her. Later on, mildly inebriated, they have sex, a meaningless, brief encounter that neither is likely to remember for more than a couple of weeks. He, of course, was not thinking much of her satisfaction, and doesn't even know that he has conceived a child with her. She is stuck raising the child, alone.
There's a disturbing parallel here. The two people in the second case have lost any account of meaning in sexual relations, their erogenous zones as common to their mutual experience as their hands, feet, arms, and faces; in fact, the divorce of sexuality and the sacred conveys a basic attitude of nihilism about their bodies. To be a sexually functioning human being means no more to them than to be a sexually functioning golden retriever.
This is the fruit of "the sexual liberation" in which women are "free to have sex like men do," but instead tend to serve his more selfish desires.
There's no question that the society surrounding us has lost this sense of the sacred about sexuality and relationships: The massive popularity of programs such as "Temptation Island" and other forms of pornography fill television and the walls of many men's dorm rooms.
There also can be no question that treating the discussion of vaginas and other aspects of human sexuality as commonplace and appropriate to the general public sphere, especially in crass and blunt ways, does not aid in reestablishing what has been so cruelly lost to us.
There was a day and a society where sex and everything surrounding it meant dignity and commitment, when sex meant more than an exchange of orgasms.
Let us bring it anew from the ashes.
Nathaniel Hannan
junior
Dillon Hall
January 25, 2001
All Viewpoint Stories for Friday, January 26, 2001
