Catholic Sex Blog

I suppose the best way to address the issue of sex is first to ask, “What is the purpose of sex as God intended it to be?”

A careful examination and reflection of the question, which anyone can do in his or her own time and space, will reveal three possible answers:

1. For pleasure
2. For reproduction
3. For bonding between couples

No doubt that sexual intercourse does produce pleasure, but is that its sole purpose? For example, eating is pleasurable. Does that mean that the purpose of eating is for pleasure only? For people who think so, they end up obese and unhealthy, just because they eat for the pleasure of it. Rather, the purpose of eating is to nourish our bodies.

Take another example. Sleeping is pleasurable, especially when one is tired. Does that mean that the purpose of sleeping is for pleasure only? For people who think so, they end up being a lazy slob, and probably end up missing important appointments, just because they sleep for the pleasure of it. Rather, the purpose of sleeping is to allow our bodies to recover.

How about sex then? Sex between a couple is pleasurable, especially when both climax at the same time. Does that mean that the purpose of sex is for pleasure only? For people who think so, they end up being addicted to sex, and can’t think of anything else throughout the day. Rather, the purpose of sex is something else altogether.

You see, for all bodily functions which are necessary for humans to carry out in order to live in a way that God has ordained, God has cleverly attached pleasure as a side-effect to these functions, like eating, sleeping, shitting, farting, urinating (especially with a full bladder), …, and having sex. But to pursue these activities for the pleasure alone is unhealthy.

So we’ve established that answer #1 is not the right answer. True, sex does give pleasure, eating does give pleasure, sleeping does give pleasure, and the same goes for all other natural bodily functions including shitting, farting, urinating, breathing, yawning, sneezing, etc. But pleasure is not the sole purpose of any of these bodily functions.

If you look at it another way, what would happen if a couple engaged in sex purely for pleasure? Well, for one thing, they’d end up with multiple babies. What a bother. You can’t kill them, since that’d be murder. You can’t keep bringing them to the adoption agency - they’d give you counselling. Repeated abortions is dangerous for the mother’s health. So what do you with them?

Society’s answer has always been to address the ‘problem of fertility’ at the root. Maybe in the course of having sex, there was a way to separate the pleasure from the babies? Maybe we can prevent babies from even being born in the first place?

And so society has come up with condoms which prevent conception, masturbation (mutual or otherwise) which prevents conception, anal sex, oral sex, the Pill which either works to change a woman’s natural cycle so that she doesn’t conceive, or affects some hormones post-conception so that the fertilised egg cannot attach itself to the womb. In actually, such a Pill causes abortion of the pregnancy, hence is called abortifacient. The most common of these is Mifepristone also known as “RU-486″ and marketed under the brand name Mifeprex. It is widely known that such Pills induce abortion.

Once you handle that problem of the irritating babies that keep popping up, you’re free to have sex in any form for the sake of pleasure alone.

Actually, society has also come up with a way to deal with the problem of overeating. You want to eat, but you don’t want to additional weight that comes with it. So you either regurgitate the food out, so that you can eat some more (no one would hesitate to call this perverse or an illness), or you take a pill that allows the food to pass through your system undigested. More pills… Remember those weight-loss pills that promise to allow you to lose weight while maintaining your normal diet? This is how they work.

The problem here is, what if you were to do this all the time? For regurgitators, they will end up malnourished, and if it carries on, they will eventually die.

So what happens if an entire society does the same with sex? To separate pleasure from reproduction? To put it simply, society will end with this generation, because there is no more reproduction of the human species. Hence, a culture of death.

I missed out one answer, didn’t I? Answer #3 - sex is for bonding between couples. Well that’s actually incorporated into having babies. If one does not try to separate answers #2 and #3, and answers #1 from answers #2 and #3, one would tend to end up with a healthy marriage and family.

It is no secret that a married couple who uses contraceptives will be more likely to end up in divorce. Why? The reason is spiritual, but saying that doesn’t make it less important. It’s not a secret at all… it’s just not made known well enough…

Firstly, humans are beings made of a fusion of spirit and matter. We are neither completely matter, like animals, or completely spirit, like angels. We are spirit and matter. What we do in the flesh, we affect our spirit as well… which is why sins committed in the flesh can have an effect on our spiritual state, and our spiritual state can affect our physical being. Which is why when you can’t control your addictions (to food, sex, sleep, drugs, etc), you are more likely to be unable to control yourself spiritually and end up living a life of sin… if your addiction does not already lead you there.

In having sex, a couple bonds not just physically, but spiritually as well. A complete physical bonding reflects a complete spiritual bonding. What happens if you put a physical barrier, like a condom or a diaphragm, into a sexual intercourse? The physical barrier is a reflection of the spiritual barrier.

Sex is a time when couples express their marital vows - to give of themselves completely to each other, to receive of the other partner completely, in a free, total, faithful, and fruitful way. But with contraceptives, whatever the form, the couple is saying with their bodies, “I give you all of myself, except my fertility.” or “I want all of you, except your fertility.” Such an action is a reflection of a deeper withholding of something else on a spiritual level.

In the end, contraceptives not only creates a barrier to prevent reproduction (#2), it also creates a barrier to prevent bonding between couples (#3).

Answers #2 and #3 are intrinsically linked to each other; they cannot be separated… just as physical union cannot be separated from spiritual union during sex.

And that, is the purpose of sex.

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It started with a comment on another blog that denies seems to deny pornography’s link to rape. I chanced across it while searching the Wordpress tag “pornography”. After writing a whole long comment and faced with the possibility of it being deleted on that blog (like how I delete some inappropriate comments on this blog) through no fault or blame on the owner of that blog, I decided to post the comment, albeit edited, on my own blog. Some sub-headings were included to make reading easier.

What is pornography, and why is it wrong?

As defined in Wikipedia, pornography is “the explicit representation of the human body or sexual activity with the goal of sexual arousal”. In other words, pornography is the use of the human body to sexually arouse the viewer. This is wrong because the human body is not supposed to be used in any way, because when we use a person, we are reducing his dignity from that of a person to that of an object (to be used).

Why is pornography, sodomy, and adultery the “business of the law”?

Pornography, sodomy, and adultery all affect the society, hence it is the business of the law indeed.

Pornography, as mentioned above, is the use of the human body as a commodity. Specifically the pornography industry uses the human body in an obscene manner to exploit people - the actors and actresses, and those who purchase the material, all in the name of money. The pornography industry is larger than the revenues of the top technology companies combined: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflix and Earthlink. (Source: Pornography Statistics 2007)

As for sodomy, studies have indicated that the body’s natural immune system is broken down by repeated exposure to semen during anal intercourse. Also, the tearing and rupturing which can take place during such intercourse exposes the individual to infection by manifold serious and fatal diseases. Of these, AIDS is the most well-known and the most dangerous. (Source: Larry, Burtoft, Ph.D, Setting the Record Straight: What Research Really Says About the Social Consequences of Homosexuality, Focus n the Family 1994)

Adultery is a crime against marriage and is illegal in some jurisdictions. If the business of marriage falls under that of the law, then how can adultery not concern the law, since adultery is a breach of the marital contract? I don’t have a source for this, hence this is using common sense.

Did Alfred Kinsey manipulate his results in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male?

Yes, Kinsey did indeed skew his results. Dr Judith Reisman’s research shows us how:

Kinsey engaged in what is known as “category manipulation”. In one example, he classified 1,400 criminals and sex offenders as “normal” on the grounds that such miscreants were essentially the same as other men - except that these had gotten caught. The “human males” category could then include incarcerated pedophiles, pederasts, homosexual males, boy prostitutes and miscellaneous sexual predator.

One of the co-authors of Kinsey’s work, Clyde Martin, was charged with all the statistical analysis of data for the project of “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” despite not having any background in statistics. And even he admitted that “criminal and abnormal men permeated the sample to such a degree that the only way to clean it up would amount to rewriting the entire book”.

Abraham Maslow, an American psychologist of global acclaim in the 1940s, was a friend of Kinsey. He had already proven that volunteers in a sex study were usually “unconventional” men and women with high rates of unhealthy and disapproved sexual activity. Relying upon these volunteers - even those not counted among prison populations - would produce results that showed a “falsely high percentage of non-virginity, masturbation, promiscuity and homosexuality in the population.

Which is what happened - according to Kinsey’s skewed data, 95 percent of the American male population regularly indulged in deviant sexual activities such as extra-marital affairs, homosexuality, pedophilia, etc. Maslow offered to help Kinsey clean up the “volunteer error” in his work, but once Kinsey realised how this would compromise the outcome of the data and steer it away from the results he wanted, he abruptly terminated his friendship with Maslow.

It is an established fact (stats coming) that child molesters regularly use pornography to seduce their prey, to lower the inhibitions of their young victims and to serve as a kind of “instruction manual”. In a study of 36 serial sex murderers interviewed by the FBI, 81 percent admitted using pornography. Of those studied, 87 percent of girl child molesters and 77 percent of boy child molesters admitted to regular use of pornography.

Decriminalizing pornography came about when the U.S. Supreme Court accepted the revolutionary Model Penal Code with its recommendation of drastically reducing the penalties for its 52 major sex crimes according to Kinsey’s data.

Prior to that time, the definition of obscenity according to case law was “anything offensive to chastity or modesty, expressing or presenting to the mind or view something that… decency forbids to be exposed… tending to stir the sex impulses or to lead to sexually impure and lustful thoughts…”

The new Model Penal Code declared a thing obscene if “considered as a whole, its predominant appeal is to prurient interest… And if it goes substantially beyond customary limits of candor in description…” According to Kinsey, sexual activities such as sodomy, incest, pedophilia, and bestiality are within customary limits, so one is left to wonder what exactly the Model Penal Code restricts.

- the source of these past nine paragraphs is “The Kinsey Corruption: An Expose on the Most Influential ‘Scientist’ Of Our Time” by Susan Brinkman, based on the book “Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences” by Dr Judith Reisman

What does the use of pornography lead to?

Using common sense, consider this: If a person regularly used pornography, he would be so “sexually charged” up (heh heh) that he would need to release it somewhere. First, it would be masturbation, but because these feelings of pleasure lead to addiction, and addiction is a progressive disease, more is required than before to obtain the same sexual high previously experienced. The person would therefore seek out more thrilling ventures to meet his need for sexual pleasure.

If the person was married, sex with his wife would no longer meet his need for sexual pleasure, because the fantasy is always more pleasurable than the reality. He would seek out other sources to obtain that sexual high, such as in extra-marital affairs, prostitutes, etc.

But don’t take my word for it; that’s just my common sense speaking. Ask a professional psychologist who specializes in addiction. Or, you can take the word of Sexaholics Anonymous, as they write:

“Some common characteristics of male and female sexaholics include isolation, depression, guilt, and a deep sense of emptiness. Our common behaviors include fantasizing about sexual and other self-centered desires, harmful co-dependent relationships, compulsive masturbation, use of pornography, including the Internet, promiscuous sexual relationships, adulterous affairs, and compulsive pursuit of exhibitionism or sexually abusive relationships, regardless of legal consequences.”

Or you can take the word of professionals who have researched this. Both Sexual Addiction Recovery Resources and Sex Addiction Help explain the Sexual Addiction Cycle which begins with Fantasy, which leads to Ritual, which leads to Acting Out, which leads to Shame, which leads again to Fantasy, and the cycle repeats.

I write passionately about this because my life (like Dr Judith Reisman’s) has been affected by the lies that resulted from Kinsey’s “research” which has affected the society where we live in, because our society tells us it is “normal” for every man to view pornography and “it doesn’t cause any harm”. Not true on both accounts. Both come from Kinsey and his skewed findings.

For single men, addiction to porn has many negative effects, but for the married man, it is even worse. For every married man addicted to porn are a corresponding wife and children. How many hundreds of millions of lives are affected directly or indirectly by pornography? We don’t know, but we are slowly starting to feel its effects. Sexual Recovery Institute has more to say about partners and children of porn addicts.

What can we do about pornography? It affects everyone, yes, even you. Because even if you are not directly affected by it, someone you know and are close to is, although you probably don’t know it. That’s how pervasive this problem of pornography is. But because you are affected, you can do something about it.

The first thing that you can do is to find out more. I have a directory of links to good websites that you can go to in order to have a fuller understanding of what we are facing here. After that, spread the word to all the people you know. If each one of you is aware of the danger of porn, the world is that much richer and better equipped to deal with the problem of pornography.

Boys are introduced to pornography and masturbation at a very early age. For some, they are introduced to it even before their bodies develop what is needed to enjoy such activities. Some of the men I have known have been viewing pornography and masturbating to it since puberty and have never had a wet dream before.

Here are some of the reasons why people who continue to use pornography to masturbate give to justify their uses, and the corresponding response I would give:

1. It feels good.
- Can’t deny that, but it doesn’t feel good every time. Sometimes it’s just not satisfactory. At other times, you feel damned guilty afterwards. Still at other times, you left a big mess in the room and you have to clean up and make sure you don’t get caught. Then there’s that nagging guilt and suspicion of other people using the computer and chancing across your porn files.

Life’s more than about feeling good. It’s more than about such fleeting feelings are. Abstaining from instant gratification, not just masturbation, helps create a better, more permanent form of happiness by introducing you to real love, instead of lust.

2. It doesn’t harm anyone.
- Actually it does. It harms you, because you are taking that love you have that is meant for others and directing it towards yourself. Basically, you are having a sexually intimate relationship with yourself which can only lead to the detriment of the loving relationships you have with others.

3. It doesn’t harm anyone else.
- Why is it wrong and against the law, both legal and moral, to commit suicide? It doesn’t harm anyone else too. It is because the ones who love him are harmed when they realize that their loved one had problems and that they could not be trusted to share his secret. There is a great sense of betrayal of trust in the persons.

4. No one loves me. It doesn’t harm anyone else.
- The one who commits suicide harms society as a whole because it deprives the society of one person’s gifts. Similarly, masturbation deprives society of the love you could be giving to other members of the society and giving it to yourself instead. Thus, not only is the rest of society harmed by this selfish action, the rest of society doesn’t benefit from it either.

5. It’s my body, and I can do what I want with it.
- Really? Then make your hair move on its own. It’s your body, isn’t it? Why can’t you move it? Or how about never falling sick. It’s your body, isn’t it? Why can’t you always remain healthy? Simply because your body doesn’t belong to you. It’s been loaned to you to take care of.

Your human body is not yours, contrary to what you might think. You need to return it when you’re done with it. It’s like borrowing someone’s mobile phone to make a call. You don’t use the phone to knock in a nail when you borrow it, do you? No, you treat it carefully because it’s not yours. You use it only for what it’s supposed to be used for. Masturbation is not what the genitals are supposed to be used for.

6. I need to masturbate in order release this sexual tension in me. It’s the natural thing to do.
- What happens if you don’t release it? Will it collect until you pop? Actually yes. When you sleep at night, your body will release the sperm periodically in a totally natural way. That’s the truly natural thing to do - to allow nature to take its course.

7. But it’s so inconvenient to get up in the middle of the night to wash up after wet dreams.
- The natural thing to do isn’t always the most convenient thing to do. You do have to make a trip to the toilet to pee, don’t you? And no one complains about that inconvenience, except maybe the elderly. But really, this excuse of inconvenience is really all there is to it - an inconvenience… because you and I know that it’s not the real reason why a guy jerks off once a week or more. We do it for pleasure. This excuse of inconvenience is just an excuse to make us feel justified while jerking off.

There are, of course, more reasons, but those are not reasons that I have ever used to justify myself. Maybe I will write another post on that in future.