Ritual or Habit

by Jean Roberta

Sigh. It’s hard to be the caboose on the train, the person who posts last in a fortnight, or two-week period. What to say that hasn’t been said before?

So far, no one has discussed short vs. long in terms of sexual relationships. Whether you prefer to spend a few hours with a beautiful stranger or date for a few months or bond for many years and many children is more than a personal choice.

There are various terms for a sexual encounter between strangers who never met before, and don’t intend to meet again. For centuries now, this type of relationship has been considered low-class, immoral, and especially repulsive to “nice girls” or respectable women.

What this actually means is that female-identified people get blamed more than those on the butch end of the gender spectrum for engaging in hookups or one-night-stands. If the girl/woman/transwoman gets paid for her service, in some jurisdictions, she and her customer can both be charged with a crime. Before Christian values came to dominate Western culture, things were different.

Let’s consider the reasons for this.

Stranger-sex is often compared, at least implicitly, with marital sex, which is/was presumed to be blessed by God. Yet marriages are not necessarily based on personal attraction, and until very recently they were male-dominated by law. Abuse in marriage (including forced sex and pregnancy) is generally harder to escape than a hit-and-run assault by a stranger.

Luckily, marriages can be legally dissolved in the modern world, and this is a good thing for the victims. Conservative Christians generally disapprove of civil marriage, divorce and abortion (or even contraception) on grounds that marriage was originally intended to be a sacrament, a lifelong commitment which included a promise to God, and was a context in which to raise “legitimate” children who could inherit property from their fathers.

There is a theory that the sex trade as we know it developed from a most un-Christian ritual in which a priestess or devotee of the goddess of love, pleasure and beauty would wait in the temple to offer sexual service to any passing stranger. The stranger who was blessed in this way would be expected to make an offering, usually in cash, to the temple and indirectly to the goddess herself.

The principle involved is not hard to guess. Sex between strangers, especially if one of them is a professional pleasure-giver, trained and motivated for that purpose, can be a celebration of sexual energy as a good thing in itself, unmixed with the baggage of a personal relationship. It can be a generous sharing of sensual joy, a way to give thanks for the privilege of living in a sensitive human body.

The degradation of this kind of exchange into a secret, illegal and widely scorned activity didn’t happen by accident, nor as an inevitable result of historical progress. Stranger-sex was deliberately discredited in the past, as it is now, by those who don’t want sexual pleasure to be separated from heterosexual marriage and childbearing.

More recent and more credible evidence than the temple-sex theory suggests that the pagan (pre-Christian) people of Europe held spring festivals, including sex parties, for centuries before the Christian establishment managed to drive such practices underground. A child with an unidentifiable father, conceived in an orgy on May Eve, was called a “merrybegot.” This term sounds more respectful than “bastard,” a patriarchal term which is still used as an all-purpose insult almost independent of its original meaning.

Aside from, or in addition to, a general sex-party was another sex ritual now called the Great Marriage, in which a tribal king or chief would mate with a woman representing the Goddess or the land or the natural world to ensure the general welfare of the tribe for the coming year. This ritual still holds great appeal for psychologists, anthropologists, and fantasy writers because of its symbolic value.

A lot of what passes for “morality” in Christian-based cultures has morphed into concepts of “mental health.” Even among people who don’t use Christian terms, stranger-sex is still widely considered unhealthy as well as dangerous, especially when contrasted with the security of long-term relationships. (Ha.)

Now that stranger-sex no longer carries a whiff of hellfire, it gets criticized because it doesn’t last. This seems to me to be an implied comparison of apples and oranges, or edibles that aren’t even in the same family.

The claim that hooking up with a stranger is not an adequate substitute for personal love seems self-evident to me. Even in ancient times, did anyone really have to choose between those two extremes? As far as I know, the Great Marriage was never meant to replace more ordinary sexual relationships, nor was the ecstasy of Beltane or May Eve meant to replace sex in a context of shared personal history. I suspect that those who still celebrate May Eve in the old way don’t deprive themselves of sex or companionship for the rest of the year.

Even for those who hope to find a soul-mate and live “happily ever after,” long-term monogamy might not be bearable. And even though the internet has made it possible for one seeker to find hordes of potential mates from outside the seeker’s immediate vicinity, dating burnout is likely to set in at some point. Who wants to go through the ritual of speed-dating or exchanging text-messages with hordes of strangers in the hope of meeting a dream lover? I wouldn’t. (And a good thing too. My spouse would divorce me.)

I’m not sure that anyone has found the perfect combination of sex, love, and companionship, but I know that most of what I was taught in my youth about sexual “love” is a pile of manure. Stranger-sex is far from “casual” in many cultures, and long-term commitment was not even expected to be an expression of personal love before the Renaissance.

I don’t care who gets it on in which ways with whom else or for how long, and I would love to believe that Western culture (especially in cities) has become sophisticated enough to accommodate a variety of sexual relationships. What concerns me is the ongoing contempt for those (especially the female-identified) who engage in stranger-sex. Hookups happen a lot, as apparently they did in ancient Babylon and Greece, but now they don’t usually include the mutual respect of people who recognize a spark of the divine in each other.

If there is still a sense of reverence between people who interact sexually, but who don’t (yet) have a personal relationship, I suspect this happens only in a context of BDSM, or in cultures that have somehow been isolated from Christian prudery. Pity.
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Don't Sext Me

By Jamie Hill

There's another take on sex and technology that's not so literary, and not nearly as amusing. Last year the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy did a survey (in conjunction with CosmoGirl.com) asking nearly 1300 young people about their electronic activities. According to the survey, 1 in 5 girls (11% between the ages of 13 and 16) and 18% of boys have sent or posted nude or semi-nude pictures or videos of themselves. Further, 15% of senders forwarded the photos on to people they didn't know, or had met online. 39% of these kids admit to writing sexy emails and text messages. (Facts taken from an article by Judith Newman, www.readersdigest.com)

The kids have dubbed these kind of messages 'sexting', and in many cases apparently see nothing wrong with it. Some of these kids are as young as 10 or 11. Unfortunately, children don't have the mental capacity to think long range. On the internet, pictures never really go away. These photos and videos could resurface weeks, months or years from now, and may even be linked to the model's name. Potential employers don't like the pics you posted on MySpace? Wait 'til they get a load of these. My, you were adventurous when you were 11.

Two cases in the news recently have shown that these activities might have other, long-tem effects. Some of the kids charged with these crimes might actually have to register as a sex offender! Probably not what the creators of the sex offender laws had in mind, but hey. You breaks the law, you pays the price.

Here are the news items, complete with links in case you think I made this stuff up:

(Newser) – Pennsylvania teens are in trouble over child-porn photos—of themselves. Three girls who took the pictures, and three boys who got them via cell phone, have been charged, Pittsburgh’s WPXI-TV reports. A student was caught with one of the phones in school in October, prompting a police investigation. But the charges violate the spirit of state child-pornography laws, says an attorney.

Police were hoping to make a point about the danger of such photo-sharing, MSNBC adds. “That cell phone can be put on the Internet where everyone in the world can get access,” said an officer. While the kids may not serve prison terms if convicted, they might have to register as sex offenders for a decade, the lawyer notes.

(Newser) – A 14-year-old New Jersey girl has been charged with possessing and distributing child porn for posting nude photos of herself on her MySpace web pages, reports WPIX-TV. If convicted, the girl may have to register as a sex offender. The case highlights increasing problems with children posting or texting racy images of themselves. "This is a wake-up call for parents," said an official. "The girl posted the photos because she wanted her boyfriend to see them."


















When I read about stuff like this, I'm really glad my kids are grown. They had the internet to cause trouble with while growing up, but no cell phones until they were driving on their own, so they could reach us in case of emergency. 'Sexting' hadn't been created then. Or I should say, it hadn't been labeled then. It probably began as soon as texting became the norm.

Personally, when I wanted to get in trouble as a kid, I went to the library and looked for dirty books. They were there, you just had to dig for them. (As an aside to this story, and sort of an update, on Feb. 23 I posted here at the Grip about a local library that had removed four 'questionable' books from the shelves: The Joy of Sex, The Joy of Gay Sex, The Lesbian Kama Sutra and Sex for Busy People. After they made this ruling, the library board never quite figured out what to do, so they tossed the idea around for a couple more months. Last week, they rescinded the vote and are allowing the books to stay on the shelves. They're going to put up a sign at the entrance stating the library contains some books with adult material, just so people know.) Damn! My secret is out. I might have some company trolling up and down the aisles, looking for dirty books.