Is Society Oversexed

Witch hunts or justifiable anger?

The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husband’s is perfectly scandalous*

Every once in a while we hear about some horrible incident where an innocent child’s life is turned upside down by the sexual predations of someone older, who should know better. One of the most recent is a divorced man in Cape Town who picked up two desperately poor (and very young) girls and paid them R25 each for oral sex. The irony is that this all came to light as a result of the man paying the one girl R5 more than the other, and the argument that resulted (and probably continued in their respective homes) alerted the one’s mother. One can easily imagine the mother’s reaction, her calling the police and the media.

Westerners who travel to the East, especially Thailand and the Philippines, are notorious for financing the so-called sex industry. When I traveled to both countries I noticed several older men walking around with local girls young enough to be their daughters. In Thailand (Phuket) I noticed a British girl talking to a pretty Thailand girl (about the same age) and asked if they were friends. The British girl (who was about 15 or 16 years old) answered, “No, she’s my father’s friend.”

The technology exists today to allow continuous sex without conception. This obviously leads to a lot more sex than we would otherwise have. There’s nothing wrong with sex, obviously, as long as it is in an acceptable context, and we take responsibility for the consequences of our actions. What does disturb is the constant pursuit of it, and the way sexuality is overtly and increasingly explicitly part of our everyday business. It’s overt in terms of how we dress and present ourselves, what we consider successful and what the media presents as something to aspire to. Beauty and sex has been made into a kind of God. Women worship it by cutting and enhancing their bodies, by applying make-up for hours on a daily basis. And men support this activity by following Oscar Wilde’s motif: The only way to behave towards a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to someone else if she is plain.

My concern is the extent to which society (especially western) is depicting itself, and transforming itself, into a softcore pornographical mindset. Life does seem to resemble, increasingly, a porn movie. What are the basics of a porn movie? No plot, plenty of nonsense (in terms of dialogue), lots of gratuitous sex (often with the participants pretending to be a lot happier and excited than they really are) and an overall empty and shallow set of interactions. Isn’t society becoming similar? Our jobs demand so much time from us, that we have so little left for conventional intimacy – things like talking and listening to friends and family. Perhaps becoming increasingly sexually active is a desperate way of getting intimacy as quickly as possible.

The more promiscuous society becomes the more the society finds itself lacking basic discipline, in terms of its own appetite. That means a lack of control of oneself. It may not seem a serious thing, except when we notice people around us not being able to control themselves. We can see evidence of this in those things the form or disrupt (or destroy) the fabric of society. We see it in our children at school. We experience it in the form of crime, including crimes of passion.

The way to fill up the collective emptiness is to become less mentally active and more spiritually centred. To still our beating hearts, to meditate, to go out into nature and absorb those things that nourish the spirit (not the flesh). And we, as individuals, need to develop discipline that maintains the internal grail, and rather than allowing ourselves to become half empty or worse, filling ourselves up with meaning.

*Oscar Wilde in The Importance of being Earnest