Sex education (2)
Candour and privacy
Arthur S. Wigfield
The role of marriage society is possibly being undermined by those who regard the love, tenderness and sense of sexual propriety implicit in this institution as inimical to the full enjoyment of voluptuous animal passion. While occurring in the minds of most as fantasy, this forms the sexual reality of many for whom the pleasure principle, is a more important attribute of the sex act than procreation. Clearly the two are of equal merit.
• Modern enlightened sex educators, rightly equating self-understanding and fulfilment with sexual gratification, appear to encourage indiscriminate licence. Many persons find this teaching incompatible not with their concept of marriage but with their insistence that all sex outside marriage is immoral while all sex inside is, by inference and by religious teaching, not only moral but responsible and therefore wholesome, which is clearly not always the case. These quasi-reactionaries deplore pre-marital experience and mistrust all education, injudiciously leaving natural impulses to nature and group sex lore. When, in the struggle between these polarised extremes we find not only the mass media and commerce profiting from man's almost universal appetite for sexual titillation and trivialisation, but also propaganda suggesting that avoidance of unplanned pregnancy is the only responsibility in sex, the stage is set for an alteration in sexual mores of great magnitude and far-reaching consequences. The instability of many marriages and often the distress following many immature pre-marital affairs is often to be traced to ignorance and reticence concerning matters other than fidelity and contraception.
Most people, aware of sexual anatomy, physiology and aberration, know little about the physiology and psychology of coitus. Yet coitus and reproduction, two imponderable miracles, are so fundamental that candour should come as readily for the first as for the second. Sex is mankind's most private affair but ceases to be its most precious. Being instinctive, its practicalities are discovered and its, purport discerned without tuition. While many unscrupulous moderns describe and depict with brutal vulgarity nought but sensuality, its finesse and subtlety have all but defied the tongue and pen of the world's every bard and songster. Nevertheless, this powerful urge must be satiated or sublimated if we wish to avoid the little understood and seldom admitted consequences of sexual frustration.
Coitus is not an intellectual pursuit, but the prelude and aftermath lend themselves to rational contemplation. Man is often callous in his gallantry. Abandoning himself to the voluptuous, he no longer interprets pregnancy and disease as by divine grace or retribution but transfers his faith to the medical profession, the pharmaceutical industry and the rubber trade.
Through these agencies, with or without love, but with no thought for procreation, he achieves the ultimate in communication, release of tension and calm repose. Such fulfilment is commonplace outside marriage yet this is provided perfectly and uncompromisingly within this institution which, though not essential to procreational or recreational sex, is indispensable for civilised parenthood. To marry, so enticing and easy, is one thing. To develop into a married person, so challenging and arduous, is another.
Love and desire are both unifying processes — but so forceful is desire, often amounting to infatuation, that many hastily contracted marriages face inevitable dissolution. A romantic prologuewith courtship and betrothal presaging a life of connubial bliss too often precedes a disillusioning epilogue with Cupid's arrow pointing' to clinics, courts and confessionals. For some, sexual intercourse amounts to a banal ritual while for others, unashamed of their libido and performance, it becomes an harmonious riot. Although the former may be self-sufficing, even transcendental, it lacks the relish of fantasy which characterises the latter. Propriety and prudery preclude its free discussion, for want of which men forsake wife for mistress. Felicitous indeed are those marriages whose partners not only act the role cast for them, but whose understanding matches that of psychiatrist or priest.
This concept need not exclude from its embrace a wholesome al liance of responsible tender pre marital love, but casual immodest sex without courtship or serious intent is sordid and animal and quite pathetic when habitual. The exiguous pleasure of "sleeping around" is the ephemeral and perilous stuff upon which prostitution thrives – and more disruptive. Individuals who make this their life-style and indeed many who casually ignore the moral sanctions or permanently the legal sanctions attaching to marriage run grave risks.
Society will dispense with these sanctions at its peril. It is a function of society to record parental unions and uphold the rights and privileges of husband and wife. Together with man's innate loyalty, solicitude and conscience, all epitomised in love, marriage also shields the middle-aged and elderly woman from the appeal of a younger generation.
Male assertiveness and female receptiveness, terms aptly connoting something more human than aggression and submission, are biological facts. Their denial is the essence of permissiveness; their admission implies male courtship and female modesty but this in stinctive behaviour, found throughout the animal kingdom, has been distorted among the ignorant and unimaginative by perfection in contraceptive technique and imperfection in sex education. Female modesty is a show of sexual refusal, a reticence allowing for discretion. Male courtship clarifies any disparity between ulterior motive and avowed intent. Mature betrothal which follows, with or without intimacy, depending on circumstances and personalities, forebodes sexual happiness. This may depend upon satisfactory courtship before successive acts of coitus, each being one of devotion, a pledge, a spiritual link, even a commemoratiori for those who rejoice in their children. Each act is enhanced by submission to passion and remains unsullied by any lack of procreational intent. To deny this is to deny beauty in sexuality. Successful connubialities are compounded of love and lust and where they eventually pall, marriages are apt to flounder. A wife, preoccupied with schooling, scrubbing and scrimping, loses her attraction; her husband loses his potency or interest. Through bashfulness, misunderstanding or ignorance they lack complete rapport; innermost thoughts remain suppressed; they drift. Mostly the man muses on another with whom he rediscovers his potency and acts out his fantasies. Homes or hearts soon break.
Until a new liberality of teaching, thought and understanding lead male and female to sexual happiness within the best institution society has yet devised for the welfare of succeeding generations, the humbug and hypocrisy will continue. Both infidelity and inarticulate pretence lead to alienation, whose repercussions resound far beyond the walls of bedroom, maternity ward .or clinic. Through sex we commune, through speech communicate. Let us then share our secrets privately at home.
Dr Wigfield is Consultant Venereologist at Newcastle Genera/ Hospital, and Lecturer in Venereology at the University, Newcastle upon Tyne.
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