IN RESPONSE to the previous post on the widely-held conceit that we live in an age of unprecedented sexual discovery and pleasure, a reader offers this view.

Anna H. writes:

As a Mennonite, I am aware that we are considered backwards by society for such “repressive” practices as encouraging modest clothing and a family-based lifestyle and discouraging divorce, premarital sex, and abortion. Clearly, these beliefs are terribly oppressive to modern folks, especially women. Or are they? And they certainly must stifle the enjoyment of sex. Or do they?

Of course my evidence is merely anecdotal, but it seems to me that the ideal romantic relationship so many people long for today is actually enhanced by carefully choosing that one person, saving yourself sexually for him or her, and living out your promise to stay together for life. “How dull,” society often says of practices espoused by Mennonites and other conservative groups. “If a man is sexually inexperienced, how does he know he can please a woman, and vice versa? And if a couple doesn’t have sex before they marry, how do they know they aren’t dooming themselves to a miserable life of incompatibility? How can a young person even know that they will still be attracted to the same person years down the road? Isn’t there something wrong with a person who can wait for years to have sex because they are looking for The One?” Our culture’s media rather clearly presents the expectation that providing great sex and being sexy will help a woman land the best man she can have (usually after a series of misses). The notion that great sex comes from developing and maintaining a loving relationship seems quaint and almost silly today.

Looking around my conservative but not Plain Mennonite community, I have to think we have it pretty good sexually because of the “rules” we are expected to follow. Even though most of the young people go to college these days, they still intend to keep their first sexual encounter for the wedding night instead of for some random hook-up. It is so sweet when a young couple falls in love and heads joyfully towards marriage and making a home together without the baggage of “children from a previous relationship” and a host of exes and former sex partners lurking in the background. In public and at home, married couples treat each other kindly, seek out each other’s company, and serve one another in the way the traditional marriage vows advocate, even when circumstances are less than ideal. Maybe this in itself isn’t the stuff hot sex is made of, but you do have to wonder if there isn’t something going on in those bedrooms when you see how many parents of older children also have the late in life baby, born as the mother approaches or enters her 40s. Older couples touch lovingly, help one another get around, and, when one passes away, the other is truly grieved and changed by the loss. Somehow I doubt that comes from a lifetime of engaging in “glorified rape”.

Perhaps I have made a mistake here in considering sex to be something that naturally and happily grows out of a deep and abiding love for one’s partner. How unenlightened I must be. Maybe Dr. Berman can set me straight.

Laura writes:

That is well said. Anna is very unenlightened. : – )

Sexual excitement depends on differentiation. Women are excited by masculinity and men by femininity. Traditional sex roles keep these ideals alive and ever present.

Weddings have become more extravagant to make up for the loss of excitement. Today, couples fall into bed after an orgy of festivities. The wedding night is not infused with the long days of anticipation. Many couples in the past may not have had honeymoons Dr. Berman would approve of, but these days were more often the thrilling start of a mutual awakening.  Most married couples pick up on each other’s unspoken signals over the course of time without any of Dr. Berman’s toys, manuals or mechanical rituals. Sheer busyness is also destructive of sexual pleasure, and the postmodern couple often collapses into bed.

I wouldn’t argue for traditionalism on the grounds that, hey, the sex is better! But I think it often is better, much better, and when it is not, life is filled with compensations that are not found in the lonely exile of the modern individualist, who is pressured to equate happiness with the number of sexual epiphanies he has experienced.

Also, in a world of sexual restraint, daily life becomes more beautiful. Sublimation involves the conversion of longing.

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