Sex as Consumption

[Genosse Kotze]

I've heard blurbs about how gratuitous sex is really just an offshoot of the problems of this compulsory, consumer 'culture' we are mired in. I haven't really read up on it but just the mention of this has prompted me to start giving it some thought. I assume that everybody who visits this site is familiar with some of capitalism's most insidious workings, so I won't dive too deeply into that, but I believe what is now referred to as 'sex addiction' is really connected to what Marx referred to as commodity fetishism (and when talking about sex, it takes on an absolutly delightful double meaning!).

I believe we are all in agreement that capitalism turns everything--people included--into commodities. Proletariats are forced to rent themselves out and once every last drop of labor has been squeezed out of them, they are thrown away. Section one of the Communist Manifesto sums up this whole situation nicely, but if you need further convincing that capitalism turns people into commodities, just what do you think a temp agency means when it says 'sales' are up? As Immanuel Kant would have put it, people are being used solely as a means, without any respect for their intrinsic humanity. Now, I believe that the commodification of people goes well beyond the scope of just pure economic exploitation, and is now being reflected in all other sorts of human endeavors, namely sexual relations. But first, let's give modern consumerism a good gander.

In the US, the pursuit of widget-accumulation is the highest goal one can strive for. Of course, people are manipulated and coerced into doing it, and the PR industry really accelerates the race to see who can max out the most credit cards in the shortest time span. Constant consumption like this is utter madness, unsustainable, and drives people into oblivion. If chasing after new cell phone models, ipods, etc. trumps the securing of neccessities like housing (which should be free anyway), you may find yourself evicted from your home. Whenever I hear about a department store trampling, you can really see just how vulgar people have become. But this behavior is, of course encouraged! Somebody who has a shopping addiction is the ideal citizen in capitalist society, no?

The term 'shopping addiction' isn't just a sensationalized metaphor either. Shopping has become the one activity that people can derive pleasure from. When you make your purchase, it's a quick meaningless feeling of gratification. And when you're not shopping, you feel truly miserable, and you really can't derive any comfort from looking at your closet full of shit. What's the solution? Go out and shop some more. In order to not experience the withdrawal of not shopping, you go out and do it some more. Where do suburban kids go to hang out? "Hey, let's go chill at the mall!" "Hey, what do you want to do for fun today?" "Let's go shopping!" In this society, if you aren't 100% committed to consumption, you are of course alienated from your peers who are, and you become an outcast.

Now, the quick sense of gratification one derives from making a purchase can be easily likened to an orgasm. And just like a compulsive shopper who needs to constantly gratify his/herself, so too does the sex addict feel compelled to get out there and troll for some ass. And this irrational compulsion to fuck is also encouraged out of fear of becoming ostracised if you're not as sex crazed as some as your peers are."What, you some kinda fag or something?"--a typical enough response to those who don't fit the "men are pigs" characterization. I don't know how this works for women, but I'm willing to bet that the alienation they experience in such scenarios is much more profound.

When people are turned into commodities and consume others as commodities as well, it makes for some interesting speculations as to what sex is going to look like in the future. Since it’s been reduced into essentially masturbating yourself, just with another person, I see no reason why we won’t be able to get some in the hooker aisle at Target or Walgreen’s.

Just like Marx called for the abolition of the bourgeois form of property relations, so too am I against the commoditized form of sexual relations.

[bloody_capitalist_sham]

Look there is nothing wrong or "bad" about a highly sexualized adult population.

It is after all natural.

If i understood your post, it would seem that its likely you don't get much or any sex at all and resent the fact that loads of other people get lots.

And what is the "men as pigs" characterization? can you explain that please.

Lol this post reeks of angsty Lameness :P

[Ihavenoidea]

If current media-pressure and capitalist people-price tags continue, you'll be able to buy women at Walmart.

Agreed (even if some of you disagree). Good post.

[Kropotkin Has a Posse]

It's a hell of a post, and sadly it seems entirely true.

[Genosse Kotze]

That post was a bit lengthy, so when I came to finishing it, I had forgotten what I originally set out to write about! But yeah, one often hears revolutionaries talking about how they have to rid themselves of bourgeois ideas and characteristics that have been internalized--racism and male chauvinism being chief among them--and I just see this as being consumerism internalized. What bums me out is that the only people who seem to take issue with this are coming from the religious right, who seek to fill people who enjoy fucking too much with shame and guilt. Listen, it's meant to be enjoyable...I don't think anybody while doing it stopped and said, "this sucks! Let's go bowling or something." My problem is that this it has become an empty kind of enjoyment (just like shopping, or doing heroin). I'm not even talking about prostitution per say--I see that as classic economic exploitation, it's just the nature of the work that's different, which carries with it its own set of unique hazards--but rather what one author (can't remember who) called 'Raunch culture'. And as for the dude who said I need to get some; You’re right. I think I could go for some ‘commodity trading’ with that mom of yours!

[bloody_capitalist_sham]

Do you guys feel you're being exploited or Commodified when you have sex then?

Why not tell us how this happens.

and could you please explain that "men as pigs" bit.

[bcbm]

My problem is that this it has become an empty kind of enjoyment (just like shopping, or doing heroin).

How can you measure this in any reasonable fashion? I've never found my sexual experiences to be, as a whole, "empty" enjoyment. The few times they were had more to do with individual relationship issues than any sort of commodification.

[détrop]

Yeah KKM, I think a good way to describe sex in consumerist society is as a form of entertainment, something which is no longer sacred. It is cheapened in a sense because it is so easy. Its like sex is a "sport" or something, you know? Everybody is fucking everybody...and a day later, they're fucking somebody else.

I think in such contexts, the tensions between genders is increased-- they are "playing each other." Sex today is a way to "get control" of the "other," rather than unite with the other for mutual ends.

Its comical really, but sad too. I watch people courting each other in public all the time, and I take them apart. I see through them.

[bloody_capitalist_sham]

Detrop

Come on now. stop talking shit.


something which is no longer sacred

has it ever been sacred? why should it be sacred?


It is cheapened in a sense because it is so easy. Its like sex is a "sport" or something, you know? Everybody is fucking everybody...and a day later, they're fucking somebody else.

This is a good thing. Well, at least its a good thing that people are free to do this if they want. surely you agree. Would you want someone regulating who you can have sex with, how often and when? i don't think so.




Its comical really, but sad too. I watch people courting each other in public all the time, and I take them apart. I see through them.

X ray spex!!

[détrop]

has it ever been sacred? why should it be sacred?

Procreation is the most important event that human beings could ever experience. There is nothing more beautiful than this...even though the baby is screaming bloody murder, which means that he's pissed because the womb was warm and comfortable. That's his/her way of saying "fuck you asshole....I didn't ask for this!"

But look at sex in consumer society. Look at the divorce rate and family values. Look at how many babies are born by accident, or aborted. Look at all the sexually transmitted diseases running rampant across the world. I demand that these problems are solved before the human race continues to have sex for meager pleasure. From this point on, nobody gets to fuck anybody until further notice.


Would you want someone regulating who you can have sex with, how often and when? i don't think so.

Yes I would, although I am just a Platonic guardian and I don't get to make those decisions. The philosopher kings, officials, and eugenic scientists get to decide who mates with who. I just protect everybody from the bad guys, and am only allowed to breed with the warrior caste.


X ray spex!!

You know it dude. I can see for miles and miles and miles and miles.....

(I don't really like The Who, actually, because the idiots always smashed their perfectly good instruments after each performance as some kind of pseudo-revolutionary anti-establishment gesture. And Keith Moon was a total ass.)

[Genosse Kotze]

Ok, I'm going to try and address some new points that were brought up, starting with what I meant by "the men are pigs characterization" since I neglected it in my last post. What I was thinking of when I said it was when dudes are talking about the women they've fucked as if they were discussing a new car in Auto Trader magazine...allow me to get side tracked for a moment...

Since I see some of you are having a difficult time buying into my original premise 'the comodification of sex', let's look at the inverse: 'the sexualizing of commodities', beginning with car commercials. Whenever new cars come out, some companies have opted to market them in a very sexualized manner. In the commercials they show the sleek design of the car, and the curvature of the fenders and whatnot, as if they were filming some nubile, Brazilian model. There is also a commercial for Heineken where they show close ups of a beer bottle’s sloping neck, with beads of water clinging to it, while they play that ‘don’t you wish your girlfriend was like me’ song. Sound ridiculous? Then my premise might not be entirely full of shit. Not long ago there was some media droning about the commercial where Paris Hilton was getting it on with a burger on top of a car. Just what was that commercial selling? Burgers? The car? Paris Hilton? Does it even matter anymore? The point is for you to get aroused so you'll be more agreeable to whatever it is they are pushing. If commodities are becoming sexualized, I think it's reasonable enough to believe that this process could also work in reverse.

...but yeah, what I had in mind by "men as pigs" was essentially the jock stereotype, who's intellectual capacities are such that he can only think about football, drinking and cheerleader-date rape.

There was the other dude who mentioned "the sacredness of sex" being lost viz. its commodification. He also mentioned something about divorce rates, and eroding 'familiy values'...so I'm almost 100% that he was kidding, because those are the talking points of the likes of Ted Hastert (well, formerly. lol), Jerry Falwell, and the ever hateful Pat Robertson. I’m not a proponent of the women in burqas, locked up in kitchen cells, save sex for marriage, religious fanatic argument. But I don’t see why the alternative has to be commercialized, MTV-Spring Break society.

[molecular transmutation]

I agree with KKM, even though myself is sexually active can agree with you. Sex has been inbedded into lyrics, television, magazines and advertisement (all of which can be used by capitalist). it is transfixed into our mind that sex is neither difficult to comprehend or reisky. I ride a bus home school, and there is a little 8 year old kid on my bus who seems to be hornier then most guys without be able to hold an erection and wont be to for a while. i wouldnt really want o criticize rap, or any other form of music similar to this, but it is infused with sexual lyrics, and the youth no longer see sex as bad, or risky. it becomes more obvious when 11 and 12 year olds know much more then expected despite the fact that almost all of them have never had a relationship.

[molecular transmutation]

hmmm.... you guys are over thinking the whole sex issue. the whole No sex before marriage idea has been around for thousnads of years. this at a time when people were getting married at the age of 11 to 14 years, if you had sex before 11, then you are fucked up, and should be treated with something. all i know is that sex can good and bad. its just too much of a wishy-washy topic to begin with.

[freakazoid]

C.S. Lewis touches on this subject in his book Mere Christianity in Book 3 Chapter 5, Sexual Morality. Here is a link to the etext, http://www.lib.ru/LEWISCL/mere_engl.txt His thoughts on it are interesting and I agree with him. Here is everything from that chapter;


We must now consider Christian morality as regards sex, what Christians
call the virtue of chastity. The Christian rule of chastity must not be
confused with the social rule of "modesty" (in one sense of that word); i.e.
propriety, or decency. The social rule of propriety lays down how much of
the human body should be displayed and what subjects can be referred to, and
in what words, according to the customs of a given social circle. Thus,
while the rule of chastity is the same for all Christians at all times, the
rule of propriety changes. A girl in the Pacific islands wearing hardly any
clothes and a Victorian lady completely covered in clothes might both be
equally "modest," proper, or decent, according to the standards of their own
societies: and both, for all we could tell by their dress, might be equally
chaste (or equally unchaste). Some of the language which chaste women used
in Shakespeare's time would have been used in the nineteenth century only by
a woman completely abandoned. When people break the rule of propriety
current in their own time and place, if they do so in order to excite lust
in themselves or others, then they are offending against chastity. But if
they break it through ignorance or carelessness they are guilty only of bad
manners. When, as often happens, they break it defiantly in order to shock
or embarrass others, they are not necessarily being unchaste, but they are
being uncharitable: for it is uncharitable to take pleasure in making other
people uncomfortable. I do not think that a very strict or fussy standard of
propriety is any proof of chastity or any help to it, and I therefore regard
the great relaxation and simplifying of the rule which has taken place in my
own lifetime as a good thing. At its present stage, however, it has this
inconvenience, that people of different ages and different types do not all
acknowledge the same standard, and we hardly know where we are. While this
confusion lasts I think that old, or old-fashioned, people should be very
careful not to assume that young or "emancipated" people are corrupt
whenever they are (by the old standard) improper; and, in return, that young
people should not call their elders prudes or puritans because they do not
easily adopt the new standard. A real desire to believe all the good you can
of others and to make others as comfortable as you can will solve most of
the problems.
Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no
getting away from it: the old Christian rule is, "Either marriage, with
complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence." Now this
is so difficult and so contrary to our instincts, that obviously either
Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct, as it now is, has gone wrong.
One or the other. Of course, being a Christian, I think it is the instinct
which has gone wrong.
But I have other reasons for thinking so. The biological purpose of sex
is children, just as the biological purpose of eating is to repair the body.
Now if we eat whenever we feel inclined and just as much as we want, it is
quite true that most of us will eat too much: but not terrifically too much.
One man may eat enough for two, but he does not eat enough for ten. The
appetite goes a little beyond its biological purpose, but not enormously.
But if a healthy young man indulged his sexual appetite whenever he felt
inclined, and if each act produced a baby, then in ten years he might easily
populate a small village. This appetite is in ludicrous and preposterous
excess of its function.
Or take it another way. You can get a large audience together for a
strip-tease act-that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose
you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a
covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let
every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton
chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something
had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had
grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about
the state of the sex instinct among us?
One critic said that if he found a country in which such striptease
acts with food were popular, he would conclude that the people of that
country were starving. He meant, of course, to imply that such things as the
strip-tease act resulted not from sexual corruption but from sexual
starvation. I agree with him that if, in some strange land, we found that
similar acts with mutton chops were popular, one of the possible
explanations which would occur to me would be famine. But the next step
would be to test our hypothesis by finding out whether, in fact, much or
little food was being consumed in that country. If the evidence showed that
a good deal was being eaten, then of course we should have to abandon the
hypothesis of starvation and try to think of another one. In the same way,
before accepting sexual starvation as the cause of the strip-tease, we
should have to look for evidence that there is in fact more sexual
abstinence in our age than in those ages when things like the strip-tease
were unknown. But surely there is no such evidence. Contraceptives have made
sexual indulgence far less costly within marriage and far safer outside it
than ever before, and public opinion is less hostile to illicit unions and
even to perversion than it has been since Pagan times. Nor is the hypothesis
of "starvation" the only one we can imagine. Everyone knows that the sexual
appetite, like our other appetites, grows by indulgence. Starving men may
think much about food, but so do gluttons; the gorged, as well as the
famished, like titillations.
Here is a third point. You find very few people who want to eat things
that really are not food or to do other things with food instead of eating
it. In other words, perversions of the food appetite are rare. But
perversions of the sex instinct are numerous, hard to cure, and frightful. I
am sorry to have to go into all these details, but I must. The reason why I
must is that you and I, for the last twenty years, have been fed all day
long on good solid lies about sex. We have been told, till one is sick of
hearing it, that sexual desire is in the same state as any of our other
natural desires and that if only we abandon the silly old Victorian idea of
hushing it up, everything in the garden will be lovely. It is not true. The
moment you look at the facts, and away from the propaganda, you see that it
is not.
They tell you sex has become a mess because it was hushed up. But for
the last twenty years it has not been hushed up. It has been chattered about
all day long. Yet it is still in a mess. If hushing up had been the cause of
the trouble, ventilation would have set it right. But it has not. I think it
is the other way round. I think the human race originally hushed it up
because it had become such a mess. Modern people are always saying, "Sex is
nothing to be ashamed of." They may mean two things. They may mean "There is
nothing to be ashamed of in the fact that the human race reproduces itself
in a certain way, nor in the fact that it gives pleasure." If they mean
that, they are right. Christianity says the same. It is not the thing, nor
the pleasure, that is the trouble. The old Christian teachers said that if
man had never fallen, sexual pleasure, instead of being less than it is now,
would actually have been greater. I know some muddle-headed Christians have
talked as if Christianity thought that sex, or the body, or pleasure, were
bad in themselves. But they were wrong. Christianity is almost the only one
of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body-which believes
that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some
kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an
essential part of our happiness, our beauty, and our energy. Christianity
has glorified marriage more than any other religion: and nearly all the
greatest love poetry in the world has been produced by Christians. If anyone
says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once. But,
of course, when people say, "Sex is nothing to be ashamed of," they may mean
"the state into which the sexual instinct has now got is nothing to be
ashamed of."
If they mean that, I think they are wrong. I think it is everything to
be ashamed of. There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food:
there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the
main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of
food and dribbling and smacking their lips. I do not say you and I are
individually responsible for the present situation. Our ancestors have
handed over to us organisms which are warped in this respect: and we grow up
surrounded by propaganda in favour of unchastity. There are people who want
to keep our sex instinct inflamed in order to make money out of us. Because,
of course, a man with an obsession is a man who has very little
sales-resistance. God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had
no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance
of our will to overcome them.
Before we can be cured we must want to be cured. Those who really wish
for help will get it; but for many modern people even the wish is difficult.
It is easy to think that we want something when we do not really want it. A
famous Christian long ago told us that when he was a young man he prayed
constantly for chastity; but years later he realised that while his lips had
been saying, "Oh Lord, make me chaste," his heart had been secretly adding,
"But please don't do it just yet." This may happen in prayers for other
virtues too; but there are three reasons why it is now specially difficult
for us to desire-let alone to achieve-complete chastity.
In the first place our warped natures, the devils who tempt us, and all
the contemporary propaganda for lust, combine to make us feel that the
desires we are resisting are so "natural," so "healthy," and so reasonable,
that it is almost perverse and abnormal to resist them. Poster after poster,
film after film, novel after novel, associate the idea of sexual indulgence
with the ideas of health, normality, youth, frankness, and good humour. Now
this association is a lie. Like all powerful lies, it is based on a
truth-the truth, acknowledged above, that sex in itself (apart from the
excesses and obsessions that have grown round it) is "normal" and "healthy,"
and all the rest of it. The lie consists in the suggestion that any sexual
act to which you are tempted at the moment is also healthy and normal. Now
this, on any conceivable view, and quite apart from Christianity, must be
nonsense. Surrender to all our desires obviously leads to impotence,
disease, jealousies, lies, concealment, and everything that is the reverse
of health, good humour, and frankness. For any happiness, even in this
world, quite a lot of restraint is going to be necessary; so the claim made
by every desire, when it is strong, to be healthy and reasonable, counts for
nothing. Every sane and civilised man must have some set of principles by
which he chooses to reject some of his desires and to permit others. One man
does this on Christian principles, another on hygienic principles, another
on sociological principles. The real conflict is not between Christianity
and "nature," but between Christian principle and other principles in the
control of "nature." For "nature" (in the sense of natural desire) will have
to be controlled anyway, unless you are going to ruin your whole life. The
Christian principles are, admittedly, stricter than the others; but then we
think you will get help towards obeying them which you will not get towards
obeying the others.
In the second place, many people are deterred from seriously attempting
Christian chastity because they think (before trying) that it is impossible.
But when a thing has to be attempted, one must never think about possibility
or impossibility. Faced with an optional question in an examination paper,
one considers whether one can do it or not: faced with a compulsory
question, one must do the best one can. You may get some marks for a very
imperfect answer: you will certainly get none for leaving the question
alone. Not only in examinations but in war, in mountain climbing, in
learning to skate, or swim, or ride a bicycle, even in fastening a stiff
collar with cold fingers, people quite often do what seemed impossible
before they did it. It is wonderful what you can do when you have to.
We may, indeed, be sure that perfect chastity-like perfect charity-will
not be attained by any merely human efforts. You must ask for God's help.
Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help,
or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each failure,
ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first
helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always
trying again. For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness,
or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul
which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and
teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust
ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not
despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal
thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.
Thirdly, people often misunderstand what psychology teaches about
"repressions." It teaches us that "repressed" sex is dangerous. But
"repressed" is here a technical term: it does not mean "suppressed" in the
sense of "denied" or "resisted." A repressed desire or thought is one which
has been thrust into the subconscious (usually at a very early age) and can
now come before the mind only in a disguised and unrecognisable form.
Repressed sexuality does not appear to the patient to be sexuality at all.
When an adolescent or an adult is engaged in resisting a conscious desire,
he is not dealing with a repression nor is he in the least danger of
creating a repression. On the contrary, those who are seriously attempting
chastity are more conscious, and soon know a great deal more about their own
sexuality than anyone else. They come to know their desires as Wellington
knew Napoleon, or as Sherlock Holmes knew Moriarty; as a rat-catcher knows
rats or a plumber knows about leaky pipes. Virtue-even attempted
virtue-brings light; indulgence brings fog.
Finally, though I have had to speak at some length about sex, I want to
make it as clear as I possibly can that the centre of Christian morality is
not here. If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme
vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the
least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the
pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising
and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For
there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must
try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The
Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous
prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a
prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.

[Dominick]

Isn't the view of sex as something which must be restricted, in the amount of encounters and partners, a product of a society in which monogamous sex is the dominant ideology? As the monogamous relationship is a product of class society, shouldn't we have an impetus to rid ourselves of those ideas? Further, sex has no intrinsic value aside from that which we attach to it, so it seems perfectly reasonable for individuals to attach it to differing degrees of importance to it. So, for example, I ascribe not intimate value with one woman, and we agree we are simply doing it to satisfy a bodily need, while I may ascribe an enormous value to it with my girlfriend. As such, I do not particularly see anything wrong with the amount of sex someone has, only the way in which they perceive their partner; if a male only views women as vagina, then there is a problem, however, if each view the other as an equal, with whom they engage in certain behaviours to satisfy their needs, I see no problem. Moreover, the way I conceive of sexual relations functioning in a society without capitalist relations, is an individual may have many sexual partners, or romantic partners for that matter, because those emotions/acts will no longer be viewed as something quantifiable or scarce. As to the failure of marriages/relationships, I would argue it is indicative of the fact that the monogamous relationship does not correspond with the nature of man, which is highly promiscuous.

[Chrisso]

Hmm I liked the post. I got a part time job (I am a student in the UK) and once I had earned about £1500, I left. I didn't need money any longer, I had enough of a stockpile and I had bought everything I wanted. (iPod - guilty as charged, but I believe they are good, Monitor, 360, Guitar).

I am still sitting on a substancial amount. I refuse to learn to drive due to the fact I don't NEED to. I hate our local shopping centre (Despite it being the largest in Europe), and I generally shop on the internet.

I wouldn't say I have become a social outcast, but I have lost out to things sociologically due to not hanging around at the centre all day every day. Fight consumerism!

PS: To the previous poster; have you ever read Brave New World by A. Huxley? It highlights the way in which sexual promiscuity is used to eliminate 'love' . After all, the notion of 'love' drives us to do the most ridiculous things, such as revenge or revolution. In my opinion, intimate relations with a single man/woman is the best way. It helps to raise a stable family and produces the most balanced children...we don't want the single-parent epidemic any worse than it is.

[Pandii]

I dont think that a single parent is any better or worse that a two-parent up bringing! I have met many people who have been brought up in all manner of familes are are well rounded people, those with issues of some sort do not come from one particular type of family upbringing either.

But, about the sex as a commodity topic. I agree to a certain extent that it has become socially acceptable for men the brag about sleeping with girls at parties etc/ and for girls to follow the mantra of keep your legs open and your mouth shut. On the other hand, depending on who you are talking to, sex is a sacred act, a loving act, something meaningful and not to be had with any other than your true love.

As said above, sex has the value you tack on to it. Sometime I make love to my partner because I want to be intimate, other times because I am, or he is horned up.

I dont think either are unacceptable.

However, I know that some people talk about sex as if it is a commodity, or a challenge to see who is the 'wealthiest' in the notch-on-the-bed-post arena. I dont agree that men or women should be subjected to turning to selling themselves to get by, or that either sex should see the opposite sex, or even the same sex, as just something for pleaure.

But, then again, you do meet people who are mutually happy with a one-night-stand.

Who am I to judge what other people are happy doing.