sex

Sex and happiness

By John Taylor; 2007 August 21

Talking about atheists, we think of them as being for sexual promiscuity and religious types being against it. Not always. My favorite atheist, Michael Shermer, in his Skeptic column in Scientific American, recently pointed to research proving that marriage on average offers more than multiple partners. Talking about happiness, he wrote,

"This habituation to even a multiplicity of wonderfulness is what economists call `declining marginal utility' and married couples call life. But if you think that an array of sexual partners adds to the spice of life, you are mistaken: according to an exhaustive study published in The Social Organization of Sexuality (University of Chicago Press, 1994), married people have more sex than singles -- and more orgasms." (Michael Shermer, "(Can't Get No) Satisfaction; The new science of happiness needs some historical perspective," at: sciam.com)

The fact is that there are huge corporate interests spending billions to persuade us to consume as much as we can, including sexual "spending." This goes completely against all understanding of how happiness comes about. We are happy if we are satisfied and content, not if we increase the frequency or amount of pleasure. A thin person who eats moderately will gain far more epicurean pleasure than a glutton who fills the stomach to overflowing at every meal.

The same thing is true for sex. Take Viagra, for example. In 1999 it was introduced along with a massive publicity campaign. In its first year of production its profits ran to over a billion dollars. That is not chicken feed, even by corporate standards. Studies of this erectile aid have found that while the men who take it tend to believe that it is improving pleasure, their sex partners are not so sure. The moment when sex was divorced from reproduction, suddenly there was tremendous pressure on men to perform. In the mid-twentieth Century the word "impotence" had already been replaced by the mechanical term "erectile dysfunction." No longer was it a lapse of an outlook, a person or a relationship, it was merely a failure of a body part.

Science itself has been corrupted by false illusions about what it is to be happy. Shermer concludes his excellent column on happiness with these words,

"Historian Jennifer Michael Hecht emphasized this point in The Happiness Myth (Harper, 2007). Her deep and thoughtful historical perspective demonstrates just how time- and culture-dependent is all this happiness research. As she writes, `The basic modern assumptions about how to be happy are nonsense.' Take sex. `A century ago, an average man who had not had sex in three years might have felt proud of his health and forbearance, and a woman might have praised herself for the health and happiness benefits of ten years of abstinence.' Most happiness research is based on self-reported data, and Hecht's point is that people a century ago would most likely have answered questions on a happiness survey very differently than they do today. To understand happiness, we need both history and science."

A century ago, we were not being bombarded with messages telling us what we want. Or what will make me happy. Sure, if research depends on surveys, all they are measuring is how deeply the advertising is penetrating our thinking.

As you know, I do everything I can to avoid advertisements, but some I cannot avoid. Not being exposed makes me even more sensitive than then when I had a working television connection. A television advertisement now hits me in the face like a sledgehammer. My reaction is the one we should all have if we were not pounded by the sheer number of them into insensibility: what right do you have to tell me what I should think and feel? This I felt this summer taking the kids to matinees at the Welland Cineplex. Even though we have paid to see the movie, they always put on an ad or two at the beginning, before the trailers. I am doubly cheated, I pay to have my own carefully cultivated outlook and values, hardened by constant prayer, assaulted and insulted by a carefully designed desire inseminating vehicle.

Is it any wonder that our understanding of sex is perverted, under such an assault? We must have sex, and the more the better. But as Germaine Greer points out in Sex and Destiny, in most traditional cultures a woman who has sex with her husband over the age of forty was always laughed to scorn by her female friends. What is the point of having sex at such an advanced age? Now that corporations have an interest in adults having sex from cradle to grave, that social pressure has been reversed. Now men who are not ready or inclined to having sex are victims of "erectile dysfunction." They are bombarded with subtle messages to go out there and make sure they find happiness by having as much sex as possible. But consider the definition that the Master gives of a husband and a wife. Look as long as you want, you will not find the word "sex" mentioned:

"As to thy question concerning the husband and wife, the tie between them, and the children given to them by God, know thou, verily, the husband is one who has sincerely turned unto God, is awakened by the call of the Beauty of El Baha and chants the verses of oneness in the great assemblies. The wife is a being who wishes to be overflowing with and seeks after the attributes of God and His names; and the tie between them is no other than the Word of God." (SW, Vol. 9, p. 85)

Not sex, the Word of God. Here is the rest of this Tablet. Search all you want, you will not find sex mentioned here either.

"Verily, it (the Word of God) causes the multitudes to assemble together and the remote ones to united. Thus the husband and wife are brought into affinity, are united and harmonized, even as though they were one person. Through their mutual union, companionship and love great results are produced in the world, both material and spiritual. The spiritual result is the appearance of divine bounties. The material result is the children who are born in the cradle of the love of God, who are nurtured by the breast of the knowledge of God, are brought up in the bosom of the gift of God and are fostered in the lap of the training of God. Such children are those of whom it was said by Christ: "Verily, they are the children of the Kingdom.” (Id.)