No reason to be ashamed

By Alex P. Vidal

“Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.” —Bertrand Russell

OUR sexual behavior is often judged by clergymen whose qualifications include their solemn renunciation of sexual intercourse.

“Tragically,” protests Dr. David Reuben in Beyond the Birds and Trees, “those who undertake to control our sexual destinies are often sexually sick themselves. The decency league dedicated to abridging sexual behavior—except on their terms—are simply trying to deprive others of the reasonable use of their sexual orgasms.”

Reuben adds: “Every one of us has made that seven-inch journey through the penis into the vagina to meet the other half of our future protoplasm, and has then settled in the uterus for the 280-day wait. There is no reason now to be ashamed of how we traveled and where we grew—there is no more suitable place.”

In Any Woman Can, Reuben, 89, a psychiatrist and sex expert who now lives in California, says sex started with the crocodile.

“This scaly cold-blooded distant relative of man was the first animal to develop a penis. Before then, life was much simpler. All the earth’s inhabitants had about the same type of sexual equipment and used it about the same way.”

This was how Reuben explained further:

The male and female simply backed up to each other, wiggled their sexual equipment into contact, and oozed primitive sperm into contact with primitive eggs.

There wasn’t much to see, hardly anything to feel, and in many species if a couple turned on like this once a year, it was sufficient. Twice a year was oversexed and many animals copulated only once in a lifetime.

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For one thing penis was visible. Secondly, it revolutionized sex by fitting inside the female body. In those days there was no such thing as a vagina. The female sexual equipment was a cloaca consisting of a common channel for urine, feces, and semi-annual eggs. (Things have improved a lot for women since then.)

Obviously, the crocodile penis too has undergone major design modifications as it was handed down over the years to homo sapiens. From the evolutionary point of view the modern American male sports the latest in phallic equipment. But problem still remained.

Men equipped with this wonderful organ quickly developed a lively interest in the female sexual apparatus, by then improved and expanded into a closely-coupled vagina, labia, and clitoris.

Like the crocodiles before them men and women discovered that combining their sexual resources resulted in immense pleasure for both contributors.

For the next 50,000 years all went well. Sex was a normal psychological function as routine as swimming had been to the crocodile and as essential and enjoyable as eating was to early man. Then came the Dark Ages.

About 400 A.D. Western civilization abruptly lurched in a different direction. Suddenly sex was out and guilt was in.

As some long-forgotten genius in the field of medieval motivational psychology discovered, men and women are unbelievably responsive to the liking up of sex and guilt.

From that moment on, the fate of society (and most of its members) was sealed. The most efficient means of controlling human behavior had been put into effect: focus on an activity which everybody must engage in—sex; select its most joyable aspect—copulation; finally provide the threat of severe and relentless punishment for its enjoyment.

As the machinery of sexual repression creaked into action, the power and influence of those in control grew enormously. There were, to be sure, a few hitches at first but all resistance finally yielded to the crushing force of sexual repression.

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One of the major early problems was that the moralists actually underestimated the potential of their new weapon to change the destiny of the Western world.

Apparently the original idea was to make sex only a minor transgression. However all levels of society almost immediately succumbed to the irresistible urge to feel guilty about perfectly normal sexual feelings. In effect this was the “new morality,” Dark Ages version.

In some ways a most frightening form. Sex rapidly became an emotional commodity to be consumed under the strictest prohibitions, if at all.

Like the famous insurance policy that pays off is the insured is killed by a cable car on the Fourth of July while carrying an Easter bunny, sexual relations came to be allowed only under the most rigid restrictions.

According to these forerunners of our modern moral guardians, sex was to be limited to married couples in bed, in the dark, fully clothed, ideally involving an important man and a frigid woman with just enough sperm dripping onto the lady’s private parts to bring on a joyless impregnation.

That was another challenge for the moral reformers. Since it sets a liberal tone toward sex, a major hatchet job was in order.

The Good Book was extensively distorted and misinterpreted to make it appear to endorse sexual repression.

Genesis was reinterpreted to make Adam and Eve seem like sinners who were evicted from the Garden of Eden for daring to engage in sexual intercourse.

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Later versions were further sanitized and Adam’s penis was replaced by the ever-present serpent hovering greedily around Eve’s pubic fig leaf.

The sexual purifiers smugly ignored reality: if God had not intended His first man and woman to copulate He would simply have molded their mortal clay a bit differently and left them nothing to work with.

Some of the changes were downright silly. In the Revised Version of the Bible of 1881, the word “whore” was changed to “harlot” and the term, “whoremonger” was replaced by “fornicator.” No exact figures are available to the number of souls saved by these semantic gymnastics.

The Bible was only the beginning. After emasculating this once lusty and vital Scripture, every other possible work of man, artistic and literary, were purged and distorted to eliminate any mention of rational human sexuality.

Fifteen hundred years ago the single most enduring principle of Western society was forged: SEX IS BAD.

From that moment to the present, hundreds of millions of innocent people have been brainwashed into believing a silly bit nonsense: sex is synonymous with sin.

Regrettably, no force on earth has been able to turn back the emotional calendar and the misconception goes on, constantly reinforced.

For more than a dozen centuries every persuasive force available has been harnessed to desexualize the most highly-sexed animal this planet has ever known—the human being. Their message is always the same and always untrue: sex, except under nearly impossible circumstances, is wicked.

One of the real tragedies of recent times is the attempted corruption of the human body. A small group of moral crusaders, working with that fevered devotion seen only in the mentally deranged, has been trying to convince everyone that the perfectly synchronized beautifully designed, elegantly planned mechanisms of their bodies are nasty, filthy, and horrid.

That psychological masterpiece which makes human reproduction unique has been distorted by those who should know better into a curse and a sickness.

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In reality menstruation signifies perfect health. The ounce or two of blood that is passed each month is the banner of a normal reproductive system. If blood is unclean, imagine what the moral crusaders can make of a nosebleed.

When it comes to sexual intercourse, the guerrilla fighters for purity bring on their big guns. Their favorite word is “dirty”—and they are wrong again.

By every test, sexual intercourse is probably the purest and daintiest activity that a man and woman can engage in, aside from being the most enjoyable.

The genitals themselves are normally free of harmful bacteria, the secretions are perfectly sterile, and the penis and vagina were obviously designed to be brought together in their own inimitable style.

By contrast, the throat of every person, including the anti-sex orators, is crammed with a dozen varieties of lethal bacteria.

These include the bugs that cause diphtheria, gonorrhea, strep throat, and rheumatic fever. If they want to start a crusade, it should probably begin in their own noses and mouths.

Actually the sexual reformers are on the wrong track. If they really hope to make men and women afraid of themselves, they might devote their attention to other organ systems.

Breathing offers a good opportunity. We take in good clean air and pervert it into bad breath! Only a few cynical mouthwash salesmen have jumped on that one, but there is plenty of room for moral education about how the body ruins God-given oxygen.

Sweating is another good area. Fifty thousand years ago human beings used their noses as much as their eyes. They could identify a stranger by his smell and could distinguish approaching animals and men by their specific odors.

The need for that talent has diminished somewhat but the human aroma still clings to man. It is now known as “body odor” and must be eliminated at all costs.

A human who smells like a human is headed for social and occupational disaster. In order to be accepted by the rest of his race, his breath must reek of carbolic acid, his armpits give off the scent of gardenias, and his skin exude hexachlorophene.

A few years ago chlorophyll tablets were developed to expunge once and for all every trace of human smells. (As a tribute to man’s sanity, they were tried and quickly discarded by all except fugitives wishing to avoid the bloodhounds.)

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Perhaps the last frontier for those reformers who want to protect us against ourselves is the digestive system. If they really concentrated they might be able to spoil the pleasure of eating for a hundred million or so fellow citizens. All they would need to do would be to explain, “When you take that beautiful food, provided for you by Heaven’s bounty, and put it into your body, it is attacked by filthy chemicals and changed into a green stinking mass. Do you know what that food finally becomes? Do you know what it is turned into?”

The lecture would have to stop at this point because the devoted moralists couldn’t say the word.

Every organ, every secretion, every cell of the human body was put there by nature, by the Creator, for a purpose.

The respiratory system, the digestive system, the sweat glands, all have a vital function in the preservation of the body. The sexual organs are no exception. For the past few hundred years, not more than a fleeting moment in the history of mankind, a strange collection of misguided do-gooders and moralizing misfits have tried to make us forget how we all arrived in this world. They miss the point. Ever since the beginning of the human race, sexual intercourse has been the most noble and wholesome of all man’s activities.

In spite of the shrill protests of those self-appointed moral guardians, nothing is going to change that.

Every woman, married or not, deserves the freedom to enjoy the ultimate expression of her sexual potential. With knowledge and determination and courage, that achievement is within her grasp.

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two local dailies in Iloilo.—Ed)