What is so sacred about sex? – Part 1  

In the Saturday, May 6, 2006 edition of ‘The Mirror,’ columnist Dr. Clayton Clay wrote an attention-grabbing article titled, “Pornography and a young mind.” In the article he recounted a problem a single mother told him she was facing concerning her five-year old son.  The young boy got an erection whenever his mother touched him to either give him a bath or dress him up. Initially doctors had told the woman that it was normal for boys his age to wake up in the morning with an erection. But apparently this boy’s case was more than that. Anytime he saw what he thought was sexually exciting, he got aroused like nobody’s business, and this included his mother’s touch.

The woman said that on one occasion she saw her son pick up a pillow and simulate sex in reaction to a love scene on, Promise, a soap opera on TV. She said she gave him a good beating for this behaviour which she considered immoral. Sometime later the woman received a report from the boy’s Day Care centre that he was caught inserting his fingers into the genitals of a girl in his class. The mystery of this boy’s puzzling behaviour was unravelled for the mother when she took the boy to his father’s house, where he often spent his holidays. The mother discovered a pile of pornographic videos and magazines in the bedroom of her estranged husband. Apparently, these materials were what  had so decimated the innocence of this young mind that he now could not help but associate the female body, even his mother’s, with the delights of sex.

In a subsequent article in the May 13, 2006 edition of ‘The Mirror,’ Dr. Clay reprinted a letter from a 51 year old man who confessed that, “I am always thinking about sex.” The man stated that he had two wives and also two sex mates. “I call them two sex mates because that really is what they are. I am more than able to satisfy all four women. As if that is not enough, I visit prostitutes as well.” he wrote. The details were simply stunning, for he seemed to be pushing the meaning of the word “Addiction” to new heights. He confessed, “I admire women with broad hips and big buttocks and I carry with me memories of such women anytime I see them into the secrecy of the toilet, bathroom or bedroom, work myself into imagination and enjoy myself.” He had been in the habit for 36 years. “… I cannot imagine masturbating at the age of 80. But in all probability that is what is going to happen,” he said helplessly. He also confessed that he had tried to stop this habit through repeated New Year’s resolutions but all had failed.

Further, somewhere in 2011, I listened to a woman being interviewed on one of our local radio stations about her sexual life. She was a well-to-do widow who was in a primarily sexual relationship with a far younger man who provided her with what she needed sexually. She in turn took very good care of this young man’s financial needs. Asked whether she feared if the young man would one day leave her when he found a younger woman around his age, the woman said she was aware of that prospect but in the mean time the young man was providing her with what she wanted.  She sounded very casual about the whole story.

 A panoramic view

The above stories may seem strange to some, but the signals from some research studies seem to suggest that we are either on the verge of or already in a sexual revolution. A study published in the International Family Planning Perspectives Journal, in 2003 on ‘Reproductive Health Risk and Protective Factors Among Unmarried Youth in Ghana,’ which used a nationally representative sample of 3,739 unmarried 12–24-year-olds, found  41% of female and 36% of male youth reporting that they had sexual experience. Four percent of these females and 11% of the males had had more than one sexual partner in the three months before the survey. In another study published in the same journal that year on ‘Sexual Health Experiences of Adolescents’ in Takoradi, Sunyani and Tamale involving 704 never-married youth aged 12-24, it was found that 52% of the respondents had had sexual intercourse.  Further, the 2008 Ghana Demographic Health Survey (which interviewed 11,778 households) reported that 8% of young women and 4% of young men had their first sexual intercourse before the age of 15, while 44% of young women and 28% of young men had first sexual intercourse by age 18. Thirty-four percent of all never-married women aged 15-24 and 30% of never-married men aged 15- 24 had sexual intercourse in the 12 months preceding the survey.

In addition, just recently it was reported in the news that 15 school girls in the Akuapem South District of the Eastern Region, aged between 14 and 16 years underwent Jadelle method of family planning to protect them from unwanted pregnancies because they had made it clear that they could not abstain from pre-marital sex.

Our generation is one in which sex and sensuality are not big deals. Why wait till marriage when the movies, soap operas and the reality shows say it is alright to start now? We cannot imagine a pre-marital love relationship without sex. “Eeish, is such a thing even possible?” we wonder. Married folks seem to find it necessary to get someone to satisfy them sexually when their spouses are not within reach. Even the average joke today must have some allusions to sex. Sex is like a free drug to be dispensed to anyone ready for it, (and sometimes even to people who are not ready for it – the cases of abused women and children). Our culture’s sexual temperature is heading towards fever level. In his satirical poem on the modern western mindset, Steve Turner, wrote, “We believe in sex, before, during and after marriage.” This is much like the emerging popular culture in Ghana. We do not believe there should be any set limits on sex except those we impose on ourselves as individuals; we want to have sex, we want to watch others having sex, and we want to dress in sexually attractive ways in public. In public discourses we may affirm that such things as adultery, fornication and pornography are wrong but in private life we deny them.

Here is the simple truth: When our minds are not convinced about certain beliefs or values that we advocate, our lives would eventually reject them, and this is precisely what is happening in Ghana today. We are outgrowing the “taboo days”; we need reasonable and convincing reasons why we ought not to have sex with anyone, anywhere and at any time we want.

Many of us today live quietly with the belief that everything is alright so long as you do not hurt anyone, to the best of your definition of hurt.  This belief is rapidly working itself out in our lives – for both non-religious and religious folks.  Today we have an expression like “two consenting adults” as if to suggest that so long as there is agreement about the sexual act among two adults, there can be nothing morally wrong with it. We have no moral right to describe a particular sexual act as immoral since the definition now rests with the “two consenting adults.” We play with words now. The weight of words like “adultery” and “fornication,” for instance, have been reduced to mere “cheating.” Thus in an “open relationship” it cannot be said that you have cheated when you have slept with another person. The moral rightness or wrongness of the sexual act is no longer defined in the act itself but rather by the agreement or absence of agreement between any two people – married or not. Everyone else must mind their own business.

 Putting things into perspective

 While a case against such subjective attitude to sexual morality can be made from a social point of view, I think it ultimately cannot hold without a stronger foundation for our sexual moral obligations.  Consider the following thought which I borrow from the former Cambridge University professor and also Atheist-turned-Christian, C. S. Lewis: Let us picture a man on a ship among a convoy of ships on the sea. Now, if this man thinks or says about something he wants to do with his ship, “it is not wrong because it doesn’t hurt anyone else”, he understands well enough that he must not damage the other ships in the convoy, yet he honestly believes that what he does to his own ship is simply his own business. But does it not make a world of difference whether this man’s ship is actually his own property or not? Does it not make a great difference whether we are indeed the owners or the landlords of our minds and bodies or simply tenants who are responsible to the real landlord? This question is intended to force us to make absolutely sure that our bodies have not been “given” to us by someone else, before we start living to please ourselves. If it is the case that someone else made us for his own purposes, then it is quite certain that we would have a number of duties, which we should otherwise not have if we only belonged to ourselves. But of course, for some, this is a big “IF” because they do not believe (or at least they live as if they do not believe) that there is any higher Being than ourselves, to whom we must be responsible.

….Part 2