The Sex Issue

Originally appeared on AOL, edited, Thursday, February 3, 2000

Someone else said,

Most of the women I run into and those most of my friends run into......I constantly hear the women don't wish to deal either with sex of a relationship......especially since most of them have been burned by men in the past........Interesting, Polar Bear, you decry the moral decay of society and sexual promiscuity, but you are perfectly willing to participate in it.......I personally support everyone's right to sexual freedom and I certainly had it when it was available......But I find it ironic that you can't seem to notice the inconsistency........I can't wait for your reply......LOL

OK, let me clarify my position. Please "bear" with me (no pun intended) as this is going to be a long post.

1) I DO decry the moral decay of society. Morality has been the casualty of the so called "modernism" based on philosophical materialism. I have elsewhere contended and will continue to stoutly maintain that the following people have led us all down the slippery slope into the current social decadence. These are names which sooner or later will live in infamy.

Jean Jacques Rousseau, who fathered five children and then put them all in an orphanage so that he would be free to "commune with nature", whose ideas led ultimately to the social dialectics that destroyed a social order that gave us, among other things, most of the greatest works of art that have ever been produced and led ultimately to....

Karl Marx, who was many diabolical things including a hypocrite who wouldn't let his daughter marry a man he considered "beneath her class", the father of modern day social idealism, which in its many forms have managed to kill more human beings than all the religious wars and conflicts in all of recorded history in just one century!! Then came...

Charles Darwin, who foisted the word "evolution" on all of us as an excuse for the devaluation of some human beings over others, the father of one of the most dearly beloved dogmas of current materialistic science as an excuse for the repudiation of any authority outside of science including any morality or code of ethics. (Those who get my drift should automatically feel a twinge of suspicion every time they see or hear the word "evolution" as a code word for being "politically correct with respect to contemporary science") If Darwin was right then so too was Hitler. You couldn't have produced the one without the other. Then came...

Sigmund Freud, who popularized an illegitimate form of medical practice known as psychoanalysis, based on concepts that have never been discovered by the same methods materialistic science commonly requires everywhere else. Nobody has proved the material existence of the "id", the "ego", the "superego", etc. and never will. Freud's bogus theories were and are an excuse for furthering on one hand sexual licensee at the expense of social order and on the other hand, creating a new clique of inquisitors or "expert witnesses" who have the legal power to determine the sanity or insanity of persons in or out of courts of law throughout much of the "civilized" world.

I publicly repudiate all of these people and their misguided and essentially evil ideas as well as their unreconstructed followers, whom I hold responsible for much of the moral decay we see around us today. To borrow a phrase from John Anthony West, they are "emotionally dyfunctional and spiritually dyslexic".

2) I never have, nor ever will advocate a sexual promiscuity that I feel I can participate in. Oh I could, like so many other people, just throw up my hands and say with so many, "well if it feels good, do it" and by this intend to have as many sexual partners as I please. But I wont. What I have said elsewhere is that the rules (oh we moderns hate that word don't we?) are different for people at various ages and in various circumstances. And I certainly do not advocate a return to Puritanism as if this would solve anything. It wouldn't.

What I have said is that the sexual issue is different for unattached persons in their twenties than it is for unattached persons in the forties, fifties or even older. The specific issue concerns provision for children. Younger people usually are more concerned with bringing children into the world than older people who may have already had children. For those of us who have already had children, sexuality is or can be used for a quite different purpose.

3) It is this "different purpose" for sexuality that concerns me the most personally. Having already lived through a successful marriage of ten years which ended naturally, til death us did part, and having already produced children from that marriage, I became aware that there are certain people who one meets who are, for want of a better term for it, "soul mates". A soul mate is someone one recognizes right away. This is not the same as love at first sight, which is usually infatuation, although looks are usually part of the means of recognition between soul mates and cannot be so easily dismissed as some would idealistically wish to do.

I have suggested that the reasons behind so much unhappiness in relationships involve people being sexually intimate with people they have no legitimate "soul" business being involved with in the first place. If for instance I decided to have sex with some woman I just went out to dinner with and she wanted it too, an absolute prerequisite anyway, then there might be a chance that I would be denying her the opportunity to meet her true soul mate as well as denying myself the opportunity of meeting mine. How responsible would that be? How much respect would we really have for each other? How much respect for sexuality would we be expressing?

Relationships are hard enough even when they are good matches. There are always adjustments that need to be made. How much easier is it when one "knows" the other in a way that almost defies understanding? The "care and tending" of a relationship is so much easier no matter what difficulties arise when each knows that the other loves them because they can love each other. There are far fewer needs to "prove" love which in any case cannot be proved. Let me repeat that; LOVE CANNOT BE PROVED.

What I said was that I wouldn't try what I wouldn't be willing to buy. This is really very simple and shouldn't be misconstrued. I am not a Puritan, nor a Biblical fundamentalist. Should there be a mutual discovery, me of them and they of me, a person who is obviously a soul mate, then the possibility of sharing a sexual encounter is many times greater anyway. If there is a possibility of a long term relationship, and I am a believer in the benefits of marriage, then I would be willing to engage in a sexual encounter with that person, expecting it to lead on into permanence. This is not promiscuity. But just how often is this supposed to happen? How many soul mates do each of us really have? Probably very few, but certainly more than just one in a lifetime.

Since I distrust a strictly materialist view of the world, I am certain that there is still much that I don't understand, much that seems mysterious to me. None of us knows why certain things attract us and others repel us. Not really. We can claim we are conditioned, but those of us who have really bothered to examine ourselves know who we are. The attractions are clearly part of our individual path through this life, the repulsions should be repudiated as not part of our individual path, though perhaps perfectly ok for someone else. Again, there will be a tendency to think that I am advocating a "one best fit for all" approach. Not at all!! If there is a name for what I call my philosophy on this matter it might be called an "ethical meta-existentialism". Each of us must find our own path and those who are going down the same path we are on will try and avoid distractions while respecting the rights of others to go down their own paths.

Then of course there are "opportunities" which limit our lives and we are always at the mercy of these coincidences. Some even get them and willfully evade them! They assume they are merely acting from their will, but meanwhile they may be losing their "soul" and their soul mates as well. Who knows if they shall ever get another chance? None of us does.

But there are means and methods whereby like radio signals, we can each one of us project our messages to our soul mates. These involve things like prayer, in whatever way one conceives of it, meditation, especially on what we personally regard as beautiful and creations, including things as seemingly mundane as business or professional careers and associations of allied interests.

I hope this sufficiently clarifies things.

The Polar Bear