To a culture that believes it has the right to an orgasm whenever, wherever, however, with whomever we want, she [the Church] tells us the truth that sex is so sacred, an actual reminder of God's love for us, that it is intended only between a man and woman united in lifelong, life-giving, faithful marriage.
unexpectedly gets something of a second from Christina Nehring in The Nation,
What's bad is that now we have books like [Jonathan] Margolis's O: The Intimate History of the Orgasm, which insistently and insipidly fetishize orgasms--adding, thereby, not just to our fears in the erotic realm but also, paradoxically, to our boredoms. What may be worse is that such books are in sync with the zeitgeist.
And the truth about sex and orgasm is definitely between those two states. And it belongs to the self and the to the self in league with other selves. The church fetishized sex a long time ago. Most of the players I know in the BDSM communities are ex-catholics, obsessed with giving and getting pain, a la Mel Gibson. Charming, eh? But my orgasm is about my body being whole and healthy and it is indeed sacred. Not that any catholic priest has a clue about that stuff, eh?
ReplyDeleteIf the BDSM communities are mostly former Catholics, rather than Catholics, that indicates it's not the Church doing the fetishizing.
ReplyDeleteMaybe these former Catholics don't know what a figure of speech is:
"The pleasures of sex are more vehement than the pleasures of food and exert more pressure on us; they need more whipping into line, for the more we give way to them the more they dominate us ..." --Thomas Aquina, Summa Theologiae (Timothy McDermott, ed.), p. 429.