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“The Irony of the Sex Recession”
Categories: Meditations
At the end of 2018, The Atlantic ran an article (I’m not going to link to it; it’s pretty salty stuff) proclaiming a surprising fact. In modern America, people are having less sex than they have for decades. Porn use, along with everything that goes with it, is booming. Actual sex, not so much.
Since then, I’ve read several articles bemoaning this trend. After all, if our nation stands for anything these days, it stands for sexual autonomy. It stands for the notion that people should be able to do whatever they want with whomever they want. We are willing to legalize and support abortion, even, to remove the consequences from sex. And yet, it all seems to be having the opposite effect. We have stepped on the accelerator, but the car has slowed down.
To the worldly, this is baffling. To the spiritually minded, though, it makes a bleak kind of sense. Sex was created by God. Like all of His other creations, though it can be perverted and abused, sex is inherently good. It is creative and connective. It unites us with our spouses in any number of dimensions, and it connects us to the future through the children we conceive. As is characteristic of the designs of God, sex in marriage elegantly achieves many positive ends.
Now, imagine for a moment that you’re the devil, and you see this beautiful thing that God has ordained for husbands and wives to share in. What are you going to do?
First, you’re going to lie about it. You’re going to use human desires to persuade the foolish that the marriage bed truly is not the best place to satisfy those desires.
“Why wait until you’re married?” “Why confine your sexual interests to your spouse?” Sexual immorality is evil because it frustrates the good design of God.
Second, you’re going to make it about pleasure rather than connection and creation. In our hookup culture, sex is intimacy only in a physical sense. It does not unite souls. It does not join hearts. It does not express and deepen a marital relationship.
Similarly, you will want to remove sex from procreation as far as possible. Abortion does this, as does homosexual sex. Thus, rather than being about somebody else, sex becomes about the self.
Once you’ve gotten things that far, the final step is to abolish sex. After all, Satan always wants to destroy the works of God. If sex is about pleasure, you can find that pleasure by yourself. You don’t need anybody else.
Besides, relationships are hard. You don’t get whatever you want whenever you want it. You have to be nice to somebody else, live with them in an understanding way, and work through difficulties and struggles. Why go through all that trouble when you can get your satisfaction with no strings attached?
Thus, the effect of sexual license is ultimately to do away with sex. As always with sin, once people get what they want, they find out that they don’t want it after all. The end result of selfish pleasure-seeking is not happiness but loneliness, misery, and despair. Porn never made anybody’s life better. The passing pleasures of sin are no substitute for the enduring joys of godliness.
By contrast, if we want sexual fulfillment (and indeed life fulfillment), the recipe is simple. Be holy. Find one person of the opposite sex. Marry them. Stay married until one of you is dead. Love and serve them wholeheartedly. Hate sin in your marriage and in your hearts. Stamp it out.
If we will do this, we will discover the sexual blessings that God has prepared for us. If we will not, though, we will encounter not the goodness of God but the malice of the devil. As the sex recession reveals, this is precisely what our poor deluded sex-worshiping society is learning.
