garcia madero.

Tonight is Caroline's birthday party. Decorations are going up, food is being cooked, cake is being baked, alcohol is being served. All in the passive voice.

I've been thinking a lot about the difference between values within our country, specifically in the context of sexual relations. My family in the South are all Southern Baptists more or less. Of course, there are varying degrees of their religious conviction, but they all come from a social background that preaches abstinence and sexual repression (in my opinion). Living in California, it may be hard for us to understand that more than half of our country still feels this way about sex: that it is purely a reproductive act, or at least that it is a pure act, to be done with one partner after marriage in your king-size bed with rose petals everywhere and little cliche phrases uttered every few moments. Not to say that this vision is negative. It can be quite beautiful. The problem of it is that it is merely an image - that elevating sex to a cinematic quality removes it from human experience and makes it unattainable. This is the sort of human interaction that makes me completely uncomfortable. Sex is not a godly experience, it shouldn't have anything to do with the religious. It is a conscious decision made by two people (or more, if you're into that) to explore the limits of human contact. The very physicality of it - the body, free and released, open, inviting - attests to this notion. I think conflating abstinence from sexual intercourse with Christian purity is more dirty than partaking in the closeness of human interaction. It leads to fetishism, to desires unmet and unexplored, to frustration, to alienation. And this alienation is exactly what sex should be preventing. I'm not advocating free love. I'm not a hippy, far from it. What I am advocating is responsible love and love that takes into account the profound implications of sex to the human condition. Maybe it's close-minded of me to be so open-minded, but looking at sex any other way seems backwards and, for me personally, a limit on the already limited closeness that we feel for one another.