Sex and sex

By Paula Sophia

The other day a woman I hardly knew asked me, “Do you have sex?”

            I answered, “Yes, I have sex all the time.”

She stared at me for a moment, blinked and walked away. I had a lot of fun trying to imagine what she was thinking.

            But really, we all have sex all the time, everywhere we go, everything we do. We have sex. We are sex.

            In our society sex is who we are (male or female), and sex is what we do (well, if we’re lucky). Sex can be a noun, an adjective and a verb all at the same time. No wonder we’re confused.

            Our nation has been embroiled in a heated debate over same-sex marriage, and you know, after a great deal of reflection, I’ve decided I’m against same-sex marriage. People shouldn’t have to have the same kind of sex all the time; it weakens a marriage and threatens the family unit.

            Do you see what fun sex can be?

            Of course much of our confusion about sex can be attributed to the Bible and its advocacy of a narrow sexual outlook. Scripture recognizes two sexes, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).

The Bible goes on to prescribe certain behaviors and expressions and a social order: banning cross dressing (Deuteronomy 22:5), excluding men with altered or ambiguous genitalia (Deuteronomy 23:1), prohibiting male to male sexual relations (Exodus 18:22), declaring a divine subordination of women (1 Corinthians 11:3 and Ephesians 5:22-24), all in the name of defining and enforcing a specific cultural identity.

In the Epistle to the Romans, St. Paul wrote, “Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise,” This view surpasses sexual intimacy and even defines as natural or unnatural many behaviors, personal adornments, and social roles.

However, the natural order to which Paul refers is, in all truth, its own artificial construct. If you look at the natural world, you’ll see a spectrum of sexual identities and behaviors and not the strict binary of mutually exclusive opposites.

Insects and arachnids defy St. Paul’s prescribed natural order because the females are often larger and more powerful than the males, and the females often consume their mates after copulation. Male sea horses gestate their young. Snook fish are born male and turn female later in life. Female hyenas have phalluses and are often bigger than the males. Lionesses do the bulk of hunting in a pride of lions. Many species of flowers have both male and female sex organs embodied in one blossom.

            Humans are not immune to the sexual diversity found in nature. Anne Fausto-Sterling reported that people come in bewildering sexual varieties that test our values and social norms. She revealed that people are often born with ambiguous genitalia and that infants are sometimes born with a mixture of both male and female anatomy and/or genitalia that appear to differ from their chromosomal sex.

In all, there may be at least five sexes: female, male, herms (hermaphrodites, people born with a testis and an ovary), merms (male pseudo-hermaphrodites born with testes and some aspect of female genitalia), and ferms (female pseudo-hermaphrodites born with ovaries combined with some aspect of male genitalia). In a word, intersex.

            If variance exists in the genitals, who’s to say it doesn’t exist in the brain, a much more complex organ? Could homosexual, transgender, and intersex people be playing a part in a grand biological imperative?

            So much of the Bible has been refuted by scientific inquiry, i.e. the notion of a firmament (the flat earth explanation), the geocentric assumption (the view of the solar system rotating around the earth), and the discovery that microbes, not a person’s bad deeds, cause disease. At one time, defying these viewpoints was seen as defying the natural order of things.

            How long will it be before we start expanding our knowledge and language so we can have a more articulate vision of sex, sexual identities, and sexual behaviors? How long will it be before our notions of sex will go the way of the geocentric theory?

            Well, it took the Roman Catholic Church more than 350 years to apologize to Galileo, a pioneering astronomer who declared the solar system heliocentric, that the earth and planets revolve around the sun.

            Hmm, I wonder…

            In the mean time, I’ll have sex.