Saturday, October 27, 2007

Speaking of contracepting ourselves to death

If demographic trends continue, I've just read, the population of Yemen will surpass that of Russia by mid-century. At first it seems a small thing, I know. "We've had our two kids, so we've done our part," a couple will tell themselves; and so the woman will agree to have her fallopian tubes cauterized. It seems quite reasonable. And they'll go on "having sex" without the inconvenience of children. Then comes a whole culture of recreational sex, in which the proper end and purpose of "having sex" (babies and bonding) is inverted with and displaced by its proper accident (pleasure), so that the whole end or purpose of "having sex" now becomes pleasure (the accident) rather than the proper end (babies and bonding) of the act. Thus, a woman will tell her gynecologist that it was an 'accident' that she got pregnant, although she was regularly "having sex"; or a man will say that he had no intention of getting the woman so enmeshed with him emotionally, although he was regularly "having sex" with her. In the meantime, this culture of death is 'sexing' itself out of existence. We're not talking, of course, only about Russia. Just about twenty minutes down Michigan Avenue, where my wife works in Dearborn, she tells me that the refined sexual modesty of her Muslim co-workers makes some of their mainstream American clientele seem like lewd barbarians.

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