Well. My laptop charger died unexpectedly, so I'm writing Hive posts on my phone, something I used to do quite often when I was young and couldn't sleep in a lover's bed. Those early days of spending nights away from home, which I guess is as good a segway as any into my subject.
Seems only appropriate to end the year with one of the first photos of myself I took in 2024.
I'm at a point in my life where I'm trying to redefine my relationship with organized religion, but if there's one thing we can safely agree on is it fucks you up about sex something awful.
(Catholicism, perhaps, most of all. It is, after all, the religion I was raised in, so naturally, it's my go-to when I say religion.)
Thankfully, I was raised Catholic quite loosely and left early enough that I never ended up weird about sex. I have quite the imaginative power, yet I struggle to picture myself if I'd been brought up properly Catholic. Suffice to say, knowing myself, I think I would've felt a lot of shame. Of needless shame, too.
'Cause while I don't think we all have the same level of interest in sex, I think we all naturally take some interest in it and it seems to me any religion that associates sex with sin and even worse with that hot burning place fucks you up about your own human instincts something awful.
I was having a very interesting conversation earlier with people my age who, unlike me, were raised properly, rigorously Catholic. And while I think highly of them, I couldn't help noting how messed up their relationship with their own sexuality is. How difficult to admit, even to their peers, their desires and needs. I'm a very open-minded person, yet they still struggled with the shame of admitting the fairly obvious. That they are, like us all, sexual beings, that they have needs and desires. That sometimes they are primal. To me, that's a compliment. I think it can bring about quite a lot of good (not to mention fun) to be primal. But clearly not to them.
It seems so... unnecessary to me. In my experience of life so far, how much you enjoy sex seems to have very little to do with your worth as a person, and it seems so silly to me, so needlessly controlling, to put it into the heads of young people that they're wrong or defective for wanting something so natural and so inanely good. Because I do so think sex is (more than just being "not" a sin) a good thing in your life. To quote the late Bukowski, sex is kicking death in the ass while singing. I first discovered that quote as a 17-year-old just discovering sex, and I have yet to find evidence that contradicts it. It's one of the best, most joyous actions you can partake in, so brilliant and life-affirming, it seems to me almost criminal to make the youth hate themselves and feel ashamed for doing it.
I'm lucky. I've had a great relationship with sex so far. I love it and make no secret of it. And find, as I go, that saves me a lot of trouble. I lack that compulsion to pretend I'm something I'm not, and have found, once you get past the initial hurdle of walking through life as a wanton sinner, it's quite liberating (if we're being honest).
Not that there's much of a choice. Sinners know sinners by the scent of their hearts.
I understand, in a sense, the need for "sin". I understand the need to focus the individual on what is constructive species- and society-wise. Certainly, we're now living the opposite swing of the pendulum, where the accent is on too much hedonism and string-free sex (and seeing the consequences). But. It just seems to me that this great tabooization of sex has ultimately done us more harm than good. To think of all those people who repressed such an essential part of themselves just because it was "wrong", "sinful", "dirty". For their entire lives. Maybe even burned others at the stake for it.
I've often wondered at those epithets. I live in a world where dirty is a compliment. Where you want a dirty woman, preferably with a dirty Martini. But I remember often the people who come from a different world than mine and for whom "dirty" feels like a monstrous condemnation. And whenever I think of them, my appreciation for organized religion rapidly dissipates.
I don't think you can dispute the order, the purpose that organized religion has given us, throughout the centuries, yet I can't understand (and find it hard to forgive) the myriad of repressed, self-loathing people told their desires were foul.
Do you think about them? All the people who lived and died hating their own "foul, depraved" urges? Because I think about them all the time.
It's quite an ego-trip, I know, but if I was in charge of a religion, I would put sex, that beautiful, raw, primal act of finding one another at the heart of it. Not relegated to the shameful peripheries. It seems to me such a fruitful earth to build upon.
Suppose that's why they don't leave me in charge of organized religion, eh?
(Obviously, there's more at play, such as the advent of the Pill and easily available contraception. Obviously, there's a sense of clan- protection in discouraging loose morals. But I think a lot of this "for your own good" stuff has served as a fantastic means for control and submission also.)
How and who are you about sex? Are you proud of who you are, or is it something you find hard to talk about?
