Discussion About Sex

A Discussion About Sex

By Roy D. Follendore III

August 13, 2002

OK I am a heterosexual male who happens to like sex. I am not saying I am different from any of you. I accept the fact that most people do. If people didn't, I suppose there would not be nearly as many people around this planet messing it up. Maybe that would be a good thing for nature if human sexuality did not exist, but it would probably not be a good thing for people. The fact is that sex has mostly been a pretty good thing for mankind. Sex helps people get along with each other. You might say it gives us a few things in common. It also gives us things to think about right now other than terrorism and the failing stock market. Fortunately we do not have to have sex to think about sex. To put that thought in inverse, we can think about sex, but we do not have to do sex. Cognitively we do not even have to be sexually active in any way to be conscience about sex. Thank God that at any given moment we can view sex extemporaneously, and that we do not have to have sex to appreciate the opposite sex. From this perspective that seems enough said about the general nature of sex, so let me move on to my personal basic feelings about the opposite sex.

I think that women are more interesting to look at than men. I am the first to admit that I think naked women are beautiful. When I was young I had a subscription to Playboy magazine. I guess all of this is part of what makes me a normal male. I remember I liked seeing the look on face of the playmate of the month's face when they would show off their gorgeous body. Most women are proud of their bodies and it shows on their faces when they pose for pictures. Women don't actually have to be naked to have that look on their face.

For the most part, most women are all the things that most men are not. For one thing, they listen. Men generally don't. Women express their feelings yet they remain sensitive and secretive. For me just about all women are fascinating even though they may not always be nice or pretty. On the sexual level, the stereotype is that man gives, women take but even that of course is not always true. With respect to emotions the opposite is true. Women are the center of attention. In that way women really do put out. I think that is where they got that saying. As a man I sometimes feel that I don't exactly understand why women would want to have anything to do with men on any level. Of course I admire strength and I admire courage. Men generally go out of their way to constantly present themselves as having more of these particular attributes than women, even though it isn't true. When you play out the natural concept of things, when it comes to sex, women often have more strength and courage than men.

I have thought about the kind of mindset women must have about sex in order to enjoy it and I have to say that I just can't get into their frame of thinking. I know what you may be thinking. This may just be a knee jerk emotional response. But I understand that feeling for exactly what it is. I just don't have that kind of courage. Maybe some may think I am also a little homophobic, but on the other hand I can find it easier to accept that aspect of myself. When it comes to certain kinds of sex I suppose I am a coward. So if I had to transpose my perspective to that of a female, I can only come to the conclusion that in my male state of mind I would probably have to be a flaming butch lesbian. I admit that I instantly have negative instincts when I consider the fact that if I were a woman I would have a woman's feelings about these things. OK I am back to ground zero on this particular topic so I must digress to explain how I came to have these set feelings about who and what I am.

While I was in college I wrote a story from the perspective of a woman giving birth to a stillborn child a thousand years before. I had just been to a Paleolithic American Indian mounds that had been excavated. They had several stillborn children that had been buried and I felt something for the events that must have taken place. In retrospect, my story was interesting but it was still a story from a mans perspective of childbirth. It was just my small experiment in risking my self esteem for better personal understanding, but I don't think it an act of failure. I realized when I wrote that story that I was risking my sense of male masculinity and presenting my own vulnerabilities through that kind story and at that particular time in my life. It was both difficult and worthwhile. It was worthwhile because it gave me a perspective about women and myself that I was not ready then to understand.

A few years after writing that story I assisted my wife and delivered two of my children at our home. I can tell you for a fact that what I observed was not what I had written in my story. For one thing, we were a successful team. For another, it was also not what I had thought of in terms of my own male cerebral process. The words that I wrote were dramatically inadequate. A woman giving birth is not only an exquisite machine, it is an absolutely amazing and wonderfully noble act of human compassion. That does not mean that during childbirth she is necessarily speaking like a noble. For my perspective it was a set of physical and emotional transitions and interactions that went well outside of what I am able to understand or comprehend as a male. It sounds funny to say that what surprised me was that birth was so much about sex. Assisting my wife in giving birth was sexual in a way that forever changed my thinking about the concept of sex and that is the point. The idea that a woman having a baby does not involve sex is propaganda. By hiding the birthing process behind closed doors the myth is propagated that the whole process is virginal. I guess some men think that a baby teleports out of the womb and onto a woman's wet nipple like it was being teleported through a Star Trek transporter.

I think that this part of the human sexual experience is something that our society is missing today. Farmers who delivered the milk cow would often assist in delivering their son or daughter. Brothers and daughters would help too. Modern society does not truly understand the complete nature of sex. Males do not truly understand the complications of sex because it is kept well hidden from us. We males are brought up to think that sex is all about conquest for intercourse. We are presented with the idea that the act of intercourse and the act of birth are completely separate and completely different concepts. Birth is not a part of our male memory, and it is something that we must not witness. Unfortunately for most of us, our part is over when our sperm is planted and our woman is pregnant. For males, participation ends after we have nurtured our woman to a hospital. Several hours later after we "deliver her to the hospital", where there was just the two, there are now three. So much for all of the attention she once gave us. "We are a family now," she says "so get over it."

The intervention of the modern hospital sees to it that our child is born in an "official" and dignified manner. From their perspective, they just slap that fat lady you bring in on our stainless steel table, connect up the million dollar machine that goes "ping," put her feet in the stirrups, pump her up with drugs to shut up her complaining, and wait an appropriate amount of time to cut the cord. If that does not happen in time for our golf date, just get a scalpel and unzip her belly to get that baby out of her womb and call it a day. It is money in the bank. This is a cold, calculating and isolating process probably invented by some male who envisioned all of the reasons why the story should work from the perspective of a woman. Women and children have become medical commodities through an antiseptic hospital industry of birth. Men are also causalities.

That is not really what natural child birth is about. My wife may certainly want to speak for herself about the "wonderful and enlightening" experience we had together, but from my perspective it made me appreciate her and what she truly is. I did not know anyone could have expressed that level of strength and courage. Moreover, the experience gave me an appreciation of my children and how powerful the fact is that they are their own individual personalities. From the moment they are born children begin to grow into their own. If we are successful they come to know who they are and they successfully become independent. We have added to the clan of women or perhaps the clan of men.

But the cruel fact is that most men lose the choice of understanding about sex because of the way that we have been brought up, in indefinable ignorance about the entire process of sex. Birth as a continuation of the act of sex usually no longer happens at home. Men are no longer exposed to the concept of birth when we are growing up as children. We men have become the manufactured product of sexual repression that has lasted since men were first not allowed to be a part of the birthing process. Perhaps emotional bonding with our children in society has been lost because modern male culture lost the understanding of what women are capable of at the pinnacle of their womanhood. We have lost the understanding of what wonderful individuals human beings are even as they are born. I think that this loss of human knowledge contributes to many of the fundamental problems we see with respect to sex within our society. I think that it is a reason why men feel that they can ignore their children.

Our children do not carry forward our spark of life into the future, hospitals do.

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In an open, free and Constitutional society, human adult sexuality can become a commodity that can be packaged for the private enjoyment of adults. We may not approve nor go out of our way to view graphic images of sex but it is there and almost everyone agrees that some of it is at least interesting. These facts mean that sex on the Internet is a multibillion dollar almost anything goes industry. Unfortunately, when we are browsing the Internet we will find both the things that we are looking for as well as the things that we might not want to see.

But if we are to be a civil society there are compelling lines of basic morality that must be drawn and held when it comes to sex, even on a free Internet. Regardless of your religious convictions, the first moral commandment for the Internet is that children are not sexual commodities and they shall not be exploited. The use of the Internet by child pornographers should be appalling to us all.

But the exploitation of children on the Internet is more than just a crime, it is also a social disease in which we all indirectly participate. This disease begins and is sustained by ignorance extending throughout our community. Those who do not want to see what is out there do not want to know enough to report anything. Those who inadvertently see, do not have a way to anonymously report what they have seen. They are often too embarrassed to report what they have seen. With the advent of the Internet it seems we have built a perfectly open system of communication, while we have ignored the fact that open communication is not necessarily free of human inhibitions. It is basic human nature that people will not report what they may have inadvertently seen in an open environment when in doing so they themselves feel threatened. In this manner, open systems like the Internet inhibit proper communication.

If we good people want to put a halt child exploitation on the Internet, we must do two essential things. First we must build a National Virtual Private Network for Children to isolate underage citizens from predators. Second we must provide a secure and technically anonymous means of supporting communication from the public to the agencies in our Government charged with protecting the rights of our children. If our Government wants to stop the abuse of children through the Internet they must recognize these two concepts.

Until they do, the best place to report the exploitation of children is at www.missingkids.com .

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