As an author, I’m supposed to post on media on a regular basis. Writing blogs is a good way to entertain followers without constantly badgering them about my books. According to my media training, I should pick a popular subject in order to get more followers.
What better subject than sex?
I got an urge to write a blog about sex while I was watching the 2 seasons of “The White Lotus.” I was taken in by this serial, which is a well done psychological study of rich people on vacation. The problem I found was that in a story I like to be able to identify who’s good and who’s bad. I need a foil against which the villain and the hero can shine and emerge in a tridimensional fashion. In these anthologies, as they call them, there is NO ONE who is a decent human being, who achieves the purpose of life, happiness, and who has self-esteem, which consists of the certainty that one’s mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means he’s worthy of living.
As I was sucked into the stories, I noticed a growing sense of sadness and depression.
Art in any form projects in concrete terms a sense of life as a metaphysical, all encompassing feeling. The shows were so well done that I felt they were indicative of life as it is in reality. Sex was a central theme in both seasons and was projected, at its best, as an unimportant and casual bodily function, and, at its worse, as a depraved tool for revenge.
The most illustrating description was in the first season. One of the main characters compared sex after marriage to a reality show where one has to eat a bunch of worms and does it very quickly, so he doesn’t throw up. This is how these shows regard sex, one of the main reasons that makes life worth living.
I cringe, fearing that some spectators may be influenced to believe that these shows actually represent the sad reality we live in. To counteract that belief, I want to reassure everyone that, if you have a good marriage with a well-matched soulmate, sex is still exciting and fulfilling even after many years together and at an older age. We live in times when we have options to help us to be able to express our feelings with our bodies, even after aging, and even after facing serious illnesses that preclude the use of hormone replacement. Having being married for 40 years, and having practiced medicine for 45, I speak to this from personal and also professional experience.
Excitement comes from knowing, admiring, and respecting the other person, sharing values, and seeing our values reflected by our life partner.
Quoting Ayn Rand, as she describe a sexual encounter between two of the main characters:
“The course led them to the moment when, in answer to the highest of one’s values, in an admiration not to be expressed by any other form of tribute, one’s spirit makes one’s body become the tribute, recasting it—as proof, as sanction, as reward—into a single sensation of such intensity of joy that no other sanction of one’s existence is necessary.” Ayn Rand from Atlas Shrugged.
One thing we always have to keep in mind, is that the most important sexual organ is the brain. Long life and happy sex to everyone.
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