Peter Espeut
I AM AMUSED - but I guess it's not so funny - that the AIDS prevention people have chosen to place Safe Sex Week every year in the week containing Valentine's Day. This only helps to confuse sex with love, but then I guess that confusion is already rife. I think it was the American comedian Flip Wilson who famously said, "Love is a feeling you feel when you feel a feeling you never felt before."
But then the rush of sexual passion is also a feeling. No wonder some people fall 'in love' so easily when they see a sexy girl or guy, and fall 'in love' with someone else a few weeks later so easily. They are confusing 'passion' with 'love'. "Ah love yuh" means "Ah want to have sex wid yuh". So maybe the AIDS prevention people know what they are doing to place Safe Sex Week every year in the week containing Valentine's Day.
It is tragic that so many young people today get their notion of love from the movies and television. Ultimately, love between two people is a caring relationship intended to last for the long haul. Love has to do with 'giving' oneself to the other, but where will modern young people learn what this really means?
THESE WON'T DO IT
Watching shows like The Bold and the Beautiful where iconic movie stars play roles of 'using' the other for personal gain - won't do it. The so-called 'blue movies' which promote sex as 'recreation' - the use of the other as a source of pleasure and entertainment - won't do it. Treating other people as 'objects' for personal gain or pleasure sets up the wrong kind of 'relationship' which will lead to dropping them when the gain declines, or some other person who promises more pleasure emerges. Viewing women as sources of selfish pleasure is one of the causes of rape.
"I want a man to mind me, and give me a good sex life" I was once told by a voluptuous suitor. "What's love got to do with it?" I wondered. "I have one man to pay the rent, one to pay the utilities, and one to buy the groceries," a female medical student once told me. It all boils down to the exchange of sex for money, and there are special words for that. Sex as a commodity demeans both the buyer and the seller, and blocks deep authentic love.
We can't begin to discuss parenting if we can't even get beyond safe sex. There are some people who "every time they itch they have to scratch", as one talk show host is fond of saying; and even though we are several notches above other animals, many people act as if their brains are below their belts. We don't have any social institution - not family nor school nor church nor peer group - that has been able to successfully teach self-control, restraint and responsibility. The idea is still out there that if when "nature rise" and you hold back, you will get sick!
SEEK TO BE FULLY HUMAN
To be human is to make choices, and love - after all - is a choice: a choice to give oneself, a choice to deny oneself, a choice to join with the other to make life, amid the challenges. A choice to form the fruits of love into mature rounded human beings. Only mature people, who know themselves and their faults, can truly love. And the rose with its beauty of form, its sweet scent - and its 'makka' - is a good symbol of authentic love.
Let us all seek to be fully human. I wish you all deep, tender love.
Peter Espeut is a sociologist and a Roman Catholic deacon.
