I went to SixFlags Great Adventure yesterday with Ashton and a close friend of his, Chris. Chris used to be a high-school teacher and taught in California, Boston, and Florida. He got so fed up with the attitudes and actions of both students and administrators that he left teaching.
One example he gave that caused him much frustration in one particular district concerned assigned daily duties for teachers outside the classroom. In this particular school, certain teachers were assigned the duty of breaking up sex between students during the school day. This was not a poor school, but a successful public school with a dress-code, etc. The school had security cameras that caught guys putting on condemns while the girls lifted up their skirts and the two would go at it in – in front of cameras. “Let’s skip class and go have sex!” Chris, seeing what was going on via the cameras, would then go and break up the activity. He was quick to add that this problem was not only in this particular school! He also said that at least they were wearing condoms. I guess so.
Sex, for so many, has simply become a recreation activity. It has lost is uniqueness and “specialness.” I remember hearing a marriage counselor saying once that sex was like a Band-Aid. The more you play with it by putting in on and pulling it off, the more it loses its stickiness and its effectiveness. The counselor talked about sex losing its ability to act as a bonding agent in marriage relationships, resulting in more loneliness, less intimacy, infidelity, adultery, and divorce.
I believe sex is one of many primary means by which relationships are held together. If it simply becomes recreational and something to play with – putting it on and pulling it off – we lose one very important aspect of successful married relationships. We are bearing the whirlwind of “free” and “non-consequential” “love.” It is a great confusion between love and lust. Sex as a recreational activity may be fun at the moment, but long term the consequences of havin’-all-this-fun is nothing less than failing and dysfunctional future relationships. I think that then leads to much more loneliness, isolation, and a profound lack of fulfilling and life-giving relationships.
I see this in many gay guys who have played with sex for so long that the confusion of sex, love, and lust has caused them to be unable to form long-term committed relationships, which results in extreme loneliness, heartache, and with some great illness. This isn’t something that is specific to being a homosexual, but is the result of the homosexual subculture accepting with great gusto the whole “free-love” notion. This is, of course, common among heterosexuals as well, but our cultural boundaries still said to hold off and value sex as something deeply shared only between two people who have committed themselves to one another for life. These boundaries seem to be in their final collapse among most young people, and I suspect will result in a profound increase within their populations of the same things we witness among those who have gone before them. Sex is a wonderful and enjoyable thing, but like anything used in ways it is not intended and then abused, it turns into something that destroys.