Sex
By Jemila Kwon
“One, two three, say, “SEX!” Click. The photograph was snapped, semi-immortalizing me, along with the rest my coach-training cohort. The room, filled with women and one man from from places like Dubai, Greece, France, England, Germany and Jordan, as well as me, the token American student, reverberated with giggles, hardly distinguishable from the sound of twelve year-old girls. Some things are universal.
I love sex. It wasn’t always that way. Like when the first time I got married (I was a virgin) and it sucked. It was, well, degrading. In a legally tendered, pastor-sanctioned Christian marriage. It happens, more often than you’d think, that sex in marriage is unholy, in one way or another, yet the M word is like a tent that covers the sins of countless people against their own partners.
I love sex. I am divorced. I got married again to a wonderful man who had sex before marriage. He’s glad he did, only because he has absolutely no doubts that I am IT — the one and only one for him. The the occasional “ew” thoughts I have toward his previous partners pale in comparison with the incredible happiness I have in a partner totally sold out for yours truly. I would much rather a husband with experience who knows that what he wants is me than a husband without experience who secretly wonders, “What would it be like with someone else?”
I love sex. My husband and I assume that the partner who doesn’t feel up for doing has eternal veto. Let tell you, I want it a lot more than I would if I felt like it was my duty. In fact, I am the initiator over 50% of the time.
I love sex. I am not the only one making love when we do it. It’s a holy, intimate, loving, incredible, hot thing for him too.
Sexuality is a funny thing. It runs our culture and sometimes our lives like gasoline, and sometimes it lights up our sacred inner places…or even opens the way for a new soul to enter in.
As curious, spiritual beings, we wonder, “What’s love got to do with it?” What’s sex for?
Release, please? A song of creation? An intimate celebration?
For those of us who have had sex, or sex with love, or gotten pregnant (or gotten someone pregnant,) we understand all of these elements often present either as instigators or self-evident experiences during the sex-act. Pretty much everyone is okay with sex where all three elements occur each in balance with the others. — at least if you’ve gotten a legal license to fuck.
But what if you love your partner more than life itself and you offer each other your sacred vow to honor one another always…but you just don’t think your sex life is the government’s business? Now that’s a conservative Christian viewpoint that has been co-opted by the liberals, if you ask me.
Or what if you just want to get off and you couldn’t care less about intimacy or anything uniquely human about sex — the fact is, you’re up to your eyeballs with work and your horny and you think it’s your wife’s Christian duty is to let you spill your seed all over her on the grounds that it’ll help you keep your eyes on the prize — instead of on someone else’s prize, like take your secretary, for example?
Or what if you’ve dotted your legal “i”s and crossed your intimate “t”s and you lovingly bring each other orgasm in an act of complete, joyful surrender…but you don’t want to have kids. Ever. Like you’re not open to it.
On the other hand, what if you’re a teenager with an undeveloped frontal lobe, way too many hormones and cute, possibly charming boy or girlfriend and it happens, because unmarried sex has always happened,whether or not it’s condemned, accepted or ignored. I wonder what it means to protect our daughters at a time when there is something we can do to protect them from cervical cancer, even if we cannot always protect them from impulsive choices?
Or what if you weren’t scheming to ruin your Christian parents’ lives when you rode the rainbow down to earth and discovered early in life that you like people…like you.
Sex is a life force that catalyzes the start of a new person, invigorates us while you occupy this spinning planet and creates within us contradictory impulses that can either deepen our compassion and connection to all living beings, and especially our human brothers and sisters, or it can tear us apart, in our inner selves, in our families and perhaps most preventably, in our communities.
I think we appoint ourselves The Judge,when we see only two options: judging or condoning. In good faith, if find we cannot condone a sexual behavior, or a couple engaged in a non-condonable (from our viewpoint,) behavior — then we feel integrity-bound to judge. Which is ironic. Because we have only one judge. And he didn’t come to judge. Go figure that.
So what’s the alternative to condemning or condoning? A life-giving alternative is to employ different part of your brain and take “The Judge” off of payroll, or assign it a more suitable job, like separating out the rotten bananas from the regular ones in preparation for baking banana bread.
What I am saying is that by focusing on the people in front of us in the present tense, we can free ourselves from the compulsion to judge them. Let that be God’s job. Instead of imagining that we have to figure out which check box to click on Christ’s online survey of moral uprightness, give the whole checklist back to God, who has already ripped up the thing and put it out of his Mind, as far as the east is from the west. Instead of thinking about whether a couple is doing something wrong, help them with the lives in front of them. Get them water. Invite them over to play Cranium simply to be a friend. Let go of fixing them. God knows, it’s not in our power to fix people, nor has the task been assigned to us. Consider asking open-ended questions, by which I mean, open-ended questions to which the asker does not (think) she have the answer.
And whatever else you remember, do keep in the mind that the Master of the big bang holds you fully and loves you totally wherever, whenever, if ever and with whomever you have an orgasm.
Jemila Kwon is a life coach dedicated to helping leaders from all walks of life live at full potential. She lives, loves, laughs & learns with her husband and three kids. www.leapcoachinc.com
