I have a quiz for you. Check out the following quote and tell me who is speaking.
Humanity today is living in a large brothel! One has only to glance at its press, films, fashion shows, beauty contests, ballrooms, wine bars, and broadcasting stations! Or observe its mad lust for naked flesh, provocative postures, and sick, suggestive statements in literature, the arts and the mass media!
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Too hard? I'll make it easier. You don't need to tell me the name of the speaker, just which religion he belongs to.
OK, I admit it; I am a tricky bastard and my question is a trap. The description of modern society that emerges from the previous quote, in fact, could come from the lips of any religious fundamentalist, since ultraconservative members of most religions seem to be reading from the same script. In case you are wondering, the words above were penned in the mid-1900s by Sayyid Qutb, one of the father figures of modern Islamic fundamentalism. But they could just as easily have been spoken by a biblical prophet 3,000 years ago, or by Pat Robertson yesterday. Enraged by the individual rights offered by many modern societies, religious fundamentalists from different traditions are all particularly offended by the greater degree of sexual freedom enjoyed today by millions of people around the world.
I don't think it is a coincidence that the most vocal, hostile opponents to a more open sexuality are also fond of the most aggressive, dogmatic, intolerant, holy war—waging interpretations of certain religions. After all, if you are busy getting laid and having joyful orgasms, you are less likely to be so damn angry all the time. Sexual repression and fundamentalism are made for each other.
The fundamentalists' fear of sex is a running theme in their war waged against modernity. The fields of battle in this conflict are many. The availability of birth control is a prime example. For the Catholic Church in particular, birth control is deeply troublesome since embracing sexual pleasure and separating it from the possibility of having kids flies in the face of their dogma that sex is condoned only for the sake of having children. Perhaps even more troublesome, it enables human beings to take charge of their reproductive destiny rather than leaving it “in the hands of God.” This is precisely why the Catholic Church still officially outlaws birth control to this day, despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of Catholics conveniently ignore this prohibition. Not to be outdone, some Orthodox Jews and Muslim fundamentalists are just as opposed to birth control. And it was only a few decades ago that many Protestants supported laws imposing jail time on those teaching the public about birth control.
Sex education is still viewed by most religious conservatives as the gateway to perversion and immorality. The idea that unmarried teenagers may learn how to enjoy sex while avoiding unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases is enough to make them recoil in horror. “Just say no to sex” is the beginning and end of their version of sex education.
Good old-fashioned censorship is yet another approach favored by religious conservatives in their losing battle against “unregulated” sex. If we were to pick one man to carry the banner for sex censorship, the prize would go to Anthony Comstock. After coming across some pornographic pictures as a young man in the mid-1800s, Comstock was forever haunted. “Like a cancer,” Comstock wrote, “it fastens itself upon the imagination, defiling the mind, corrupting the thoughts, leading to secret practices of most foul and revolting character, until the victim tires of life, and existence is scarcely endurable.”
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Wait . . . all of this because he saw images of naked men and women having sex? Damn . . . Sayyid Qutb would be proud.
Tormented with guilt by his fascination for porn, Comstock dedicated his life to fighting it. He successfully lobbied Congress to pass censorship laws, became a postal inspector who opened other people's mail looking for “sinful” material, destroyed tons of books, was responsible for over 4,000 arrests, and drove over a dozen people to suicide as a result of his persecution. Comstock's censorship efforts included everything from medical anatomy textbooks to the works of writers like George Bernard Shaw and Walt Whitman.
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In the United States, it wasn't until the 1960s that Comstock's spiritual heirs saw the tide turning and their repressive policies being overturned.
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But Comstock still has plenty of soul mates throughout the world: from Muslim advocates for the strictest interpretations of Islamic law to Chinese politicians influenced by a deadly combination of a Confucian historical heritage with a Communist present, many are those whose hearts flutter at the thought of burning books and squashing anything having to do with sex.
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Oddly enough, even in the United States, the same conservative Christians who normally adore free-market capitalism clamor for government intervention imposing more restrictions when the law of supply and demand responds to the public thirst for sex. In one of the most bizarre examples of skewed priorities, many religiously strict parents voice little objection if their kids play video games where you have to mow down your opponents with machine guns, or chop their heads off with samurai swords: boys will be boys—they believe—and a little blood and gore won't do them too much harm. But their relative tolerance for extreme violence doesn't extend to sexual themes. Whereas ultraviolent video games are usually considered appropriate for teens, any type of nudity, even within otherwise mellow, nonviolent games, have parents jumping up and down screaming for the strongest possible restrictions against this blatant attempt at corrupting the minds of their kids. I don't know if it's just me, but this seems more than a little counterintuitive. After all, which would you rather see coming at you in a dark alley—an AK-47–wielding ninja assassin or boobs?
While you visualize yourself in the proverbial dark alley and ponder your options, you may also want to consider the enthusiasm with which certain religions have endorsed “vice laws.” In the city where I am writing at this moment (Long Beach, California, once home to the indigenous Tongva people and now home to great Thai food, a sizable gay community, and Snoop Doggy Dogg), less than a hundred years ago it was illegal to kiss or even hug someone in public. Six months in jail and heavy fines were used to discourage such “sins.”
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Around the same time, Congress passed the Mann Act. Originally intended to target men taking women across state lines to sell
them into forcible prostitution, its purpose was expanded by the Supreme Court under pressure from various churches. Under the new guidelines, it became illegal for an unmarried couple to cross state lines together. This meant that, basically, any man bringing his girlfriend across state lines was guilty of a federal felony. The way the good people from the churches viewed it, forcible prostitution and consensual sex out of marriage were morally equivalent, since any kind of unmarried sex violated their idea of morality.
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For that matter it was only very recently that laws against “unnatural” sexual acts, such as oral sex, were abolished in the United States.
This same desire to impose one's sexual ethics on everyone else is what led to worldwide stringent laws against prostitution, despite the fact that wherever it is legal and regulated prostitution results in fewer abuse cases and fewer incidents of sexually transmitted diseases than where it is illegal and unregulated. But this matters little to moral crusaders as long they get to force the rest of society to follow their standards. Consider that a few decades ago Christian fundamentalists opposed research to find a cure for venereal diseases such as syphilis. Even today some maintain the same attitude about HIV, since they consider STDs divine curses sent to punish sinners and bring humanity back to the “right” path.
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It is perhaps sobering to notice that most of the examples of repressive theology at work come from the modern West, which is usually condemned for its excessive sexual permissiveness by most of the Muslim and Hindu world, as well as by those countries were Confucianism runs rampant. The relatively more open attitude found in the West doesn't exist because Western religions take a more relaxed and positive view of sex, but rather
in spite of
the sexual ethics of Western religions.
Since our little journey through the sexual morals of world religions may have bummed you out by now, I'm here to come to the rescue and offer you some water in the midst of the desert. Just when you start thinking that all religions have been shaped by sexophobic freaks, I'll give you three examples to show you otherwise. The one and only Tom Robbins introduced me to the first.
The hero of our story is a Japanese monk from the fifteenth century—hardly a promising start if you're looking for sexual redemption, but don't despair. Appearances in this case are very deceiving. The life of Ikkyū Sojun was wild from the beginning. Born in 1394 as the illegitimate son of the Emperor of Japan and a lady of the court, Ikkyū barely survived a political conspiracy aimed at wiping out possible heirs to the throne. After being banished from the court, his mother placed him in the care of a Zen temple when he was only five years old—a desperate move made in an effort to save his life. Despite being considered a genius by his peers, Ikkyū seriously flirted with suicide on a couple of occasions. But in a way his early existential troubles made him much stronger, since he would eventually become renowned for his ability to find joy in the midst of the most desperate circumstances.
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Ikkyū's sharp intellect and intuitive grasp of Buddhism made him a likely candidate to climb the religious hierarchy within Zen temples, but Ikkyū instead chose to raise his middle finger toward the religious establishment of the day and create his own path. In an act of rare defiance, he burned the certificate of enlightenment (think of it as the Buddhist equivalent of a spiritual PhD) given to him by his teacher—a daring gesture since the certificate was a requirement for the higher offices in temples.
Certificate of enlightenment
?
Has spirituality turned into some bureaucratic perversion? Screw this, I don't want any part of it, thought Ikkyū.
Then Ikkyū found yet another way to burn his bridges with the religious orthodoxy. Despite his earlier iconoclastic behavior, he was named abbot of a temple. He disappeared a little over a week later. When the other monks went looking for him, they only found a poem he left behind which said if anyone wanted to see him, they could find him at the sake shops or the local brothels!
It wasn't that Ikkyū was giving up on Zen in favor of a life of drunken parties and hookers (though sex and sake-drinking were among his favorite activities). Rather, choosing the life of a vagabond teacher wandering the countryside was for him an extension of his Zen insight. It's precisely because he loved what Zen could be that he couldn't settle for what Zen in the temples had become. Given a choice between the power politics, corruption, hypocrisy, and blind devotion to empty formalisms that characterized many Zen communities and the freedom to actually live and embody Zen in the midst of a world rich with passion and contradictions, Ikkyū didn't hesitate. Earning his nickname “Crazy Cloud,” Ikkyū chose freedom. This total freedom made him shunned by most monks, and at times it could be dangerous and lonely, but that didn't bother him. Monks and other religious officials annoyed him anyway. In their hands, Zen had stopped being a living experience and had turned into a ritualistic dogma. Hookers were much more fun to hang around—more down to earth, more genuine, more real. As he wrote,
The sound of priests piously intoning sutras . . .
How their empty words grate on my ears!
Lost in elegant dalliance
And love-talk, we . . . scoff at grim ascetics.
With a young beauty, sporting away in deep love play;
We sit in the pavilion, a pleasure girl and this Zen monk.
I am enraptured by hugs and kisses,
And certainly do not feel as if I am burning in hell!
Stilted koans and strained answers are all you have.
Forever pandering to officials and rich patrons.
Good friends of the Dharma, so proud,
But a brothel girl in gold brocade has you beat by a mile.”
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The blood pressure of Ikkyū's Zen comrades must have gone through the roof. Most Zen texts hardly ever mentioned sex, and when they did, it was always with stern, puritanical words of warning. Ikkyū dismissed the strict mainstream Zen view of sex as a superstition created by unstable minds afraid of truly being alive. Taking pleasure in the body to him was a natural, healthy antidote to the mental neurosis afflicting most “spiritual” people. As he wrote, “The autumn breeze of a single night of love is better than a hundred thousand years of sterile sitting meditation.”
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And in another passage that can't be accused of ambiguity, he states, “Don't hesitate: get laid—that's wisdom. Sitting around chanting sutras: that's crap.”
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Now, these are words to live by. Take that, sexophobic freaks!
One of the things that bugged Ikkyū the most was the artificial distinction between what's sacred and what's profane, separating spiritual virtues from raw, earthy living. Contrary to the conventional Buddhist wisdom of the times, Ikkyū felt passion and enlightenment went hand in hand, for enlightenment was nothing other than daily life experienced in all of its intensity, with full awareness. By awakening us to the here and now through intense pleasure, sex could be considered no less than the holiest of rituals, and an orgasm could be as powerful and deep as the most solitary mystical vision.
For a devotee of joy-no-matter-what such as Ikkyū, they were one and the same.
The puritan souls in the Zen community were horrified, but many other people from all walks of life, fascinated by his disarming honesty and zest for life, naturally found themselves gravitating toward Ikkyū. Eventually, a wide circle of artists, poets, actors, and musicians formed around him. And so, between sweaty sessions of mind-altering sex and epic sake-drinking bouts, Ikkyū managed to find the time to shape the cultural history of Japan by influencing the tea ceremony, theater, calligraphy, poetry, and painting. In Ikkyū's own words, all of this was accomplished while “. . . tasting life and enjoying sex to the fullest.”
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