Pure Sex
At some point in human history, someone, somewhere, came up with the idea of purity.
At some point in human history, either simultaneously or subsequently to the genesis of the idea of purity, someone, somewhere, came up with the idea that having sex was impure.
Very confusing ideas.
What is purity anyway? It didn’t always exist. It’s a human invention, it has to be. So where did it come from?
There are some clues in the word itself. The purity here is being used in a moral kind of sense. The word ‘pure’ has other meanings than just the moral. It can mean the purity of a substance, like pure water, or pure gold. In this case, it means that the substance hasn’t been mixed with anything. So is this what moral purity means? Someone who has not been mixed with anything?
It makes a kind of sense when a you think about it that way – at least at first. You can take up the view that a person starts off with a moral state that is unmixed with anything. Then if they engage in some kind of immoral act, their moral state takes on some kind of blotch, at which point they have moral state that is not entirely unmixed. It has become impure.
But this then begs some very confusing questions. What is this moral state a person carries around with them? And by what process does an immoral act leave its mark? And what even counts as an immoral action anyway?
What’s this moral state thing we’re carrying around with us? It can’t leave some kind of physical trace on our bodies like memory. It’s not something you can surgically remove and point to. If it was some earthly institution would have branded it by now. And if it’s not physical, what is it? Abstract? Outside of space and time? How would that even work? Where is the connection between this moral state and us who ‘carry’ it?
And if this strange moral state, being abstract and outside of space and time, does exist – how then does an earthly and immoral action, enmeshed deep within the confines of space and time, manage to influence this lofty moral state? How does an earthly action generate a blemish that may inflict itself upon something so aethereal? How does that work?
And what distinction is there between a moral act and an immoral one that empowers an immoral act to generate this blemish, and the moral act not? Where does such distinction come from? Where does it exist? Outside of space and time again? If so, how is it that this definition is so enmeshed within actions that are themselves so tightly bound to the earthly realm?
Very confusing questions.
Yet all the more confusing still to consider the relation between purity and sex. Why is it that a woman having never known sex can be said to be more pure than a woman who has? What is it that is so particular to sexual experience to make it so much more impure than other experiences? Is an unbroken hymen somehow more pure than a broken one? Does the earthly act of having her hymen broken somehow generate some kind of blemish that then somehow translate itself onto her aethereal moral state?
And how is it that this very same act is suddenly pure given a simple ceremony of marriage? Does the blemish travel up from the hymen and down the arm only to be held in check by the woman’s wedding ring? If a wedding ring, then why not a boyfriend ring, or a friendship ring, or an acquaintance ring, or an I-just-really-felt-like-it ring, or any ring of any kind? Under what perverse physical law or mechanism does pure sex in the bed of marriage operate so as to distinguish it from impure sex outside of it? What’s going on here? How does this strange idea work in the arena of time, space, and brutally honest reality?
What is this link between sex and purity? Where was it invented? Why was it invented? How is it that someone can even utter the idea without their brain tying itself into knots with the sheer confusion of it all?
Does purity exist? Is purity true? Is purity real?
Very confusing questions.
Much easier, much less confusing, to do away with this strange idea of purity. To take each woman, each man, each lover and each moment sans aethereal moral state. To take them as they are and for what they are.
What else can they be, if not what they are?
