HERPES AND THE IDEOLOGY OF RECREATIONAL SEX
By Charles W. Moore
© 1998 Charles W. Moore
Remember Herpes? Back in the early '80s, Herpes was for a short time the sexually
transmitted disease (STD) du jour, the subject of newsmagazine cover stories, and
much pontificating by "experts."
Then AIDS reared its hideous head, and Herpes dropped off the media map virtually
overnight. Unfortunately, the disease didn't disappear along with media attention.
According to the Centers For Disease Control, one in five Americans over the age
of 12 has incurable genital Herpes. That's a 30 percent higher incidence than in
the late '70s when Herpes was the crisis of the week.
The statistic is also a staggering commentary on how pervasive alley-cat sexual mores
have become in North American society. The fastest rising Herpes demographics are
among white teenagers.
Unlike syphillis and gonorrhea, genital herpes is incurable. Women with herpes get
cancer of the cervix about 5 times as often as people without herpes, although this
statistical association does not necessarily mean that herpes actually causes the
cancer.
Type II herpes simplex virus causes most infections below the waist, characterized
by painful genital blisters which disappear and reappear in most patients, with the
virus itself remaining in the body and causing recurrence of symptoms such as fever,
enlarged and sometimes tender lymph nodes, and the blisters.
The Herpes II virus is spread during sexual contact with an infected person, and may
be contracted even if that individual remains asymptomatic.
The standard herpes-avoidance advice is to "limit the number of your sex partners,"
"use a condom," and if you think you're infected, "avoid any sexual contact and visit your local STD
clinic or doctor." How progressively non-judgmental.
Herpes is just one more installment of the terrible price we pay for society's affirmation
that recreational sex is not only OK--but very nearly a basic human right. Popular
culture has decided, on the basis of mere collective opinion, that pre-marital sex;
extra-marital sex; teenage sex; general promiscuity; homosexuality; pornography and
erotica; prostitution; cinema and video-game depictions of sexual violence; etc.;
etc.; are either morally adequate, or at least not to be judged, condemned, or in
any way censured by society.
We've embraced the notion that sexual activity is just another necessary bodily function--sort
of like scratching or going to the bathroom. People believe they have a right to
satisfaction, and that sexual gratification is a wholly acceptable way of achieving
it. It is taken for granted that college students will have an active sex life, and
the same assumption is increasingly made about high school children.
People have been willingly brainwashed with the dangerous untruth that to restrain,
inhibit, or discipline ones sexual urges is "unhealthy" and unnecessary. STDs demonstrate
that quite the opposite is true. Sleeping around was never "healthy", but now it's
sick-making and sometimes deadly.
STDs aren't the only health hazards associated with promiscuity. Pregnancy in the
younger teenage years is particularly fraught with risks. Incidence of cervical cancer
rises dramatically in women who have had multiple sexual partners.
The "consequences argument" (herpes, AIDS, teenage pregnancy, disposable marriages
and families, etc.) that refute the sexual revolution should be evident to any thinking
person, but one rarely hears the recreational sex concept being challenged--certainly
not by politicians or the popular media, and depressingly seldom by religious leaders
either. It is virtually taken for granted that college students will engage in an
active sex life, and the same assumption is increasingly made about high school children.
By age 15, 27%-33% of girls and 20%-33% of boys are sexually active. 61% of sexually
active teenage girls have had multiple partners. By age 20, three-quarters of young
people have had sex. Reportedly, 25% of teenagers contract a STD each year. 55%-60%
of 16-17 year olds have had sex, and 23% of these had their first experience before
age 14. 15% have had sex with 5 or more people.
And why not? If sexual mores really are "a matter of choice", and one opinion is "just
as valid as the next"? Who has the right ot impose arbitrary moral values on dissenters?
The answer, in times when a more lucid grasp of reality obtained, would have been
that certain behaviors are objectively wrong
. But when social consensus insists that "right" and "wrong" are merely subjective
value-judgements--relative expressions of taste and opinion--how can we declare that
anything
is absolutely "wrong"?
Of course those of us not completely addled by relativist dialectic KNOW
that promiscuity IS
wrong. How do we know? Rationally, we can apply end-result analysis to observation
of consequences. But it goes deeper than that. To use an archaic phrase, WE KNOW IN OUR HEARTS
that it is WRONG
. The wrongness doesn't depend upon my opinion, your opinion, or anyone's opinion--it
just IS
. An objective moral order really does exist, despite liberal-humanism's efforts to
deny it.
In his book "The Stone Monkey", Bruce Holbrook observes: "humans, unlike animals,
have a MORAL
dimension to their physical health. If they follow civilized sexual mores, they do
not contract venereal disease. If they do not, they sicken and die."
"Sexually promiscuous monkeys," writes Holbrook, "do not develop venereal disease,
whereas man is MEANT
not to be promiscuous, so that his/her sexual tissues are more sensitive than those
of promiscuous monkeys. Human society cannot function the way monkey society does...
humans are physically programmed to be deterred from sexual promiscuity."
Sexuality is a powerful primal force. Learning to impose orderly restraint on sexual
behavior was one of humanity's most substantive steps toward civilization. All major
religions and enduring cultures have recognized this. Conversely, societies that
don't impose strict limits on sexual expression may survive, but they don't advance,
and ones that relax existing sexual mores soon suffer sharp decline -- ancient Rome
and Greece for example. Modern Western culture is already well along in this entropic
process.
We've embraced the notion that sexual expression is just another necessary bodily
function--sort of like scratching or going to the bathroom. People believe they have
a right to satisfaction, and that sexual gratification is a wholly acceptable way
of achieving it.
This pernicious idea that sexuality is an acceptable form of recreation, outside formally
sanctioned and ordered relationships (ie: marriage), is a recipe for disease and
social breakdown.
Twenty-five years ago, I thought the late Malcolm Muggeridge had gone slightly off
his rocker when he declared that modern Western society had "established a deliberate system of promiscuity...,"
and that: "The purpose of [sex] is procreation, the justification of it is love; if you separate
sex from procreation and love, very rapidly you turn it into a horror."
A horror indeed. Nowadays I'm convinced Malcolm was on the right track.
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