I’ve always been surprised—okay, not surprised, but aware—at the extent to which sex is missing from marriage ceremonies. You find the presenter or priest or officiator of the ceremony talking a lot about love and marriage, but usually never mentioning sex at all.
When one considers that marriage is the bonding of two people for the purpose of sexual reproduction (or at least sexual fidelity), it seems a glaring omission.
Why is discussion of this central core of marriage missing from our ceremonies—why is sex hidden at weddings? The answer is simple, I think. Marriage is a religious ceremony, and the official in charge is almost always a representative of one of the major world religions, most often Christian or Muslim. And our major religions have an incredible amount of antipathy towards sexuality.
Which in my book casts them as evil and anti-human. People who don’t copulate can’t be trusted. And people who copulate but think it “dirty” or “undignified” have feelings that can be trusted even less. There is something poisoned and unhealthy about them.
No doubt the poison comes from religion. Christianity and Islam can never be condemned enough for the despicable outlook they bring to sexuality. They reek of memes which are cancerous. They have reeked for centuries.
If the dominant religions had their way, no one would feel any connection at all between sex and love. The twain would never—or almost never—meet. Sex would be dirty, debased and animalistic, and love would be cerebral and angelic. I can’t imagine anything more anti-life, more inhuman than such a split.
Marriage is a physical bond between two people who have built a house of sex between themselves—who have found their sexual home in each other.
But our sex-hating religions can’t admit that. They want marriage to be mental—the joining of two pure minds, the mingling of souls.
They wish marriage could be bodiless, just as they wish life could be bodiless. Which is nothing but self-hatred, since bodies is what we are and must be.
In real life, splitting sex from love has bad consequences. In the worst outcomes, it leads to rape and the murder of women. But even in mild cases it results in a bit of self-loathing. Splitting sex from love necessarily splits feeling from body. It disembodies our feelings. It alienates our bodies.
I will never forgive Christianity for hating sex. Nor will I forget that the hatred of sex issues directly from hatred of the body. I will neither forgive nor forget that Christianity and Islam and all the others stinking religions want us to be as divorced from the body as possible.
They worship nonexistence. If anything in this world is evil, the worship of nonexistence must fit the description.
In marriage ceremonies they pass this evil attitude on to our children. A wedding ought to be all about celebrating the sexual home two people have found in each other, but instead the occasion is used to hide sex. The minister or priest shouts about ethereal love (or worse, God’s love) while pretending sex has nothing to do with it. They thereby send a very clear message to our children that sex is a totally separate thing from love, that the two don’t go together.
The subtle message is that sex is off-scene, if not obscene (which actually means the same thing as off-scene), and its place is outside of marriage. Subtly the message sent to all of us is that sex is extramarital. Of course when sex crops up outside of marriage—exactly where religious people have pushed it—they cry adultery and sin. Yet their message all along has been that marriage is really not about sex but about love, not about bodies but about eternal minds.
The problem, you see, is that sex exposes their falsity. Sexual passion is the trump which makes it plain that we exist for pleasure, and that pleasure is inherently bodily. Sex tells us that we are indeed animals, that biological evolution uncovers both our intimate history and our ultimate nature. Tells us that our home is not heaven but here on planet earth coupled together, having sex.
We are biological beings. We are body beings. If we bring this fact into our wedding ceremonies, making marriage a celebration of sexuality and sexual coupling, if we make marriage sexual again, then we send the message to ourselves and our children that sex and love are not divorced, and neither are bodies and minds.
It is the beginning of self-healing. And sanity.
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