As Americans sing at ball games, America is the home of the free and the land of the brave, modern day America is imprisoned, held captive, and controlled by and within the idea of sex. Most Americans’ thoughts are dominated, motivated, and captivated by one common denominator: the erotic. Religion and cultural morality teaches sexuality is wrong, and its arousing thoughts, actions, and feelings should be banished from the consciousness. Because Americans feel obligated to conceal their sexual desires, they rebel, thus becoming obsessed with its pleasures, images, and risk.
Since 1996, nearly $1 billion in state and federal funding has been budgeted for abstinence-only education, despite the lack of evidence supporting the effectiveness of the abstinence-only approach (Rose 1208). According to Susan Rose, “In abstinence-until-marriage materials, sex is often equated with death, disease and danger…used to persuade young people to steer clear of sex before or outside of marriage.” (Rose 1208).
The abstinence-only video, No Second Chance, shown to middle-school audiences, correlates having sex outside of marriage with images of men dying from AIDS (Rose 1208). Even the title of the film, No Second Chance implies one will not be forgiving for the sin of having sex, before marriage. In No Second Chance, a sex educator compares sex outside of marriage to playing Russian roulette (Rose 1208). According to Rose, the sex educator tells a classroom of young people that:
‘Every time you have sex, it's like pulling the trigger - the only difference is, in Russian Roulette, you only have one in six chances of getting killed." When one boy asks, "what if I have sex before marriage?” he is told, "Well, I guess you'll just have to be prepared to die. And you'll probably take with you your spouse and one or more of your children (Rose 1209).
According to Katherine Sender PhD, of Annenberg University of Pennsylvania, whose areas of expertise include consumer and popular culture and cultural production, argues sexual content was not banished, but was contained by aesthetic "tastefulness" or was used as a class-based frustration which "respectable" families could compare themselves with the seemingly lower classes, which participated in promiscuous sexual activity (332). Sexuality was thus deployed in clarifying new formations of social structure; a respectable professional identity was distinguished both from the lower classes and from degenerate social elite in part through the training in sexual modesty (Sender 332).
‘Every time you have sex, it's like pulling the trigger - the only difference is, in Russian Roulette, you only have one in six chances of getting killed." When one boy asks, "what if I have sex before marriage?” he is told, "Well, I guess you'll just have to be prepared to die. And you'll probably take with you your spouse and one or more of your children (Rose 1209).
According to Katherine Sender PhD, of Annenberg University of Pennsylvania, whose areas of expertise include consumer and popular culture and cultural production, argues sexual content was not banished, but was contained by aesthetic "tastefulness" or was used as a class-based frustration which "respectable" families could compare themselves with the seemingly lower classes, which participated in promiscuous sexual activity (332). Sexuality was thus deployed in clarifying new formations of social structure; a respectable professional identity was distinguished both from the lower classes and from degenerate social elite in part through the training in sexual modesty (Sender 332).
Because sex becomes taboo, the risk of sex becomes much more fascinating. The repression of sexuality is a contributing factor in the obsession of sex. Sex, then, becomes a force in which to overcome taboos. According to Michel Foucault, “More than the old taboos, this form of power demanded constant, attentive, and curious presences for its exercise; it presupposed proximities; it proceeded through examination and insistent observation…It implied a physical proximity and an interplay of intense sensations” (Foucault 1663). The erotic, is then seen as a form of liberation, freeing one from the shackles of constant repression and reprimand from the church and morality. When taking this form of freedom, some become hyper-sexualized and obsessed. As stated by Foucault, “This need to take sex ‘into account,’ to pronounce the discourse on sex that would not derive from morality alone but from rationality as well, was sufficiently new that at first it wondered at itself and sought apologies for its
own existence” (Foucault 1652). Repression then is the cause, if not the definition of hyper-sexuality.
The thought of sex, is a dominating thought amongst members of society. According to S. Michaels, J.H. Gagnon, and E. Laumann, PhDs of the University of Chicago in the Department of Sociology, fifty-four percent of men think about sex everyday or several times a day, only forty-three a few times per month or a few times per week, and a mere four percent less than once a month. Nineteen percent of women think about sex everyday or several times a day, sixty-seven percent a few times per month or a few times per week, and fourteen percent less than once a month (Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, Michaels, 1994). These statistics prove that sex is, in fact, one of the most concentrated subjects.
Profits made from sex, in ways independent of prostitution, also has an effect in the American society’s obsession of sex. Images portraying sex dominate the airwaves, television stations, especially in advertising. According to African American feminist and author, Audre Lorde,” Erotica is marketed to women in their homes like Tupperware, or through cable channels and video cassettes” (113). According to Katherine Sender PhD, “The common sense of ‘sex sells’ masks the relationship between sexuality and commerce, discouraging analysis of the particular ways that sex is articulated to marketing and ignoring the limits placed on visible manifestations of sexuality in advertising and commercial media” (331). Sex seems to be everywhere from advertising of digital cameras, to the advertising of cheese-burgers, images of sex has been proven to increase sells.
To overcome the sense of imprisonment, people perform sexual acts to provide themselves with a sense of power and control; to release themselves from the tension directly correlated with sexual repression. As stated by Linda Singer, member of Miami's Philosophy Department from 1980
to 1990, who specialized in the field of Sexual Theory and Politics, “The function of power is not to limit or repress sexuality, but is rather to produce and proliferate sexuality and the demand for its disclosure” (Singer 151). Singer also states, “Sexual proliferation made sense as a strategy since what was understood to stand in the way of better sex was a regime of repression and an economy of self denial” (148).
Sexual suppression is the cause of American sexual obsession. Strict codes in religion and societal morality imply and enforce that sex, out of wedlock, is morally incorrect, and those that participate in its pleasures, outside of marriage, are condemned in this life with their names and health tainted; as well as in the spiritual world, destined to eternal agony. These strict codes cause a cliché effect that “one always wants what one cannot have.” Society has become engrossed and fascinated in the ideas, images, and liberation of sex.
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