Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality (18 page)

I am happy to say that after several wonderful lovers, I found a man who makes me happy. He is a little religious, but it doesn’t get in the way of great sex and a great relationship
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The boyfriend’s sexual map went through Jesus, a circuitous route based on the erroneous idea that the mind is one entity. As a result, he could not integrate the two areas of his brain. The only way he could deal with the disgust he experienced in one part of his brain was to confess from another part, keeping these two areas separate and unable to communicate or integrate. Chances are he will engage in future sexual behavior that will puzzle him and create huge guilt and remorse.

Once adolescents are imprinted, those cultural sexual patterns remain an important part of their sexual preferences.
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Let’s look at some religious maps and how they might impact adult sexuality. Throughout adolescence, Muslim men receive strong messages about male dominance in marriage. The Koran is highly male-focused, with women being of little importance. Mohammed married as many women as he wanted, even a nine-year-old girl. Polygamy was acceptable and women were given in marriage with little consideration. Rules and punishments for women are far harsher than for men. The sexes are separated from childhood and male privilege is obvious in their disparate treatment of the sexes. In many Muslim countries, boys get an education, especially a religious one, whereas girls get minimal schooling outside of the home. Women are told that their purpose is to please the man and have children. Men are taught that sex with an infidel woman, especially in another country, is not a sin against Allah. For a Muslim woman, sex with any man except her husband is a crime.

With these messages imprinted in adolescence, Muslim men have ideas about women that are misogynistic by Western standards. Here is a story I received from an American woman who met a wealthy Arab man on-line and started dating him long distance:

The first few times we met in person, he flew here. We would spend a week or two together and have the greatest time. I really fell for this guy. He was educated in a very prestigious United
States university and was a thriving professional in Lebanon. He was very secular and seemed to have no use for Islam though his family was still religious. He knew how to treat a woman and was amazing in bed. I am pretty poor most of the time with a kid in college so I wasn’t in a position to fly to the Middle East. After almost a year and several visits to the United States, he offered to fly me over for a visit. It was an exciting opportunity. When I arrived, his father met me at the airport – not him! We went directly to his father’s house where I waited for almost a day until my friend arrived. His father and mother treated me O.K., but it was very uncomfortable. They spoke very little English and I spoke no Arabic. When he arrived, he acted glad to see me, but he didn’t even touch me or give me one of those passionate kisses I loved. I soon learned that I would be staying with his parents for the entire two weeks I was there. I had little or no time alone with him. Everywhere we went, his father was with us
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The most disturbing thing was how much his personality had changed. He was not affectionate at all and often talked to his parents as if I was not there. In public, he seemed nervous, and definitely did not want me getting close to him. Not once did he take me to his house. I tried to talk to him about it, but there was little privacy, and he never seemed in the mood to talk about serious things
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We did manage to have sex a couple of times, but it was hardly what we had in the States. I could go on and on about this bizarre trip. I enjoyed seeing a new country, but didn’t have any interest in him or that culture after that
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One might chalk this up to “cultural differences,” but this guy's sexual map came from Islam. While he was able to act like an American man when in the United States, his sexual map was strongly influenced by the religious culture when he was in his home country. His personality seemed to change when he was home. More likely, his sexual map changed. In the United States, he could effectively ignore his Muslim sexual map for a few weeks, but he could not do so in his home country.

What might the hormonal response be if a person is subjected to a steady barrage of submission messages from birth? Whether Islam, Christianity or others, religious messages have an impact as sex hormones battle stress hormones within the religious person. The body says, “take action on your sexual urges,” while religion says, “you will go to hell for doing so.” Such constant conflict will eventually distort sexuality.

Religious restrictions and fear messages combined with normal biological urges inevitably lead to stress. In his work with baboons, Robert Sapolsky has used direct measurements of testosterone, steroids and stress hormones to show the impact of social connection to health and well-being. His research is important because humans under stress show similar hormonal patterns to baboons. For decades social isolation has been noted as one of the most stressful events a person can experience, but only recently have measurements actually shown how extremely stressful this can be for both humans and baboons.
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Social isolation can lead to major depression, illness, gastrointestinal disease and suppressed immune response, among many other mental and physical problems.

Religions use the threat and practice of social isolation to maintain control and loyalty in followers. Leaving religion means risking social isolation and all the physical and mental consequences that may follow. Submission messages, combined with threat of social ostracism, deter people from leaving the church. For many churches, social isolation is a key tool for maintaining conformity. Those escaping often report strong sanctions and isolation from their former communities and families. Those who stay in religion can be stressed by pressure to suppress and ignore their biological map, are given powerful guilt messages and condemned for thinking about sex. This often leads to depression, emotional problems and stress-related illness.

We have multiple sexual maps – from genetic and epigenetic influences that are largely out of our consciousness to social and cultural influences that may or may not be within our awareness. We are a social and biological species with sexual patterns and tendencies that exist independent of any
religion. Religions attempt to force sex into a one-size-fits-all box, placing a layer of complexity on sexuality that is neither realistic nor related to the biological roots of our species. In the next section we will take a look at what other cultures can tell us about human sexuality.

81
Schore, A. (2001). “Effects Of A Secure Attachment Relationship On Right Brain Development, Affect Regulation, And Infant Mental Health”
Infant Mental Health Journal
, 22(1–2).

82
Bereczkei, T., Gyuris, P. and Weisfeld, G. (2004). “Sexual imprinting in human mate choice.”
The Royal Society
, 271.

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After Edvard Alexander Westermarck (1862–1939). He was a Swedish-speaking Finnish philosopher and sociologist who studied marriage, exogamy and the incest taboo. He was the first to propose that there is a biological reason people are not attracted to close relatives and there is little evidence that an incest taboo is necessary as Freud proposed.

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I recognize that this ignores other possibilities that can influence sex. These are far less common, even rare. In the interest of simplicity, we will stick to the basics but will explore some other influences when we discuss tier-two epigenetics.

85
Långström N, Rahman Q, Carlström E, Lichtenstein P. (2010). “Genetic and environmental effects on same-sex sexual behavior: a population study of twins in Sweden.”
Archives of Sexual Behavior
, 39(1).

86
Bailey, J.M., Pillard, R.C. (1991). “A Genetic Study of Male Sexual Orientation.”
Archives of General Psychiatry
, 48(12).

87
Parks, L., Ostby, J, et al. (2000). “The Plasticizer Diethylhexyl Phthalate Induces Malformations by Decreasing Fetal Testosterone Synthesis during Sexual Differentiation in the Male Rat.”
Toxicological Sciences
, 58(2).

88
Hanan, Mary, “Women With Male DNA All Female.” Avaiable online at
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MedicalMysteries/story?id=5465752&page=1
.

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I owe a debt of gratitude to my friend Dr. Dan Dana for his development of this idea.

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Josephs, R. A., Sellers, J. G., Newman, M. L., Mehta, P. H. (2006). “The mismatch effect: When testosterone and status are at odds.”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
, 90(6).

91
Bernhardt P.C., Dabbs, J.M. Jr., Fielden, J.A, Lutter, C.D. (1998). “Testosterone changes during vicarious experiences of winning and losing among fans at sporting events.”
Physiology & Behavior
, 65(1).

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The word “Islam” means “submit” in Arabic, but Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Bahai’a and any number of other religions might as well use it as their slogan as well.

93
Robert Sapolsky, “This is Your Brain on Metaphors.”
The New York Times
, 14 Nov 2010.

94
For further discussion of religion and disgust see
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
, by Steven Pinker (2011).

95
Ray, D.W. and Brown, A. (2011). “Sex and Secularism: What Happens When You Leave Religion.” See
IPCPress.com
for the full report. We will discuss this research in
Chapter 16
.

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For more information see Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam,
A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the world’s largest experiment reveals about human desire
, (2011).

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Discussed in Robert Sapolsky's
A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons
, (2002).

Western ideas of sex and sexuality reflect a tiny slice of human experience. The varieties of sexual experience, belief and practice are vast. In understanding sexual variety, we will see how the major religions limit sexuality to an arbitrarily narrow area of acceptable practice
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“Whatever the main biological function of human copulation, it isn’t conception, which is just an occasional by-product.”

-Jared Diamond

Before agriculture, virtually every society engaged in hunting and gathering. While “modern” societies have marginalized or eliminated hunter-gatherer societies, there are still sufficient numbers in places like the Amazon and Africa to study and make an educated guess about life before agriculture and what sexual practices may have looked like before the major religions came along.

For tens of thousands of years, hunter-gatherers maintained a steady population with very slow growth. It was a successful lifestyle, with less disease and greater overall health and lifespan than those of agriculturalists. To put it another way, we lived successfully as hunter-gatherers for 99.5% of human history.
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The hunter-gatherer lifestyle had characteristics very different from those of the agriculturalists that supplanted many of them. For example, unlike agriculturalists, hunter-gatherers could not afford too many children. No woman can efficiently gather roots, nuts and berries, and carry more than one child. Infanticide was a form of population control but may not have been practiced often because nursing women are less fertile. Women among hunter-gatherers often nurse far longer than those in agricultural societies, up to four years. Children were not weaned in many cultures until they were capable of learning how to help with gathering. As a result, children were spaced about four years apart.

Women also provided 60-70% of the calories to the family through gathering. This can be seen in the archeology of preagricultural societies and in today’s hunter-gatherers. In many ways, the evidence is still present in Africa, Australia and South America, as well as North America, until the very recent past.

Compared to agricultural communities, hunter-gatherers exploit their environment more evenly and completely. The food and medical knowledge of these societies is astounding and their diet often consists of 10-12 times more food items than that of most agriculturalists.

To understand the importance of farming on religious and sexual ideas, we first need to understand what religion and sex were like before agriculture.
Then we will examine the evolution of sex and religion through early agricultural societies up through the advent of the major religions of today.

How did sex and religion interact before agriculture? Cultures in Africa, Polynesia, the Amazon and China can show us a variety of religious and sexual practices that probably existed before agriculture. By examining these, we can see how today’s religions impact and determine sexuality in modern culture.

The Hadza people live in the Rift Valley close to the cradle of human evolution and near where the original fossils of Australopithecus were found by Mary Leaky in 1959.
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A hunter-gatherer tribe, they have resisted the movement to agriculture for centuries. As a result, they have been pushed onto marginal land and have lost 90% of their traditional area. They live a mobile life and use the resources of the land. They have little concept of time. Their genetic stock may be 100,000 years old or much closer to the root of humanity than almost any other group.

They live in such low-density populations that diseases do not cause significant problems. Violence and murder are rare. They have lived in the same area for thousands of years but have left hardly a trace. Since they move frequently, the Hadza do not need or want possessions. Besides, they do not recognize official leadership. The community is very fluid, with people coming and going, joining and leaving local groups regularly.