Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality (20 page)

Among hunter-gathering societies, social and political equality between the sexes is more common. In 74.3% of foraging societies, a married couple can live with either side of the family.
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Foraging groups tend to trace lineage through both parents.

This all makes sense if marriage is fluid, even unofficial, but this pattern changes decisively with agriculture. Property ownership made a huge impact on human societies. The focus of human activity changed to support the massive population load that came with more food. Equality between the
sexes became far less common. Women began having children every two years rather than every four, and children became important for labor. Farmers had to acquire and defend their land, plant and harvest crops, and build storage areas for produce and animals. All of this requires a concentration of labor and resources very different from hunter-gatherers.

Marriage was much more structured among landowners and not as structured among those who were not owners. Control of the land depended on control of the children, who would inherit it. This, in turn, meant sexual control of the wife. While the Hadza woman may decide to have a new husband or have a dalliance with another man, such thinking was taboo in agricultural societies. The landowner’s children must inherit the land, not some interloper.

All cultures seem to have some kind of taboos and restrictions on sex and sexuality, varying from extreme to almost non-existent. We will look at three ancient agricultural cultures that predated modern religion to see what sexual practices they had and how religion influenced them.

Ancient Greece was an agricultural and class-based society. The upper classes had large land holdings, the lower classes worked small plots and the slave class served both the land owners and the government.

Upper-class men tended not to marry until their 30s, and women were kept sequestered until marriage. As a result, prostitution was an important, even honorable, institution. Prostitutes were both male and female, and men might visit both. Not only was prostitution legal, Greek cities often owned and regulated houses of prostitution. For example, the great Athenian statesman Solon used tax money from brothels to finance a temple to Aphrodite. At some times and places in the Greek world, sacred prostitutes were part of some religious rituals and requirements.

The view of women was summarized by Demosthenes, “We have courtesans for pleasure, concubines to provide for our daily needs, and our spouses to give us legitimate children and to be the faithful guardians of our
homes.”
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At the same time, the law dealt severely with women who had sex outside of marriage.

Older Greek men often had sexual relationships with boys and younger men. In military life, soldiers generally mentored boys. During his training, the boy might perform sexual services for his mentor. Once a man came of age, he was expected to marry, have children and perhaps take on a boy himself. Same-sex relations among equals was discouraged.

The gods of Greece were overtly sexual. They had sex, marriage, illicit lovers, illegitimate children and much more. They raped other gods, had sex with humans and murdered or harmed one another over sex and sexual partners. The whole drama of human sex was played out in Greek religion, a mirror of Greek sexual practices, mores and taboos.

As with many contemporary agricultural societies, Greek religion and sex were closely connected to the requirements of agriculture. Women were seen as inferior and under the control and ownership of their husbands or fathers. Upper-class women were expected to stay in the house and out of sight, whereas lower-class women might be seen going about their daily chores and duties in the streets. Women had little political power, and arranged marriages were the norm.

Greek religious practices were quite different from those of Christianity and Islam with respect to sex and sexuality. Unlike modern religions, Greek religion had less impact on sex and sexuality. Sexual rules were more governed by the partriarchal need for control of property and progeny than by a god or gods. While one might strongly disagree with the treatment of both women and children, there was little in the way of religious guilt around sex, especially for men.

Similar to the Greeks, Roman religion had little to say about sex. The ruling classes were concerned with paternity and modest and upright behavior. Married women were sexually restricted to their husbands, but husbands could have sex outside the marriage as long as it was not with a married woman. Not surprisingly, prostitution was a common part of Roman society. Homosexual behavior between peers was strongly sanctioned, but a master could have sex with a slave or male prostitute.

Too much love for one’s wife was seen as a lack of masculinity. In fact, Pompey the Great was ridiculed by many in the Roman Senate for being too much in love with his wife.

With the discovery and excavation of the buried city of Pompeii in 1748, much was learned about Roman sex, especially pornography. Elaborate sexual scenes were found on the walls of homes and houses of prostitution, indicating the Romans enjoyed visual stimulation as much as Internet porn viewers today.

Roman religion was a conglomerate of religious ideas and gods from Greek, Etruscan and other cultures. The head of the family was responsible for deciding which gods to worship and ensuring the gods were satisfied. There was still great superstition, as in the wide practice of astrology, but no monolithic religious structure dominated Rome until the ascendance of Christianity in the 300s CE.

Nevertheless, there were brief periods of sexual repression, such as when Augustus (63 BCE to 14 CE) attempted to reign in the adulterous upper and middle classes. He used religious justifications, in part, but it did not last long, and he had trouble following his own laws.

With the rise of Christianity, sexual repression began in earnest. Christian writers in the late imperial period had a fixation on sex and sexuality. They railed against pagan sexual behavior and championed such concepts as the virgin birth and celibacy.

From the Greeks and Romans, we can see a well-formed agricultural pattern of sexuality. Religion is not a major influence over sexual practices, though religion does support concepts like male superiority and sacred prostitution.

Any number of sexual ideas and theories were developed and practiced in ancient China. But around 1000 CE, the culture became more conservative, and Confucianism almost took on the role that early Catholicism and later Puritanism played in the West. Sexual texts were suppressed and destroyed, and public discussion and display of sexual ideas and art was discouraged. As a result, Chinese culture lost sexual art and ideas for 1,000 years. Scholars are only now discovering some of the lost texts and artwork of the pre-Confucian era. In 1999, a Chinese sex museum was established
in Hong Kong.
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It was very controversial and was almost closed down several times. Its exhibits contain sexual toys, sexual art, sex texts and much more. It represents an entire cultural heritage that was otherwise unknown to modern Chinese.

The idea of an exchange of energy between the man and the woman was prevalent in Chinese sexual beliefs, especially in Taoism. A certain kind of sex with a specific kind of woman was thought to revitalize the man. Further, specific sexual positions and practices, if properly done, were thought to prevent or cure illness and extend the man’s life and health. The woman’s pleasure and excitement was important for the proper exchange of Yin and Yang. Unfortunately, this slowly came to focus less on the woman and more on the man. Ultimately, the practices treated women as objects through which men could achieve greater life and health.

The religious beliefs were related to the notion of heaven and earth. These were represented in men and women as separate aspects of heaven and earth and reunified in the sex act. It was also believed that in order to send life force, called Qi, to the brain, men must not ejaculate inside the woman. These ideas changed and evolved for two thousand years and were not universally accepted or practiced at all times and places.

Pre-Confucian Chinese culture integrated religion and sex to a larger degree than either Greece or Rome, but the pattern was still agricultural with male dominance and ownership and inheritance issues being tantamount.

In almost all agricultural societies, women are relegated to the back room. Greece and Rome were not friendly places for women and by today’s standards would be characterized as misogynistic. Chinese sexual ideas, while interesting and somewhat in line with actual human biology, were not particularly friendly to women either and gradually became more male focused.

Preagricultural societies engaged in sexual practices spanning the full spectrum of sexuality. With the advent of agriculture, sexual options narrowed
the role of women and became more constricted and restricted. Our analysis could go on across many more agricultural societies, including Maya, Inca, Egyptian, Indian, etc., but the results are all the same.

This brief survey of cultures shows the breadth of human sexual ideas and practices compared to the current religious environment. It also shows the roots of male dominance in agriculture that influences today’s religions.

Humans are capable of a wide range of sexual behaviors. We may tend to practice certain sexual styles, but those tendencies can and are shaped by the culture we live in. For example, we may have a genetic tendency toward polygyny as a species, but not as strongly as gorillas – besides, our religious map tries to push us closer to or farther away from our biological map.

As we have seen in our discussion of other species and of different cultures, humans do not seem to have a strongly predetermined sexual style. We are not gibbons that live in comparative isolation and have one mate for life, although some people do that. We are not gorillas with many wives where the male shows grand displays of aggression to keep competing males away, although some people and cultures have that configuration. We are not chimps with their male displays of dominance and multiple mating systems, although we have individuals and cultures that value aggression and dominance over other males and females. Finally, we are not bonobos with females that rule the roost and keep male aggressive tendencies in line, but there have been many cultures with that approach. We are all and none of these. Humans are the most sexually flexible mammals on the planet.

Within this wide range of sexuality, tribal religions existed for tens of thousands of years. Each tribe had its unique set of sexual practices. Two cultures with very different sexual practices could exist almost side-by-side, each justifying its norms with religious stories that were centuries old. For example, the matriarchal/matrilineal Hopi and Navaho lived in the geographic vicinity of the patriarchal/patrilineal Apache. The practices of each were thought to be a product of their godlike ancestors. Before modern religion, sexual practices throughout the world showed no evidence of a biologically predetermined pattern.

Next, we will look at how development of the major religions changed all of this, creating a set of practices and beliefs that prohibit and preclude the full range of sexuality.

112
Bramanti B, et al. (2009). “Genetic discontinuity between local hunter-gatherers and Central Europe’s first farmers.”
Science
, 326(137).

113
Marlowe, F. (2004). “Marital Residence among Foragers,”
Current Anthropology
, 45(2).

114
Pseudo-Demosthenes,
Against Neaera
, 122.

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For more information about the Ancient China Sex Culture Museum, see
http://www.regenttour.com/chinaplanner/sha/sha-sights-sex.htm
.

Religions have systematized violence against women for thousands of years. What is the cost of this repression?

“Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law.”

1 Corinthians 14:34 KJV

The most sexually restrictive cultures have strong double standards for male and female behavior. Women and men are supposed to act in prescribed ways, with men allowed more leeway and freedom in many cases. For example, a woman is often blamed when she is raped. The laws often make it difficult, if not impossible, to prove rape, and the man is assumed to have been lured and tempted by the woman. In sexually repressive cultures, women are always more oppressed than men.

Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and Christianity all claim that their laws and rules around sexuality are necessary to control the evils of sexual sin – humans simply cannot be trusted to control themselves without religious restrictions. But what is really going on? We know from examples of other cultures like the Na and Hadza that people do quite well in their sex lives without religious restrictions.

Most sex-positive cultures don’t seem to have problems with rape or sexual abuse, for example. Why are rape and sexual exploitation such terrible problems in many religious cultures and not in the less religious ones? In the sexually uptight Hindu, Muslim and Christian cultures, sexual exploitation is a major problem. Is religion actually encouraging and supporting abuse toward women and children? Does the assumed moral superiority of men give cover for abusive behavior?

We look in horror at the murderous sexual laws of Saudi Arabia today: women and men are publicly executed for adultery; women are publicly whipped for violating the strict dress codes of the kingdom; religious police have the power to condemn and punish even the smallest sexual indiscretion. These laws and practices are barbaric, but they are remarkably similar to those of Israel in 500 BCE. They are the laws of a monotheistic, patriarchal religion that has eliminated the female role from the pantheon forever. Whether the male Jewish Yahweh, Allah or Christian Jesus, there is no room for female gods, and the feminine is to be suspected, devalued and feared. This is very different from almost every agricultural religion that came before. Greek, Roman, Parthian, Indian, Egyptian, Persian and most other agricultural religions had female gods, often related to human, animal or crop fertility. We will discuss this transition in the next chapter, but for now, let’s look at the effects this new monotheistic approach had on sexuality.