(As I wrote this post, I imagined as my interlocutor the many people who have said to me, online or in person, things like, “Boy, you Catholics are on a roll with the pelvic issues. Time to move on.”)
You think it’s all about sex… that the freedom to have sex when we want, with whom we want, and as often as we want, is paramount. So therefore – obviously – the church is to blame for lack of freedom.
Stay out of my bedroom.
Meanwhile, in a coffee shop, a barista looks at a poster pasted on the wall dictating exactly how the drink is to be made – in pictures, no words. Sighs, blends the bland coffee drink for the nth time.
Across town, in a standard grey cubicle, a worker sipping a latte made by that barista, files forms dictated not by him and his intelligent surveying of a problem – but dictated by those worried about documenting every.single.thing. so that when the lawsuit ($$$) happens – the great fear – the evidence will be there. “We did not deviate from protocol.”
And each so-called profession has its picture-perfect posters.
Teachers, with their No Child Left Behind.
Doctors, with their for-profit health care.
Engineers, scientists, researchers, academics with their assessment.
So that now each person mirrors a version of “how to make the perfect hamburger” on the wall of the fast food restaurant.
No room for innovation or –
heavens –
Mistakes. Errors.
Sin is impossible in this world where we must all be perfect. And so is forgiveness.
Meanwhile, the mistake we can’t fully control, pregnancy, and therefore, sex – without which we wouldn’t be a society – sex, needs deregulation so that we can be free
but especially free to work. Free to become this new society made not from sex, but from grey industry.
So sex becomes boxed in, industrialized too. Orgasms must happen. Children must not. And whatever else happens, there must not be messy romantic entanglements. “I’m sorry you thought that exchanging bodily fluids means anything. I just don’t want a relationship right now. But I’ll take the sex.”
A pill or an IUD (mandated and made free of charge) suffices to keep women and men oriented toward that perfection we have enshrined in the posters on fast-food walls. The corporation must be free, after all.
Or if romance does happen, it must be tamed. White picket fence, 2.5 kids and a dog. And complaints about married sex being boring. Sorry. Make that 1.5 kids. (Wouldn’t want to disturb the boss by demanding too much maternity leave. Mustn’t give the boss the sense that I’m committed to this job anything less than 100%.) Divorce.
Sex. Sex. Sex. And the illusion that sex is free.
And those who would raise questions about sex – who simultaneously advocate for the right to give communion to illegal immigrants (oh, messy world) or ban landmines or speak for the just wage or against the Ryan budget or against the death penalty or against preventative strikes against Iran or self-regulating markets
come under suspicion. Because clearly, there isn’t a link between sex and anything else (!). Keep out of my bedroom, all while encroachment comes in a hundred different ways elsewhere.
After all, which of these press releases do you remember? The ones that call into question that political economy on which all this apparent (sexual) freedom is grounded?
Or the ones (apparently) against sex and (industrially free) society?
You think it’s all about sex, two people in love, alone in a private bedroom. But I am not so sure.
Hamburger photo linked to Mitzi Dulan, RD (www.nutritionexpert.com)
Brilliant posting. Alas, our consumerist, atomist society and the hegemony of my way or the highway thinking. How evolved we must all feel now. Thanks for your posting.
There are no words. This is brilliant and spot on. Thank you.
The hypocrisy is that society attacks the Roman Catholic Church for being strict, regimented, and unimaginative, when your examples point to a society aspiring to be that way so that we protect each other from, well, each other. We are so afraid of even the prospect of harm, that we erect procedures and protocols to avoid even veering near to harm.
Of greater concern to me is the double-standard lurking underneath some of the examples you give. The people who establish the procedures their subordinates must follow to the letter generally come from a social level, or received access to a level of education where thinking is encouraged. They usually attend the better schools where teaching is not for the test, but how to develop the ability to think. Lower classes attend schools which “teach for the test,” and develop students who are not educated to think, but trained to obey procedures and directives. That division is unhealthy for a civilization, never mind a democracy.
May I add that this can be a teaching moment the Church can avail itself of. The examples Jana speaks of is something the Church has dealt with in the past: the heresy of moral rigorism which leaves no room for forgiveness, grace, redemption, and growth from having learned one’s lessons. People following procedures, without knowing why and not being able to suggest improvements, cannot grow in moral or intellectual virtue. The Church, falsely stereotyped as strict and regimented ironically may use that stereotype to speak with credibility to how society can aspire to excellence without an obsessive fear of mistakes that regiment the dynamism, the spirit out of life itself.