Why I Write Erotica

Antony O'Beara 8/20/2023

A boy stands at the front of a platform holding five roses.  Behind the boy, four girls await in a line, and in front of him an audience of pubescent children watch.

 

"This is Amy," the boy says and hands the first girl a rose.  "She is the first girl I held hands with."

 

"This is Beth," he adds and follows with a second rose to the second girl.  "She is the first girl I ever kissed."

 

"This is Catherine."  Another rose.  "The first girl I ever made out with."

 

"This is Danielle."  And another rose.  "The first girl I went further than making out with but didn't go all the way."

 

Now all the girls had roses, and the boy turned back to face the audience. With both hands, he clutched the final rose to his chest and told the audience who it was for.

 

"And now I've met Erin, the love of my life.  Next week, we will be married, and she will be my wife," he declared.  But as soon as the words were out of his mouth, his eyes turned to the last rose, and he lamented, "I just wish I had more to give her."

 

This last rose was, of course, his virginity.

 

I was in the audience.  My parents insisted that I attend church every Sunday, and on this particular Sunday, the youth program had decided to teach us this very strange lesson about sexuality.  I would have been around the age of twelve at the time.  Even so young, I recognized that something was very off about the lesson that we ought to wait till marriage before holding hands.  My mother insisted that the real lesson was not to go further than making out.  For those who don't know, "making out" was a colloquial term that at the time meant kissing and caressing your sweetheart.  Going further than "making out" but not going "all the way" was typically understood as making out while touching your sweetheart's erogenous parts, such as her breasts or buttocks, with her doing the same to you but without progressing to sex.  Regardless, I could not accept my mother's analysis of the skit.  It was not what they said.  It was not the lesson the skit presented.

 

For years, this skit rolled around my mind like a tumbleweed.  I did not know what to do about it.  I knew it was wrong, but I lacked the words to explain how.  Now, I have a term for it: sexual asceticism.

 

Ultimately, morality is a matter of drawing lines, of establishing the border that distinguishes between right and wrong so that people may do right and avoid doing wrong.  With the drawing of lines comes the potential to draw them wrong.  If drawn into wickedness, then the line fails to prevent the faithful from suffering the consequences of the sins they are unaware they are committing.  This is bad enough, but something much worse happens if the line is drawn into righteousness.

 

The church I attended had drawn the line wrong.  They were not alone in their error.  Neither were they the first.  They were at the tip of a long and thick history of Christian theology about sex that culminated in the notion that there was something inherently sinful or naughty about sex in its entirety.  Of course, we all understood that sex was not evil.  We knew that sex between husband and wife was good.  Yet, the church's approach created this shadow around the topic, and that shadow became a line that made youths like I perceive it all as wicked.

 

Passion is alluring.  It is supposed to be.  Whether intentionally or not, the church taught me that I sinned with every kiss and caress.  And what was the result of this error?  It was my eventual wholesale abandonment of their philosophy until I understood where they had gone wrong.  This is the hazard of drawing the line into righteousness: that the faithful believe they have crossed the line by acting upon desires still good and righteous–desires that they are meant to enjoy.  Once across that line, they believe themselves already gone with no further barrier ahead.  Thus, they come to be upon a path to hedonism, the same as if they had been taught no distinction at all, and the path to hedonism leads ultimately to the self-destruction of nihilism.   

 

The solution that I found was purpose.  Specifically, sexual purpose.  I knew that sex existed to make babies, but what I had yet to realize was that it existed to make families.  It is not merely reproductive.  It forms an amorous bond between father and mother, and it is within that bond that those children are created, nurtured, and molded into men and women.  Upon this path, the biological function of sex is combined with its pleasure to form its purpose.  If this seems obvious, it is.  Yet, it has still been lost to popular culture.

 

Without its purpose, sex becomes meaningless.  It becomes just an orgasm, just a form of entertainment.  From this sexual nihilism springs all the sexual dysfunction of our time.  Worse, the sexual dysfunction actually makes sense from such a perspective.  If sex is just entertainment, then children are a hazard of sex rather than an essential element of its purpose.  Instead of a blessing that fulfills the promise of family, the child becomes a burden that hinders the pursuit of hedonism.  By applying this logic, the desirability of birth control naturally follows.

 

But birth control fails.  Birth control is imperfect and imperfectly applied.  So, what do sexual nihilists do when their orgasms result in pregnancy?  They dispose of their child.  Whether from within the womb or outside it, they dispose of their child.  We call this process abortion when done from within, and we used to call it murder when done thereafter.  Now some nihilists call it abortion regardless.  Nonetheless, it is an inevitable result of wanting sex without wanting children.

 

Moving further down this line of mal-logic brings us to another inevitable question: if sex is just an orgasm, then why must man perform the act with a woman or a woman with a man?  Before, the wrongfulness of homosexuality was obvious—homosexuals cannot create families.  Now, such arguments seem trite and archaic, as anyone can have an orgasm with anyone willing to lend his or her body to the task.  Children and family are no longer the goal, only pleasure.  As sexual nihilism deprives people of their reasons for opposing homosexuality, acceptance becomes the norm.   

 

But what is a man, and what is a woman?  Once, a man was the one whose role in sex was to impregnate.  Woman was the one whose role was to be impregnated.  With eyes off of reproduction, the concepts of man and woman are left without their foundational definition.  So unmoored, they become fluidic.  They become sets of masculine and feminine personality traits that anyone can have any combination of, including combinations that change daily.  From this, people derive the notion that a man can be a woman and a woman a man.  We call this phenomenon "transgenderism," and once you remove the creation of families from human sexuality, it actually makes sense.  It even makes sense that they often render themselves sterile in its pursuit.

 

Worst of all is what awaits the children whose parents bothered to have them.  In the past, we understood that children cannot create their own families.  They lacked both the physical and mental maturity necessary to do so.  Thus, they were kept apart from sexuality.  With sexual nihilism in vogue and the centrality of the family removed from the common perception of sexuality, the reasons for protecting children erode.  Already we see the arguments forming and new terminology being coined.  If sexuality remains nihilistic, those arguments will prevail.

 

To avert this growing disaster, sexual nihilism must be destroyed.  The only way its destruction can be accomplished is to replace it with sexual purpose.  A return to sexual asceticism may turn back the clock, but it would also set it ticking again.  People must understand that the enjoyment of sex, even erotic sex, is good so long as it is done consistent with the purpose of sex.  It is my hope that I can encourage people to mix fun with function so that we are never ascetics or nihilists ever again.