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THE HYGEINE OF MARRIAGE: SOLVING OUR TRADITIONAL SEX MORALS PROBLEMS
This has been a rather severe indictment of our traditional sex morals, but it has been given with a constructive purpose in mind: to show how important it is for all of us to overcome the reticence, the sense of embarrassment, or the feeling of obscenity with which we have formerly approached questions of sex, and to realize that we must bring these topics into the light of open, scientific discussion if we are to escape from all the evils that have attended our previous false modesty.6 And just as we saw at the outset of this chapter that sometimes we have to learn a new vocabulary in order to talk to a physician about certain bodily functions, so, in regard to all the problems of sex, we must learn a new language in order to converse with one another like intelligent, civilized beings instead of remaining as inarticulate as dumb animals.
But how shall we begin? Since the language of the gutter is hopelessly bound up with feelings of obscenity, it is obviously impossible to clothe it with respectability. So we must learn an entirely new vocabulary, one which will approximate that of science and will, therefore, be free from any sense of indecency, carrying with it, instead, the dispassionate and objective spirit of science. Thus we shall have taken the first step in solving some of the problems that have long been neglected.
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Men's Health-Erectile Dysfunction
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Pharmacy Information
SEXUALITY DEFINED: PAGAN-POLYTHEISTIC INFLUENCES - ROMAN SEXUALITY
Although there is reasonable agreement among most authorities regarding the characteristics of Greek sexuality, Roman customs and values are a matter of considerable debate. Conventional wisdom holds that the Roman society was as sexually promiscuous as the Greek; and it is popularly believed that the collapse of the Roman Empire was due, in no small part, to the sexual excesses of its citizens (Canter, 1963). These views have been challenged, however, on the grounds that the sexual excesses of Roman society have been greatly exaggerated and that the accounts of these events are biased and inaccurate (Bullough, 1976). Whatever the actual case, certainly Roman culture was more complicated and multidimensional than Greek society. The Roman Empire endured for a relatively long period of time; and, whereas the Greeks retained their beliefs and customs, Roman culture changed in the light of the changing empire and in the face of continuous exposure to other cultures.
The Romans, of course, shared the polytheistic religion of the Greeks, as well as the sexuality of their deities. Thus, they shared the Grecian religious approval of sex. As Grimal states:
To love was to obey the gods and achieve one of the requisites of the human condition. Chastity could be required by religious rites in certain cases, but it was not a good thing in itself; not even a desirable thing; it was rather an impairment of what was good and desirable for among the gifts of the gods to man, love is always to be found. [Grimal, 1967, p. xiii]
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