Emma Collins has some complaints about sex during, and she fears following, the pandemic:
I want sex to feel holy again. I want kissing to feel like prayer. I want the bed to be an altar, and oral sex to become worship. I want the physical act of love to feel like what it actually is— a glimpse into the part of someone’s soul that transcends their social self, a look behind the veil of their constructed personality. I want sleeping beside someone to take on the quality it had the first times I tried it— when, at seventeen, I was shocked to find that my dreams had intertwined with my lover’s during the night, as though our subconscious voices had spoken to one another.
So why do I feel like Collins is implicitly demanding that I feel the same things as she? There is, perhaps unintended, a subvocalization against natural human variation. I sympathize when she says,
People need a chance to embrace again, without having to fret over contracting a fatal disease or that a spontaneous kiss will be misconstrued as sexual assault. There may be value, at the right moment, in remembering a certain kind of recklessness, in ceasing to demonize our need for each other. Constraints on passion never completely prevail.
But when that spontaneity is threatening or dangerous, then it’s wrong.
As ever, morality is not context-free. In other cultures and other realities, sex can be a ritual, a drab requirement, even a weapon, and I cannot help but remember that when I feel she is demanding that I treat it as ‘holy.’ Sure, go ahead and do that – but, as an agnostic, I’ll take my own path, thank you.
