By: Allie Joy Kapus
Sex, By Myself
What makes me feel good? What turns me on? What numbs my mind and helps me forget stress and life and other people for a while?
It’s like tunnel vision. These questions form the bedrock of the way that our society has come to view sex, relationships, and intimacy. We live in a world dominated by postmodern sexuality.
Let’s break this term down. Postmodern. This word is often associated with a lack of truth and absolutes. In a postmodern society, the “anything goes” mentality reigns supreme. Your behavior, ideas, views, and morals – whatever you believe is what is true. And this somehow applies to every single person. The individual is sovereign and the only standard is personal preference.
Sexuality. God designed sex to bring honor to Himself and to serve as a uniting force between husband and wife. Sexuality fosters intimacy, communicates love, and thrives in selflessness. We aren’t able to have sex by ourselves. By its very definition sex goes beyond the individual.
These two terms are vastly different. Postmodernity functions by prizing individual rights and perspectives, but sexuality was created to be shared between two people in a lifelong context of love and commitment. When you force these two words to coexist or ignorantly put them side by side, it makes for plenty of pain and confusion.
But postmodern sexuality has defined the way that most people have approached sex for over half a century.
Swipe left
Swiping left. Hooking up. Calling a phone sex hotline. Typing in a pornography site and letting your mind go numb as you watch people stage intimacy. These practices have become so commonplace that they are viewed as a rite of passage instead of something taboo. While we engage in these behaviors, physically, they make us feel good. But after the fact, we have to justify our actions and normalize them to the point where the sense of shame we once felt diminishes until we’re trapped and feel empty.
These behaviors are not normal. Despite the notions that the world constantly feeds us, partaking in sex selfishly is not truly fulfilling. Deep down we know this. Engaging in sexual behavior calls upon something profound within us that wants to be loved and desired, to be confident and to feel safe in sharing ourselves with someone else. But when these actions lack a covenantal commitment to another person, they go from sacred to shallow. They leave us discouraged, inwardly focused, and forgetting the only Source of meaning, intimacy, belonging, and joy.
Sexual Revolution
Postmodern sexuality is self-centered. It attempts to justify and even celebrate the individual seeking sexual fulfillment. Where did this mentality come from? Postmodern sexuality emerged in the early 1960s with the rise of sexual liberation and the release of the birth control pill to the public. Sexual movements normalized hooking up and allowed the individual to express his or her sexuality in whatever means seemed right to that person. The pill caused a dramatic drop in the birthrate and a spike in casual sex. As women felt freer to engage in sex with much lower chances of becoming pregnant, sex became much more commonplace, both inside and outside of marriage.
In more recent decades, the rise of technology, especially within the home, has fostered an overwhelming access to sexual stimulation.
a broken design
With the rise of changes like these within society, sex has come to revolve around consumerism, autonomy, and self-gratification instead of sacrificial love. And though sex and human intimacy have been imperfect since the Fall of man, postmodernity has taken sexuality to a new level of depravity. Postmodern sexuality has taken God’s design for sex and intimacy, as well as our God-given desires for relationship and completely twisted them, popularized them, and, to many, normalized them. This is a weapon that the enemy wields in an attempt to attack something so fundamental to God’s design for His people.
Despite the sexual darkness in which millions, both Christians and non-Christians alike, are living, the Gospel offers hope for this emptiness. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be delving into the brokenness of postmodern sexuality and what that looks like in the light of Jesus and His intentions for sexuality as a unifying and God-glorifying gift.
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Allie Joy Kapus is first and foremost a daughter of the King. She graduated from Liberty University with a Bachelor of Arts in English and minors in Spanish and Psychology. Allie completed her Senior Honors Thesis on the presentation of postmodern sexuality in short fiction and has also been published in two of Liberty University’s other onl