"Why do you talk about sex so much?" Students and colleagues as me this question frequently, though it is based on a rather gross inaccuracy. In my General Psychology course, the common trigger of the inquiry, less than 5 percent of class time and assignments is devoted to material related to human sexuality. I always find the question diagnostic of profound dysfunction about sex in the Seventh Day Adventist subculture. Conversations about it are so stilted, so choreographed, and so sterile that they are often worthless—or worse.

"Conversation" is too generous a term to describe the verbal exchanges about sex that often go on between Adventist young people and their elders. A conversation implies an interchange and exploration of thoughts; most often, Adventist young people get a rigid and highly predictable set of responses to questions about sexuality—more of a liturgy than a conversation.

"Can I have sex before I get married?" adolescents ask, one way or another. The answer, delivered either in no-nonsense style from the pulpit or with spoonfuls of sugar from somewhere else, is, simply, "No." Instead of stimulating a conversation about sexuality, the question most often becomes the occasion for a lecture on how sex is reserved for marriage. Rather than using the question as an opportunity to begin discussing healthy ways to have sex, it becomes an extended attempt to persuade people not to have sex.

I devote 2 of the 5 five percent of the time I spend on sex in my General Psychology course to exploring another way to think about such matters. Instead of the subculturally correct answer "No" to the question "Can I have sex before marriage?" I suggest "Yes" as an answer. Indeed, I suggest going a bit further. Not only can young people have sex before marriage, they should have sex before marriage. Perhaps even this answer is a bit tame. I think young people must have sex before marriage, and I direct them in the strongest language I can to go out and start immediately, if they have not already done so.

Of course, all this begs the question of what we mean by the word "sex" (such a question does have value beyond presidential evasion). Sigmund Freud, so often misunderstood by friends and foes, may have made his greatest contribution in discussing this question. In his Autobiographical Study, Freud argued that sexuality should be "divorced from its too close connection with the genitals."1 For Freud, intercourse was only one manifestation of a sexuality that characterizes human nature throughout life. If sex is more like the general giving and getting of pleasure thorough the body, as Freud suggested, then it makes sense to stop telling teenagers not to have sex before they get married, and to begin discussing how to have sex before and after marriage.

The "how to" of sex, more broadly conceived, is infinitely more complex than that of intercourse, and is truly the work of a lifetime. How to give and get pleasure through the body, while maintaining concern and respect for your partner and yourself, requires maturity, sensitivity, and, not least, practice. There is no magic in the ministerial incantation "I now pronounce you husband and wife" that suddenly gives one skill and maturity. If the first time a couple tries to have sex occurs on their wedding night, they are asking for trouble. Kissing, hugging, holding hands—even a prolonged mutual gaze—are all forms of human sexuality. Placing these body pleasures in the service of intimacy and commitment is in part a long-term process of trial and error.

My call for genuine conversations about sex is not an attempto "relate to the kids" or a search for "relevance"; real conversations are no more only about telling people what they want to hear than they are about just saying "No." Indeed, my concern about the need for these conversations is not limited to the needs of young people. When we limit our definition of sexuality to intercourse—and our conversations to how not to have it—we impoverish the sexual experience of everyone. For example, older adult Christians (never married, divorced, or widowed) have a real need for a climate in which their sexual needs can be honestly discussed without prefabricated, thought-stopping answers.

What we all need is more—not less—talk about sex.

Notes and References

1. Sigmund Freud, An Autobiographical Study (London: Hogarth Press, 1935), 23.

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