Let's talk about sex

Welcome to this special edition of Hot Press, dedicated to the inextricably intertwined themes of sex, love and romance.

It’s interesting. When the moral custodians of the Catholic Church were triumphantly in the ascendancy here, the very notion would have caused a major rumpus. Any whiff of sex being described in print and the anti-happiness league were down on you (if you’ll forgive the expression) like a ton of bricks. To get a flavour of just how suffocatingly oppressive it was, all you have to do is read the highly entertaining interview inside, with Lee Dunne.
At one stage, Dunne was one of Ireland’s most successful authors. His Paddy Maguire Is Dead was published in Britain in 1972, but banned in Ireland on the basis that it was indecent and obscene. If anything, his success fuelled the fire of righteous wrath that was turned on him, and as a result a total of eight of his books were banned here. Nowadays, most of them would be considered tame in the extreme, light comedies quite suitable for old ladies. Well, old ladies of a certain disposition, anyway…
Of course, Dunne was just one in a long line of Irish writers who fell foul of the censors. In 1926, the then Minister for Justice Kevin O’Higgins appointed the Committee On Evil Literature to explore what might be done to control unsuitable printed matter in Ireland. Shortly afterwards, on the recommendation of the Committee, the Censorship of Publications Board was set up, ushering in a profoundly hostile era for Irish artists and writers. In 1950, the poet Robert Graves described the Irish censorship regime as “the fiercest literary censorship this side of the Iron Curtain.” He was right.
Works by great Irish writers like George Bernard Shaw, Sean O’Casey, Samuel Beckett, Sean O’Faoláin, Kate O’Brien, John McGahern, Brendan Behan and Edna O’Brien were all banned. So too were books by D.H.Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Andre Gide, Doris Lessing, Thomas Mann, Norman Mailer, J.D.Salinger, Philip Roth and dozens of other literary giants. But that was only the half of it. As late as 1976, the year before Hot Press was launched, the Irish Family Planning Association’s booklet Family Planning was banned.
All that is ancient history now, or feels like it. To say that we have come a long way in the intervening 30 years is to put it mildly. Irish society has been transformed. The anti-happiness league have, in most respects, been routed. In the world of literature, there is effectively almost untramelled freedom of expression. The inhibitions and restrictions that had been internalised have mostly been cast aside. We are approaching our sexual maturity as a nation.
Has the change been a good thing in every respect? There are people who bemoan the fact that pornography is now freely available in newsagents all over Ireland. Who live in fear of what their children might come across on the internet. Who argue that women are trivialised and objectified in the new sexual climate to an extent that wasn’t true in the past – and that this is a very bad thing.
It’s a complex subject but of one thing I am sure: the repression of sex and sexuality that was and is a by-product of Jewish, Christian and Islamic religious scripture, tradition and beliefs alike is a far greater evil than the exploitation of sex for commercial purposes. Right now, this repression is at its most extreme, and evil, in Islamic countries, but it is also at the heart of Christian teaching.
Most Irish people have a much more relaxed and tolerant view of sex now. Have we strayed too far from the traditional view of sexual ‘morality’ and accepted too readily a new culture in which sex is commodified? Undoubtedly, there has been a coarsening in our attitudes to sex in certain respects, symbolised by the availability of the likes of Penthouse in ordinary newsagents. But my own view is that in other ways we have not gone far enough. To take one example, it is common wisdom that sex is best with someone you love – by which people almost always mean someone with whom you have a long-term relationship. Anything else is vieweed as cheap. But this makes one quite irrational assumption: i.e. that it is impossible to feel love for someone with whom you share a once-off sexual encounter.
Of course this isn’t true at all. Indeed where lust, longing and eventual sexual communion are embraced without strings or expectations, there is scope for a different, selfless kind of love that requires nothing of anyone in the future but celebrates our shared humanity and vulnerability in the teeming, magnificent present. Imbued with this quality, sex can be deeply compassionate and loving and full of genuine human respect. Arguably there should be far more, not less, of it about.
In many ways the idea of exclusive romantic love and the religious orthodoxy of a monogamous married relationship as the only legitimate context for sexual activity are born of the same neurosis. It’s as if people simply cannot acknowledge that sex is a good thing in itself. But it is.
Music, literature, food, wine and the pursuit of knowledge may jostle for positions in the Top 5 – but without a shadow of doubt, sex is life’s greatest pleasure (and as the fella said, it’s free as well). For sure, love comes into it. So does respect. But that is – or should be – true of every aspect of our lives. It is important to remember, especially with lovers to whom we have committed our lives and our future plans, that sex is a pleasure we can enjoy purely for the fact that it makes us feel good. And the world would surely be a better place if we could all learn how to do just that without fear, guilt or recrimination being dragged into the equation. Here’s to it…