What Sex Means to Me

by: Lanisha Porter

To have sex and dismiss the connection that is being shared is the absolute lowest experience. To use someone only as a means to your end cheapens what sex means. Sex is powerful for the spirit and the flesh...so very powerful that it carries the potential to create new life. Needless to say, we live in a culture where sex is easily available, which means we get to bypass ever seeing the value in it.

Sex to me is the highest and most intimate celebration of love. It is special to me because it is sharing your body, your energy, and your matter with another person. In my world there's nothing casual about being offered the privilege to invade in someone's personal space like that. To have sex and dismiss the connection that is being shared is the absolute lowest experience. To use someone only as a means to your end cheapens what sex means. Sex is powerful for the spirit and the flesh...so very powerful that it carries the potential to create new life. Needless to say, we live in a culture where sex is easily available, which means we get to bypass ever seeing the value in it. Sex has literally become a retreat for selfish-pleasure instead of mutual bonding. We've lost what the exchange should be about; we have forgotten that sex should, in my opinion, be an exchange.

Both persons willingly and passionately giving, in hopes to satisfy each other out of love and servanthood. But if there is no love, there can be no servanthood...and ultimately when we have sex just for pleasure, we never have to appreciate the other person—let alone be concerned with satisfying them.  I take this to be just as bad as when it was legal for blacks to only be considered 3/5ths of a person. The only difference between now and then is that slaves may have gotten more consideration. Nowadays, we simply reduce people to being a body and excuse everything else that makes them unique like their: thoughts, beliefs, emotions, dreams, and their spirit. We ignore everything else immaterial as long as we can touch what is material about them. This is a sad reality. Here's why: the pleasures of sex are fleeting. They do not carry the power to transform and sustain people. Only love can do that; love has a universal power to transform and transcend. Love lives in perpetuity.  This is the way I feel about sex and this has driven my decisions surrounding it. 

I know that my value— in addition to my vagina—also includes my mind, my entire essence, and my emotions that first must be appreciated in length before anyone can ever touch my body.

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Many people think that women who hold sex as being sacred have reduced their personal worth to only being valuable insofar as they have a flowered vagina. But this is not true. I am very aware that my inherent value stays in tact no matter who touches me. Instead, it means I know that my value— in addition to my vagina—also includes my mind, my entire essence, and my emotions that first must be appreciated in length before anyone can ever touch my body. There are many women who own their sexual prowess, and can generously indulge with many partners. That's their personal choice. What I am saying is that because my self-principles are organized differently, I'm a woman who is not willing to share myself in that capacity with multiple people. Love ought to be honored, and I am willing to be that change I want to see in society. If I'm going to do anything I'm going to mean it and I'm going to do it with the person who means something extremely special to me. This doesn't make me any less of a woman, or sexual being—it just makes me careful in my choices. Often people do not understand why I think this way. They say "it's just sex, it's not that serious as you are making it Lanisha." Fine. Not everyone will accept my views nor will they understand my timing. And I've learned to be okay with that. But I will still stand next to them, anyway. 
 
To be clear about the takeaway of this message: I don't think people who have lots of casual sex are bad people, but I do think their choices boldly reflect their truest quality of character and lack of deliberation for future outcomes. And while many people think that we as individuals exist in isolation, free to enjoy endless pleasure for ourselves, they seem to forget that those very choices although made individually, still inform the moral standards for society as a whole. If majority of people start feeling comfortable enough to indulge in sexual impulses while disregarding others, we will start to see the family unit wither away into failed pieces, and marriages collapse at the expense of infidelities. When one can willingly volunteer themselves  to help a partner commit adultery, they are contributing to a world of failed relationships and broken homes. This is the type of attitude that gives way to mistresses, polygamy, one night stands, and overall dishonor.
 
This piece isn't to make anyone feel bad but rather it's to encourage very careful thought about the world we are creating with the actions we commit ourselves to. I honestly don't think a few rounds of pleasure is worth the moral degradation of a society we have to live in for a lifetime.