An Orgasm a Day Keeps the Doctor Away

Sex is good for you. Something we long suspected was finally ratified on a cover of Time magazine last year. When something makes the cover of Time, it leaves the realm of controversy and enters the kingdom of fact. Yes, sex is good for you. It boosts your healthy hormones and it reduces stress. Pardon the naivety, but one must ask: What is Sex? Is it the kind of "strength when he wants it" missionary job that your typical erectile enhancement ad promotes as apple-pie normal? No. Turns out it's much more encompassing. In effect the experts are telling us that having an orgasm a day keeps the doctor away, and it doesn't matter how you have it! Aha! Then all of us can be healthy, and not just the lucky married folk for whom the flame never goes out. Now it can be told: even the solitary jerker is doing something healthy to reduce his or her stress and live longer. What's more, even the philandering wife or hubby who ain't getting any at home can now know that there is some "good" to be had in her or his action. Many, after all, believe that solitary sex can never be the super vitamin that "real" sex is. (There will be more on that in a later post.)

America, we've got some mixed signals here! I know. Imagine that. Mixed signals right here in the U.S.of A. I mean it's not just the sexual Taliban, and their demonizing ways, that is confusing us. We also get anti-sex messages "lite" from more moderate types--you know, the kind of people who run for politics or who appear as talking heads on TV. These more balanced types also promote abstinence as the best way to go for the young and unmarried because of AIDS, teen pregnancy, and general well being. But we all know, don't we, that their naysaying is due to the "Cover Your Ass" (CYA) syndrome that has so infected this good land of ours that it is near impossible to find an honest answer to any important question, especially as it pertains to sex. In the Time article, it was actually doctors who were 'fessing up up that Sex is Good for You! Imagine that. But when push comes to shove, these same doctors would probably fall back to a CYA position and say: "Don't do it unless you're married and you know for sure your spouse is faithful, and it would probably be a good idea to even then use a condom, unless of course you want to make a baby. Whew! Poor doctors. They have so much Ass to Cover.

But at least many of them are admiting something that most of us have long known. That sex is good for us. So what, then, exactly is the problem with sex? Why are the sexually free constantly on the defensive in this land of ours? I know. I know. Turn on the TV, you say, and you see sex everywhere. So who's on the defensive? But that's popular culture as reflected and distorted through the media, and that has little to do with political-corporate America. Carrie and her buds on Sex in the City are not only fictional phantoms, but even in their fictional world they are sexual outlaws dreamed up, many think, by gay male writers projecting their whoreishness onto straight women. To get a better read about what "official" America still thinks about sex, consider the governor who had to resign last year when the truth began trickling out that he was gay. Or far more dramatically, consider the torturous moral meatgrinder that America's politicians and pundits were thrown into over the Clinton affair just seven years ago. With amazement, I would read one distinguished liberal pundit after another gassing away about how the President's agony was deserved because he had had the gall to lie about his blowjobs. One wonders how America's gay citizens, many of whom have spent their lives "lying" about their sex, felt about that impeachment--especially since it is the official policy of the U.S. military to encourage its gay soldiers to lie about their sexual practice in order to maintain a sense of denial-based decorum in the barracks.

Yea. We're conflicted about sex, alright. But at least now we know that it's healthy to get your rocks off. Now perhaps we can start having a sensible debate about the healthy (and therefore) acceptable ways of getting it on.