Today, society is so hypersexualised that we can’t turn on the radio or watch a movie without being inundated with sexually suggestive songs or bed scenes.
But do you know that sexual promiscuity is destroying people and humanity by deconstructing the institutions of marriage, family and morality?
Where did all of these begin?
For the past hundreds of generations since recorded civilisation, be it in the East or West, traditions contend that a man marry a woman in a sacred matrimony, sanctioned by an ordained clergy like in the Judeo-Christian tradition, or getting down to their knees to receive the blessings of Heaven and Earth like in traditional Chinese wedding ceremonies.
The Code of Canon Law states: “The matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life, is by its nature ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring.”
In China, the way and meaning of a man-woman relationship is laid down by the ‘Exposition of The Spring and Autumn Book (春秋经解)’, which says:
“Yang alone grows not, Yin alone completes not. So heaven exists thus earth exists. Sun exists thus moon exists. The meaning of man-woman; the rites of marriage; the way of heaven-earth; the basis of human relationship.”
“独阳不生，独阴不成。故有天则有地，有日则有月，男女之义，婚姻之礼，天地之道，人伦之本也。”
However, this institution of marriage that forms the fabric of a stable society has been adulterated in the West and eroded in the East by the permeation of sexual promiscuity right to the cellular level.
What Is Promiscuity?
Promiscuity for men and women alike is casual sexual behaviour, be it having multiple sex partners, or engaging in premarital, extramarital or paid sex. And it is not confined to genital sex.
It is a new vista of pleasure and desire. It is an assortment of debaucheries.
Have we always have been so sexually immodest? No.
Just 50 to 60 years ago, any sexual gratification outside the conventional channels of accepted sexual behaviour would have been frowned upon by the moral standards and ethics of society.
But now, hedonistic sexual practice is mainstream in the West.
Since when have people become so deleteriously licentious?
Since when have we become so numb and helpless to the titillating movies and TV dramas shamelessly promulgating casual sex to our subliminal consciousness?
Let’s get to the root of it all.
Promiscuity Kills
First and foremost, any practice of promiscuity brings one closer to premature death. Having multiple sex partners is one sure way to increase one’s risk to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
HIV is a sexually transmitted infection that over time results in the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Without treatment, the average survival period after infection with HIV is estimated to be nine to 11 years, depending on the HIV subtype.
This is a dreadful disease as anyone with AIDS is set on the accelerated path to death.
Although promiscuity is not the only way to contract HIV/AIDS, being promiscuous and having sexually transmitted disease both increase one’s susceptibility to the AIDS virus.
As data from World Health Organisation shows, HIV/AIDS kills.
Sexual Revolution of the 1960s
The roots of sexual promiscuity started in the 1960s in America.
It was a tumultuous time in America where polarities of sorts played out in every imaginable way.
The civil rights movement of African Americans, the women rights movement, the liberals versus the conservatives, and anti-Vietnam war movements occupied the minds of many Americans back then.
It was a time when post-World War II baby boomers were becoming young adults and 3.6 million youths were going to universities, creating a huge pool of high-minded activists ready to challenge the status quo and explore new possibilities.
One social and cultural cause so empirically undertaken is sexuality. They explored sex outside of traditional and cultural boundaries.
These baby boomers brought about changes in perception and practices of sexuality that profoundly shifted humanity’s attitudes to sexuality today.
But who propelled the theories behind the sexual revolution?
Fusing Sexual Radicalism Into Marxism
Most people understand Marxism, or Communism, in economic terms.
Socialism—or the early stage communism—is an economy controlled by the state and planned by a central planning authority. It supposedly provides for greater social welfare and decreases business fluctuations.
This is in contrast to capitalism, which affords economic freedom, consumer choice, and economic growth.
Marxism deems that in an industrial society where goods are produced and consumed, the majority of people will be in the working class toiling for bosses who own the assets that make production possible.
This results in a boss versus worker dichotomy where workers are oppressed by bosses who seek to maximise production with lean production processes.
Marxism calls for workers to be liberated from oppression towards a more equitable, socialist state of economic workflow.
In the spirit of liberation, extreme Marxist theorists called for sexual liberation as well, as they felt that sexuality had been repressed by moral anchors.
Any divine law or authority or divinely ordained conscience governing sexual behaviour among men and women should be spurned, according to these theorists.
Once liberated, people would be able to sexually gratify themselves in any form imaginable without eschatological consequences.
Marriage as an institution thus becomes irrelevant and redundant as people may now engage in sexual acts without the need to be married.
Two such Marxist proponents are Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) and Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979).
Reich was born in Austria, spent time in Germany and Sweden before reaching the US in 1939.
He was a doctor of medicine and a psychoanalyst, having worked for Sigmund Freud.
Sexually promiscuous, Reich started having daily sexual intercourse with his family servants at the age of 11. He remained sex-obsessed throughout his life, writing in his dairies that he could not live without brothels.
In 1936, he published the book ‘The Sexual Revolution’, and later in the 1940s, ‘The Function of the Orgasm’.
Reich’s thinking was that a true political (communist) revolution would only be possible once sexual repression was overthrown.
His ideal world required the rejection of a natural moral law that supposedly repressed humankind.
In conjunction with this view, Reich saw the family, with its inevitable patriarchal authority, as the chief source of repression, and that the family had to be abolished.
In his ‘Orgasm’ book, Reich argued for sexual gratification:
“The unity and congruity of culture and nature, work and love, morality and sexuality, longed for from time immemorial, will remain a dream as long as man continues to condemn the biological demand for natural (orgastic) sexual gratification.”
He encouraged premarital promiscuity and believed that it helped marriage:
“Premarital abstinence is supposed to prepare a person for marriage. But this very abstinence creates sexual disturbances and thereby undermines marriage. Sexual fulfilment can provide the basis for a happy marriage.”
Reich wanted to liberate sex from the yoke of marriage. People should be able to have sex without having to be married.
“Marriages fall to pieces as a result of the ever deepening discrepancy between sexual needs and economic conditions.”
“The sexual needs can be gratified with one and the same partner for a limited time only.”
“On the other hand, the economic tie, moralistic demand, and human habit foster the permanency of the relationship. This results in the wretchedness of marriage.”
Reich’s footprints are everywhere to be found in the sexual revolution of the ‘60s in the US. He was called “Father of the Sexual Revolution” by the New Yorker.
Rooting Sexual Perversity in Marxism—Herbert Marcuse
Marcuse was born in Berlin, Germany, and later moved to the US in 1933 where he worked in US government agencies. After World War II, he began his academic career in Columbia University.
Marcuse brought sexual liberation to a new level by advocating sexual perversity.
His works are in the books ‘Eros and Civilisation’ (1955) and ‘One-Dimensional Man’ (1964), which he authored. The latter became a must-read in many US universities.
Like Reich, Marcuse wanted to unleash erotic desires. He saw religion as repressive. He believed traditional morality had perverted human nature.
“Modern Judeo-Christian society had become ‘totalitarian’ in its suppression of man’s ‘natural’ sexual instinct.”
“[Modern man] would fully detach sex from monogamy and reproduction and completely accept what he formerly viewed as sexual perversion.”
Marcuse advocated what he called “polymorphous sexuality” where people should seek to derive erotic pleasure from any part of the body, going beyond traditional genital heterosexual intercourse.
In essence, Marcuse had radically enlarged the sexual realm of experience.
The Status Quo Now
Sexual liberation has jumped on the Marxist bandwagon of liberating everything to include unleashing uninhibited sexual gratification from moral containment.
Marxist-sexual proponents have given such a generous redefinition of human sexuality that promiscuity is now the norm rather than the outlier in mainstream Western society.
With the widespread practice of sexual promiscuity, marriage and family have been assertively eclipsed.
We face the consequences of an emancipation that is uncalled for.
Nearly one-third of US children are living with an unmarried parent, says Pew Research Centre (2018).
Ten percent of the US population cohabit with a partner.
In over one third of marriages in the US, one or both partners admit to cheating. Twenty-two percent of men and fourteen percent of women admit to cheating on their significant other, according to an infidelity study documented in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy (2016).
Infidelity is considered one of the most emotionally traumatic and stressful events a person can go through.
Looking back at what Marx addledly proposed 170 years ago in ‘The Communist Manifesto’, one could not help but be amazed by how his proposition has come to fruition today:
“Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.”
Despite the abrupt disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, communism has not lost its grip on humanity.
In my next article, I will expound on how sexual liberation narratives, such as those from Reich and Marcuse, intellectual buffoonery as they seem, got so widely accepted by people who were traditionally bound by culture and religion.
