| "The threat of the moral breakdown of western society
and sexual and civil anarchy if the family ideal was not rigorously
upheld, has kept the policing of the public's sexual mores a priority for
hundreds, nay, thousands of years. The Christian church viewed
sexuality, particularly women's, as something potentially explosive and
uncontrollable, capable of leading [hu]mankind into serious sin. Sex
had to be controlled and kept to its reproductive function. Marriage
was the only acceptable platform for the expression of desire and a
convenient way to provide new, legitimate citizens. Homosexuality
and promiscuity were considered abominations, and nudity was stripped of
its innocence by original sin: knowledge brought awareness of nudity, and
with it shame, into the Garden of Eden. Also, for the early
Christian ideology to take hold, the old ways had to be discredited.
Pagan religions, with their strong matriarchal ties to nature, birth,
fertility and magical rituals, sometimes involving nudity, were often
portrayed as debauched and impure. Sex and desire became pregnant
with sin--only the weak succumbed to earthly temptation. (Michelle Olley,
in Adonis: Masterpieces of Male Erotic Photography. 1999) |
"Our
society is in a crisis over sexuality, in part because the churches have been
paralyzed by fear of stepping away from the confines of the Christian sexual
tradition to develop a responsible sexual ethic which not only accords with our
scientific and experiential insights into sexuality, but which better accords
with our understanding of the central revelations of the gospel. . . . It
is past time that we admit that the reason so many differ with specific
conclusions of inherited sexual ethics is that the entire approach to Christian
sexual ethics has been and is grievously flawed." (Christine Gudorf)