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SHOW 114 TRANSCRIPT
Does Sex Have a Future?

SEX occupies a good part of our psyche, engaging our thoughts and influencing our behavior. It has been around forever, baffling and unchanging. Sex is still baffling, but suddenly it is changing. Artificial insemination, even cloning, for reproduction? Virtual sex for recreation? Erotic adventures on the Internet? Sex is diversifying into a brave new world of biochemical procreation and electronic stimulation. But all software and no hardware? All pleasure and no intimacy? Is something missing here? Sex already pervades modern life, transforming our values and, for worse or for better, disrupting our morals. Now what happens when technology multiplies our sexual options and accelerates our moral shifts? What is the link between sensual pleasure and personal intimacy? And what is the impact on personal relationships and social cohesion? Where is sex going? To assess its future, we need to understand its nature. Our experts share with us their diverse views on human sexuality. 

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PARTICIPANTS 

Dr. Paul Abramson is a professor of psychology at UCLA where he teaches courses on human sexuality, including one entitled "Sex and the Law." The co-author of Sexual Nature/Sexual Culture, Paul discusses the nature of sexual pleasure why it's so important in evolutionary terms; he also gives his theory of cybersex.

Dr. Vern Bullough, a professor of history at California State University, Northridge, has written or edited over fifty books on sexuality, including Human Sexuality: An Encyclopedia. Vern focuses on the historical and cultural contexts of sexual practices.

Joyce Penner, R.N., a clinicial nurse, and her husband, Dr. Clifford Penner, a clinical psychologist, are sex therapists working in the Christian community. Joyce and Cliff have co-written many books on the importance and pleasures of sex within marriage, including Men and Sex. 

Dr. Gregory Stock, the director of UCLA's Program in Medicine, Technology, and Society, is the author of The Book of Questions: Love and Sex. Greg sees sex as growing in importance and as increasingly separated from procreation.

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ROBERT: Paul, you're an expert witness in prominent legal cases involving sex. What kinds of sex-related lawsuits affect public policy?

PAUL: The colloquial phrase is "sexpert" witness. I'm concerned with the regulation of all expressions of sexuality: in our behavior, our speech, and even our fantasies--such as how they're played out on the Internet. And also with how society protects people from sexual harm--abuse, rape, harassment, and so on. All these behaviors are highly regulated, and all are in the legal domain. In your introduction, you said that sex pervades everything in our lives. One thing it doesn't pervade is the U.S. Constitution, and there's real debate about whether sex is a fundamental right, and about the extent to which our freedoms of speech and press extend to sexual issues. Many of the cases center on constitutional rights of sexual expression, behavior, and privacy--like sexual expression on the Internet, where we now need global definitions; gay marriage; abortion as a privacy right; and how best to protect people from sexual harm. 

ROBERT: These legal interpretations will affect our self-image as sexual beings. 

PAUL: The laws that govern and regulate our sexuality are going to influence the way we talk about it, the way we express it, the way we cohabit, the way we associate, and so on. So I see the future of sex closely tied to the manner in which sex is legally regulated, and the extent to which we have constitutional guarantees for expressing it.

ROBERT: Vern, as a medical historian, you've specialized in sex research and written numerous books, such as Sexual Attitudes: Myths and Realities. Give us a historical overview of sexual understandings and misunderstandings.

VERN: Well, we know that sex existed back then, because we're all here, but in the past there was mostly tremendous misunderstanding--ranging from what causes pregnancy to what kind of sex is permissible, and the like. Cultures differ, and time periods differ. At some times, for example, masturbation has been acceptable, and at other times it hasn't. Sometimes there was very little talk about premarital sex, other times there was a great deal. How much sex a person could have was subject to debate. Judaism has been generally positive about sex, whereas Christianity has been hostile--it's what I would call a sex-negative culture. For much of its history, Christianity argued in essence that the best sex was no sex. Cultures vary tremendously. All you can say about sex in the past is that it was there, and everything we do today was done then. 

ROBERT: Cliff, you and Joyce are sex therapists in the Christian tradition, which historically has avoided open discussions about sex. What has been the reaction of the Christian community to your very open and honest approach to sex? One of your books is 52 Ways to Have Fun, Fantastic Sex: A Guidebook for Married Couples. Fifty-two? You're not limiting sex to once a week, are you?

CLIFF: Absolutely not! Have sex as many times a week as you like. The response to our message has been wide open, and it grows out of great need. We're applied people--we don't do much theory. We're out there working with people who are struggling with their sexual lives. In the Christian community, particularly, there's a widely felt need for therapy, because there are so many people having difficulties with their marriages. They see all the trouble there is in relationships, and they're eager to get any kind of help. So we get a very warm response. But regarding what Vern [VERN] was saying--that traditional Christianity has had a hostile attitude toward sex--we've tried to come out with the exact opposite message: that people need to celebrate their sexuality.

ROBERT: Do you hear complaints that you deal too frankly with sex?

PENNER: We get some complaints, but we go where we're invited, and they welcome us. When people are upset about what we say about sex, it often relates to something in their own past.

ROBERT: Greg, you look to the future. At the horizon, what do you see for sex?

GREG: There are going to be powerful forces impinging on sex, with the potential for changing it. The impacts are going to be enormous. First, sex and reproduction will be further separated. Second, sex is a very strong drive and it will increasingly pervade everything we do--in terms of advertising, the multiplication of social expressions, and so on. Sex has become dominant on the Internet in a very short period of time, and cybersex can provide immediate gratification of various sorts, even if it's only in a limited way. And then we'll have pharmaceuticals that create arousal--Viagra-like drugs. The abortion debate will become muted, as procedures like the RU486 pill make the decision to abort very personal and hence very difficult to regulate. The abortion issue will give way to debates on reproductive technologies--cloning, genetic engineering, things of that sort. So sex is going to become a lot more complicated.

ROBERT: How will these complications affect personal relationships?

GREG: The biggest impact on personal relationships will be this separation between reproduction and sex, which will continue to grow. And then there's our ability to manipulate reproduction, using pharmaceuticals and other techniques.

ROBERT: Paul, let's explore the nature of fantasy, which is very much involved with sexuality. In a high-tech world, what happens to fantasy when we're surrounded with all these overt expressions of sexuality?

PAUL: The capacity for fantasy is shrinking. 

ROBERT: That's the opposite of what some might expect--they'd think that with all these high-tech sexual exposures, fantasy would be greater. 
PAUL: But all these innovations are substitutes for fantasy. If you look at all the media for simulated sex--photography, the VCR revolution, Dial-a-Porn phone sex, virtual sex on the Internet--they're all ways of co-opting the internal fantasy life, and they're primarily adjuncts to male masturbation. These are basically high-tech ways of masturbating. Instead of "stroke films," we have "stroke bytes." 

ROBERT: Joyce, as a female, can you give us another perspective? Or are male-female differences an illusion?

JOYCE: Women do provide a different perspective. We bring the complexity, the unpredictableness, the ever-changingness to relationships. Men want to figure women out, to get it down to a formula, and you can't do that. Women are too complex. 

ROBERT: If women are complex, does that mean you think that men are simple?

JOYCE: Yes, regarding sexuality. Men and women provide different dimensions of the whole picture. In the Christian community, we need to counteract the idea that the woman's role in sex is just to satisfy the man--the idea that she isn't a sexual person, doesn't have sexual needs. Ultimately that idea doesn't work: it isn't fulfilling for him, and it isn't fulfilling for her.

ROBERT: With the Internet and various new technologies expanding expressions of sexuality, do you find that your patients' fantasy lives are changing?

JOYCE: All of us are designed with the capacity for imagination and imagery, and fantasy can enhance the sexual relationship between a husband and wife. But when these self-generated thoughts are replaced with simplistic external images, we become distracted from the relationship.

PAUL: Females regulate sex--not only in our own species but among other primates as well. Females are the gatekeepers. It reminds me of the old joke about women having a sixth sense about whether a man is going to have sex that night or not. 

JOYCE: Yes, we are. Anthropologists have written about this. Gatekeepers are a necessary role.

ROBERT: Paul, one of the things you talk about in your book With Pleasure: Thoughts on the Nature of Human Sexuality is how the concept of restraint underlies our historical understanding of sex. 

PAUL: Yes. Just as there are evolutionary foundations for pleasure, there are evolutionary foundations for restraint. If you look broadly at primates, there's a lot of competition for sex, and competitive sex is often coupled with aggression. Well, you can segue from that to the current problems of human sexuality--sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, and so forth. Sex has its risks, and the value of restraint is that it weighs the negatives and the positives, balancing the side effects with the open and intimate expression of sex. 

ROBERT: Joyce, do you see the concept of restraint as broader than what Paul describes--that is, is there more to it than the evolutionary sense of avoiding disease?

JOYCE: When you're talking about restraint in terms of boundaries, guidelines, limitations--they're necessary ultimately for sexual satisfaction. In a sense, the restraints provide fulfillment. They protect us from danger and harm and the misuse of sex. So much pleasure can be derived from sex, which is a really a purpose of sex, but when it's misused it can also cause harm and pain and deprive us of that pleasure. And so, yes, the boundaries and restraints are necessary.

GREG: With sex and sexuality in our face all the time now, it becomes increasingly difficult to encourage restraint. People are shocked at the explosion of pornography on the Internet. Well, it's because that's what people want on the Internet.

PAUL: I don't think that's what people want. That's what men want. 

VERN: Paul has hit on it. In the past, sex has been defined mostly in male terms. And what we're beginning to do now is define sex also in female terms, which are really quite different. And if we're talking about restraints, society is based upon limitations. Say you're married--the question is, What limits are there? Can you go out and have two hundred different sexual contacts? What kind of limits do we impose? Sex is more than a physical exercise--it's also a way of becoming very intimate, very understanding, very appreciative. That aspect of it never really comes across, unless you talk to real people. 

GREG: But once you decouple sex and reproduction, it becomes a different game--and that's what we're just beginning to deal with. 

VERN: We need to talk about technology, which is so radically changing sex. The contraceptive pill is the obvious example, but what I'm fascinated by is how people can live their fantasies in different ways. Transsexuals, for instance. Technology has made it possible to change one's sex, legally and anatomically. And hormones have made this change more realistic than it was in the past. We've always had people changing their sexual anatomy--such as eunuchs, who were castrated--but they didn't adopt the role of the other sex, because they lacked the hormones. 

GREG: It's now possible for these communities of sexual minorities to link up and form subcultures, which has been difficult to do in the past.

ROBERT: People with non-mainstream feelings aren't isolated anymore. They get more cohesive within their own groups, but the groups grow farther apart from one another.

PAUL: The psychological notion of fantasy is really about a narrative, an imaginary narrative that enhances or explores something. But the issue Vern [VERN] brought up has more to do with a deep psychological substructure, in terms of gender. For transsexuals, it's not about fantasizing being of the opposite sex, but actually feeling at a very deep, intimate level that they belong to the opposite sex and just by a quirk of nature ended up with the wrong genital equipment.

VERN: I don't accept that my use of transexual feetings is more reality than fantasy. Consider cross-dressing. Many people have always wanted to know what living as a member of the other sex is like, and so they live that fantasy. In our society, that's now possible. There are a tremendous variety of these groups. They're on the Internet, they hold conventions, they exchange information on such things as how to achieve a better passing ability, and so on.

GREG: In terms of role playing, it becomes very easy on the Internet to masquerade as a person of the other sex, or another age.

JOYCE: You can be whatever you want to be.

ROBERT: Is that good or bad?

GREG: Good or bad, this is one of the places where you can explore your fantasies and your curiosities. And it seems to me that this is the kind of sexual behavior we'll have to be increasingly dealing with.

ROBERT: What does the nature of fantasy teach us about the nature of sex?

PAUL: Well, two things: It shows the extent to which we--particularly males--are obsessed with whatever enhances, solidifies, and makes our fantasy life more real. And it shows the extent to which we're willing to forgo intimacy for the opportunity to indulge in fantasy. Look at how we drive these enormous economic machines, the sex industries--X-rated videos, phone sex, Internet sex. It also speaks to what's missing in the relational aspects of sex. 

ROBERT: Certainly any new technology welcomes sexuality as a primary economic driving force. Everyone talks about how silly and annoying cybersex is, but so many people are doing it. 

PAUL: I think the whole story's economic, and I use the model of Dial-a-Porn. When the telephone companies were first deregulating and started offering various kinds of information providers, the first ones were Dial-a-Joke, Dial-a-Prayer, and Dial-a-Porn. You can guess which was the most lucrative. Dial-a-Porn became a cash cow for the telephone companies. The VCR revolution was driven in part by X-rated movies.

VERN: And the economy of the San Fernando Valley is driven in part by that.

GREG: Isn't it a little like sugar? We all have the drive toward sweetness. It's great when you can have that fruit you're seeking, but when you have easy access to all sorts of French pastries, it becomes a problem. We have to deal with an omnipresence of sexual supply.

PAUL: The question is, Are you motivated to get something or to avoid something else? Maybe our craze for fantasy reveals a fear of intimacy. The challenges associated with intimacy are often difficult, and it becomes easy to seek a substitute.

JOYCE: Some research suggests that couples who watch pornography together experience more excitement in that particular sexual event, but over time they lose the thrill, and ultimately they get less and less turned on by each other. 

ROBERT: Do you ever use pornography in your therapy for married couples?

JOYCE: No. Externalizing fantasy, rather than internalizing and sharing the fantasy in the relationship, can be a stimulus in the short term but an inhibitor in the long term.

ROBERT: For example, virtual sex on the Internet can be addictive.

CLIFF: Right. We deal all the time with patients who suffer from that sort of addiction. In fact, we've seen couples where there's almost no real sex going on at all, because the man is getting all his gratification from the Internet. The couple usually comes to therapy when he gets busted by her, and he has to face up to the fact that he's getting all of his sex virtually and she's getting none at all. Men tend to be always looking for something new--that's one of the sexual differences between men and women.

PAUL: It's not only new sex but quick sex. Women are looking for something deeper.

VERN: It used to be that men had to sneak out with prostitutes or go to a girlie show. 
CLIFF: The difference now is that instant sexual gratification is readily available in almost everyone's home. A man no longer has to head down to the other part of town.

GREG: That's a big difference--if you can log on in twenty seconds and remain completely private.

JOYCE: That's right.

PAUL: But this isn't really the future of sex. It's the evolution of male masturbation, and it's a limited domain. There will be more and more technological enhancements for making these fantasies seem more and more real, but ultimately they'll always miss the driving force in a relationship, the psychological connections.

ROBERT: So what are you saying? That cybersex is bad, but it's inevitable?

JOYCE: It's inevitable but it's unfulfilling.

GREG: It's separate from sex, in a sense.

PAUL: It's one aspect of nonreproductive sex, but, again, it's all about male masturbation masquerading as the future of sex. I think the primary use of cybersex is for male masturbation. 

GREG: Well, that seems very dismissive of the potency of this new medium and its cultural impact. 

PAUL: But I think it's indicative of the lack of intimacy in modern relationships. Greg [Stock] is commenting that the reason men choose this form of sexual expression reveals deep social and psychological issues, and I don't want to be dismissive of those.

JOYCE: Cybersex promises to satisfy. And it doesn't require anything from a man. Everything he wants is there. And the women complain. It disrupts relationships.

CLIFF: Well, we have female patients who are hooked on Internet chat rooms.

JOYCE: They're hooked on relationships. 

CLIFF: So for women, it's more the relational use of the Internet than the pornographic that counts. 

GREG: The challenge is that if our sex drives can be gratified so easily, uniformly, around the clock, then it alters the ways in which those drives are contributing to the building of relationships.

JOYCE: But ultimately cybersex doesn't satisfy the longing of each of us to overcome our separateness and our isolation. 
VERN: The difficulty is that that longing has existed all throughout the past, and you have to remember that most people didn't have that kind of companionship, for the most part--certainly not the women. In fact, it took money to be married, and a lot of people never did marry.

GREG: What happens as reproduction is increasingly decoupled from sex? How does that impact the nature of sex in relationships--and for that matter in encounters with people we're less intimate with?

ROBERT: Take the thought question to the extreme and assume that reproduction has nothing to do with sex anymore. What then happens to sex?

VERN: It changes the whole outlook of society. In fact, this is already happening to some extent. The whole fight of gays for equality is in essence a legal separation of reproduction from sex and marriage. 

JOYCE: What's interesting for us is dealing with unconsummated marriages, in which the couple has not been able to have sexual intercourse, for physical or sometimes psychological reasons. Yet they're often achieving full sexual satisfaction, so they don't come for sexual therapy until they want to have children. We see sex as having three functions: procreation, pleasure, and unity or intimacy. These couples fulfill the last two but they can't reproduce. 
PAUL: Isn't it problematic to frame human sexuality in procreative ways? Most human sexual expression throughout life is nonreproductive. From sexual exploration in early childhood to postmenopausal intercourse, our bodies are designed, in some ways, for enjoying nonreproductive sexual pleasure.

JOYCE: That's right. And this is different from most of the rest of the animal kingdom. 

PAUL: The clitoris has no reproductive function. 

JOYCE: In fact we use that to teach women that they're sexual persons with sexual needs, that they were designed for pleasure, that they aren't just the receptacle of male sexual aggression. We teach women that sex is something within all of us, because the clitoris has no other purpose in the body. 

VERN: There can be real difficulties with technology. Fertility clinics are an illustration of this: these are places where, in a sense, sex becomes a duty and you forget what marriage is about. You rush down to the clinic at some technologically determined moment, and you go in and masturbate--and here masturbation is justified, perhaps even by the church. And suppose the artificial insemination doesn't work. You become afraid to have sex in between, and you just wait until next month's visit.

CLIFF: When sex is simply for procreation, it really moves us apart, doesn't it?

VERN: Yes, it does.

JOYCE: And then the couple ends up in our office a year or two later, after they've had their baby. We often see couples who've lost their sexual relationship after going through infertility struggles, because the whole essence of why couples get together is interrupted by that process.

ROBERT: Trying to regulate sexual behavior distorts it. Whenever sex becomes goal-oriented rather than pleasure-oriented, problems arise. Whether sex is programmed for natural procreation, artificial insemination, or even buttressing one's self image, something is lost. 

GREG: But part of the reason is that in-vitro fertilization and these other kinds of reproductive technologies are still so primitive and so difficult and so horribly intrusive. As they improve, that onus will be reduced.

JOYCE: Goal-oriented sex loses its power--often quite quickly. It's a shame that in our culture we're conditioned to achieve our goals quickly. Speed is one way we define success--this is certainly true for men and increasingly for women. And yet with sex, it's just the opposite. What may be great in the rest of life doesn't work in bed. So take your time, slow down, enjoy the pleasure, don't go for the goal, don't raise the bar, just enjoy the moment. That's when it works best. 

ROBERT: In terms of speed and sensitivity, then, sexuality is very different from almost everything else happening in society. 

GREG: In a sense, sex compares with eating; the more intimate it is, the more enjoyable.

CLIFF: Yes, instead of gobbling down our food and being done with it. If we really want to savor a meal, we spend two or three hours at it.

JOYCE: If we put too much in our stomachs and feed ourselves with technology, will we be as satisfied?

PAUL: I think there's a generational difference in this. Teenagers and young adults now--women, in particular--are making much more explicit demands regarding their own sexuality, in terms of partner choices, sexual fulfillment, orgasm, and so on. They grew up in a different era--they're sexually knowledgeable and their expectations are higher. They're very much in touch with their sexual needs, and willing to explore those needs and to demand satisfaction. The real risks of sex are unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. So to me the future of sex is condoms...sounds like "Plastics," from The Graduate, doesn't it? We need better condom technologies. The condoms we use today are not much different from what they were in the seventeenth century. They're not user friendly. They diminish sexual enjoyment. We need something like a contraceptive lubricant that goes on smoothly, facilitates the conductivity of heat, enhances the actual act of sex. Then we'll see a great explosion of sexuality, even within the context of relationships. This kind of technology will drive the relationship of the couple, not the masturbation of the male.

GREG: So if you eliminate sexually transmitted diseases and decouple reproduction, then won't sex be used much more broadly than in a monogamous relationship?

PAUL: Definitely. 

ROBERT: Do you agree with that, Joyce?

JOYCE: Women open up sexually when they feel loved and cared for and have an emotional connection, and so they will demand a relationship.

PAUL: There may be a period of exploration. As adults, we do prefer relationships. But without the risk of sexually transmitted diseases, without the risk of unwanted pregnancy, the teenage years and the early twenties will look different.

VERN: Even with Viagra and other sex-enhancing drugs, sex becomes less important to many people than the intimacy involved. You recognize that the relationship is more important than the orgasm. The best examples are some of the gay couples I've studied who have been living together for a long time. They have no sex whatsoever--they might be having it on the side, but they don't have it with each other. But they're very close, very intimate with each other. What holds them together? It may be the cat or the house they own together, or not knowing what to do with the garden if the other one's gone.

ROBERT: Paul, what can we learn about human sexuality from observing primates?

PAUL: Bonobos, sometimes known as pigmy chimps, are considered our closest relatives. Their sexual behavior is diverse, and it mirrors the diversity of human sexuality.

VERN: Any telephone sex?

PAUL: Check out the sexual positions. They can use the missionary position, which kills the idea that this was the position forced upon us by--

ROBERT: Maybe the bonobos were watching missionaries. 

PAUL: What we learn from the bonobos is the extent to which the concept of "natural" extends beyond reproductive sex. They have oral sex; they have intergenerational sex; they have sex on the run; they have sex for recreational purposes. Their most frequent sexual expression is female-female genital rubbing. They use nonreproductive sex for conflict resolution, for bonding, and so forth. Bonobo sex has a primary social function. It's a full-bodied sexuality--quite different from that of chimpanzees, who have a limited sexuality tied to a specific estrus period. The bonobos act as if they'd read the Kama Sutra and The Joy of Sex. 

ROBERT: Cliff, do you see human sexuality as going beyond the animal model?

CLIFF: Oh, it absolutely has to, because unless we're able to make that deeper personal connection, that soul connection, sex doesn't have that meaning we're all looking for.

JOYCE: And we're having sex far more than just to reproduce.

PAUL: From an evolutionary perspective, the reason sex feels so good is that it's the incentive to get us to copulate often so that more offspring are produced. But the significant characteristic of human sexuality is that it's not specific to procreative sex. It's like an evolutionary loophole: human sex drives can be satisfied by nonreproductive sexual behaviors. So you get this incentive to engage in sex, which in most other animals would be tailored only to reproductive behaviors, but in humans it's not.

CLIFF: Human males are ultimately satisfied the most when they're in a relationship with a partner who is deeply satisfied. And when that happens, there's something more going on than just having an orgasm.

ROBERT: What does that tell you about the nature of sex?

CLIFF: That it's terribly complicated. Unless sex is able to happen between two people, it's not going to deeply satisfy the soul.

GREG: Talking about the soul connection, there are many couples who have very little sex and yet have that same intensity of relationship. 

PAUL: Sexual diversity would help mitigate one of humanity's major problems, overpopulation. Oral sex, for example, is a contraceptive activity, because it doesn't result in new births. Religious texts that authorize sex only for reproductive purposes exacerbate overpopulation in ways that were never meant to be. The use of nonreproductive forms of sex limits population growth, because you achieve sexual fulfillment in nonreproductive ways. 

JOYCE: We've done a good job of fulfilling the command to be fruitful and multiply.

VERN: A little too good.

JOYCE: What we need to do is fulfill the command that a husband and wife ought to leave father and mother and "become one"--be totally open and unashamed of each other and enjoy sexual pleasure together. 

CLIFF: If you look at the Song of Solomon in the Bible, it's just full of pleasure. So it's hard to accept the argument that the Judeo-Christian religion, at least originally, was against sexual pleasure.

ROBERT: Later interpretations distorted the original intent. 

VERN: The traditional hostility of the religious community toward masturbation, for example, simply because it was not procreative, has been very great.

PAUL: As I understand it, that hostility can be traced to the sin of Onan, in the Book of Genesis, where Onan's brother died and by custom he was supposed to impregnate his brother's wife. And Onan said, "Sure, I'm ready for that, but I'm just not going to impregnate her," and he spilled his seed on the ground instead.

CLIFF: That was the withdrawal method of birth control, not masturbation. 

PAUL: But the spilling of the seed on the ground came to refer to masturbation, and became known as onanism.

JOYCE: It's a misuse of scripture.

PAUL: If you look at the crusade of Anthony Comstock in the late nineteenth century--that was an anti-obscenity movement but it was also anti-masturbation. 

VERN: Actually, it's even worse, because Comstock regarded contraceptive information as the greatest sin--the greatest evil. The Comstock laws practically prevented any dissemination of contraceptive information in the United States. 

CLIFF: We're talking years ago. You're not saying that the religious community is still putting up those boundaries today?

PAUL: No, no, not at all. And I understand you're working-- 

JOYCE: We hope we've broken those down. 

PAUL: But we're thinking in terms of Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas--and more recently the Vatican's edict on condoms. So there are clearly pointed examples that still exist.

VERN: All you need to do is listen to some of the TV preachers to know that they're still not accepting nonreproductive sex. 

ROBERT: Well, they may not be accepting it on television.

GREG: Reproductive issues and overpopulation will probably be dealt with technically, rather than through alterations of our sexual behavior with condoms and so on.

PAUL: Or dealt with legally. Constraints could be placed on the number of children you can have.

ROBERT: Cliff, how does your theology influence your approach to sex?

CLIFF: The basic belief is that we are created to be in a relationship, and we envision sex to be the highest expression of that relationship and that intimacy. Sex is living out our humanness in its ultimate form. 

ROBERT: But sex has also been classified by various religious groups as among the worst of the sins. Is that changing?

CLIFF: Well, I think it depends on whom you have it with.

VERN: And who's doing the talking within the religious community. There's no agreement in the religious community on the joys of sex. 
ROBERT: But is there a change?

JOYCE: There's definitely a change. 

ROBERT: And both of you are helping make that change?

CLIFF: We hope so. 

ROBERT: Good. We want a prediction. A hundred years from now, what will have happened to sex?

PAUL: Better condoms. 

VERN: The biggest change in sex will be the changing attitudes of women. The key to what sex can be is what women make it to be. In the past, we've thought of sex in male terms, and maybe by the year 2100 we'll be talking about it from a female point of view.

JOYCE: Vern took my point. Yes. Intimacy is necessary for both men and women. But women will be the ones who require sex to be something more than just technical, more than just physical.

CLIFF: Men will get beyond just the momentary gratification. They'll become more complex in their sexuality, so that they will have moved in the direction of women.

GREG: There's great diversity of opinion here, and that's what we're going to see more of in the future--all sorts of coupling, linking, and using technology, using pharmaceuticals. And I think that sexually transmitted diseases will not be an issue. Sex will be much more diverse and much more recreational--separated from reproduction, and in fact separated from relationships in some ways. 

ROBERT: CONCLUDING COMMENT

I'M not sure it's progress, but eventually we will make better babies by cloning our genetic material, and we will feel more intense sexual pleasure when stimulated chemically or electrically. These new products will be advertised as "cleaner" and "risk-free" and marketed with no danger of disease or emotional trauma--that will be the sales pitch, but the goods may be damaged. Sex is a primary descriptor of the human psyche. It occupies significant ground on our mental map, more than what is needed for procreation or even pleasure. As the search for intimacy intensifies in an age of depersonalizing technology, it may well be the intimacy of sexuality that provides the greatest fulfillment. But while technology may heighten physical satisfaction, it may also make true intimacy harder to achieve. How humans deal with their sexuality helps define what it means to be human, and that, at least, won't change in the future, as sex continues to bring us closer to truth.

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