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“You would rather see a man dying without a whimper on the battlefield than a woman making love with a whimper in the street.” Conversations with God

Some of my favourite books of all time are the ‘Conversations with God’ series. If you haven’t heard of them, ‘Conversations with God’ is a sequence of nine books written by Neale Donald Walsch. They are written as a dialogue in which Walsch asks questions and God answers. For me, reading these books has been one of the closest experiences, to meeting my God … not a man-made idea or a being enshrined in religion or rules, but all loving, wise and un-judgmental. As God says in the book, us humans have a hard time imaging a God, without putting our human traits onto him or her.

In Book 1, God challenges Neale about lots of different topics, including humans attitudes to sex and the judgements we make when someone (and particularly women) has ‘robust sexuality’ and celebrate it openly, as seen in the quote above. So much of these books, have stayed with me, since I first read started reading them, but this one line really stuck in my head. God is right. As a society, we have very funny attitudes towards sex.

Just look at how many computer games based on violence, aggression and killing (that even young children play) there are in our society. This is a pretty socially acceptable pastime for a lot of people. Compare this to how open we are about sex and sexuality. Sure, there have been some advancements in sex education, but it is still far more socially acceptable to watch ultra-violent films, than to watch pornography or sexually explicit films. Sex education is usually specifically around pregnancy and STD’s, which is of course useful, but it is not done as part of any real and insightful dialogue about sex. Sex is one of the most pleasurable and beautiful things, humans can do together, but we have made it into something shameful and to be hidden. We have a long way to go.

Now, the catalyst to wanting to write this post, was reading an interview with Dr Brooke Magnanti a few weeks ago. If you don’t know who Brooke is, her pseudonym was Belle de Jour. She worked for years as a high-class London call girl – and wrote an anonymous blog about her experiences, which was eventually turned into books and then a television series in the UK, until she revealed her identity a couple of weeks ago. She has recently released a new book; “Guide to Men.”

I think Brooke’s interview, contains some of the most sense I have read about relationships and sex for years:

“All of us, she argues – women in particular – should be having more sex, for pleasure, with more partners. Magnanti happily calls herself “a slag” because she rails against the shame that still seems to surround the act “that we’re all built to do. Women, she argues, are especially overly-concerned about their sexual reputations. Last year, for the first time, I became friends with a group of other women, she says. The extent to which they lied about their numbers was staggering. To be fair, I don’t think they were changing the numbers maliciously. But they had certainly internalised certain messages and could tell you quite honestly why this or that one-night stand ‘didn’t count’ and so on.”

“What are you saving yourself for exactly?” she asks. Love? Love is love, regardless of whether you’ve slept with one person or one thousand. It would please me no end if we finally grew up and stopped equating purity with ability to love and be loved.”

“I think the great Western disease is, ‘I’ll be happy when…’ as in, ‘I’ll be happy when I have a wedding’, ‘I’ll be happy when I have a baby’, and so on,” she says. “A worthwhile life doesn’t run to a schedule, and if someone else is going to judge you for not being married by 30, screw ‘em. Their opinion doesn’t matter. If you’re going to judge yourself for the same… wow. Drop that cross already! Be happy now.”

I don’t know about you, but I found a lot of gold in there:

• Enjoy whatever you are doing (in this case sex)
• Drop worrying about what other people think and follow your heart
• Be happy now (whatever your relationship status)

As Brooke points out, we are too concerned with what other people think of us. I think some people worry that, if we all did whatever we wanted to do, there would be anarchy. But if we do what feels right to us in a conscious, authentic way, I think following our hearts is a far healthier way to live than the affairs, lies and pretending we do at present in our society. Are affairs healthier than polyamory? I don’t think so. Is pretending to be straight rather than gay, through fear of others opinions, a better way to live than being who you really are? Again, I don’t think so. We’re all different. We need to learn to get in touch with and love who we really are, including our unique preferences and desires.

If we all concentrated on finding what makes us authentically happy, on enjoying relationships and sex and dropping the judgment, of ourselves and others, what a different world we would live in. The ability to accept our own, and others preferences and the ability to realise that we are all different, is vital to an enlightened society. As God said, our judgements and expectations is what is screwing us up. It is time for a change.

What do you think?