Читать книгу The Changing Face of Sex - Wayne P. Anderson PhD - Страница 23

Our laws until recently were built on the standard of abstinence for both sexes before marriage. It is the Christian Church standard and to an even greater degree the Muslim standard. In some Muslim countries I have visited, a women can be killed for even a suggestion of a loss of virtue because of the disgrace this brings upon the family. To insure abstinence before marriage, some cultures go so far as to use an extreme form of clitorectomy that sews up the entrance to the vagina, preventing penetration.

In the abstinence standard, sexual intercourse is seen as too important an act, too valuable and intimate to be performed with anyone but one’s marriage partner. Sexual intercourse must be saved for marriage. Kinsey’s reports of the number of people having sex before and outside of marriage were very shocking to a culture where this was forbidden.

Strictly observed, the limit of intimacy was kissing, but over time the rules changed and the standard took different forms. It reached a point where some of my students felt that as long as vaginal sexual intercourse was avoided anything else was allowed.Therefore people such as Clinton could say, “I did not have sex with that woman,” when oral sex was involved.

Petting in an ongoing relationship is widely practiced, but not acceptable to many religious groups.I had one client whom I mention in another chapter who was pregnant, but still technically a virgin since there had been no penetration. Her boyfriend had ejaculated on her upper thigh and gotten sperm into her vagina with his hands.

At the time I am writing this in 2011, the U.S. Congress still wants everyone to be abstinent before marriage, and provides money to schools for programs that limit their teaching to abstinence as being the only appropriate sexual standard for the unmarried.