Discourse On Sex, Metasex, Ethics and Human Sexuality Alfredo P.

Co Sexual activity is perhaps, the funniest if not ugliest human activity the sexual positions the couple engages in are embarrassingly compromising, facial grimace elicited during the play, demeaning and the regret that comes after all energies have been exhausted seem all so senseless. Please do not laugh, and welcome to the other side of human person the sexual side. Pardon to those who opted to stay virgin or those who opted to a life of abstention for this discourse is not intended to affront or offend them. This paper is intended to raise point as to the moral issues emanating from the reality of human sexuality and sexual activities giving perhaps heavier slant on issues seldom ventilated. It is indeed for the secular world it is well then that those who are trained to look at sexual issues with prudent sensibilities listen to this from a comfortable distance. No one seems to pay attention to that the human person is so deeply influenced by his sexuality that it must be regarded as one of the basic human disposition shaping human life that it must be given some space for discussion. The persons sex is the source of biological, psychological and spiritual characteristics that makes the male and the female, and it therefore plays important role so influential in the maturation and socialization of the individual. As Molina said, Human sexuality plays a major role in everyones life. Regardless, whether we are young or old, man or woman, American or Japanese, it is an integral part of what we do and who we are. Research on human sexuality has gradually become very important area of study in the recent time by way of research and scholarly writing examining human sexuality. There are exciting sites that delve into the new interest in the observation of human sexuality and so we find for example topic dealing on: How the Brain Organizes Sexual Behaviour. One can also easily log in to an electric site such as, The Electric Journal of Human Sexuality. There is also The Kinsey Institute that provides a plethora of information on the topic of human sexuality. Then there is this website called the Online Psychological Sexuality Survey. On the other hand, moral issues come running after matter pertaining to sex and to human sexuality surfaces such that no sooner than issues do moral judgment comes immediately in tow. In this situation, some moralists, theologians, educators have been harnessed to contribute to better understanding and vital integration of the special values and qualities proper to each sex. There are those who have defended views and ways of acting that are in conflict with the true moral requirements of man, and have thus opened the door to a licentious hedonism. Thus, many people are in doubt and many are asking what is to be regarded as true when many current views are

at odds with the conservative ones. We are not here to resolve, once and for all, the conflicts of judgment due to lack of concrete findings. Science of human sexuality and human psychology need more scientific experimentation to make its dialogue with the ethicists adequately meaningful. It will, for the moment, be sufficient for us here to raise two camps allowing each side to ventilate their views and invite more ideas to follow in the process so as to allow wider participation and perspective in the future. An individual is usually accused as having loose morals when his sexual behaviour is out of line with what is usually defined and accepted by the society and culture. Depending on the environment he is born into, people of particular sexual behaviour falling inside the main track are frequently accused of being weird, deviant, or sometimes they are accused to be outright sinners. Some societies even impose punitive acts of incarceration, and I have heard someone saying being stoned to death? But as we traverse in time, culture and civilization, we begin to see things from a different spectrum. We see things that are often unfamiliar and perplexing but at the same time at the signal of unprejudiced reason we say to ourselves, why not? Conservative and Religious View of Sexuality Conventionalists consider sex morally appropriate only within the bounds of marriage insisting that there are substantial moral restrictions on sex within marriage for sex has no purpose outside the act of procreation. From such standpoint emerges also what reflects religious and conservative moral views of sexual morality. Conservative society considers sex as permissible only within the bounds of marriage on ground of sexual utility. It looks as sex to include family lifes requirement such as raising children and the consequent welfare of society as whole. It is concerned with what would ensure the formation and maintenance. Sex within marriage, they argue, reinforce the loving relationship between husband and wife, and the exclusive availability of sex within marriage will lead most people to get married and stay married. This position shuns extra marital activities for they argue that unavailability of extramarital sex will keep marriage strong. Such clarity of purpose or intention springs from the fact that any human activity must come out of a certain purpose. I shower to refresh or clean myself. I eat to feed my hunger; I work to earn a living and so on and so forth. As a consequence, the logic of sex is for procreation. Here we find sexual utility as the foundation of the conventional argument regarding sexuality and sexual activity. Another argument advance by the conventional sexual morality is the natural law theory. This law has for its root, the medieval argument of St. Thomas Aquinas. The principle may be roughly rephrased as follow; Actions are morally appropriate insofar as they accord with our nature and end as

human being. According to St. Thomas, procreation is the natural purpose or natural end of sexual activity, and thus sexual activity is morally legitimate only when it accords with his fundamental aspect of natural law. Since sex is for the purpose of procreation, and since the proper upbringing of children can occur only within the framework of marriage, extra marital sex violates the natural law, and is deemed immoral. St. Thomas is no doubt, committed to the restrictions and regulation of marital sex itself. Since procreation is understood as the sole natural purpose or as natural end of sexual activity, any sexual activity not directed to procreative purpose is therefore considered as contrary to nature. It goes without saying that masturbation, oral sex, and anal sex, mutual masturbation and other non procreative sexual activities such as homosexual activities are all considered as not in accordance with the natural purpose of sex and are therefore considered immoral for they frustrate the natural purpose of procreative purpose. This position on the natural purpose of sex traversed beyond the medieval 12th century all the way to the recent time and is again reaffirmed by the Catholic Church in the 20th century. Humanae Vitae encyclical in 1968 declares, Each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life. In an even more recent Vatican document we find this; The deliberate use of the sexual faculties outside of normal conjugal relations essentially contradicts its finality. It also categorically says, Homosexual acts are disordered by their very nature. And it reiterates, Masturbation is an intrinsically and serious disordered act. The Vaticans Pontifical Council for the Family recently published restricting guidelines by its president. For purposes of discussion we call this conservative moral position as matrimonial in context, always directed to the purposive albeit utilitarian ground, rigidly espoused by the conventionalist. For them matrimony is natural for man and extra procreational activities and promiscuous activity are contrary to the true purpose of sexual activity and as such also contrary to mans good. The Liberal View In contrast to the conservative stance we mentioned we encounter the non conventional; liberal view of human sexuality. A liberal thinker sees an altogether alternative perception that non marital, non procreative sexual activities are not immoral and should be given a fresher look. This more progressive or permissive views of human sexuality give full space to sexual expression either in solitude or with others. There are great numbers of erotic activities beyond those define by the bounds of marriage and sexual procreation that need to be addressed with

greater understanding. It is not to be understood as free for all things for they have their boundaries and some regulatory operational norms in the liberal view. Restrictions are held in place, and this would include those outside the bound on consensual approval; activities involving harmful infliction of oneself or of other, break of promise, lack or no respect for the body of other, and other norms that may be defined by different society or culture. It affirms that sexual activity is morally objectionable to the extent that it is incompatible with a justified moral principle that requires an analysis of the implications of the relevant moral rules in the area of these behaviours. Included also will be the seduction of a minor; rape of course is also considered a moral outrage since it deprives the consent from the partner. Let us not forget to include too, the use of other as object of sexual gratification due to deception or coercion; all of these are frequently included in the moral restrictions here. But here we ask pointedly now, what are these liberal sexual activities beyond normal sex that need to be understood from a different spectrum? The Other View of Human Sexuality as a Metasex In most familiar classroom discourse on human sexuality in recent time, what issues of interest are no longer questions of male or female, heterosexuality or homosexuality more than the emerging spectre of matters pertaining to human Eros. Traditional labelling or condemnation seem to play so little role such that usual tag of gay, pervert, homosexual, lesbian, pederastrian, etc. Seem to convey little social meaning and they seem to no longer berate the people being called such label. Postmodern culture being inclusive, and accommodating, tends to sneer at these traditional labelling as being square, arrogant, bigot, self righteous, puritan, to say the least. It may be timely for us to entertain other way of looking at human sexuality one that brings us a way of looking at human sexuality one that brings us away from being condemnatory, judgmental, and moralistic. In a fictional work entitled The Metasex Manifesto... Marco Vassi takes us to a fresher way of looking at human sexuality. He introduced various terms that seem to have gradually brought contemporary sexual understanding closer to him than when it was first written. Vassi introduces the term metasex to raise contraputo to the conventional word sex, and at the fulcrum he speaks of eroticum as the operational framework to distinguish human erotic activities. Vassi rises the following operational terms that changed the landscape of human understanding to the human sexual disposition needing

some exciting some exciting discussion. His discussion in his work revolves around the terms, Eroticum, Sex, and Metasex. Vassi did not attempt to redefine the meaning of the term Sex; in fact he upholds the meaning of the word as explained in the traditional sense. Sex, he agrees, is a vehicle for procreation, or making babies, and nothing else. Sex qua sex, is for the propagation of the species and should not look for any other reason outside it. Vassi considers the definition to be correct, but he asserts that there is a vast realm of erotic behaviour that falls outside this stricture, and for that he said, one may have to look beyond the constricting and suffocating term as sex to introduces the term Metasex to explore the human sexual behaviour, and thus leads us to the two other terms. On the other hand, he introduced a term, which he calls Metasex. Metasex, at the surface takes us to the origin of the word, meta, which literally means, beyond, but as an operational term, metasex is a concept used to describe the condition of a person who had subsumed the fragmentary aspects of the erotic manifestation into a unitary appreciation. It is a category of behaviour used to delineate erotic activity regardless of consciousness involved. Metasexuality properly understood, is the shadow of sexuality, it is distinct modality of being and should never be confused with sex per se. At the core of this is the multi purpose that can be drawn from the sexual activities, and to give these activities fuller room, the new term Metasex has to be introduced. Anything beyond sex but takes the erotic sensibilities in tow assumes metasexual form. At the fulcrum of Sex and Metasex he introduced another term that he calls Eroticum. As an operational term, Eroticum stands at the fulcrum of these two distinctive activities of Sex and Metasex. This term therefore connotes a matrix that embraces both the sexual and metasexual activities. Eroticum stays at the centre because it is at once open to possibilities of human sexual activities. It does not judge, it does not condemn, and it is amoral. If people take sexual activity to carry some moral sense, it is because he is unwilling or unable to accept the other predisposition of human in the metasexual sphere. Meanwhile from the metasexual point of view, sex is self limiting, devoid of colour, texture and even lacking imagination required by someone in such greater pleasure. To illustrate the language raised above, we may illustrate them by giving the activities according to the distinctive nature of the two. On one hand of self limiting understanding of human sexual activity against the more including spectre of human eroticum for better understanding of what Vassi is trying to tell us. Remember at all time, that he is not predisposed to look at the erotic matter as moral issue more than giving us the nature of activities pertinent to human erotic condition. How ethics emerges from this

distinction may have to be interpreted by the people engaging in such activities. Sex on one hand belongs to biological eroticum with the purpose of the propagation of the species and could be a relatively rare activity. The condition is imposed by biological requirement involving the penetration of the male organ to the female organ and the eventual insemination during the time of fertility. This form of activity requires reverence and responsibility for not only is the act itself is relevant, but the couple must be aware of the full dimension and consequences of such act, which is to create human being. The propagation of human species is the highest fulfilments the human are capable of doing. The act also defines the vision of human survival; relationship, culture, and education for these are the legacies the parents bequeath to children. On the other hand Metasex belongs to the realm of psychophysical eroticum and it could be of any reason, it may be cultural, civilzational, work or play, pleasure, affection, money, exchange of energy, communication and exploitation, theatre or even meditation. The condition can be variegated and not concerned with the details of the act it could be among men, among women, men and women, strangers, friends, passionately or dispassionately done, conventional or extreme and the number can be varied. In metasex, the necessary quality is compassion since circumstances are so flexible and the range is over the full spectrum of human behaviour. It is thus necessary that the humans must not lose sight of one anothers humanity. What is prohibited will be exploitation, lying or damage done to the person/s involved. From the above matrix, one may have to be warned that the basic error in the perception or understanding of the all erotic thinking lies in muddying the aesthetic metasex with the moral paradigm of sex, an subverting the mystery of grandeur of sex with the relativistic values of metasex. The rumination of sex, however, transports human imagination from a fictional literature to real sexual expression or is it real sexual behaviour drawn into fictional literary narrative laden with evolving reality in literatures age? We can proceed on with erotic guro. Vassi decreed outmoded model and man become burdened with concepts that accuse man, condemn man, label man, marginalize man with such concepts as homosexual, bisexual, pervert, etc. This is because we use sexual standard to view metasexual activities. There is no quarrel that there is only one way to do sex, the male and female in genital intercourse. But once we indulge in other activities beyond this procreative direction a whole new spectre emerges, they acquire new meaning enters new metasexual realm. At this instance simple sex becomes meaningless and the new activities requires new form. From thereon, man

has to find new ways of articulating the erotic experience, something that goes beyond sex, thus it is now called Metasex. One may argue, why talk about eroticum at all when in the ideal sense we ought not to talk about it all? The question bounces back, because human nature moves him so. If sex is limited to simple procreation, one may have to stop engaging in erotic activities after having the first, second or the number of children the couple purposely wanted to procreate. Married couples that have produced the number of children desired, or a couple that have reached menopausal period will have to stop engaging in sexual activity. But is procreation the raison dtre of human erotic activity? We may have to answer this more squarely and that answer may be one that does not come from a logically argued system of thinking, but one that is drawn from the innocent, natural human disposition as a biological being. From here we ask the question again, is procreation the sole purpose of human erotic activity? The answer is obvious, even if we refuse to engage in erotic activities, nature has it coming and coming and coming to us. Until such time when final enlightenment shall have come to us, we will remain doing erotic activities, aside from the professional activities we engage in. Erotic activities are very much a part of human life and the man who enjoys the pleasure of sex or metasex has no reason to condemn those who refuse it. While those who refuse to engage in sex and metasex have no reason to condemn those who engage in them either. This should not in any way undermine the position of religious institution where the understanding of sex has to be elevated in the altar of God or gods. In such level, the activity of sex becomes a moral issue. Moreover, the people who are into religious order have taken some kind of disciplined rational option of entering a spiritual vow of chastity. Such reverential position must be taken with all respect for the enormous sacrifice they have to give up for higher purpose of spiritual life. Not many are given such intellectual strength, least of all emotional will to live up to that high level of self denial. Perhaps it is also for this same reason that they are looked up to with great reverence. That single sacrificial act is at once heroic and divine. But for the lesser mortals, for people of this world of flesh and blood, the disposition is different, and a different secular yardstick should therefore measure them. To provide a communicable vehicle for grasping and communicating erotic behaviour and feeling, Vassi therefore further introduces the concept of mode, which is to him the paradigmatic mood within which the metasexual activity takes place. By that, it displaces all questions of detail, number, and gender thus putting sex and metasex in a more fluid context. With the new model, we can more closely approximate the reality of the erotic condition. With the rubric of mode, sex finds its proper tone while metasex is given its full freedom of expression.

Metasexually, there is no real difference between what two men do in bed from three women do in bed or from what a man and a woman do in bed; for to label them as homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual is to impose some value and moral judgment at once condemnatory and bigot. Moreover, such labels can alienate us from one another as human beings, first and foremost. From this new paradigm, an old criterion is dissociated and the moral perspective vanishes. For the old cup becomes hallow as it become primitive, wasteful, and wanting of explanation. Mode determines the purpose, the meaning of metasexual activities. And we must try to explain these interesting modes of expression of human eroticum. Masturbatory Mode is in many ways the home mode in a solitary activity involving a private person who may, out of self awareness, begin to stimulate himself/herself with the simple purpose of exploring private fulfilment through personal arousal. Masturbation itself is often the introduction to eroticism. Imaginations come with this activity, as the absence of participant one does not just touch oneself but he needs fertile imagination to sustain the arousal all the way to the end. Metasexually, someone choosing masturbation as activity of expression is more or less valid than any other way of doing it. Then there is the Therapeutic Mode, which I should say, is the trickiest mode as it passes through a transition of formal purpose to actual pleasure as it simultaneously liberates repressed doing, one makes the unconscious conscious and subsequently saner and healthier. Therapeutic mode gives one the open field of reviving ones lost potency. One may undergo some stimulation to experiment on the possibility of reviving lost sexual prowess; the stimulation may be done with someone trained to do it or one may resort to taking some medicinal pills sustained by visual or imaginary fantasies, the idea is to revive the sexual predisposition to come to its original normal level. In this mode, a person who wants to find out his potential ability to impregnate a woman, for example, may have to masturbate to find out his motility count to determine if the sperm he produce has adequate fertile count to impregnate a partner. This is a common medical laboratory practice required of men trying to determine his ability to procreate. The medication that comes after the laboratory test is incidental to the act of determining the fertility of the man. But then, human disposition can draw him to another lever called the Theatrical Mode. This mode is a function of psychic distance, and entails the notion of performance. In this mode there is always an audience which may consist in actual onlookers, or may be projected awareness of the participants viewing the acts as though from the outside. This mode requires the lightness

of touch, deftness and this refers to the quality of mind and not to the activity. The participants may be involved in something, as heavy as flagellation, but the psychological set within which they amuse themselves must not grow ponderous. Taken literally, this form may require some costumes or some specific roles i.e. virgin and debauchee, prostitute client, even the more comical role of a gay dressed in flirty lingerie chased, stripped and raped by a male suitor lover. The common danger of theatrical mode is solipsism, which has the tendency to cut the circuits of energy flow between the performers. For the acting out of fantasy requires steady attention. Here the importance of passion is clear; for it spells the difference between peoples using and abusing one another. To have two or more fantasies brought to life through the eroticum without the entire affairs degeneration into confusion requires the skill of an acrobat. To maintain the act as an act, the level of good theatre, without psychopathy, requires soundness on the participants. The style may vary ranging from classical to improvisatory approaches. It can be scripted or it may revolve around a roughly defined character and the role play ensues. Dialogue, costumes and pros may be included or not, while the play can be simple, innocent or sophisticated. Like dance and theatre, it sculpts counters in time and space using only the body as a medium. Here, one can perform tragedy, comedy or even drift into irony. Then, there is also what is called the Aesthetic Mode where eroticum is raised to explore the possibilities of elevating the eroticum into a heightened form of activity thus elevating the act into art form. It explores the possibilities of attaining pleasure in the most fastidious detail such as the ones found in the classical Kama Sutra. We may linger on the little detail on the Kama Sutra here, for example, in which the Eastern thinkers have devoted a whole discourse on human pleasure and sexuality. It for instance devote the Introductory chapter on the three aims and priorities in life the acquisition of knowledge, conduct of the well bred townsman, reflections on intermediaries who assist the lover in his enterprises. It discusses on sexual union highlighting the discussion on the stimulation of desire, types of embraces, caressing and kisses, marking with nails, biting and marking with teeth, on copulation (positions), slapping by hand and corresponding moaning, virile behaviour in women, superior coition and oral sex, preludes and conclusions to the game of love. It describes 64 types of sexual acts detailed in ten chapters showing graphically, well, in sculptural reliefs on temples the aesthetic depiction of a sex position. The book also discusses about the acquisition of a wife explaining the forms of marriage, relaxing the girl, obtaining the girl, and managing alone, union by marriage. The chief wives have some specific roles and conducts to play and how she deals with the rest of the wives.

Kama Sutra also explains how man and woman get acquainted, examination of sentiments, and the importance of pleasure in the activity. It explains the choice of lovers, looking for a steady lover, and ways of making money, renewing friendship with a former lover, occasional profits, profits and losses. It tells us on improving physical attractions, arousing a weakened sexual lover, all in fine details. The possibilities of attaining pleasure and the ability to sustain them are immense and always elevated to the level of aesthetic imagination. Finally, there is this called Religious Mode. This mode takes the form of religious cult or ritual. A temple prostitute in Indian tantric religion requires choosing the most beautiful virgin in a village, for example. The virgin is offered to the temple and raised in the there until she reaches adolescence. At the first sign of her menstrual cycle the virgin is prepared to be offered to the high priest at the time of fertility. At the expected time of fertility, the virgin is offered in the altar where she is devirginized and sexually consumed by the temple high priest. It is said that the temple high priest penetrates the virgin only at the right moment of religious ritual, when the cosmic spirit shall have entered the high priest; he penetrates the virgin and implants the cosmic seed or energy to the virgin. The act is supposed to be a highest form of religious offering and the impregnation is supposed to be the product of union between gods and human. The Question of Sexual Utility, Law of Nature, and the Law of Man The more pressing issue that one may now have to face if one were to evaluate the issue on human sexuality that we have just raised is the question of Sexual Utility, of what is natural and what is unnatural, and with this we may have to answer also the more pressing questions of what are the laws of nature and what are laws that should apply to humankind. But what is natural and what is not natural? We say something is not natural if it is a/the product of human artifice. My computer, my car, or my cell phone are not natural for the substance of which they are made gave been removed from their natural state a state in which they existed before men came along and have been transformed by a series of chemical and some physical and mechanical processes into other substances. These things have been rearranged into objects that are quite different from anything found in nature. The same thing can be said when one is to put denture, artificial heart, contact lenses, or the process of artificial insemination or IVF (In Vitro Fertilization). By contrast, if one were to stick to things that can be called natural, the opposite of anything that man interferes into will be unnatural. The law of nature as scientists understand it is different from the law of man for the former is purely descriptive while the latter is perspective. When

for instance in science, we say that water boils at 212 degree Fahrenheit or that a volume of gas varies directly with the heat that is applied to it and inversely with the pressure, he means merely that as a matter of recorded and observable fact, pure water under standard conditions always boils at precisely 212 degree Fahrenheit and that as a matter of observed fact, the volume of a gas rises as it is heated and falls as pressure is applied to it. These laws merely describe the manner in which physical substances actually behave. It goes without saying that the man made law is different in that it does not prescribe behaviour. Any legislature or any other social or moral law does not pass natural laws. Natural laws are not proclaimed or announced; they impose no obligation upon anyone or anything; the violation of natural laws do not entail penalty nor is there any reward for following it. For here it is clear that while the laws of nature one finds a prescriptive injunction, one has the option to be bound or unbound by it that is the case of manmade laws. That is why in a country where gay marriage is prohibited does not become binding in another country where such married is allowed. But if we were now to analyze this given, human laws, being artificial conventions designed to exercise a degree of control over the natural inclinations and propensities of men, may in this sense be considered to be unnatural. It seems that the issue becomes arguable when one is to discern the meaning of natural, unnatural, and it becomes even more complicated if one were to interpret natural as moral and unnatural as immoral, for the reality of things seem to have brought us to this ever growing human concerns, science being unready to come to terms with moralist, legalists and theologians. For it seems that nothing is intrinsically wrong with going against nature per se if that is how we should put it for the time being. That which is artificial is often far better than what is natural and that is what science and technology are into, and man benefited from these scientific and technological invention. Interference with nature seems not to be evil per se. If nature were left to its own devices, without the intervention of human artifice, men would be consumed with disease, they would be plagued by insects, and they would be chained by the places where they were born with no means of swift communication or transport, and they would suffer the discomforts and the torments of wind, heat, water, fire, with no practical means of combating any of them. Interfering with nature, or what some people would call artificial and unnatural means, doing battle with nature, using human reason, will and skill to thwart what might otherwise follow from the conditions that prevail in the world, is a peculiarity human enterprise, one that can hardly be condemned merely because it does what is not natural. I have said at the start of this paper that we do not intend to come with conclusive remarks for it merely intends to raise issue of the perplexing phenomenon of human sexuality wherever the discussion would lead us. The point raised may have some persuasive weight, but we should not claim to its truism. For more opinions haves to be heard, and even more arguments be set

in place on this phenomenon of human sexual disposition. That is why we should not claim to truth in the points raised, no matter what persuasion it may carry. For what we have just come to knows and what we have just come to argue, is indeed so little compared to those that may be raised against them. But today we celebrate the spirit of philosophy; a science that allows human thought to raise issues wherever reason leads it. Not everyone is eager to push the frontier of human thought, for many have come to settle in the comfortable fold of their culture and faith. As we therefore cheer to those who have found truth by following their lighted path, here is a toast to the poor seekers for to them is laid the life of philosophy.