the gapanese invasion is nigh!

"pinakamaganda ka nga sa buong kapuluan, pero latina na naman ang magwawagi ng korona at sash sa miss world! racism ba ito? lupasay!"

Sunday, August 24, 2008

should one engage in pre-marital sex?


We are a highly sexualized generation. What the previous generations had been silenced for discussing, being taboo, we can openly talk about under the veil of Sex Education or can draw from various media as print, TV, or celluloid. In this generation wherein several major issues concerning sex like contraceptives or AIDS epidemic prevention are being tackled or, hopefully, being addressed, pre-marital sex is one such issue that has long ripped its clothes, done its foreplay, reached climax but that continues to procreate negative offspring.
I am not for one’s engagement in pre-marital sex. All things being equal, I have to eliminate certain sectors of the society in order to highlight my “NO” stand: people, who are at ripe age for marriage, say 26 onwards (past identity crisis stage), but are too bohemian to care about the social stigma of enjoying sex out of wedlock; people who are forced into it, like rape victims; people with emotional maturity—those who are ready to answer for the consequences of their actions. For purposes of immediacy and relativity, I will use the current context of Philippine society to prove my point that one must shun pre-marital sex.
Studies by the University of the Philippines Population Institute raised alarm over the increasing rate of pre-marital sex engagement among consenting, necessarily immature Filipino youth. For instance, young people barely out of their teens constitute the 50+% that lose their virginity, or frequently “taste the cherry,” so to speak, while still in high school or early in college. While the activity surely satisfies the curiosity or yearnings of the wanton flesh and renders a kind of liberation from the hypocritical or pretentiously conservative protectors of morality, the end will not justify the means: unwanted pregnancies, risks of sexually-transmitted diseases and AIDS, uncalled-for marriages, guilty feelings, social ostracism.
While I wish to stress that sex must be postponed until such time one is emotionally prepared to swap “I do’s” with one’s partner, I do not want to mislead the audience that marriage should be constructed as a license, a ticket, a passport for one to secure so that one can get laid, after all. Sex, pleasurable as it is or seems depending on whether or not one has tried it, is integral to marriage in order to multiply and create the social unit called family. However, marriage is not a piece of cake with cherries on top for anyone to pop; it is a life-changing major decision more or less inspired by mutual love, with love meant as work while sex, fun. Marriage is a vow made only once, and even as in it, sex is legitimate if only for the social approval and even as it does not prevent marriage people from having extra-marital affairs, there is more than just drama in saying, “for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.”
As this point of our lives, nearing the stairs of the fulfillment of our dreams, we cannot afford to become parents way too young, or to get infected with venereal diseases and HIV, or to attain celebrity status through gossips and scandals. Let us not forget that sex occurs in the brain, necessarily making it a brain thing. Engagement in sex, especially pre-marital sex, entails then the use of thinking, doesn’t it?

1 comment: