'On the one hand, sex is a really big deal. It's essential for human reproduction and important for intimacy and relationship between lovers. It is also a source of great happiness and profound disappointment. Whether a person is sexually active or not, sexuality generates energy, creativity and beauty. It's a gift from God that we're invited to receive and enjoy.
Instead of enjoying sex as a good gift, however, Christinas sometimes repress their sexual desires in an attempt to avoid sin or even try to ignore their sexuality altogether. Such Christians counter an oversexualized culture with an undersexualized spirituality. This distortion of purity depicts the good Christian as a disembodied spirit floating through this world on the way to heaven and portrays sex as something dangerous and dirty that ought to be kep in a darkened corner of life. Even when a person marries and sex suddenly becomes good and blessed, it is still kept in a corner, deemed to be a private and morally dangerous area. This approach is an accident waiting to happen: what is repressed reappears, often in troubled from. Sex is a big deal and it deserves to be released from its darkened corner.
But, on the other hand, sex is not a big deal, or at least not in the way we're led to believe. On a personal level, we're told that our inner sexual feelings are the measure of our true selves - that by knowing, exploring and expressing our sexual desires, we become our real selves. Efforts to discipline or redirect sexual feelings for the sake of a greater cause may be seen as foolish or even dehumanizing. In the global economy sex is bought and sold, and is used to sell things, to gain happiness, to be beautiful and to achieve social status. When such a big deal is made of it, sex becomes an idol, offering identity and purpose to individuals and economic growth and international notoriety to nations. Sex is not such a big deal and deserves to be dethroned.'
Jenell Williams Paris, The End of Sexual Identity: Why Sex Is Too Important to Define Who We Are, p.12.
