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We must recognize that human sex can be used for various purposes. First, it serves as a basis for procreation. Lust is the inducement of nature to lure every being into the service of maintaining and preserving the species. Religious and state laws regard this as the only permissible purpose of sex, any sexual activity outside of wedlock and any artificial prevention and interruption of pregnancy being prohibited or frowned on.
Second, sex can be used as a tool for personal gratification, mainly as a vehicle of pleasure. As man learned to escape nature’s compulsion, he made sex independent of the process of procreation. Today, the two functions, namely fertilization and sex experience as pleasure, are for most people completely unrelated, the percentage of sexual acts which lead to pregnancy being rather small. But pleasure implies many sensations, some of which have completely different and sometimes contradictory meanings and significance. Pleasure can imply superficial and rather incidental gratification or deep emotions which involve the whole personality. The kind of gratification sought determines the role sex plays in the lives of different persons. There are those who consider pleasure of any kind as the only reason for living; to such persons, sex is merely an inexhaustible source-perhaps the only source-of enjoyment. Their hedonism or “pleasure hunger” as Wexberg calls it, makes them grasp any opportunity for pleasure, with little or no regard to the price or consequences. Hedonists are usually disappointed and cynical people and, therefore, shortsighted in regard to life as a whole. They do not believe in their own future and happiness and, therefore, do not care what will happen later. For them, pleasure has to compensate for their feeling of being a failure. In the same category belong those who use sex for the purpose of gaining power, prestige, social status, or personal superiority.
Sex, however, can have a third function, that of unification. It is a tool which can unite two persons more closely than anything else. Through sex two may become one, physically and spiritually. This unifying function of sex also provides pleasure, of course. But it is a fundamentally different pleasure from the previously described pleasure. Its gratification is deeper and lasting. It implies giving oneself, while hedonism implies mainly taking advantage of another. While hedonistic excitement seeks variation and depends upon the spur of the moment, the desire for unification looks for stability and future happiness.
The subjective feeling of love may employ all three types of sexual functions. The first and the third, however, involve a long-range program, while the second, the tendency to seek mere gratification, is likely to neglect human and social values.
It seems that in our time sex has lost to a great extent its first, primary function, but people have not yet found the third, the fulfillment of unification. The concept of sex as being useful only for pleasure is prevalent and deprives people of deeper gratification, of lasting love, faithfulness, and devotion.
