Column | Sexual taboo became sexual commandment

‘Everyone should have sex fun; not accidentally or sometimes, but always.” It quote is from de Volkskrant from last Saturday: an interview with the sisters Krista (33) and Marcelle (31) Arriëns, who call themselves Sex sisters and who “approach sex in a new and vulnerable way” via YouTube, TV and information in schools.

Vulnerable will definitely be, ‘vulnerable’ is the new ‘exciting’, only in Ukraine they don’t seem to be over-enthusiastic about the concept. But new? That sex is good, tasty and healthy? From puberty I hear this thump trumpeting in my ear. Fortunately, I had relatively old parents, who didn’t chirp, but teachers, psychologists, always had the same tune.

Such statements can be compared with: ‘Everyone should have a second home in the south of France, not by chance or sometimes (vacation), but always.’ What is new is that the sisters, who in my sixties are obviously young, state that there is such a thing as a ‘right to good sex’. It belongs in the basic package of human rights. Food, roof, sex. Good sex.

That raging indoctrination drove me crazy as a 15-year-old, and it has only gotten worse over the course of my life. Clumsiness, shame, horniness, hubris: everything characterizes those first sexual experiences better than this honey-sweet babbling.

We are back in the fifties and sixties of the last century. That every mother-to-be is told that childbirth is ‘an unforgettable experience’, there is still some ambiguity in it: it can end well and also unforgettably bad. But that cheerful nurse tone remains obligatory about sex. The sexual taboo became a sexual commandment.

Is it just fun? I remember a courtship with a boy in his bedroom, both of us fifteen, where his mother caught us and pulled me resolutely from her son.

She exclaimed: What a scumbag? No, she argued against her son. Why she had chosen me for sex, again just as patriarchal-dominant-aggressive as that of her ex-husband, from whom she had just divorced.

You can call that scene vulnerable.

The last seventy years represent a unique period in human history: we talk about sex just a little more than we do it. Has the sex become ‘better’? Rights and obligations that apply in sexual practice are now ‘clearly named’, as it is called. Hopefully it will help against rape. But whoever hears for so long that sex always brings pleasure, soon comes to the idea that there is never anything wrong with it.

Always have fun with sex? Always laughing with Lubach, you mean.

Stephan Sanders writes a column here every Monday.