Check Your Attitudes to Sexuality
Can we ever be totally relaxed towards our sexuality? Are there any guidelines on how we can best understand human sexuality?
Everybody resolves sex problems in their own way. (PhotoXpress)
Our understanding of sexuality is influenced by innumerable factors. (PhotoXpress)
Anyone who can explain the origins of the differences between men and women deserves a Nobel Prize. (PhotoXpress)
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“Our” understanding of sexuality is determined by various factors
Our understanding of sexuality is rarely truly "ours". Our attitudes to sexuality are usually the same as those of most people around us. Some people tend to exaggerate or behave in more deviant ways, but they cannot avoid the influence of the general views of their social environment.
People want hard facts and a world they can understand. When Freud shocked the scientific public with the idea that it is our sexual drive that makes us who we are and that it plays a significant part in the development of personality, the discovery was very difficult to accept. But his hypotheses stayed within the realm of science. The understanding of sexuality among ordinary people is left to the family, Church and school. We broaden our knowledge with an increased access to the media, in particular the Internet. People are thrown into this pool of knowledge, half truths, lies and beliefs. People have to distinguish among different pieces of information and everybody trusts a particular source. Children trust parents, believers trust Church, romantics trust their emotions, some people trust books, and others trust the Discovery Channel, or their physicians, or esoteric knowledge of other cultures. People acquire knowledge of sexuality from different sources, but at some point they stop and say that it seems acceptable to them.
Problems of “science” with sexuality
Every science has its subject of research. The science of sexuality focuses on sexuality. The next step is to determine what sexuality actually means. Is it a way of reproducing, a set of chemical reactions in the body, an expression of affection between two people who promised to be faithful to each other? Is sexuality only sex, or is it love as well?
It is impossible to write down all the hypotheses to define sexuality. You have probably noticed that it is difficult to describe sexuality. Every science studies sexuality to a lesser or greater extent. Psychologists found that physical problems may be related to the state of mind. Physicians found that it is the other way round. Biologists dissect sex organs because they are only interested in their function. Theologists ponder over the connection between the Holy and sexuality, and anthropologists seek to understand the influence of sexuality on a human being as a whole. In every science, researchers study sexuality in their own way. The field of sexuality doesn't represent a single, homogenous subject.
How to find the information you want?
Sexuality is so deeply intertwined with your self that you cannot talk about it objectively. Everybody who tried that was caught in a trap, including great Freud. His attitudes to sexuality and women are evident in every sentence he wrote in his analyses. Even though he was ahead of his time, he was also a powerless prisoner of that period of time. We are prisoners of our times as well. We know that sexuality is intended for reproduction, but we hardly use it that way. We know what causes sexual abuse, but we are unable to uproot it from society. We know that men have penises and women have vaginas and breasts, but a lot of people are disgusted to see others naked on the beach, particularly if they do not look “aesthetic”. We believe that 
monogamy is natural, although it is probably anything but that. We haven't determined whether sex education has a wholly positive or also a negative effect, or what is the effect of pornography, which increasingly more people watch. We do not know the origins of different sexual orientations and why some people are homosexual.
If you throw a stone in the air, it will fall on the ground. This is certainty. There is no certainty in sexuality. All we have are our attitudes. And we can truly be humble confronting the complexity of life.
Read more about sex and sexuality in our 
Lover's Guide.
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