Walking in the Valley A weekly column for those who live and walk in Silicon Valley by Barbara Dahlgren

Where Do Sexaholics Come From? Column for the week of March 9-15, 2003

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Friday and Saturday marked the presentation of “Sexaholic....a love story” in the Bay Area. The San Jose Mercury News says the three reasons people should see it are:

1. “Stage and film actor, John Leguizamo can do things with his hips that cannot be adequately described in a family newspaper.”
2. “This Tony-nominated solo is a veritable pelvic tour-de-force guaranteed to raise the roof, not to mention a few eyebrows.”
3. “It’s also a play with something to say about race and culture and how even
bad boys grow up eventually.”

Comedian/actor, John Leguizamo has appeared in films from Summer of Sam to Moulin Rouge. He’s known for comedic monologues about his Latino heritage and sexuality. Evidently this particular one-man show is autobiographical and spiced with more 4, 5, and 6 letter words one would care to imagine, not to mention the sexual overtones or should I say, tones. I haven’t seen it so I can’t comment on it’s content. But I find it interesting that it’s appearing at the Flint Center, which is located on the DeAnza College campus. This is probably something every red-blooded American college student should see. It fits right in with some of the curriculum offered in today’s institutes of higher learning.

At Berkeley you can take a course in Male Sexuality. Part of the class assignment, so students can get to know each other better, is to take pictures of your own genitals, mix them up, and try to match class faces with the pictures. Get to know each other better? No doubt. Maybe that’s where the author of the movie The Banger Sisters and the jerks who send me 10 uninvited emails a day asking me if I want to enlarge certain parts of my anatomy that I don’t even possess got their education. A San Francisco State class offers students tips on finding porn on the Web. Mount Holyoke College offered students the opportunity to participate in an erotic dance course. The dean of faculty feels that stripping builds self-esteem. And we wonder why people can’t install an infant car seat because the instructions are written at a tenth grade level?

If you think this lackadaisical attitude toward sex and pornography is not contributing to the dumbing down of America, you are badly mistaken. Read the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and see how becoming a promiscuous society contributed to their demise. We are becoming a country obsessed with sex and everyone’s right to do whatever feels good to him or her or it. We constantly misuse our Constitution to protect the wrong people. People cry, “First Amendment” when public libraries want to put filters on computers to block Internet porn sites. It’s a sad state of affairs when mom and pop finance Jr.’s college education just to find out his teachers hold X-rated films on the same literary plane as Shakespeare.

I guess the theory is you need a degree to appreciate porn, however you don’t have to go to college to see it. You can just look at television or magazine advertisements, and I’m not referring to Playboy. Webster’s defines pornography as “writings and pictures intended primarily to arouse sexual desire.” I’d say a naked woman with arms and legs tastefully placed covering certain areas of her body to advertise soap or perfume could fall into that category. Sex sells products. If a little sex sells, then a lot of sex will sell more. Gone are the days when we could draw a line in the sand and say everything on this side is good and everything on that side is smut. That’s the trouble with drawing a line in the sand. It’s too easily erased and redrawn without even a trace of where the line was originally.

God created people. God created sex. Everything God created was good. The proper use of sex is good. God is not a prude. Just read the Song of Solomon. However man with Satan’s help has managed to pollute everything God created. Sexaholism is part of that pollution. Remember, God created sex, not sexaholics. If you don’t believe me just enroll in your local college.

©March 2003

Be sure to visit this page every week to read the next edition of Walking in the Valley. You can write to the author at bdahlgren@wcgsouthbay.org.