A Brief but Cogent Insight about Church, Patriarchy, Hierarchy, and Sex

I was watching a fragment of a movie that was either set in the early 1800s or set in an imaginary world with similar social mores and attitudes; there was a scene in which a fiery preacher was glancing at a woman in the congregation and getting flashback memories of the hot steamy sexxx they'd had together, and he was visibly flustered and awkward about having her there.

And it hit me very clearly that he feels vulnerable to her because of the prior intimacy, and doesn't like that in this context; I could see the gears in his head spinning, if you know what I mean... that is, he was just a character in a movie so obviously I'm projecting a bunch of archetypal stuff onto him based on his social location and the surrounding environment portrayed in the movie, and within that framework of understanding I was suddenly seeing things from his vantage point:

• quite aside from any specific mention of sex, his customary way of being and behaving there in his church is all about control and propriety, acting with dispassionate detachment as a rule-following socially obedient and socially approved role model;

• there's a social hierarchy in place there and he's at the apex of it, shared with the male community leadership of older established successful men and with younger men and mothers and wives and single women and children strung out below in more or less consecutive order of privilege authority and power;

• sex and the complex of feelings that accompany it really throw a spanner into the works, making him partially inclined to respond to the woman as an equal, an intimate, and although he very much enjoyed the sex at the time, he doesn't like this situation;

• he is going to want to denounce sex, and to denounce women who have sex, as something shameful that needs to be evicted from the church context, and relegated to whatever ghetto of other social interaction it may be consigned so as to minimize this kind of disruption while still existing so that there can still be sex;

• one outcome of this is that sex, for men like him, will be primarily something that happens not with one's social equals, the people that one interacts with in one's primary social context — because no woman in that context can really be his equal, and therefore he can't afford the intimacy — but instead will take place with people who are enough below it that they aren't welcome in that context;

• this, in turn, cheapens sex itself as something inappropriate in the context in which one such as him spends most of his social life; it is instead something that one scuttles off to experience in a different social context which is otherwise below his position, reeking of dirt and contempt and deplorability;



None of these observations is particularly new or unique, but notice how the attitude towards sex is an outcome, not the cause, of the social hierarchy. Sex is a threat to hierarchy of this sort, so it is perceived as such and treated as such.

Note also what will likely happen to "family generative sex", sex between husband and wife, etc; it obviously has to persist if yon clergyman is going to have children, but the same threat to hierarchy would exist if he were having erotic passionate intimate sex with his wife and now she were present there in the church setting. So sex in this context will be kept tame and dull, with sex of the exciting variety that gives one flashbacks and ongoing emotional responses exported to the other context.

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