When I think of Jim Morrison of The Doors, I think of the songs I grew up on: “Light My Fire”, “Love Me Two Times”, “Love Her Madly”, and “Touch Me”. Even at a young age, whenever I listened to the doors, I envisioned Morrison and the band as defining the rock star life: sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll. In my mind, sex, alcohol and drugs would seem to be idols in Morrison’s short life. Always the poet, Morrison penned a quote that does make me wonder whether he had started to realize that these idols were, in the end, unfulfilling. As Morrison said, “Sex is full of lies. The body tries to tell the truth. But it’s usually too battered with rules to be heard and bound with pretenses so it can hardly move. We cripple ourselves with lies.” It’s hard to know exactly what Morrison meant when he said this, but I do believe that, in our culture, we’ve created an idol out of sex, and when we allow sex and sexual pleasure to become our all in all, in the end, it’s crippling.
Our culture spins the story that we can have endless sex with no strings attached. Pornography teaches us a selfish form of sex and teaches us and our children to seek temporary sexual satisfaction and pleasure in the glow of our smartphones or computer screens. Pornography itself is full of lies, for example: women always orgasm; the more sex partners the better; the kinkier or more violent the sex, the more stimulating; it degrades women and portrays sex in the absence of love, romance and commitment; and, it divorces sex from reproduction. Additionally, popular teen-targeted TV shows and movies teach that a woman’s worth and power rest in her appearance and sexual availability. Sex, as our culture presents it, it full of lies, and as Morrison pens, when we have to live into the rules and expectations that society places on our sexual fulfillment, it cripples us. I’ve talked with boys and girls who are terrified about living up to our culture’s expectations about sex. They feel as though they must perform and look like porn stars. They feel inadequate if their bodies don’t look like the bodies they see online and in popular culture. Their worth and value is being battered by all of the sexual expectations that are placed on them due to early exposure to pornography and the pressure to be sex gods.
But real sex, sex as God designed it, has nothing to do with lies. Instead, it has everything to do with freedom, love, vulnerability and intimacy in the deepest sense. But, if you aren’t talking with your children about healthy sexuality; if you aren’t protecting them from early exposure to pornography or from the lies in the media, then it’s highly likely that they will buy into the culture’s lies about sex. For help, be sure to check out our resource, “The Talk” to get started with your kids in an age-appropriate fashion.