While scanning through the BBC news homepage I came across this video about how young people in Japan are giving up sex entirely. I have never been to Japan, but it appears that in many ways that country is just as western in many of its core sexual values.
I find it interesting that there is a fascination with these people, thinking of them as so strange, who are giving up sex. They're not giving up family, and they know that sex is needed to create children...but in a way they are at the other extreme with our modern sexual obsession and so seem so unusual by those who have commonly accepted western sexual values.
But that there is such an extreme divide shows us that this seems like this is how things often are...we have generally become obsessed with all things sexual in western culture (and thus, no kind of sex, as long as it is consensual, is viewed as wrong). So it should not be surprised that many people have gone to another extreme and simply abandoned it.
There will come a day, I suppose, when the BBC will look at us who are married and monogamous and think us just as strange as those who have given sex up entirely. Will we seem as strange to our modern culture?
