A “Letter from Rio de Janeiro” appeared yesterday in the Chicago Tribune, written by Colin McMahon, the paper’s South America correspondent. Titled Sex and the City–of Sex, it begins thusly:
RIO DE JANEIRO — Does a city already intimately associated with sex really want to build something called a “City of Sex”? And if it does, Rio de Janeiro is asking itself, would said City of Sex really have to look like that? City of Sex is a proposed erotic center that would be built in the famed beach neighborhood of Copacabana. The center would house art shows, informational exhibits, shops, a museum and clinics dedicated to sexual health.
As an aside, does there exist a more ironic euphemism than “sexual health”? Speaking of euphemism, the article also notes that the proposed City of Sex would contain — not surprisingly — “swingers clubs”. One thing is for sure: our pansexual overlords have an amazing talent for marketing over the top hedonism in such a way as to make it seem like it’s no big deal. Still, not everyone is happy about the proposal:
But Rio residents have recoiled …[and] [w]ould-be neighbors have lodged protests. Even some of Rio’s plentiful prostitutes don’t like the idea. They see the City of Sex turning into a kind of sex ghetto, ultimately keeping sex, and those who work providing it, locked up in a box. Whatever kind of attention the project brings, its creator welcomes all of it. “We are a country closely connected with sex. Everyone knows that,” said Igor de Vetyemy, who designed City of Sex last year for his final architecture school project at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. “But we don’t know how to live with sex.”
That’s strange, considering how many times we hear variations on the tired old protestation, “But we don’t know how to live without sex.”
“There is still a lot of Puritanism here. We talk only about the bad things of sex — sex tourism and the child exploitation. We never talk about the good faces of sex” [emphasis added].
He doesn’t go into detail as to what he believes to be the “good faces of sex”, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the ability of spouses to express complete and total self-sacrificing, self-donating mutual love in a way that uniquely allows human beings to reflect the inner life of God and to be open to the possibility that their act of love may result in the creation of another person with an eternal soul wasn’t what Vetyemy had in mind. Following Mark Shea, I have repeatedly said what now appears to me plain as day:
Show me a culture that despises virginity, and I’ll show you a culture that despises children.
It’s nothing short of tragic that in our world today, what is perceived as “sexual freedom” is actually sexual slavery (in either the spiritual or the literal sense). And it’s equally tragic that the purveyors of so-called sexual freedom will not (cannot?) recognize that a pansexual society inevitably fosters such obvious evils as sex tourism and child sex trafficking.
