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By Root 1160 0

are, even while we tell everyone to do their own thing. Perhaps you are married, and you have sex a few times a week or a few times a month. You may judge your sex life as satisfying but conceptually dull, the ultimate in normal. I invite you to notice that our version of moderation is just another wacky regimen. Note too that only a bit more than half the relevant population fits this “norm.” Again, my chief purpose is to reveal that our beliefs about what we ought to be doing are far too heavy-handed, and nothing reveals this better than a little historical perspective. Consider the absolute conviction that people had about a handful of outlandish ideas, based on changeable arguments, and almost no real attempt at proof. It should wake us to a more realistic understanding of our own convictions.

All this said, I think our era allows more room for happiness through sexuality than average. There are constraints of our time period. There is AIDS. There is the fact that, as a result of our long educations and tight economy, the biological readiness for sex comes much earlier than the social and economic readiness for its consequences. There is also the fixation with homosexuality as problematic. And there is a kind of boring silence about sex, because when it becomes visible, people interpret this as a psychological “issue,” which may or may not be fair. Nevertheless, you can have a pretty good time here in the twenty-first century. Past centuries have been better with allowing people to try for happiness by using drugs or through an economy that values craft, community, and leisure. We’re pretty good with sex. There is room to move, without having to change any laws or overhaul entire institutions. Of course, you do need a little historical perspective.

16

Treatments

You are lying on the beach in a quiet cove in the Yucatán, listening to softly crashing ocean waves. When you open your eyes, you see palm trees on either side of you; behind you, in your stilted cabin, your sun-shy spouse sleeps in. You can see the narrow beach on either side of the cove extending emptily far into the distance. You check under your bathing suit to see how dark you are getting, then feeling a little guilty for wasting the opportunity to go into the ocean, you haul yourself up and take a dip in the turquoise water. The waves are rough enough to keep you busy. Still, you feel a sharp pang of bliss as you float and gambol, letting the ocean and the sky press you back and forth like two kids who won’t let go of a ball. One wave surprises you, though, and knocks you down; you clamber out and collapse back into your spot on the sand. You think of the office you work at back in the States and of how long you looked forward to this trip. You sigh with pleasure, lick your salty lips, and close your eyes. Happy.

Just what are you happy about? It is not easy to say. Many people report that the sun feels good on their skin. It seems like an objective truth when you see how crowded Jones Beach and the Santa Monica Pier get on a bright day. But what about the people of Mexico and Jamaica, for instance? They do not seem to find their sunny beaches nearly as compelling as their tourists do.

Natural beauty and quiet are both a delectable change from strip malls, television, traffic, copy machines, chattering, and cubicles. It isn’t exactly interesting, though, and the ocean isn’t exactly quiet. It is loud and monotonous. You know how nice it is when you are resting and someone shuts off the lawn mower or the vacuum they were using? At the ocean side, if there were a button we could press to make the surf stop for a while, a lot of us would probably press it. As for the natural beauty, note that the palm tree has become a symbol of happiness. There was an obvious reason to correlate the tree with warmth and leisure, but by now it has taken off on its own, standing as such a strong symbol of paradise that a beach and sun without palm trees would be like a birthday party without balloons. That is, nowadays, the palm trees are doing some of the work of