The New Religion?

What is truly new today is that there is a new religion. In a few words, it is the general feeling that no one is really healthy without a fully developed sex life.

This spiritual bulletin appears in France's "Christian review" Esprit (most of whose editors are Roman Catholics), in a special issue devoted to La Sexualite. The magazine's contributors take it for granted that a "sexual revolution" has taken place, citing, among other examples, the "new wave" of French films. The new sexuality is a result of 1) the Industrial Revolution, which emancipated women economically, and 2) the "greatest biological invention of modern times," contraception, which emancipated them sexually and enabled them to determine the size of the family.* But France is still a patriarchal society based on the idea that women do not have the right to make this decision. "The man we see waging a crusade against birth control," writes Research Scientist Andree Vielle-Michel, "is a 19th century man, who cannot imagine a world that is not dominated by the male." What France needs, she says, is a type of 20th century man, who will join woman in building a democratic society in which she lives as comfortably as he does.

Revenge Through Sex. Father Marcel Henry, director of Parole et Mission, published by a Paris community of priests, attributes the rise of the "new religion" of sexuality to the fact that "modern man. shut up in cities, cannot contemplate Nature as did peasants in other days." The one "work of Nature" presented for his contemplation on all sides, "from the cover of his magazine to the movie advertisement, is woman." Hence, "a kind of taste for the erotic has become a deep-seated part of his mind and his habits, as it once sometimes inhabited the mind of great men in bygone days."

The new sexuality is the result of modern man's disappointment with his technological and political worlds, writes Esprit's Associate Editor Paul Ricoeur, a professor of General Philosophy at the Sorbonne. "Eroticism is. therefore, revenge not only against the insignificance of work and politics, but against the insignificance of sex itself." Other morsels in Esprit's 319 pages:

P: "Women, above all, have become conscious of the fact that their 'blossoming' depends on the quality of their physical pleasures."

P: "Women's social emancipation has brought about her sexual emancipation; she no longer resigns herself to being only the last love affair of her husband."

P: In the "new religion," it is up to each individual "to invent his [or her] own sexual ethic according to the problems posed by the violence of his [or her] desire, taste for love affairs, or worry over conjugal fidelity."

P: Modern woman has decided to understand sexuality, to include it knowingly in her universe without letting herself be carried away by it, to welcome it like a domesticated animal which she can yoke to her uses, not like a savage force . . . Does this presage the end of great passions? Perhaps."

Bring Back the Mystery. Esprit's surprise symphony on sex provoked a prompt protest from Roman Catholic Novelist Jean-Rene Huguenin, 24, who accused Esprit of accepting the "new religion" too uncritically. Wrote Huguenin: "Youth has begun to tire of this civilization devoid of mystery that pretends to have the answer to everything, and teaches it only to believe in that which can be seen, touched, or counted. It is tired of finding bodies so easy to possess, and to lose, by this very facility, the hope of a more subtle joy, which it dare not call love. It is tired of hearing its heart beat fast for precisely 30 seconds, on a bed that is barely rumpled, on the same evening of the first encounter . . . It is tired of these get-togethers of philosophers, psychiatrists, reverend fathers, scholars and know-alls . . . come to put out its dreams and fabricate for it a nice and reasonable and sterile conscience. It despises the world you have made, and the reasons you have given it to wish to die."

* There are 800,000 births a year in France and an estimated 400,000 abortions. Abortion is a crime, and birth control is condemned by everyone from clergy to Communists--by Communists on the ground that, in making people financially better off, it postpones revolution.

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