PART I: PURPOSE AND MEANING OF SEXUALITY.

Sex is distinct from sexuality. Sex is a biologically based need. Oriented toward generation of new life and toward pleasure and release of tension as well. The aim or goal of sex is genital activity culminating in organism. On the other hand, sexuality, a very basic dimension of our personhood, is our self-understanding and self-expression, our way of being in the world, as male or female. [1]

Obviously, sexuality is broader term than sex, although it includes sex and relates to our genital organ systems. Sexuality permeates and affects to some extent all our emotions, thoughts, and actions; it includes culturally defined attitudes and characteristics that we make our own as masculine and feminine. It also involves our affections toward and appreciations of those of the opposite and / or same sex. Our attitudes toward our own bodies and those of others are rooted in our sexuality; ‘we are embodied consciousnesses, body-selves.’

Sexuality is a sign of our incompleteness as individuals and a means of calling us to inter-relate with other humans, to communicate and commune with them. Not everything about our sexuality is actually clear and distinct. It is perplexing too. The puzzle of our sexuality is the mystery of our need and yearning to reach out to other persons, to embrace them both physically and spiritually. In this dimension, sexuality serves to create and develop our personality by integrating us as person into human society.

Sexuality as an expression of human love involves not only the spirit but also the body; hence, married love includes genital sex. It would necessarily follow that the objective meaning of sexual acts is expression of love in relationship; love which is self-giving and for creative of new human life. And that is why the truly human sexual orientation is heterosexual though cases of homosexuals are reported. Genital sex is ideally for us humans an act of creative love; though also used for sheer pleasure and recreation.

Person’s sexual orientation is usually not freely chosen and is therefore not morally reprehensible, but the person is usually free and in control of his or her actual behavior.

To be human means to be a sexual being, a being that has at the core of his or her being, the urge to relate to members of both sexes to form interpersonal relationships.

Sexual intercourse is ideally meant to be a, sign of total, unreserved mutual self- giving; expressive of oneself as a person. Therefore, the sphere of sex has a character of intimacy, which no other instincts have, not even bodily pains; sex is not merely a biological action such as thirst or hunger, otherwise, it is incomprehensible why the satisfaction of an instinct implanted in man’s nature by God should be something immoral outside of marriage, especially if it led to procreation. .

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[1] Lucius F Cervantes And God Made Man And Woman: A Factual Discussion Of Sex Differences. [Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1959], p.g. 58.