Societal Views On Sex

I find myself thinking that maybe if society didn't hold sex to such a high esteem we wouldn't have so many cultural problems that deal with sexuality in a negative way. Our desires are mainly stemmed from the fact that we can't be fulfilled. We want what we can't have and therefore, the things we can't have we want all the more. Sex is one of those things. I will agree that it is beneficial for the members involved and that it creates intense feelings, but sex has been so overly dramatized that I feel that humans have lost what sex really is. To me, sex is a way to communicate a desire that you have for another person, it is something to enjoy and to share when appropriate. The overly romanticized view of sex creates it as something that adds or subtracts from your self-worth. It seems that too many people believe that the act of sex will completely relieve the partners of all future desires, that it allows people to magically become complete.
Due to this romantic view several people are forced to be virgins, or undergo processes to ensure virginity, so that their passions are completely fulfilled by only one man. The romantic view is also what pushes the character, Emma in Madame Bovary, to become adulterous. Emma has this view that love is an emotion that fills you with such passion that you are completely overwhelmed by this one person for the rest of your life. She wants the passion so badly that she admits to herself that she wishes that her husband, Charles, would beat her. Beating her would give her the passion she desires because what she is looking for isn't something that would make her feel better or become a better person. What she is looking for is something to feel. If you are beaten you feel that hurt for the rest of your life. It scars you and can create this extreme hate. Extreme hate is an emotion that is felt much more strongly than a lasting love. You can feel the hate curdling around inside of you, but love is more of a comfort with another person. Love is a soft desire.
Society has tried to quench the intense desires of people so that they don't release their destructive powers. Any sort of desire, if not monitored carefully, can become destructive for all people involved. The destruction that desires can cause is outlined in Madame Bovary and Celestina. With the romanticized view of sex, society has mistaken passion and desire for purely a sexual thing and has therefor tried to reduce sex to something that should only be accomplished for reproduction purposes and be demoralized. In chapter 8 of Madame Bovary the author, Gustave Flaubert, creates a setting where Rudolph and Emma first express their desires surrounded by society to show a juxtaposition of the views. Rudolph is speaking sweetly to Emma about his passions and desires to be her servants (a.k.a to get into her pants) while the speeches of the fair are penetrating through their conversations. He says, "A hundred times I wished to go; and I followed you- I remained." While the next line is from the speech, which is where the president of the Agricultural society shouts, "Manures!" (Flaubert, 140). We see the back and forth of the society versus the lovers.