In 1963, homosexuality was the punchline to a joke that you didn't want your mother to know you knew. Today, it's a a common lifestyle. When kids wanted to rebel, they would drink or smoke. Maybe they'd have premarital sex. Today, those are common choices although tobacco is giving way to marijuana and many states are even legalizing it.
Fifty years ago, miniskirts were about to come into fashion. The late sixties saw growth in fashion trends that showed more and more skin. They couldn't have imagined more conservative trends would return, but eventually college coeds would eventually go to spring break wearing thongs on their rear ends.
Now, several states are dealing with the implications of gender equality on clothing laws. If men aren't required to wear clothing that covers their chests, why should women be required to do so? New York already said that toplessness is permissible for both women and men, even though culture is slow to make the shift. In the election in November 2012, San Francisco voters narrowly voted to make indecent exposure illegal.
I don't think public nudity will be legal in all parts of the US in ten years. I do think that the people of 2063 will view our emphasis on covering certain body parts as prudish.
I'm not saying they'll be right, but that's the view. If you want to know how people will feel, think about your feeling around Muslim women who wear head scarves or more. It could be that Christian young women who chastely wear thong, string bikinis will be laughed at by their nude friends on the beach. It's funny to think of a thong as a modest body covering, but the tankini would have seemed radical fifty years ago, but is the bathing suit of choice among many Christian girls today who see the one-piece as too prudish, but the thong as too revealing.
Nudity won't be the only thing that we see more of in the next fifty years. I've mentioned trio and multiple marriages, but I think that we'll see dating relationships that are precursors to these marriages.
Looking for a wedding ring might not tell you if someone is done looking or not. A married woman might be looking for a wife to go with her husband or a second husband. Maybe some people will prefer dating married people. They'll reason that a husband has already made a commitment and since multiple marriages will be legal, he might be looking for another spouse.
It's possible that as spouses get used to their relationship, they'll think they can add spice by adding another person to the relationship. A husband who's lost interest in sex might encourage his wife to let him be the provider, but get a new husband to fulfill her sexual needs.
Instead of dealing with problems, people might think it's natural to add others. This reminds me of when I worked in tech support and installers would call up and just want to add more and more equipment to an installation to fix a problem, but instead they just complicated the problem. Relationships will be the same way. People will try to fix simple problems by making things more complicated.
Just as grocery stores now have contraceptives, they'll start carrying more sexually themed devices. While people used to have to go to certain areas of town or order online for these items, you'll see them next to the condoms in the pharmacy.
The sexual revolution of the 60s was stunted by the AIDS outbreak of the 80s. As medicine develops more and more remedies for AIDS and other diseases, a new free-love movement could surface again.
Labels like homosexual and heterosexual might seem antiquated as people choose sexual partners based on momentary preference and not lifestyle.
Just as we now sometimes hear people say, "I'm not gay, but I did experiment in college," we might hear people say "I sleep with whoever I want. It all works for me."
Believe it or not, this way of thinking is actually rather old. A friend of mine in seminary arrived with a masters degree in classical studies. He told me that ancient Greeks didn't think of themselves as homosexual, but that there was nothing wrong with any form of sexual expression they could think of. It wasn't unusual for older men to have a young male lover for a time before getting married to a woman to start a family.
The difference is that women are now equals, so we can probably imagine that some women might experiment with lesbianism before marrying a man for family reasons. Some women will be life-long lesbians, but moving back and forth between sexual lifestyles and practices won't be seen as unusual.
This also means that transexuals and transvestites might be quite common as people struggle to find their identities. Maybe a man will get breast implants and live as a transexual for a time before going back to life as a straight man and then dabbling in homosexual practices.
As science expands, its possible that gay and lesbian couples will no longer need a third party to have children. Perhaps lesbians will be able to harvest eggs from one partner and science will harvest the DNA and make synthetic sperm that can impregnate the other partner.
It's a more difficult problem to enable men to carry a baby to term, so perhaps an artificial uterus will be invented. In a similar procedure, a male's sperm can become an egg and the partner's sperm will enable a gay couple to have their own genetic offspring.
The artificial uterus might mean that straight couples choose not to carry their own babies. Many women would now prefer not to have some of the changes that their bodies undergo as a part of pregnancy. This will mean that some women will have children that are genetically theirs, but who weren't gestated in a human womb. If the artificial uterus is invented, it might start as a way to help women who've had hysterectomies or who are unable to carry a baby to term, but these other uses will follow soon.
A possible unintended consequence of early babies born this way might be a lack of bonding as infants are strangers to their parents' voices and heart beats. This might be easy to overcome, but at risk infants might need extra care.
For churches, the changes in sex and family will be frightening. The challenge will be to bring people with new family and sexual patterns into the church so that they don't dismiss God immediately as judging. I'll probably be dead when these things come to fruition, but it won't be easy to love people who don't think non-traditional relationships are wrong. It will be hard to balance grace and truth, but just as the early church welcomed former temple prostitutes and others who had more difficult sexual pasts, so the mid-twenty-first century must learn to love people despite whatever their past.
Paul
Source: http://trinitydigitalmedia.com/2012/11/church-2063-sexuality/
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