Sex in Heaven

Last night, ABC aired the Barara Walters' special What is Heaven? How do we get there? Honestly, it was pretty condescending. The questions she was asking all these wonderful august belief leaders--from the Dalai Lama to Joel Osteen--were the kinds of questions that young adolescents might ask, not adults.

I think the time has come for an end to specials put together by people who have more wardrobe changes in an hour than Betty Grable in a technicolor spectacular...

The genre, like the Biblical Epic, is a dinosaur. Dead. (this is not a measure or Walters personally--just of the specials--I feel I must qualify this because, from my experiences, many folks at the top have trouble taking criticism from outside their circle. There's always this *thing* that we don't like *them* personally...when the criticism is about their product, not who they are...and, in this case, the product was pretty lousy.)

Yet the answers to one question in particular--is there sex in heaven?--keep sticking in my craw like the worst phlegmball I've ever had...

Why?

Because most of the images of a Heaven with sex are from a male perspective.

And if Heaven is a masculine place, where do women belong?

I keep thinking of Valhalla, the Viking warrior heaven, where the afterlife is in Odin's halls....

but that's a men's heaven. The Valkeries come down and pluck warriors from the battlefield....

so, do women's spirits become Valkeries?? If so, that might be a fun kind of Heaven--a Heaven with a purpose. Get to wear big ole armor and a helmet with wings and spend time riding around on a big ole horse....

If women can die and become Valkeries then that's kind of a powerful position to be in.

If that's not the case, then where do we go? And what if you're a woman who dies in battle?

Then there's the Muslim view, which allows for sex in heaven...

and if that's the case, do women die to become concubines of the good men who go to heaven?

If that's the case, then women remain merely servants of men....

Chistian heaven is without sex--mostly because sex is seen as a bedevilling animal appetite (like appetite in general) and when we are perfected in death we shouldn't need sex any more than we need to eat.

For that matter, eating really isn't part of Christian heaven either. Ideas of eternal feast don't really resemble Henry VII's dining table...

It seems that even in ideas of Heaven, women are servants of men's eternities.

Where, then, lie our eternities?

The ideas and thoughts about Heaven have always been written by men. Few women have ever written about Heaven.

Yet, if they have, we don't hear much about them...

It would have been nice if Walters had stretched things a bit intellectually and spoken to someone who would have highlighted those views of Heaven written by women...or at least spoke to one woman scholar of religion about Heaven.

We don't do our children any justice by only discussing a thoroughly androcentric view of Heaven.

So, what might happen to women after death? Do we not go to Heaven? Or are we transformed into beings who are happy to serve men whatever they desire in Eternity?

Or are the heavenly beings we may be transformed into after death simply a-sexual--not desirious of sex any more than they are desirous of food?

It's because we don't have these answers that I don't worry too much about Life after Death...there's too much life to live without spending all sorts of time worrying about an afterlife.

But I'd hate to think that Heaven, if there is one, is the banal, androcentric place the Walters special painted it to be. If that's the case, then no wonder so many people keep looking for longevity formulas. Being super-old in this life would indeed be more fun than spending Eternity in any of the Heavens discussed on that show....