COMMENTARY : Magic Johnson’s Lifestyle Cannot Be Overlooked

It is time to re-examine the canonization of basketball star Earvin (Magic) Johnson that took place immediately after he bravely announced that he has contracted the human immunodeficiency virus and is retiring from athletic competition to be a spokesman for AIDS awareness.

His program, he announced, would center on preaching “safe sex.”

In the rush of genuine sympathy, good wishes and prayers that washed across Magic, the circumstances of this tragic development were not probed very critically. A widespread interpretation, however, suggested that this could “happen” to anybody. The heterosexual community was reminded that its members are at risk, that it can ill afford to think that this is somebody else’s illness.

In a poignant column, for example, Anna Quindlen wrote in the New York Times of the human face of AIDS, of too many good young men dying before they reach 40, and of her explaining the meaning of safe sex to her 8-year-old. “I’m far less concerned about my kids’ lifestyles,” she concluded, “than I am about their lives.”

One would not wish to diminish the compassion for Magic Johnson or for the hundreds of thousands of persons suffering from AIDS. But the prescription of safe sex is too easy. Like it or not, we cannot separate life from lifestyle. AIDS may be contracted through getting contaminated blood, but its main transmission occurs through sexual relationships.

Lifestyle, in fact, has been a significant issue in the case of Magic Johnson. Much as we feel for him, he contracted his illness, as his doctor quoted him, “from messing around with too many women.” In weekend interviews, many athletes commented on what one termed the “Fantasy Island” of professional sports, of the women available everywhere, of the exemption from the rules that goes with the big money, the constant hype and the perpetual adolescence of the professional basketball tour.

Is it irreverent to ask whether this reckless way of living does not imply the chronic sexual harassment of women, an issue that inflamed the country a few weeks ago but which seems to be overlooked in the present situation? As this immensely sad story continues, will we be tempted to idolize Magic Johnson less as we see more of the tawdry sports universe in which this disguised fate lay in wait for him?

To promote safe sex as a “real world” response is to accept promiscuous sexual behavior as a given about which only the prudish are alarmed. In fact, sexual activity is not psychologically or humanly neutral. It can be, and is, harmful to the growth and development of teen-agers who are, in effect, being told to do what they want but to be careful about it. That is the equivalent of abandoning the young when they need us most, of abusing them sexually by neglect.

Safe sex will not protect teen-agers from the distortions in their sense of values that sex without fidelity or emotional commitment may invisibly visit upon them. Neither will it help them to carry out the tasks of their passage through adolescence that, like the challenges of learning to walk and talk as infants, they must complete to move on to the next stage of life.

Adolescents are not adults and, as distinguished psychologist Erik Erikson has explained, what they must master during this period of development is identity, a sense of who they are. That, according to Erikson, is the preliminary to the successful experience of intimacy with others, which is the charge of young adulthood. Only then can human beings achieve the generativity, the living beyond the self that marks full adulthood. Safe sex for teen-agers is not a “real world” response because it traps them on a Fantasy Island, with the real world forever beyond the horizon.

The divorce rates, as well as the unhappiness and loneliness of countless grown-ups, constitute another kind of contemporary plague, the long slow death of the psychologically isolated who may be good at sex but have never learned how to live intimately with another human being.

How thick with paradox is this state of things. We condemn our schools for not being able to teach mathematics, reading or history, and yet we entrust them with sex education without hesitation. We are in a fever about the content of our diets, our dieting, our exercise workouts and the labeling of every jar or can of good, for we are obsessed with taking good care of our bodies. But we hardly show any interest in nurturing our spirits, in labeling truthfully those things, such as promiscuous and precocious sex, that can truly harm the growth of personality. Safe sex, safe food, sad lives--these constitute the bitterly ironic triad of current existence.

Magic Johnson is a great leader, blessed in every way to educate the nation, especially its young, about AIDS. He has far more to share, however, than just information about safe sex. His public authority derives from the enormous self-discipline with which he refined his athletic gifts. Helping young people to see that they literally make their lives by their inner decisions would be as great a service as he could render in these times. Strengthening their capacity to master themselves, including their sexual and aggressive impulses, would indeed be a saint’s gift to all Americans.

That call to the maturity of life shaped by inner control, by gradually increasing authority over oneself, with a consciousness that there is nothing psychologically casual about casual sex, is worthy of a man as great and good as Magic Johnson. A crusade for safe sex is simply not enough to ask of him. Let us not oversimplify for him the opportunity for a deeper grasp of the challenge that lies before him, and us.