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Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Sex: The Sequel
[This started out as a comment at Fausta Wertz's Website, but like a pearl or an inflamed appendix -- choose your simile -- it swelled ever larger and more irritating, and ultimately had to become a post here at Eternity Road. Dear Fausta, your Curmudgeon thanks you for the stimulus. That Fran person has had the run of this place far too often lately.]
Long, long ago, on a Website far, far away, your Curmudgeon posted what he believed would become the ultimate statement on the proper attitude toward sex. It had everything: mystery, nuance, allusion, sentiment, even a touch of self-disclosure. Its insights were in glorious Technicolor; its wit, sharper than a Ginsu knife. ("Just look at that tomato!") Your Curmudgeon had high hopes for it. Disseminated widely enough, he felt that it would rewire the American psyche, comforting the afflicted, afflicting the comfortable, and making those solitary Friday nights spent before the TV with the cat and a jumbo bag of Cheez Doodles just a shade less angsty. He expected Ron Popeil to call and ask if he could license it.
But sadly, 'twas not to be. It vanished like a drop of rain fallen into the ocean. Perhaps it's because your Curmudgeon doesn't style himself by his formal title ("Plenipotentiary High Exterminator"), or call himself a "relationship expert." Anyway, he still regards those thoughts as valuable. In particular, they bear with great force on the failure of the casual-sex milieu to produce anything more than stained sheets, morning-after recriminations, and the occasional "oops!" baby.
The sexual norms of the pre-Pill years were excessively constraining; in particular, they applied the same standards to the married and the unmarried, which cross-cuts the most important division in all of human society. But the contemporaneous emergence of the Pill and the motel seemed to have reaved us all of our senses; suddenly sex was about nothing but pleasure, what your Curmudgeon's sainted father called "the tickle in the pickle." Life in these United States was catastrophically simplified; from about 1968 onward, it was about the Quest for the Perfect Orgasm and nothing else.
We have yet to recover. Note well the inanities promulgated this very day by "sex expert" Dr. Yvonne Fulbright. If that's what passes for thinking on this subject, it's no wonder we hear of twelve-year-olds shaving their nether bits and ten-year-olds discussing fellatio technique in the schoolyard at recess.
LEARN FROM YOUR MISTAKES!
Sex is much too serious an undertaking to be casual about it. You have to expose yourself to too many hazards -- and the bacterial and viral ones are far from the worst.
Your Curmudgeon will not go so far as to say that sex is for married couples only. The Commandment is Thou shalt not commit adultery. Full stop. Adultery is and has always been the violation of the marital vow of fidelity; nothing else. The Church's arrogation of wider authority on this subject is ultra vires. (No, your Curmudgeon is not a perfectly orthodox Catholic, but you should have known that already.) But sex is a terribly serious matter, always and everywhere. It's not something to be indulged frivolously, without regard for the consequences.
Especially the emotional consequences. Your Curmudgeon will now commit the ultimate opinion-monger's sin: he will quote himself:
You have to open your defensive perimeter, your reflex-reaction zone, to let someone else get close enough to you to make love. A woman has to permit her man to enter her body. Each partner is in a state of total physical vulnerability while their embrace lasts. There are implications and overtones to this that no rationalization about sex being mere happy friction can erase....And it doesn't stop with the sexual embrace itself. No matter how often we tell ourselves otherwise, every sex act is a test of a proposition: "Will we be a unit? Will I share his home and bear his children? Will she stand by me in my battles and nurture me in my times of infirmity?"
The unit of two is the unit best suited to human beings. One person can accept and bond to another on mutually agreed terms, with little or no ambiguity about the nature, obligations and extent of the intended relationship. Larger numbers don't work nearly as well. If you disagree, you've never been in politics.
No amount of propaganda about sex being just one more way for people to enjoy their bodies can erase these facts. They are graven in our genes, and in our nature as a species.
The non-ethic of casual sex tells us to dismiss those emotional consequences -- to treat sexual contact as a purely physical event. If the past five decades have taught us anything, it's that this is infinitely easier said than done. Very few men and almost no women, of any age, are capable of it. In the usual case, the effects on her are sharper and more immediate, but the effects on him, over a long stretch of tomcattery, are equally tragic. By encouraging the practitioner to view his sex partner as just a body, they cause him to become calloused toward the possibility of love -- even to avert it if he senses it coming.
Love isn't just a nice luxury without survival implications. It's a requirement of the human psyche. Without it, we wither and die. Treating others as a mere means to a pleasurable end is the exact opposite of love; indeed, it's the ultimate expression of contempt. It's as life-destroying as love is life-giving.
In earlier days, many spouses who didn't love one another before they married learned to love one another afterward -- and one of the most important of the mechanisms that bonded them was sex. Of course, these days we speak contemptuously of persons who marry without first falling in love, but comparing the emotional and social consequences of our "modern" practices to theirs should give even the most dedicated casual-sex enthusiast pause for thought.
Intercourse doesn't really make two bodies into one; except in pathological cases, the two separate soon afterward. But the interpenetration of bodies cannot be divorced from the equally urgent desire for an interpenetration of minds and souls. When we cheapen sex down to a mere satisfaction of physical desire, or worse, a slaking of need, we undermine the foundation for love. If deprived of love for long enough, we lose the capacity to love ourselves.
The "hookup culture" strains to deny these truths. But like a few others known better to our forebears than to us of 2008, they are self-evident -- and self-demonstrating. There isn't a voluptuary in the world who can escape the consequences.
Comments
Cannot “escape the consequences.” But of course there is a huge sector of the culture that believes that having done away with truth they can escape the consequences.
A life lived without truth or consequences is a fatal lure of Satan with a long, long pedigree.
Posted by vanderleun on 05/06/2008 at 01:13 PM
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