The New Sexual World We Have Made and the Return of the Culture Wars

The transformation of sexuality

In the last fifty years, we have seen a dramatic transformation in both relationships between the sexes and our relationship to sexuality. No one thinks that there is any likelihood that we will return to traditional practices and beliefs. But in the last few months Republican candidates have tried to reignite the culture war that has accompanied these transformations.

One reason that traditionalists continue to call the changes of the last fifty years into question is that of those of us who have turned away from traditionalist ideas don’t give as deep a defense of the new world we have made as we could. We defend sexual freedom, feminism, and the acceptance of homosexuality mostly by talking about the ideals of freedom, individuality and autonomy. The traditionalists answer that those modern ideals are empty and low, a mere excuse for doing whatever we want to do. And they claim that the changes in our lives are deeply in conflict with the ideals of love, marriage, and the care of children. Of course we, too, seek love, marriage and the care of children. But we haven’t asserted as strongly as we should or could that our ideals are not only fully compatible with but enhance our prospects for love, marriage and the care of our children.

Why haven’t we done this? I think there are for two reasons.

One is that at the back of our minds many of us have some doubts about whether the ideals of freedom, individuality, and autonomy are truly compatible with love, marriage and the care of children. Those of us who are baby boomers, and even some of those raised in the next generation, grew up in a very different world than the one we have created. How could we strike out on a very different path from our parents and grandparents without wondering if we were not heading into dangerous territory? Every time we see a single friend who would rather be married or hear of a marriage breaking up or learn of a friend’s child who has run into serious problems, it’s hard for us not to wonder whether the traditional path would have led to a better outcome.

A second reason for our reticence about defending our post-sexual revolution, post-feminist, post-gay liberation way of life in terms that respond to the traditionalist critique is that we fear that to even offer such a response is to betray the ideals of freedom, individuality and autonomy. Nobody, we think, should ever have to answer to anyone else’s views of when, how and with whom they should have sex or when, how and who they should marry, or when, how and with whom they should raise their children.

While I want to insist that the claim to our own freedom, individuality and autonomy ultimately does trump any view, whether traditionalist or not, about how we should live our lives, the truth of the matter is that the way of life we have created in the last fifty years does actually rest on more than the formal ideals we use to defend ourselves against traditionalist criticisms. Whether we recognize it or not, the baby boom and subsequent generations have been creating new practices of sex, family life, marriage, child rearing and work that have aims that go far beyond just freedom, self-determination and autonomy.

Or, to put the point a little differently, by self-determination and autonomy we mean more than just doing whatever we want to do. We have tried to create a world that answers to deeper ideals about what is valuable in life.

We aim to find work and relationships that fulfill us by enabling us to grow while also serving our fellow human beings. We want to expand our skills and abilities and deepen our knowledge of and connections to the world around us and the people with whom we live. We seek challenges and novelty. But at the same time we seek the stability, commitment and comfort that not only enables us to move forward into the unknown with confidence but that also creates the security our children need. We seek mutual respect and equality in our partnerships and marriages while recognizing that some difference in roles sometimes makes sense. We struggle with the balance between exercising the necessary authority over our children while also encouraging them to be self-directing and creative.

We worry and talk endlessly with our friends about what to do with our freedom, individuality and autonomy. We obsess about all our choices: who to date, who to sleep with and who to marry; what school to attend or to send our kids; what job to take; how many kids to have;  what to eat and drink; where to live and even where to go on vacation. Our self-absorption is, rightly, the stuff of comedy. But what is funny from the outside is often tension provoking from within.

That we are self-obsessed comes in no small part from the reality that we are blazing new trails without a map. It comes because the pursuit of autonomy and individuality requires a new kind of reflection and self-awareness. And it also comes because our ideals are a lot deeper, thicker, and fuller than the formal ideals of freedom, autonomy and individuality. We would not be satisfied if we or our children used the hard won freedom of our time and place to live a life of random sexual encounters that were never mixed with love. We do not think that autonomy is well used if it leads people to fritter away their talents and abilities in work that is not challenging or does not contribute to others.  We may not have as many children as our parents and grandparents, and some of us may have none at all. But we look aghast at people whose individuality is expressed in a complete and utter disinterest in the future of our country, our species and our earth. We may tell our children, as my parents told me, that we will love them no matter what they choose to do with their lives and even “if they choose to pick up the garbage.” But while we may mean, and our children may appreciate, these expressions of unconditional love, they know in their souls, as we did, that our aspirations for them are far higher.

So our unwillingness to articulate our deeper and thicker ideals, those that go beyond the formal goals of freedom, individuality, and autonomy, makes it hard for us to respond to traditionalists when they claim the high moral ground, when they assert or insinuate that those of us who reject traditional sexual mores and the traditional family don’t appreciate the deeper and more lasting goods of love, marriage, and children and instead are weak-willed slaves to our lower desires. And that is a shame, not only because we put ourselves at a rhetorical disadvantage among those for whom love, marriage and children are central to a good human life, but because we let the theoretical understanding of human nature that underlies traditional views go unchallenged.

That theoretical view, however, should be challenged not just because it can undermine confidence in our contemporary path in question but because, for all its antiquity, it is a mistaken, destructive, and ultimately demeaning picture of human life.

The Traditional View of Sexuality

Before presenting, in the next section of this essay, an alternative that makes better sense of our lives, I need to set out the traditional view of sexuality in a more detailed, if still compressed, fashion than it is presented by defenders of tradition. Too much of the time, those of us who oppose the traditional view take it as a series of moral or religious requirements that aren’t backed by reasons of any kind. We do that because today very few defenders of traditional sexuality can actually articulate the conception of human nature that underlies it—and others who can articulate it are reluctant to do so because they are troubled or even embarrassed by it. But the traditional conception does rest on a serious philosophical perspective that, for all its very deep flaws, has dominated ideas of human nature for roughly 1500 years. We won’t be able to identify the flaws unless we are prepared to engage the traditional view in some depth.

The traditional view of human nature, in some ways goes back to middle Platonism —and on some interpretations to Plato himself. But it was given a new twist by the early Church Fathers who see human beings as composite creatures, with a soul that is infused in us by God and a body that comes from the earth. If we see ourselves in such a light, we face a fundamental choice, to live our lives in pursuit of the fleshy pleasures of this world or in pursuit of the soulful pleasures of heaven. That choice, however, is constrained by the fall of man in the Garden of Eden which has crippled our free will and put us in thrall to bodily desires for sex, food, comfort.

On the traditional view, sexual desire is the most difficult one for us to overcome because it is both deeply powerful and anarchic in nature. Sexual desire in its natural, bodily form is lust. It comes from somewhere deep within us—from our bodies not our souls. We can do our best to avoid, restrain or repress sexual desire but when it arrives and how it affects us is not something we can ever entirely control.

Sexual desire is also, in the phrase of Freud, polymorphously perverse. It can leads us to pursue every possible kind of stimulation on the way to orgasm and then, once we are momentarily satisfied, to do so again. Sexual desire does not naturally lead men and women to commit themselves to the romantic love of another person. Nor does it lead us to embrace family life. Indeed, the family and the care of children cannot survive the untrammeled lust that would, if not tamed and channeled, lead us to have sex with whoever is available or perhaps as dangerously to obsessively pursue an unfit potential partner who for reasons we never fully understand has caught our eye. Unless it is restrained and directed, lust leads us to actions that at best create jealousy and tensions within our family and at worst create broken homes and abandoned children.

Not only is the arrival and aim of sexual desire out of our control, lust is also overpowering in nature. Lust is extremely difficult to restrain and restraint is always painful. Indeed sexual desire can be heightened by both satisfying it and by restraining so that we the more we deny ourselves, the more we crave sexual satisfaction.

Restraining our lower nature, and especially sexual desire, is difficult and, on some versions of Christianity, totally impossible without God’s grace. The right kinds of education and institutions however, can help us repress and control our bodily desires so that at the very least, marriage and family life is possible.

To get off to a good start we need an upbringing that discourages the florid growth of sexual desire and trains us in self-denial. We need to be taught to fear and even have disgust for lust and the body from which it arises. We need to become deeply aware of the dangers of our sexual nature. And of course we must be kept from materials that are designed to stimulate our desires. Without such an education—or worse, with an education that simulates and heightens our lower desires—we may find ourselves living desperate lives in endless search of relief from the pain of unsatisfied desire.

Education must be supplemented by institutions that channel our sexual desires in the right direction. Human beings—and especially men whose sexual desires are particularly unruly—must be denied sexual gratification outside of marriage. The only way to keep families together is to hold male sexual satisfaction hostage to the willingness of men to support their spouses and children.

Implicit in the traditional view is the notion that male sexuality is more difficult to control than female sexuality. Thus, in two different ways, the traditional view places most of the responsibility for controlling sexuality on women. On the one hand, the traditional approach holds women responsible for enflaming male lust. This notion is deeply embedded in Christian interpretations of the story of the Garden of Eden which blame Eve for enticing Adam to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Other stories in the Bible, such as those of Delilah and Jezebel, are also reinterpreted as demonstrating that the sexual appeal of women gives them power over men. Women must thus act and dress modestly so as to avoid stimulating the desires of men.

On the other hand, sexual restraint on the part of women—who deny men sex outside of marriage—is what makes it possible for the sexuality of men to be channeled in directions that preserves the family.

That women can exert power over men both by means of elucidating sexual desire and by denying men sexual satisfaction suggests that women have control over their sexual desires in a way that men do not. Thus the control of male sexuality falls on them. There is, however, another theme in traditional understandings of female sexuality that suggests that once it is loosened from restraint, the sexuality of women is potentially far greater than that of men and, indeed, something to be feared because it can destroy a family. That is why it is especially important for the sexuality of women who enter marriage to be so tightly controlled.

On the traditional view, women who cannot control their sexual desires do have some uses for the community. By becoming prostitutes they provide the least dangerous sexual outlet for men who have trouble restraining their desires within marriage. But prostitution, however necessary it may be at times and for some men, is not the ideal solution to the problem of human sexuality. The ideal is for sexual pleasure to be found only in in marriage and for it to be restrained even there.

Thus the traditional view of sexuality is deeply critical of any view that seeks to liberate sex from the constraints of marriage. It is critical of birth control and legal abortion because both offer human beings the possibility of sexual pleasure without the fear of pregnancy. That possibility encourages the very sexual freedom, both before and after marriage, that intense moral training and the constraint of marriage are meant to control. The threat of pregnancy and the difficulties of raising children on one’s own is the strongest reason for women to restrain their sexual desires. End the threat of pregnancy, however, and women will seek sex nearly as much and as wildly as men do. The most important force that can civilize male desire—limiting sex to marriage—will thereby be undermined.

For a number of reasons homosexuality is also deeply problematic on the traditional view. One is that homosexual sex is detached from procreation and, traditionalists assume it must therefore be detached from the formation of families as well. Of course, given that many homosexuals today seek to marry, one would think that traditionalist might be more open to it. But homosexuality operates outside of the fear of pregnancy that traditionalists believe is necessary to make marriage work and so it is likely to be freer than heterosexual sex. Thus it can encourage a similar freedom among heterosexuals and thereby undermine all marriages.

While the fundamental reason traditionalists seek to restrain sexuality is to protect the family, there is a second reason as well. Sex may be the most dangerous bodily desires but our desires, for food and comfort, can be problematic as well. And in our efforts to satisfy all of our bodily we seek power and wealth and that brings us into conflict with others. This claim is more plausible in a pre-modern world, in which there is never enough good things to go around and the only way to get more is take them from someone else. But even in the modern world of material richness and economic growth, human conflict is often the result of the desire to dominate others in order to secure economic and political power that in turn satisfy our bodily desires.

We can deal with this difficulty in only two ways. Both require sexual restraint. We can work hard, and dramatically increase economic growth. But while this path gives us the resources to satisfy some of our bodily desires, it forces us to give our work the time and energy we might spend in pursuing sexual and other delights. Freud was entirely working within traditional ideas when he said that hard work requires restraint of our sexual desires. Or we can rely on government to restrain our demands for the goods we need to satisfy our bodily desires. Traditionalists today look to economic growth to take the rough edges off our political and social life. But they also claim that economic growth cannot provide enough for everyone if only because our desires expand to meet our capacity to produce. Economic growth must be backed up by moral and political restraints to keep us in line, as well as the long training in self-discipline that leads us to accept a limited satisfaction of our bodily and material desires. (That, of course, is an argument most often made by upper classes seeking to resist the demand of lower classes for a redistribution of income and wealth. Somehow it is rarely applied to the upper classes themselves.) Peace and civility, then, depend, in one of these two ways, upon the sacrifice of our sexual and other pleasures.

To this point, I have focused almost entirely on the necessity of restraint on our desires in order to avoid the terrible consequences of untamed sexuality. But, to be fair, traditionalist offer positive arguments for sexual restraint as well. Sex, they suggest, has two natural purposes, which in the Catholic tradition are called procreative and unitive. Procreation is, of course, a good for most of us and, to the extent that the traditional argument for sexual restrain seems necessary in order to sustain families that can properly raise children, we can see how sexual restraint serves that natural end.

The unitive purpose of sexuality is to express and heighten the love that ideally brings men and women together in marriage. To their credit, traditionalists do understand that a sexual relationship in which the two partners seek to give one another pleasure is a prime way in which that love is expressed, realized, strengthened and sustained. Indeed Christians point out that the love between a man and woman is not only intended by God but that the love we express in marriage is modeled after the selfless love of Jesus for us. While sexuality comes from the body, on the traditional religious model, it is transformed when it is part of relationship between two souls. It is given a higher purpose than mere selfish physical pleasure because love leads us beyond ourselves to love of another and ultimately to the love God.

Sexual restraint is necessary to this unitive purpose for two reasons. One is that sexual fidelity is impossible without a great deal of sexual restraint. Without fidelity, love between men and women is bound to collapse. The other is that, even within a monogamous marriage, men and women can come to look on their spouses not as loving partners whose ends have become their own but as a means to sexual pleasure. Given the ever present danger that lust will lead us to a pursue sex in a selfish and self-absorbed manner, we must restrain our sexual desires so that we can we fully embrace our partners in a higher form of sexual life. That is why Christians teach that chastity is important not just before but within marriage.

Thus sexual restraint is, from a traditionalist perspective, not a total rejection of sexual desires and the body but an elevation of it. To think of sexual desire as primarily a source of pleasure is to treat one’s body an instrument, that is, as a means of receiving or giving pleasure. But to restrain sexual desires is to see our body as the seat of the soul; to use our body to realize the aims of the soul in this and the next world, and thus in this life to make the composite body / soul into a fully integrated whole.

Most traditionalists today reject Catholic arguments against contraception, although as we have seen, traditionalists worry that because contraception makes pre-martial and extra-marital sex more likely it undermines the necessary restraint of our sexual desires. But it might be helpful to understand the two further arguments the Catholic hierarchy today—and most Christians in the past—make against contraception since they reveal some important facets of the traditional view of sexuality.

First, they hold that both procreation and the unity of marriage partners is the intended purpose of sex as given by God and nature. Just as God’s love is expressed in his creation of the world and care for it and us, human love must aim at creating a unity between a man and woman that is always open to being fulfilled in the creation of a child. Sex that is not potentially procreative is not natural or consonant with God’s will. Second they argue that sex that is not potentially procreative cannot attain the unitive purpose of sex because a full unity between a man and a woman is expressed only in procreation.

Both of these arguments strike most non-Catholics—and many Catholics as well—as problematic since Catholic teaching does not discourage men and women not capable of procreation from having sex. Why the unitive purpose of sexuality can survive when there is no possibility of procreation in these cases, but is unsatisfactory when contraception is used, is difficult to understand.  One would have to argue that those of us who are capable of procreating distance ourselves from the ultimate fulfillment of sexuality in procreation when we use contraception.

The Catholic prohibition on contraception also rests on a peculiar understanding of natural law in which procreation is seen as the necessary end of a sexual act. In the Aristotelian tradition that is the source of natural law teaching, mere life was never been taken to be the highest end. Rather life was a thought of as a necessary means to our highest end, a life of happiness. In Thomas Aquinas’s Christian appropriation of the Aristotle, the highest end is a life in union and fellowship with God. So it is very difficult to understand how the Church’s natural law teaching leads to the conclusion that procreation is the highest end of sex. The creation of a life that aims at the highest end, happiness or union with god is for Christians the summum bonum, the greatest good. That kind of life is not the product of procreation but of a long process in which we educate our children into way of life that enables them to pursue the ideal ends of human beings. So it would seem that natural law leads us to conclude that contraception is justified if it enables men and women to live a life that enhances their capacity to create the right kind of family, that is, one which raises children who respect and pursue the proper end of human kind. One could make a good argument that in our time and place, raising those kind of children is easier when there are fewer of them and when their arrival is planned.

Ultimately, it seems that the Catholic opposition to contraception ultimately rests not on a confused understanding of natural law but on its insistence that sexual desire needs to be constrained. It is not so much that Catholic teaching encourages men and women to wholeheartedly pursue sexual relationships in which the unitive and procreative ends are combined but that it fears that too much of a good thing will undermine the sexual restraint without which marriages may collapse. It fears, in other words, that if men and women enjoy sex too much and too frequently, the pursuit of sexual pleasure will become an end in itself rather than a means to bringing husbands and wives together in love. Or, even worse, it will encourage such a florid development of sexual desire that men and women will seek sexual pleasure outside of marriage. What Catholics call “natural family planning,” the new name for the rhythm method, is thought of and taught not just as means by which husbands and wives can legitimately limit the number of children but a means by which they restrain their sexual desires. Or, in other words, the threat of unwanted pregnancy continues to be how chastity is sustained in marriage, just as it was before marriage.

An alternative to the traditional view

The fear of the power sexual desire is at the heart of the traditionalist understanding of sexuality. To develop a better understanding of sexuality, one that is both more true to our nature and experience and a better guide to practice in this day and age critically important. This is not the place for me to set out in detail the alternative to the traditional view of sexuality that I have been working on for some time. But I do want to point to a number of ways in which this new approach departs from the traditional understanding and how it makes better sense of our sexual experience than traditional views.

Sexual desire is not a force external to our souls

First, the new view breaks with the traditional assumption notion that sexual desire in its basic form—lust—is a desire that comes wholly from our body, that presses for satisfaction, and that is not fully under our control. On the alternative I defend, sexual desire, is not something that come from outside of ourselves but rather is something that a product of who we are, what we believe and how we have come to live our lives and understand ourselves.

It is true that whatever else it may aim at sexual desire aims at bodily pleasure. And it is also true that, especially when we are young, we find ourselves desiring sex in a way that seems to come from outside of ourselves. Sometimes, especially when it has been a long time since we’ve had sex, we feel pushed or made uncomfortable by sexual desire. But by and large this is not how most of us experience sexual desire, especially if sex is a regular part of our lives. Just as we usually decide to get something to eat long before we are hungry—and only become hungry when we smell delicious food being prepared for us—most often we choose when and where to become sexually aroused. We begin some kind of sexual activity or put ourselves in a situation where it is possible or likely before we have the characteristic feelings or focus that comes with sexual desire, that is, before we become sexually aroused.

Sexual feelings are largely under our control

Second, even in those circumstances in which sexual desires seems to happen to us, this occurs in large part because of what I’d like to call our stance to the world or to some particular person. Some of us are more ready to think about sex or react to others sexually than others. Drawing on the traditional thought about sexuality, we tend to assume that this difference is rooted in our bodies—in our hormones or some other physical source. Sometimes, when we are drawn to another person’s beauty (of soul or body), we are more likely to think about them sexually or come to desire them. Again, the traditional view holds that these people do something to us—that there is a physical or bodily connection that generates sexual desire.

The truth, however, is that sexual desire is a product of our rational souls not our non-rational bodies. In saying this, I don’t mean to deny that our souls are embodied or that there aren’t neurobiological processes underlie our desires and thoughts. I am saying, however, that what determines whether we desire sex at any particular moment is how we have learned to think about, look at, and act in the world and how the world and people in it look to us at a particular moment. It is a product of our basic desires and beliefs and of our stance to the world. It is a product of culture and thought, of the ideals and ideas we have to come to accept and the interaction of those ideals and ideas with our experience. We come to desire another person sexually not because of some irrational bodily processes that well up in and over power us but because of who we are as human beings and how we relate to another person.

And that means that sexual desire is far more under our control than the traditional view holds. Whether we will respond sexually in a particular circumstance is to a much larger extent than the traditional view holds, up to us if not in the short term than in the long term. Sexual desire sometimes rises up in us when sex is the furthest thing from our minds, just as hunger does when we are not the least bit concerned about food. But, a bodily desire for food that is unconnected to some higher level desiring or thinking about food or experiencing the smell of food or recognizing that it is dinner time is, most of the time, more common and more insistent than a desire for sex similarly disconnected from our higher level thoughts, desires, and experiences.

So, whether a man or woman looks at a subordinate primarily as a colleague or as a sexual object is up to them. And whether we engage with our partners and spouses in a sexual manner in a particular time and place is also up to us. Yes, sexual thoughts and reactions can do sometimes come to us at surprising or unwelcome times. But that is because we sometimes have divided minds. We can be attracted to people who we know we shouldn’t desire or act or act sexually at places and times that are inappropriate—and indeed knowing that we shouldn’t desire them or that the time and place is inappropriate sometimes heightens our desire. But that division is in us, in our souls. It is not a product of some conflict between our bodies and our souls. And most of the time we can turn our attention away from inappropriate sexual thoughts by focusing our minds elsewhere.

Whether we act sexually is up to us

Third, and more importantly, even when sexual desires come to us in an unwelcome way, whether we act sexually is up to us. We can choose whether to be sexual with others or not. And usually that doesn’t require any special exertion of will or effort to restraint our desires. It simply requires us to act with the same capacity for human choice that enables most of us to pass on dessert when we are trying to lose weight.

Sometimes we are tempted by sex the way we are by sweets. And sometimes we can’t resist the temptation. But we are also tempted to keep a wallet we find on the ground rather than return it to its owner just as we are tempted to keep quiet when our boss unfairly chews out a colleague rather than standing up for him. No one thinks that a lack of honesty or moral courage is the result of overpowering bodily desires. So why do we assume that it is overpower sexual desires that lead us to do something wrong in the realm of food or sex? We human beings can have divided souls. We can do thing we believe are wrong in every realm of life. And when we do, it is because of that division in our souls not because some overpowering bodily desire overcomes us.

Sexuality is embedded in and strengthened by other desires

Fourth, sexual desire is not something that stands apart from our other desires but is integrated and often made stronger by them. Psychologists do surveys that ask people why they have sex. This would strike us as odd if sexual desire were like other desires. Have you ever seen a survey that asks people why they eat? These surveys show that people have sex for at least 13 different reasons and that sexual desire is enhanced and made more powerful when it is a means of satisfying other desires beyond the desire for physical pleasure. Of course, the most powerful aphrodisiac is the desire for physical intimacy with the men or women we love. But sex is sought by both men and women for many other reasons as well, from pure physical pleasure to boosting self-esteem to toning up to relaxing.

We can dispute about whether those are good reasons or not. Some are highly questionable. Since the time of the Ancient Greeks and continuing to our day, sex has been a way in which men displayed their dominance over others. I call sex that stems from this motive “dominator sex.” On the Ancient Greek view sex was always something one took from another person. And, even today, many men see their sexual partners and pursue them either as conquests or as validators of their status. But whatever we think of the reasons that men and women pursue sex, there can be no doubt that sexual desire is embedded and made powerful by its place among other our desires, aims and purposes. Standing alone, sexual desire is much less powerful than we imagine.

The relational character of sexual desire

Fifth, the way sexuality is embedded in our lives points an important feature of sexuality that is overlooked by the traditional view, it’s fundamentally relational character. The traditional view holds that sexual desire comes from someplace within us and then is directed one way or the other, sometimes in ways that are under our control but most often in ways that are not. But the truth is much more complicated. Far more than other goods, acting sexually and enjoying sex is not a product of an already existing desire but involves stimulating that desire and becoming aroused. Becoming sexually aroused for human beings is very different from and far more complex for us than it is for animals, even those nearest to us. Women don’t become receptive to sexuality at a certain point every month which in turn elicits a male desire to initiate sex. Unlike all but a few primates, men and women are capable of becoming sexually aroused at any time. We do not have to wait for estrus to have sex. But, precisely because of that, sexual arousal not in any respect automatic for us, as it is with most animals.

Because we are self-conscious creatures we have far more complicated  likes and dislikes when it comes to who we have sex with than any other creatures. This is true even with regard to what we might think of lower preferences: we care in ways that animals apparently do not what our sexual partners look like: how tall or short, how heavy and thin they are and what color hair they have. We care about how they carry themselves, how they stand and talk, smile and laugh. We care in all sorts of complicated ways about their ethnicity and families. And, of course, we care about their intentions, about what a specific sexual encounters means or does not mean for what our relationship might be with them in the future.

And, of course, most immediately, we care about how we try to engage each other in sex, how we flirt and seek to arouse one another and then how we stimulate each other sexually. The critical difference between human and animal sex is not just that we intentionally seek to arouse one another—to some extent higher animals do that—but that we are aware of those mutual intentions, and even more, that at some point we put those intentions between us in a space that becomes ours. Our mutual intention to arouse one another and have sex becomes, as Charles Taylor puts, something that is entre nous. It is no longer that I know that you know that I am trying to arouse you while you know that I know that you are trying to arouse me.  It is that we mutually recognize that we are trying to arouse one another and that mutual recognition contributes to sexual arousal. Sex has become something we are doing together, in partnership with one another.

Much of the initial play of flirtation has to do with the subtle ways in which we implicitly suggest our interest in one another without fully making that interest explicit—without making it entre nous—so as to avoid the pain and embarrassment of expressing sexual interest in someone who does not return that interest. Much of our effort to further arouse one another has to do with the not so subtle ways in which sex becomes something we are doing together and in which we find our (not just your or my) way to express and encourage lust in and then satisfy one another. And then there are all the ways in which we conduct a sexual encounter, in which we implicitly and explicitly tell one other what we like, in which we take charge for a moment or longer or allow our partner to do so, in which we move from one sexual position or one set of movements to another, in which we find rhythms and patterns by which to stimulate and stroke one another, and all else we say and do—or don’t say and do, in the process.

Mutual sexual arousal—both the kind in which we make implicit suggestions and the kind in which we make our intentions something between us—continues from the beginning to the end of each sexual encounter. At any moment, a sexual encounter can go better or worse, can create an intense moment of passion or can totally collapse in a loss of interest or anger or even disgust. And between those alternatives are so many other possibilities. All of them, however, have to do with how we intentionally attempt, as individuals and as a partners in the process, to keep one another aroused and stimulated until we collapse in orgasm or decide that we have had enough and can go on no longer.

That mutual sexual arousal is so critical to human sexuality means that sex is in a fundamental way different for us than it is for other animals. Sex for other animals can be defined in terms of how they rub their bodies together. But that is not the case for human beings. The great confusion Freud created by noticing the incredible range of behavior that he rightfully saw as sexual—our capacity for being what he called polymorphously perverse—is resolved once we understand that what makes the desire for bodily pleasure a sexual desire  is not that it aims for the physical pleasure of rubbing our body against the body of another person, not that it is focused on certain erogenous zones, but rather that it aims to elicit arousal and desire from another person which, in turn, arouses ourselves. Indeed, it is the desire for mutual arousal that is critical in making a physical act sexual at all. We can be touched in exactly the same physical way and that touch can be deep massage in one instance and deeply sexual in another. The difference is in whether the person touching us intends to arouse us (and himself or herself) or not.

Sex, in other words, is not just a physical event. Rather it is an intrinsically intentional, relational phenomenon, one that involves not just the body but the soul of another person, and in which one hopes that one’s own desire and arousal is responded to in kind.

There are some obvious objections to this claim—and if I had more space I’d respond to them at greater length. Let me just mention two points with regard to the claim that masturbation is not relational in nature. First, it is relational in at least this:  when we masturbate we are trying to—indeed we sometimes go to some trouble to—arouse ourselves. And just as we can fail to be aroused in partnered sex, we can fail to be aroused when we masturbate. And it is also the case that we typically fantasize about other people when we masturbate in order to become aroused. Sex is very special in this respect. We don’t fantasize about eating with another person when we eat alone. Eating does have its relational elements in that we eat together as a way of forming and strengthening our relationships with others. But it is not intrinsically relational like sex because, Jewish mothers aside, our own desire to eat is not something that is oriented to encouraging others to eat. Nor is our desire to eat fundamentally shaped by the desires of others to eat. Our own sexual desires, on the other hand, do stimulate and are stimulated by the desires of our partner.

And to those who say that dominator sex is also an objection to my claim that sex is fundamentally relational let me point out that practice of the dominator sexuality implicitly recognizes the relational character of sexual desire albeit in perverse forms. Men (and some women today) who pursue dominator sex are not just seeking physical pleasure from the man or woman with whom they have sex. They want submission from them. Or, more precisely, just as sexual arousal and physical pleasure is enhanced in consensual sex by the sexual arousal of our partner, sexual arousal and physical pleasure in dominator sex is enhanced by dominating one’s partner. The expectation or hope of those who pursue dominator sex is that the dominator will elicit sexual arousal and physical pleasure from the person he dominates sexually not primarily as a reaction to his own lust but to his power and status. Sometimes this is a cruel fantasy.  But since submissive women and men can be as much caught up in this kind of sex as dominant men and women, it is sometimes the reality as well. To force another to take pleasure in his or her own submission is the ultimate form of domination. It is the final way in which the dominator demonstrates his control over the dominated.

How the traditional view misunderstands sexuality: the role of lust

Given these five important features of sexuality we can see how wrong the traditional view of sexuality goes even in its best moments, when it recognizes how important sexuality is to building a loving connection between two people. The traditional view misunderstands how sex does that. There is much talk in the tradition of men and women giving themselves or their bodies selflessly to one another. The contrast here is supposedly between a sexual encounter in which one uses another person’s body to satisfy one’s own desire and one in which one offers up one’s body to another out of love for them.

This way of thinking is problematic for two reasons. First, it is hard to escape the suspicion here that the traditional view is contrasting male and female or active and passive approaches to sexuality. Given that the traditional approach to sexuality is especially concerned about the dangers of female sexuality, it frequently seems to, at least implicitly, recommend that the passive, restrained female give her body selflessly to the aggressive lustful male without herself becoming too aroused let alone too focused on her own sexual pleasure. Her pleasure in sex is found in the gift she gives her husband not what she received from him. This is obviously not an understanding of sexuality that is likely to encourage sexual practices that give women pleasure or that encourage husbands to treat their wives with the respect due equals.[1]

Second, even if we understand it in a more egalitarian way, as requiring both men and women to love selflessly, it is difficult to reconcile the traditional view with the relational character of sexuality. It is impossible to give our partners sexual pleasure without seeking to arouse them. And part of what arouses our partners is that we are aroused by them. So to act sexually out of a self-less desire to give pleasure to another person without desiring pleasure for oneself is, quite simply, impossible. Even worse, the whole notion of giving oneself to another fails to understand that when sex goes well it transcend the whole self / other dichotomy. When we have good sex with our partner we are doing something together out of a desire that we share. Or to put the point another way, sex is more than just a mutual front rub not because it ends in intercourse—good sex doesn’t always end there—but because it starts in mutual arousal.

One would think that a tradition, such as the Catholic one, that focuses on the unitive end of sexuality would understand this. That it does not comes down to this: the traditional view of sexuality has a serious problem with lust. It sees lust as a low, bodily and degrading phenomenon. It would like human beings to have sex without lust, out of a higher desire to express our love for our partner and for God.

This is not a fanciful interpretation of the traditional view of sexuality. Fascination with and fear of lust is quite explicit in the work of Augustine. He held that one consequences of the Fall is that the sexual organs of our bodies no longer respond to our souls and in particular that men sometimes get erections when we don’t want them and sometimes don’t get them when we want them. In the Garden of Eden Adam’s penis was under the control of his will just like his arm or hand was. The bodies of Adam and Eve responded perfectly to their souls and they could become physically capable of sex—that is physically aroused—without the need to arouse one another and thus without lust.

The idea of sex without lust continues to be central to the traditional ideal of sexuality. But it is an ideal wholly out of keeping with the nature of human sexuality in the only world we know. And for anyone who does not accept the notion that human nature has been corrupted by the Fall, it is a pernicious doctrine. It is a doctrine designed to make us uncomfortable with our own bodies and our sexual nature. It is a doctrine that is guaranteed to generate intense guilt over our sexual feelings and sexual pleasure. And it can also generate a perverse preoccupation with lust in those who try to escape feelings of guilt by embracing sexual experience that they cannot experience as anything but transgressive.

How we know the traditional view is mistaken

How do we know that the traditional picture of sexuality is wrong and that the alternative I propose is right? That, of course, is a long story. But let me quickly point to four pieces of evidence.

First, the human animal is far more sexual than any other species, with the possible exception of the famed Bonobo chimps. It is a terrible slur to analogize men and women who are highly sexual or promiscuous to animals. But if one were a traditionalist, the slur would be on the animals not on the human beings. We are more sexual than other animals not because our bodies have power over our souls but precisely because we are free from the limits of the body. As I pointed out above, the vast majority of animal species have sex only at set times, when hormonal and other bodily changes stimulate sexual desire. We have sex anytime and frequently. We have sex and arouse one another to do so because we—not our bodies but we as a whole—desire it.

Second, human sexual desire is highly variable. The evidence is not always clear but there is good reason to think that how much sex human beings have has varied greatly from one time and place to another. And yet there is little evidence that in less sexual times and places human beings were sexually frustrated or that lack of sex was wholly a matter of religious scruples. Rather they were just pursuing other goods—or were too exhausted by the business of staying alive and caring for their children to worry about it. If sexual desire were as powerful and constraining as traditionalist thinks we wouldn’t see quite so much variety.

A reason to accept the notion that human sexuality is highly variable is our experience today. The best surveys of sexuality today show us that there is an enormous range of sexual behavior in the US and other advanced countries. (We know less about sexual behavior elsewhere in the world)

We also know about sexual variability from our own lives. Most of us have had stretches of time in which have had sex far more often than others. Again, the source of these differences is variability in the sexual opportunities available to us—both in terms of potential partners and free time—and our own psychological state.

Third, there is a huge pornography business. No one knows quite how large it is and this is one field where the size of everything is exaggerated. But the best estimates suggest that about $2.9 billion is spent on porn every year in just America.[2] It’s very difficult to understand why a huge industry whose main purposes is sexual arousal would exist if human were as prone to being overcome by lust as the traditional view claims.

And, fourth, I think we know that the traditional picture is mistaken just by looking at ourselves. The trick, however, is to look out selves as we really are, not as we think we must be given the traditional ideas about sexuality that are all around us. On those traditional ideas, the model of human sexuality is a 19 year old man. Indeed we often say that men are at their sexual peak when they are 19 by which we really mean that frustrated 19 year old men best exemplify our understanding of sexuality. Now I would agree that if we were like horny 19 year old men for all of our lives, the traditional view would be somewhat plausible. But half of us are never 19 year old men and the other half are 19 year old men for an extremely short period of time. Most of us are lucky enough not to live our lives as sexually frustrated as most 19 year olds. And, sexually experienced women know that they are very lucky not to have to spend their sexual lives with men with the limited sexual experience and knowledge of 19 year olds.

If we look at the role that sex really plays in the life of more or less well-adjusted and sexually active men and women, I suspect you will not find that your life is not torn by the almost unbearable pressures of bodily urges that are barely under your own control. Rather than standing apart from the rest of your life and exercising a malicious force on it, sexuality is an integrated part of who you are and how you relate to others. And, I also suspect that if men looked back at themselves at 19 honestly, they would understand that the picture we have of what life was like is far more shaped by traditional ideas than the reality of our lives at that age.

What follows from the new understanding of sexuality?

So, suppose we accept this alternative to the traditional understanding of sexuality, what concrete recommendations about our lives follows from it?

Giving up unnecessary restraints

The first recommendations are negative ones, to give up some of the absurd restraints on sexuality that follow from traditional views.

First, on the new understanding of sexual desire I’m presenting here, sexuality is not something to be unnecessarily constrained out of fear that sexual pleasure will so corrupt us that we will no longer be able to control ourselves. Thinking and talking about sexuality and even sexual experimentation will not lead to a wild expansion of our sexual desires. It will not lead us down the path to ruin.

Second, once we break with the traditional understanding of sex, it should be clear that women don’t have any greater responsibility for the proper use of sexuality than men. The future of marriage and family does not depend on women denying their own sexuality.

Third, under the new view we can broaden our notion of what marriage means and how married people should act. Contraception is not something that is dangerous because it removes the threat of pregnancy that forces women to limit sex. Nor is sexuality unthinkable outside of marriage because marriage is necessary to constrain the power force of lust. Nor will marriage be threatened if it is extended to homosexual couples.

Fourth, we can give up the whole misbegotten idea of chastity in marriage, the idea that married sexuality is best if it is limited, if it avoids stimulating lust, and if it is wholly oriented to the physical act by which, either through natural or miraculous means, children are conceived.

And even if one believes, as I do, that sexuality best contributes not just to human pleasure but to human wellbeing when it is carried on by people in a loving committed relationship, that does not mean that this is the only circumstances in which sexuality can contribute to our good.

Indeed, once we turn from eliminating restraints on sexuality to thinking about positive recommendations for our sexual lives, it seems clear that, at least in our time and place, other kinds of sexual relationships often make sense.

Learning about sexuality and ourselves

Human sexual desire is not a natural force that is the product of our animal, lower nature. It is a human desire shaped by our ideals, our hopes, our desires, our very stance towards the world. And it is highly variable in nature. Thus sexuality is something that, like every other human practice, needs nurturing through education and experience. Traditionalists tell us that pre-marital sex is the product of a self-indulgent and sinful inability to control our lower desires. But it is far closer to the truth to say that in our time and place pre-marital sex is an essential part of our education, our attempt to learn who we are and what it means to be an embodied being. It is sexual experience and reflection on that experience that teaches us how to become comfortable with our bodies, how to enjoy ourselves sexually in a way that respects our own nature and inclinations. That same experience can help teach us the proper role of sexuality and other bodily desires in life and love. It can help us develop both the creativity and discipline necessary not just to have good sex but to forming committed, enduring relationships and families.

A time of experimentation and reflection is especially necessary in a world in which most men and women put off marriage until their late twenties or later; in which they take on the responsibility for finding their own path of work and love in life; and in which equality is central to our ideal of relationships and marriage. A time to learn who we are is critical given the freedom, individuality and autonomy that define life lives today, and the other goals we so cherish—finding work and relationships that challenge and excite us, that enable us to develop and grow, that enable us to contribute to the world around us, and that give us a secure place in which to raise our children. And given that we often change directions in life—taking on different tasks and roles and sometimes different partners—periods of experimentation and reflection may be necessary later in our lives as well.

It is not just a new attitude towards sexuality and the new emphasis on freedom, individuality and autonomy that has made sexual freedom a part of the education of so many young people these days. Feminism played as great or greater role in making this possible, in two ways.

First, feminism has had a dramatic impact on sexual relationship among young people. At their best—which unfortunately is not all the time—they no longer consist in aggressive men pursuing reticent women who put off any sexual relationship until presented with an engagement ring or wedding band. Instead, young men and women engage in sexual relationships while learning how to become not just romantic partners but friends with one another. This transformation is not yet complete and one often sees unfortunate instance of back sliding in which women suffer at the hands of men who still embrace dominator sexuality. But much has changed. And many of the practices of young people—such as what critics call the “hook-up culture”—that look worrying and exploitative from traditional point of view are better seen as young people finding ways to explore their sexuality while also learning how to develop friendships of various kinds. That young people put romance and love off for a time is not any more worrying than that they extend their education while putting off decisions about careers. Rather all of these changes are best seen as the result of new opportunities that enable young people to shape lives that realize aspirations that are truly their own.

Those freedoms and opportunities were especially hard won for women—and that is the second way feminism has dramatically changed our lives. Women who have the same economic opportunities and career aspirations as men have, like men, economic reasons to have sex responsibly and to postpone childbearing until their careers were on the way.  And just like men, women not need time to get their careers underway but to discover who they are and what they want in a partner.

Sex and love

I’ve argued that on the new understanding of sexuality I’m pointing to, we should give up many of the restraints on sexuality that characterized traditional views and encourage people to experiment with sexual and romantic lives in order to discover who they are and want to become.

But finally, I want to argue that the traditional view was right about something, sex is ultimately best when it is wrapped up in a committed relationship between two people who are deeply in love and married.

I’m not going to belabor this point here. In a piece, Gay Marriage and Polygamy, that defends marriage for members of the LGBT community while showing why that does not lead to the conclusion that we should accept polygamous marriage, I’ve explained how companionate marriage has become even more important in the contemporary world than it was in the past because it is central to the pursuit of individuality and autonomy. And in another essay I will be posting soon, Why I Don’t Cheat on My Wife, I explain why sexual pleasure and love mutual support one another.

While my view shares the ideal of sex within marriage with traditional ideas of sexuality, I’m not, of course, defending traditional marriage. Egalitarian, feminist marriage, in which a man and a woman or two men or two women define the roles both in and out of bed that make sense to them, is my ideal. And I would argue that it is even better if, though the partners in a sexual relationship and marriage find that different roles fit them most of the time, they are both open to exploring each other’s ways of being. (More on that on another occasion.)

As long our form of political and social life survives, I suspect that most human beings will pair up and pursue sexual pleasure in long term monogamous relationships and marriage. As I explain elsewhere marriage is a central good in our lives, not least because sexual pleasure is often greatest when sexual partners know each other well and are deeply in love. That is likely to be become more rather than less true if, under the influence of feminism, dominator sexuality plays a lesser role in our lives. But the difficulty of finding or sustaining all-encompassing love makes monogamy impossible or difficult for some people. And others will find that experimentation with sexuality is always a part of their lives, perhaps alongside or in conjunction with a long term committed relationship or marriage. Once we give up the traditionalist notion that the heavens, or at least the our political community, will fall if sexuality is not limited to marriage, there is less reason for us to be concerned about people finding their way to sexual relationships that make sense in their own lives. Marriage, with its unique combination of partners committed to one another and, most often, their children will survive, and perhaps will even prosper in a way it has not in the past, when it is a path that we choose to embrace rather than assume we will follow.

The new world works

The traditional response to the new world

Those who believe in the traditional understanding of sexuality and the rules for life that rest on it are horrified by the transformations of the last fifty years. And they quickly point to a variety of social ills to justify their horror—rising rates of teen age pregnancy, single motherhood, and divorce.

The trouble with this traditional response is that most of these ills are far more serious among people raised to hold traditional views than among those who are part of the new world I’ve described. That’s not to say that that people who really hold and live by traditional views don’t live fine, happy lives. I would imagine that many of them do.

The trouble is that the majority of people who are raised to believe traditional views don’t live up to them. How could they? To begin with, for all the reasons we have seen, in a world in which more and more education is need to attain a middle class life, and young men and women are trying to forge their own place in the world, traditional restrains on sexuality don’t make much sense.

Even if one accepts those traditional understanding of restraints and tries to live up to them, the external supports for a traditional life have collapsed. The traditional understanding may be fundamentally mistaken. But the traditionalists are at least right in this: in the contemporary world, it is very difficult for young men and women educated in traditional ideals to live up to them. And that’s especially true because our mass culture has been transformed much more by the sexual revolution than by feminism. New ideas about sexuality that are not moderated by feminism encourage young men to be more sexually aggressive than ever. And young women are more inclined to acknowledge their own sexual desires. The older reasons for women to avoid sex have more or less collapsed because contraception is available and pregnant, single women are less likely to be shunned and condemned. But the new reasons for women to avoid pregnancy—the hope for continued education and a career —have not taken hold, especially in areas where traditional ideas dominate and feminism is a dirty word. At the same time traditional ideas discourage honest reflection and communication among and between young men and women about sexuality. When young men and women are fully accepting of becoming sexual and plan for it together, they are more likely to plan for contraception. When, on the other hand, sex is the product of young men pushing young women to do something they both desire and don’t want to acknowledge desiring, it is more likely to occur without contraception.

The result is that the social ills associated with sexual freedom occur at far higher rates in the most traditional parts of the country, that is, in the Southern and Southwestern red states that overwhelmingly vote for conservatives, than they do in the East, Midwest, and Western blue states that vote for liberals The red states are those in which teen pregnancy rates are highest (32.38 per thousand white women between the ages of 15-19 in red states and 19.27 in blue states). They are the states with both the highest rates of single motherhood and in which men and women get married at a younger age (for women the average age of first marriage is 24.07 in red states and 25.86 in blue states.) There may be less shame at pre-marital sex and unmarried pregnancy but the shotgun behind the door still generates a fair number of marriages in the red states. And, in large part because people do marry younger, before they have had a chance to figure out who they are and what they want out of life, divorce rates are higher in these states as well (3.88 per 1000 in red states and 2.50 per thousand in blue states.)

Other social pathologies are found at higher rates in blue states as well. The murder rate is 4.42 per thousand in red states and 3.88 in blue states. The rate of forcible rape is 33.91 per thousand in red states and 27.02 in blue states.

Conservatives are keen to point out that one also finds a higher rate of abortion in the blue states (20.3 per thousand women) than red states (13.07 per thousand). This is true. It seems that the abortion rate is lower in red states for a number of reasons: abortion providers are often harder to find because there are more regulations and less public or private funding; more people are morally opposed to abortion; and early marriage is more likely to be accepted, or in some cases, demanded by the families of young pregnant women. It is not clear to what extent these three reasons are most important.

But while none of us like to see high abortion rates, those of us who don’t believe that abortion is murder are inclined to think that it is often a lesser evil than teen age motherhood or shotgun marriages that lead rapidly to divorce. And at any rate, abortion is not the main way that young single women are able to be sexually active while putting off child bearing. Most such women use contraception and turn to abortion only when it fails. Abortion is much more common among young women who are poorer and less educated and less likely to use contraception to begin with. And sixty percent of women who have abortions are already mothers. Their aim is not to put off child bearing but to deal with the problem of having a second or third child they cannot afford.

At any rate, the abortion rate in America is declining, and is declining faster in blue states than red states even as sexual behavior among young unmarried men and women changes little. This decline is likely to be the result of newer ways of thinking about sexuality that encourage sexual openness and responsibility among young men and women.

I should point out that one possible reason for the differences between red state and blue states is disparity in their income and wealth. Red states remain poorer than blue states both in terms of income and wealth. And many of the social ills I have discussed are closely related to poverty. However the differences are not so great as to explain all the differences in rate of teenage pregnancy, early marriage or divorce. And, to some extent, the causation may actually runs in the other way. Blue states may have higher incomes and are wealthier precisely because they give greater opportunities to women, both for education and in the employment market.

Conclusion

In the last few months, the 2012 presidential election has brought to the fore culture war issues about sexuality that had been submerged in our politics during the years when economic issues and the wars in Afghanistan and Iran dominated our national debates. For once, however, this wedge issue is working in favor of Democrats than Republicans. Partly that is because, due to questions concerning implementation of the Affordable Care Act and Rick Santorum’s unusually blunt defense of traditional ideas, we are debating contraception rather than abortion. But sexual issues are also working in our favor because of generational change. The majority of voters today were born during the baby boom or since. We baby boomers, and those who have come after us, have created a different world than the one our parents grew up in—a world of greater sexual freedom and, even more importantly, greater equality for women. Most of us have been living in this new world for all of our adult lives. And not only do we have no desire to go back to the future, we know that the present works. We know that our lives are enhanced by sexual freedom and the equality of women. And our experience teaches us that the autonomy, freedom, and self-determination we believe in are not only compatible with the traditional ideals of marriage, family and children, they actually support those ideals.

What I think would finally put the culture wars to an end is if we were even more straightforward in defending the new world we have created. We have to stop being defensive about sexual freedom. We have to stop worrying about whether egalitarian marriage is problematic for our children. The only reason we worry about those things is that we haven’t quite gotten over the impact of the traditional picture of human nature and traditional ideas about sexuality. At some level we can’t escape the feeling that there is danger in giving up the old time religion with regard to sexuality.

But there is no danger in doing that. The old time religion is a false idol. Its picture of human nature and sexuality is not only deeply wrong but dangerous. To believe it is to accept a picture of humanity that has led men and women to become deeply alienated, not only from their own bodies but from the aspirations to freedom, wholeness and a connection to others which animate great love and great lives. To believe the old time religion is to accept the need for external restraints on our desires that are backstopped by religious and political authority rather than to accept responsibility for shaping our own lives.

The true religion teaches us that we are made in God’s image. And being made in God’s image we have the capacity to frame our own lives in accord with the deepest inclinations that God has given us—to sexual pleasure, to the equality between man and woman that sustains love, to providing the best to our children, and to making the world a better place for us all.