Yes, We Ruined Sex

The Wall Street Journal has asked a ponderous question: “Have we ruined sex?” To address the issue, it called on five adults, people who presumably have had first hand experience of sex, and who enjoy theorizing about the issue.

The team includes Katie Roiphe, Andrew Sullivan, Mary Harrington, Coleman Hughes and Agnes Callard. The group is suitably diverse, and naturally it gets it all wrong. 

Before I started reading the replies I thought to myself that these distinguished intellectuals will most assuredly fail to connect sex with reproduction. In truth, I was slightly wrong. One author Mary Harrington does mention procreation in passing, before moving on to more erotic matters. For the record, no one mentions STDs.

And yet, at a time when everyone is rushing out to see a movie about a doll named Barbie, several commentators have sagely pointed out that while Barbie can be anything she wants to be, there is one exception. Barbie can never get pregnant. She can never have babies, or even baby dolls.

Call it a gesture toward liberation; it frees young girls from the notion that they might want to grow up to become wives and mothers. For some this is a good thing; for others, not so much.

As for the question itself, my first thoughtwas quite simply that we have ruined sex, by talking it to death. Upon reading the columns in question, I added a slight qualification-- we have not just talked it to death. We have thought it to death. 

Better yet, we have exposed sex to the light of day. We forgot that St. Augustine, the eminent bishop of Hippo, explained that sex is better in the dark. 

This means, we have forced sex, whatever it is, to submit to our philosophical and psychological musings and meanderings. And we got lost in the labyrinth. 

Examine one serious thinker and watch how her deep reflections lead her astray. Philosopher Agnes Callard explains that sexual activities are a ritual. For some people they might be a ritual. For others, not so much. To avoid the temptation to distort her thinking, I quote her:

A ritual is a sequence of behaviors that symbolically enacts an idea. A handshake or a bow enacts the idea of mutual acknowledgment; a wedding enacts the coming into existence of a commitment.

For example, we have trouble with the idea of death, to the point of sometimes saying of a loved one, “I can’t believe she’s dead.” The funeral enacts the idea that “she’s not just not missing on this or that occasion; she is permanently gone.” A bedtime ritual, such as a story and a kiss good night, enacts the idea “I still care about you, even though I’m leaving you alone in the dark with nothing to do”—and it does so better than simply saying those words.

The idea that sex enacts is one of the trickiest: thoroughly reciprocal desire.

I appreciate childlike naivete as much as the next man, but if you think that conjugal coitus always involves thoroughly reciprocal desire, you are missing the obvious. If conjugal and other forms of coitus required thoroughly reciprocal desire, the human species would have long since died out. 

As for her other point, namely, that desire is satisfied when it is reciprocated, the point seems blazingly absurd. You can certainly desire someone who does not want you. It happens all the time. 

Besides, desire is akin to appetite. You can feel a burning hunger for some vanilla flan without your desire being reciprocated.

As for the satisfaction of desire, you probably know that desire is satisfied when it reaches what people gingerly call climax. To imagine that people whose conjugal and non-conjugal coitus is approaching climax are thinking that they will not feel satisfied unless their desire is reciprocated, is a step into a theoretical void.

You might find this intriguing. Sad to say, I do not. But what is this thing called ritual?

When you participate in a family dinner you are not enacting an idea. You are following a multitude of rules that constitute good table manners. The goal is social harmony, not enacting an idea. When you are getting married you are not enacting an idea of commitment. You are making a commitment.

As everyone knows by now, the theory of performative utterances, hatched by a British philosopher named J. L. Austin, proposes that certain words do something, as in, when the preacher declares you man and wife, you then become man and wife. The commitment precedes the performative.

And yet, things are slightly less complicated than they appear. Within the marital context, one specific sex act, the act of conjugal coitus, consummates a verbal and public commitment. And we note, perhaps with some chagrin, that conjugal coitus is defined as a duty, not as a desire. That’s why it is called a conjugal duty not a conjugal desire. The two are not the same.

Surely, this does not preclude that you might want to do something that you are duty bound to do. Yet conjugal coitus is a duty for reasons that have more to do with procreation than with desire.

One appreciates the charm in thinking that conjugal coitus accompanies or even expresses desire, but one feels obliged to notice that most marriages, in the history of the human species, have been arrangements. True love and burning desire have mostly been the province of extra-marital sexual relations.

In truth, if you define sex in terms of desire, and if you let your desire be your guide, you might arrive at the point where you feel obliged to act on your most intensely passionate desires. And that often involves breaking your marriage vows.

Now, most human societies frown on such antics. They see sex in terms of conjugal duties and ban adultery. When sex involves conjugal coitus, the future of the family and of the society is in play. Why did human societies attempt to socialize sex thusly? Simply put, and this has been known forever, they wanted to ensure that people know whose child belongs to which father. 

The rules do not preclude desire, but they do not enact desire or even ideas. They produce social cohesion, that being a more important value than acting on the stirrings in your loins.

Of course, we need to mention certain sexual acts-- we will not name them-- that constitute foolproof contraception. Regardless of whether your desire is reciprocal, some sex acts cannot involve reproduction, and some can. 

Societies differentiate between them strictly. Heck, even Freud did. In principle, society does not care about sex acts that constitute foolproof contraception. But, this often depends on demographic considerations. If a small social group is facing extinction, foolproof contraception is a threat to group survival. If a large social group is overpopulated, it will be far more tolerant of foolproof contraception. 

More largely, as the authors make clear, sexual desire is a feminist issue. If women, as the Barbie movie makes clear, are no longer allowed to define themselves by a role like “wife” they might end up engendering a hookup culture. 

The result has been, less sex for everyone. Fostering random sex acts with people you do not know and who have not made a commitment to you turns people off to sex. And this is true, regardless of whether or not women feel that they are being liberated, either from conventional mores or from their clothes.

As Coleman Hughes suggested, the moral panic over sexual assault on campuses derived in some part from women’s dissatisfaction with hookup culture.

The real issue was a culture that not only sanctioned but encouraged young people to have sex without any expectation of courtesy, follow-through or commitment——particularly from the male side. While they couldn’t get mad at young men for participating in hookup culture, which was supposedly a feminist and progressive innovation, women could direct their anger at young men on the issue of sexual assault.

So, immodesty ruined sex. Way to go, girls!

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