Sex is Not Safe

But a Christian sexual ethic can ensure that if it destroys you, it will be through honorable self-sacrifice, not just punishment.

The thesis of this post is straightforward. I made it the title, in fact. Sex, by nature, is highly unsafe.

The associated risks are various in kind, and that being the case, it is sometimes possible to choose among them. For instance, we can diminish physical risk at the cost of greater moral and emotional risk. Fewer high-risk pregnancies, more betrayal and illegitimacy. Another kind of reshuffle might yield less pregnancy in general, fewer broken relationships, and more loneliness. One way or another though, sex is risky. This cannot be changed.

It’s hard to be a sexual being. At some point in life, I think nearly everyone looks at his or her “sex life” (understood broadly to include not just sex itself, but also sexual relationships, or possibly the lack of them, and everything that follows from all that) and says, “This is too hard.” Or “this is not how it should be.” I don’t plan to go “full Freud” here because I don’t truly believe that everything in life is about sex. It’s big, though. Our worst betrayals, our most bizarre perversions, our most desperate yearnings, and our most devastating experiences of heartbreak, very often relate to sex. And yet, it’s also a defining part of some of our deepest bonds, our most admirable achievements, our highest examples of self-sacrifice. It’s a tricksy thing, being sexed.

Sex certainly holds deep mysteries, and yet its gravity is not totally inexplicable. To capture its gravity and weight, I would submit the following three points:

1) Sex is the source of new life. In the course of mere minutes, two human beings can bring another unique, morally precious human being into existence. That is an extraordinary thing, and clearly not trivial.

2) Together with its actual life-giving power, sex has a strong tendency to lead to idolatry. Sometimes this is directed at sexual activity itself. Sometimes it’s a particular object of sexual desire. Either way, sex can inspire obsession, even derangement, a kind of madness in which the object seems to matter immensely, perhaps more than any other thing. People will do terribly destructive things for the sake of sex. (See: the Trojan War)

3) Sex opens wide pathways for people to exploit, betray, and take advantage of one another. This isn’t really so surprising when one considers how, in sex, the gratification of a physical appetite naturally involves another person, and can have immense and potentially ruinous consequences for them.

Here’s another point that’s interesting to contemplate. In sex, humans are at our most bestial in some fairly obvious ways. Animals also breed, and they likewise seem to find the experience fairly, shall we say, intense. “Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it.” That’s a lighthearted little song, but there’s a serious point underneath: in sex, we really are quite similar to the chimps and the squirrels.

Is sex necessarily base, then? I don’t actually think so, but I do think we should approach it with the assumption that it will take considerable effort to love like men, not like beasts. “Good loving” is often the work of a lifetime, as well as a major goal of culture and custom. It takes discipline, self-sacrifice, exertion. And even if you check all those boxes, the thing can still go off the rails in ways that are beyond your control. I repeat once again: sex is not safe.

What should we do, then? Well, obviously, we need some rules. Let’s be clear, though. The point of the rules is not to make sex safe. The point is to make it ethical. A good sexual ethic doesn’t guarantee that sex will “work out” in any kind of this-worldly sense. It mostly definitely can’t promise to turn sexual activity into “good clean fun.” The point of a well-ordered sexual ethic is simply to ensure that if sex destroys you, your demise will be the result of honorable self-sacrifice, not merited punishment for selfishness and predation. If you wipe out, you’ll do it as a good person, not a bad one.

One wants to add, cheerfully, “And you will at least be somewhat safer even in the obvious sense, likelier to be blissfully happy and less likely to end up heartbroken, destitute, or prematurely dead.” Maybe? One hopes? But honestly, I’m not sure. Love is monstrously risky, and “good sex” carries massive liabilities in that regard. I’m aware that there’s a whole cottage industry of people (the sort that work at the Institute for Family Studies) working to show, basically, that Good Love helps people to thrive. I’m not dismissive really, and I follow that kind of work with real interest, but it’s awfully hard sometimes to know what to make of the sociologist’s “good love” picture. What’s really being measured when people self-report that they are happy, or describe their marriage as “high-quality”? When are apples being compared to other apples, and when do the studies just confirm that the already-fortunate are also likelier to be lucky in love? And on the less-lucky side of the spectrum, where happy marriages and prosperous families are harder to attain, how does bruising failure measure against a quiet life of placid consumption? It is surely easier in many ways, and safer, not to open oneself to too much love.

I care about this topic here at Christendom Reborn because it is central to the question of vocation, which, as previously discussed, is a key Christian strategy for coping with the intensely demanding reality of individual uniqueness and worth. As discussed in that week, an intensely demanding sexual morality has always been a defining feature of the Christian tradition, as has meticulous regulation of marriage. In modern times, as in the ancient world, this has become one of Christianity’s least-popular features, almost certainly the one most people (including most self-described Christians!) would vote to change if Christ’s own teachings could be altered by democratic process. Many people sincerely believe that Christian teachings on sex are outdated, unjust, perhaps a product of prejudice more than prudence, and certainly not appropriate to our time. A recent comment thread here at Christendom Reborn gave voice to such an opinion:

People want rules, and they understand that living responsibly takes real effort. But they don’t want wink-wink-nudge-nudge rules where it’s a given that they’ll be broken, nor are they willing to burden themselves with unnecessary rules, when life is hard enough. I’d consider it the responsibility of any religious leadership to give them the lightest yoke necessary, and ensure it is one that can actually be borne. Otherwise, the failure isn’t the flock’s, it’s the shepherds’.

That’s well put, and sets up my own point, which is really rather simple. Traditional Christian teachings are “the lightest yoke necessary” for ethical sex. You can lighten that yoke only by lying to people about the nature of sex, and its real consequences and hazards. I don’t think shepherds should lie to their flock.

The traditional Christian view is consistent and elegant. It is a profound expression of the Christian commitment to persons, in all their precious uniqueness. It’s also excruciating. There are cases (many, in fact!) in which we want to relax the rules because they simply seem unreasonably demanding. I understand this, and I don’t really expect to enter anytime soon into a world in which most people want to join me in biting the hard bullets, holding people to painful and possibly life-blighting standards instead of just granting exemptions whenever it appears to us that The Consistent View is unreasonable. Sometimes leniency looks pretty manageable; the anticipated consequences don’t look particularly bad.

That judgment may or may not be accurate, but for the present I’m just going to say this. If one is seeking a consistent view of sex, philosophically sound and fit for application to all related questions, there is really just one option. That’s the traditional view. The “natural sex” view. You can say “the Catholic view” if you want, though I generally avoid that because it’s not unique to Catholics. (But, I do think the Catholic church has developed and articulated the view with particular clarity, and anyone who wants a lucid philosophical explanation should pull up the article I posted yesterday.) I obviously won’t make the absurd claim that everyone who rejects this view is functionally in the same place, but I will go this far: If you reject The Consistent View, you’ll necessarily find yourself relying at times on circumstantial human judgment to fill the gaps in our formal understanding of sexuality and human nature. You’ll have to work without a map in adjudicating some potentially-weighty questions. Maybe that’s okay. Then again, looking at the world around us, you might worry that circumstantial human judgment is often pretty badly wrong when it comes to sex.

The Consistent View has two key planks. The first is that men need to love as men and not as beasts. Our sexual behavior needs to be consistent with our nature as rational and loving beings. It’s not okay to use other people to fill our own needs (physical, emotional, or otherwise) without assuming some responsibility for their good. And as already noted, sex can bring new people into existence, so we need to take responsibility for that reality too. Avoiding sexual exploitation is a weighty task, which from the get-go lays a lot of demands on people reaching far beyond “consent.”

The second plank might initially seem odd or even paradoxical: even as we’re busy loving “as men” we need to respect the natural character of sex itself, which is fundamentally reproductive. This is, if you like, how humans breed. That doesn’t mean that every sexual act needs to make a baby (which isn’t “how it naturally works”), or that every pair of lovers needs to be trying to make a baby, but we do need to understand that sex is a baby-making activity and, you might say, “leave it as it is.” That of course raises particular challenges for gays and lesbians, since same-sex couples cannot naturally reproduce. Heterosexual couples (especially young!) may face a different challenge: hyperfertility. A pair of healthy twenty-somethings can make a lot of babies in (say) 10-15 years of marriage. I warned you that this would get hard.

Canon law can get extremely complicated if we dig into the intricacies, but take a moment to appreciate the beautiful simplicity of The Consistent View. It is truly quite profound. In our sex lives, we must strive to love as men (rational, loving, embracing persons in their full preciousness) without hiding from the natural, organic (even a bit bestial?) character of the thing. By accepting both requirements, we stand a chance of steering a path between exploitation and idolatry. We may be able to be good lovers while still submitting to a law higher than ourselves. That’s huge. It is not the only thing we’re called to do on this earth, but actually, handling the “sexual being” aspect of life with honor and prudence truly is one of the most defining aspects of our success as humans.

One can always furnish examples of people who skirted a few rules of “the Consistent View” without (apparently) coming to much grief. Great. I don’t wish to see people coming to grief, nor do I spend my time dreaming up reasons why people who reject that view (which, let’s be honest, includes almost everyone nowadays) are more vicious than they may appear. As with any law (natural, human, or divine) there are elements of “moral hazard” to this: one can sometimes fudge a bit without coming to serious harm, but then again the consequences may be more severe than we expect, at which point we may be startled to find ourselves compromised in unexpected ways. I’m aware that that risk will often seem worth it to people in hard places. I’ve already reiterated several times that sex just isn’t safe.

I think it’s pretty clear though that as the traditional view loses its hold, with fewer people accepting or even understanding its logic, the social consequences have been fairly agonizing. Many people – like my interlocutor above – recognize the need for more “rules” but no one has yet piloted a particularly good, novel solution. Perhaps that’s because there isn’t one. And if that’s true, it may in turn add up to a pretty good argument for walking back some of the “compassionate” adjustments to the traditional view, which were often made for very understandable reasons but which left us making a lot of weighty decisions without much of a map. Stepping back and looking at the arc of the past century or so, it should be clear that sex is as bruising, as exploitative, as “risky” as ever. We’ve moved some of those risks around, but the most obvious result was to make it harder for people to shoulder the burdens honorably.

To be clear, I have every expectation that full-fledged, consistent “natural sex” advocates like me will remain rare for the foreseeable future. But there’s rare, and there’s “freakish and marginalized outsiders whose perspective most people find incomprehensible.” Rare would be better. If chastity, as traditionally understood, is the best remedy for what ails us, any dose is better than none.

In some ways, the proponents of gender ideology did a wonderful thing by selecting the motto “Love is love” to promote their recommended reforms. It’s a perfect counterpoint to Christian sexual ethics. On one level it’s just a tautology, and yet it feels right to many because it channels the idea that all human love is fundamentally good, that it’s essentially all the same in character, and that we shouldn’t allow rules, circumstantial context, or higher principles or ideals to govern our judgment or choices when it comes to love. I think many people really believed they were saying something profoundly true. They genuinely wanted to affirm both love and human relationships.

They forgot something important, however. Sex isn’t safe. It often brings out the worst in us, and even “good loving” can turn out to be life-blighting. A Christian sexual ethic won’t protect you from suffering, nor will it guarantee happiness. It’s grounded in truth though, and that’s a good place to start.