February 15, 2004
BE ONE FLESH:
Has secular sexual freedom sowed the seeds of social disintegration? (Peter Sellick, 5/2/2004, Online Opinion)
While most married couples recognise the corrosive effects of adultery, it seems that the unmarried are to have as many sexual partners as the want without expecting a negative effect on their future relationships. The one proviso is that these relationships are serial; that they pay some lip service to monogamy. This marks the boundary between promiscuity and responsible sexual behaviour. However, while these assumptions may be shared by the older generation who may never have experienced such freedom in sexual affairs, they may not he embraced by the younger generation for whom the sexual handshake has become the norm. These issues and how they have effected the quality of marriage and hence the prevalence of divorce have been canvassed by Leon R. Kass in his article The End of Courtship. Kass deftly tells us of the contemporary obstacles to the formation of permanent and satisfying marriages and family. The list is extensive and includes easy contraception, the cult of individual rights, the crippling of sexual imagination, public sexual education that is reduced to physiology/safety and the demystifying effect of science that robs sexuality of its mystery.While this article takes the more extensive treatment by Kass as a given, I am going to concentrate on one aspect of our dilemma that has yielded to the penetrating theological analysis of John Howard Yoder in his article entitled One Flesh until Death: conversations on the meaning and permanence of marriage. Yoder was a Mennonite theologian who specialised in Christian ethics. He died in 1997. The centre of Yoder’s argument focuses on the proclamation of God (Genesis 2:24) that Adam and Eve will become one flesh and the subsequent repetition of those words in the mouth of Jesus when he talks of marriage (Mark 10:8). But most surprisingly, Paul also uses the phrase “be one flesh” in 1Cor. 6:16 when he talks about sex with prostitutes. It is clear that marriage is essentially a sexual union and it occurs whenever such a union takes place. This means that there is no such thing as premarital sex, all sex is marital, even that with a prostitute. Furthermore, Yoder argues that these marriages are indissoluble contra the Roman Church. The warrant for this conclusion is biblical but it is also a psychological reality. While we may behave as if we do not carry our personal history with us, the exact opposite is the case. When we leave each sexual encounter we leave a piece of ourselves behind. We have shared an intimacy that leaves a trace in our memory and our affections. Even if the encounter is a one-night stand in a strange city, we remember, a place is left in our hearts that holds tenderness and concern for the other. To live as if we can have sexual encounters that do not leave such a trace in us means that we either lie to ourselves or that we have become emotionally castrated. Yoder thus argues that our experience of multiple partners is not serial monogamy but is more like polygamy because these other relationships continue to be present in memory, they continue to exist.
Of course, spouses die and marriages break down. The social wariness of hasty replacement speaks a truth about the time that is necessary to retrieve those parts of ourselves that have been left behind in the previous relationship. For a person to be free of a marital relationship they must proceed with the work of disentanglement, a process of grieving that takes its own time and sets aside, for a time, the proclamation of God that “It is not good for the man to be alone”.
When this generation of young people hop from one bed to another, either in search for sexual gratification or as a contorted form of courtship, or simply slide into cohabitation, they rob themselves of the very things that have traditionally kept marriage sustainable. They miss the erotic allure of the long-sought partner. They miss the community support provided by a public pronouncement and celebration of marriage with its attendant advantages of shared purse, orderly habitation and most essential of all, children. For the sexual union is not enough to sustain married life, that requires the shared responsibility for other lives and the attendant maturity that develops with it. In marriage we encounter the neighbour at close quarters and we learn that the path to full humanity lies in our dying to that person, that we displace ourselves. That some couples are barren and yet still maintain their marriages does not counter the argument, they are to be congratulated. Neither does the argument run aground in the face of singles who live rich and faithful lives. But to marry and choose not to have children seems a sin against the very centre of what marriage is about. Despite our rage about the individual’s right to choose, this choice condemns couples to immaturity and loneliness as they proceed through life without their own children and their grandchildren around them to transcend their own deaths.
Yoder contends that the high divorce rate may find its causes more in how we begin our marriages than how we end them. When couples proceed from one sexual partner to another, even if serially, and even if with the intention of finding a life-long mate, they accustom themselves to divorce. While they know that it is painful, they have done it before and know that it is possible. What we have in effect is not a courtship followed by marriage but a series of maimed marriages that do not have the resources to survive. There is no way that couples can distinguish between marriage and cohabitation when life continues as usual after the marriage ceremony. The danger is that the dynamics of cohabitation set the scene for the marriage: one stays as long as things are going OK but one reserves the right to leave unilaterally when the going gets rough.
And, if sex does not leave such a permanent trace then of what value is it? Certainly it would be absurd to elevate such an empty activity to the level of a human right. Posted by Orrin Judd at February 15, 2004 5:40 PM
I'd like to stop the promiscuious use of the word secular as a modifier for every social trend that religious people find troubling. What is so secular about sexual freedom? It is a trend that pervades our culture, practiced by the religious and secular alike.
Posted by: Robert Duquette at February 15, 2004 7:36 PMHo hum. Old fogies complaining that today's young people are having more fun than they ever did, and blaming it not on themselves but on the young.
If this guy didn't have any fun when he was young, he has himself to blame and nobody else.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at February 15, 2004 9:05 PMHarry:
I know you would like to believe traditional morality was concocted by a bunch of grim old patriarchs out of sexual jelously and a determination to take all the fun out of life, but even in material terms it comes down to the question of what is more important, children and those who raise and protect them, or the glandular impulses of adults. I would have thought the innate moral sense evolution has bequeathed us would bring you darwinists on board, if only in the name of survival, but I guess that disappears when you hit the chapter on the purposelessness of it all.
You know, during the Black Death, morality broke down badly in the face of the sense of hopelessness and meaninglessness that pervaded. There were all sorts of alarmed accounts of "lewd and shameful" behaviour as people desperately tried to get their sexual innings in before the black night of nothingness enveloped them. Sort of like a compact, early version of Sex and the City.
Posted by: Peter B at February 16, 2004 5:04 AM"... if sex does not leave such a permanent trace ... it would be absurd to elevate [it] to the level of a human right."
Speech need not leave a permanent trace, yet its freedom has been elevated to the level of a human right.
Color me confused.
Peter:
"... what is more important, children and those who raise and protect them, or the glandular impulses of adults."
Those two options are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
At the risk of providing too much information, I married rather later than the norm. Up until then, while not a libertine, I was certainly not celibate. I find no parallel between my experience and Yoder's, uh, analysis.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at February 16, 2004 7:40 AMJeff:
I'm glad, but maybe many of the 50% who end up divorcing do.
Posted by: Peter B at February 16, 2004 8:29 AMMr. Guinn: I'd say the glandular impulses of adults have been given predominance over children for a good 30 years. And I don't think the consequences have been too good.
Posted by: Buttercup at February 16, 2004 8:50 AMJeff:
Maybe if you'd waited you'd not have entered the murder pact so eagerly?
Posted by: oj at February 16, 2004 9:27 AMBottom line: no matter where they start, they always end up the same place -- sex is bad for you.
Although Jeff believes a core of fundamental moral parameters are innate, I don't. Morality is a learned behavior, like making pottery.
A great deal of it does more to enhance the status of individuals than of the group as a whole. Though few of us think it through, we Americans deplore this. That's why we got rid of kings and aristocrats in favor of equal status for all.
Few other cultures have learned as much, which is why we have the most moral society in the world.
The sexual morality you guys preach had more to do with real estate than anything else.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at February 16, 2004 3:58 PMThe sexual morality you guys preach had more to do with real estate than anything else.
Real estate? How so?
Have you been reading Doonesbury again?
The one about Dr Whoopee and his "Condos"?
Harry:
Sex is neutral. Sex with the person you marry is the point and is beautiful.
Posted by: oj at February 16, 2004 6:09 PMExcept for homosexuals, for whom sex is always immoral, and with the person they marry ...
Impossible, apparently. That gays should be allowed to experience the most sublime of human experiences is obviously too horrid a possibility to even contemplate.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at February 16, 2004 8:42 PMJeff Guinn said, "At the risk of providing too much information, I married rather later than the norm. Up until then, while not a libertine, I was certainly not celibate. I find no parallel between my experience and Yoder's, uh, analysis."
Are you then saying that your experience prior to your marriage made no impression on you? Yoder is saying that every sexual experience always does. I wonder what your partners said when you told them, "What just happened meant nothing to me, and made no impression on me."
Jeff:
Henry has an interesting point, one that comes up as well when you deconstruct traditional morality but then indignantly insist you are every bit as moral as those who adhere to it. If we can remove your personal life from the debate for a moment, the worldly arguments for chastity and fidelity are that they can lead not only to a more fulfilling life, but to higher joys. Whether this is true or not is evidenced by personal testimonies, not rational deduction. Your (intellectual, not personal) answer seems to be: 'Well, I wasn't chaste and/or faithful and it made no difference." It is a little like trying to argue in favour of compulsory Latin with someone who has never studied it. Either you listen to voices that came before you or you don't. Were your grandparents faithful? If they weren't, are you happy for them?
Interesting you would define sex as life's most sublime experience. Aren't you setting the bar a little low here? If that is true, everybody should have as much as possible, no? Sublime, by the way, is defined as "so awe-inspiringly beautiful as to seem almost heavenly". I would have thought children or great music qualify, but I guess that depends on one's idea of heaven. But not too many therapists make good livings treating people betrayed or damaged by indiscriminate listening to Bach.
Well, that covers sublime. Here's sublimation: "the channeling of impulses or energies regarded as unacceptable, especially sexual desires, toward activities regarded as more socially acceptable, often creative activities."
Peter:
I was calling sex within marriage--and by extension marriage itself--life's most sublime experience.
There was a great deal more about Yoder's analysis than whether I gained anything from my pre-marital "experiences."
Henry IX:
Re-read the last two paras of the article. That is the "analysis" I was referring to that I found had utterly no echo in my experience.
Why would one's sexual experiences at 16 make them less fit spouses or parents at 26 or 36?
What if the first experience was great? Merely pretty good?
The first car I drove was a 1959 Chevy, an absolute piece of junk. I later drove better cars, but the fact that I had started with a bod one didn't make me a bad driver.
No, but I bet your paramours since regret your switch from manual to automatic.
Posted by: oj at February 17, 2004 4:26 PMHarry:
That's a terrific analogy, and one that I am sure will resonate with American women fron coast to coast.
Weren't cars of that era known for built-in obsolescence?
Posted by: Peter B at February 17, 2004 7:53 PM