Are We Just Wrong about Sex Today?

I like to compare today with 50 years ago. In 1962, I was fifteen. Although "the Pill" had recently been introduced, in 1960, the old strictures were still pretty much in place. You mustn't ever, ever have sex — except, of course, with your spouse. That was the essence of the strictures. It was, we were taught, the moral ideal.

Of course, there was a sizeable gap between that ideal and what actually went on. I call it the "hypocrisy gap." In 1947 the first Kinsey Report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, came out, revealing that American men were having a surprising amount of illicit sex. In 1953, the second report was published: so were American women ... if to a lesser extent.

But read "Good news, bad news about teen sex behavior and HIV," an article from The Washington Post of July 24. Note that:

... 46 percent of U.S. high school students in 2011 reported ever having sex, compared to 54 percent in 1991. The percentage of students reporting having had four or more sex partners was 14 percent in 2011, down from 19 percent 20 years earlier.

That makes the Kinsey Reports seem prim. Think of it: almost one high-schooler in six having at least four sex partners by the time he or she dons the mortarboard and graduates.

These graphs accompanied the article:

The article tells us:

The data also showed that sexually active black students were [compared with whites and Hispanics] the most likely to use a condom in their most recent sexual encounter at 65 percent, but that is a drop from a high of 70 percent in 1999.

60 percent of black students were sexually active, and so 65 percent of that group — roughly 20 percent of all black high school students — were putting themselves at serious risk of HIV infection.

White and Hispanic kids were somewhat less likely to be having sex, but they were also slightly less likely to be using condoms, if they were sexually active, so their HIV risk factor was right up there, too.

This comes in a time when, as the article says:

Four of every 10 new HIV infections occur in people younger than 30, according to the [Centers for Disease Control]. So reducing risky sexual behavior during teenage years is key. The average age when teens begin to have sex is 16 ... .

And when :

The research suggests that black youth are benefiting from school-based education about HIV, but once they leave the school environment, gay and bisexual youth enter a high-risk environment where HIV prevalence is high. Having sex with partners who are also black, and older, poses risks and helps spread the virus.

And yet, over the past decade:

Overall, the number of U.S. high school students who have been taught about HIV and received sexual education in schools ... has declined steadily due to budget cutbacks.

So lots of kids are getting let down bigtime. Lots of them are having lots of sex. Lots of them either don't study HIV prevention in sex-ed class, or they ignore what they've been taught. Lots of them, whether black, brown, or white, or whether straight, gay, or bi, are in line for HIV infection ... and transmitting it to others.

I think the gap between the nominal ideal and what actually goes on today is far uglier than the "hypocrisy gap" of 50 years ago.

The nominal ideal is (a) if you are married, never to cheat on your spouse; ( b) if you aren't married, not to have really promiscuous sex, but to restrain yourself (at least somewhat) to "meaningful" sex; and (c) if you do have sex with other than a known-safe partner, always use a condom.

We all know what that ideal is today. We generally ignore it.

I call this gap the "rambunction gap." Its side effect: HIV/AIDS kills a whole lot of folks ... and that's major-league ugly.

The Hypocrisy Gap's Unlovely Side Effects

The hypocrisy gap of yore had some unlovely side effects, too. It was an outright sin against God to shirk the ideal, so everyone had to keep their sexual needs and feelings under wraps — women, especially, as men benefitted from the proverbial "double standard." The Bible said wives should be subordinate to their husbands, so their own sexual needs didn't count. Best if they just didn't have any sexual needs — openly, that is.

If a woman's secret sexual needs got loose at the wrong time and place, she might end up pregnant with no legal recourse to abortion. It was something she couldn't even admit to in public, being pregnant out of wedlock. In fact, the word "pregnant" wasn't allowed in polite conversation or on TV.

Teens couldn't be taught about sex in schools, in a society in which words like "penis" and "vagina" were occasions for fiery-red blushes.

Forbidden fruit such as teen sex and gay sex and oral sex and solo sexhad no place, at least nominally, in our lives.

Neither, supposedly, did divorce.

The Comparative Death Tolls of the Two Gaps

But — and this is my first main point — few died because of the hypocrisy gap. Because extracurricular sex was rigidly circumscribed, even Kinsey didn't find all that much of it — by today's standards — going on. So a disease like HIV/AIDS didn't have a chance to establish itself ... and the old venereal diseases, gonorrhea and syphilis, were already pretty well under control thanks to penicillin.

Back-alley abortions did claim some lives, as did occasional suicides owing to shame and guilt, but between the first recognition of AIDS in 1981 and today, the disease has led to over 30 million deaths. Thus, the wages of the rambunction gap.

A "Post-Christian Sexual Ethic"?

My second main point is that the nominal ideal that we pay lip service to today looks on paper like just what the doctor ordered as a candidate for a post-Christian sexual ethic. Of course, it needs to be fleshed out quite a bit from the simple way I described it above ... and I'm reading an excellent book which does just that, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, by Margaret A. Farley.

But what Farley promulgates is just an albeit fairly liberal version of the nominal sexual ethic we find today, but mainly ignore:

• Avoiding doing unjust harm to anyone, especially by treating them as sex objects.
• Insisting that sex be consensual and mutually fulfilling in relationships set up voluntarily among equal and committed adult partners.
• Requiring that sex be fruitful in some way, either reproductive or abstract.
• Maintaining that sex must always serve rather than corrupt the "social justice" needs of the community.

But any thoughtful, modern, secular person would say the same — there's not much of a specifically Christian or even broadly religious outlook here. Meanwhile, many Christians would object to her tolerance for homosexuality, sex outside marriage, abortion, birth control, and masturbation.

Which brings me to my third main point, that there's no evidence that a sexual ethic that does not grow out of putatively God-given strictures can contain the rambunction gap. In fact, the evidence we do have says just the opposite, and the banishment of old-time religion from the public square has tracked closely with the boiling over of the rambunction gap.

The "Procreative Norm"

At the core of the dispute between liberal and conservative Catholics concerning sex today is the role of procreation. Catholic doctrine has long enshrined the "procreative norm," insisting that all non-celibates who marry put openness to procreation at the very heart of their connubial lives.

Sex is good, not evil, the Church maintains ... but only when constrained by the procreative norm.

Contrast that with this paragraph from Farley's book, in which she talks of other, non-Christian philosophical currents in the Greek world in which the early Christians were founding their churches:

Gnosticism was a recurrent religious movement that influenced formulations of Christian sexual ethics for the first three centuries C.E. Some Fathers of the church taught that there were two extreme positions among gnostics — one in opposition to all sexual intercourse and the other permitting any form of sexual intercourse so long as it was not procreative. The ascription of this kind of ascetic/libertine dichotomy seems not to be accurate, but in any case, Christian thinkers tried to avoid it.

Celibacy for those called to it and, for others, married sex governed by the procreative norm — that was what the Church Fathers settled on as good and true doctrine.

It rules out the use of artificial methods of contraception, the Church has long maintained. It also rules out the Gnostics' "any form of sexual intercourse so long as it is not procreative."

So ... what goes on today, in a world with such a bodacious "rambunction gap"? We seem intent on engaging in any and every form of non-procreative sex, including but not limited to the terms of sex between married heterosexual partners.

When marriage partners use pills or condoms to avoid pregnancy, it's just one more stab to the heart of the procreative norm, conservative Catholics insist.

Farley proposes that that existing sexual ethic based on the procreative norm be updated to promulgate a new set of norms (see above).

Yet I don't see how Farley's proposal at all changes the secular normative ideal that (supposedly) rules our sexual behavior today. Most enlightened liberals, religious or secular, who have set the procreative norm conspicuously aside are already on board with Farley's replacement norms. And yet we have an ugly "rambunction gap" that is ruining countless lives via rampant rape and sexual assault (see here and here and here) and killing countless people via unchecked HIV infection.

I think we need to start reconsidering the value of the "procreative norm" as a religious and ethical tenet.