The Need for Centeredness

My recent posts have revolved around society and sexuality:

Where Does the Urge to Rape Come From?
Lessons from "The Sex Lady"
Uncommitted Sex? Just Say No!
Our Baser Selves
The Procreative Norm

I think our society is way off balance — when it comes to sex, and when it comes to a lot of other things.

Another way to put it is that we are way off-center, and we need to be a lot more centered.

We need more self-respect and more respect for others. If we are off-center in our lives, it's a struggle to be respectful of others' needs, because we don't even understand our own needs.

Urges are not the same thing as needs. Urges can pull us off-center. True needs will not.

We are off-center as individuals, and we are off-center as a society and a culture. If the culture were more on-center, there wouldn't be as many rapes. There wouldn't be as many unwanted pregnancies and abortions. Not as many relationships that end in breakups and divorces. Not as many instances of domestic violence. Not as much child sexual abuse.


And, taking this out of the realm of sex, there wouldn't be as many tragic shootings by crazed individuals with guns.

Nor would there be as much crime in general. Most crime comes from individuals who think they have a right to something that only breaking the law can get them. That kind of self-centeredness is the exact opposite of the centeredness I'm talking about.

Most of us keep our baser behavior patterns in check, most of the time. Most of the time, we are kind to and respectful of others. Most of the time, we don't do wild things that may make us feel good in the short run, but then inevitably wind up making us feel sorry in the long run. Most of the time, we don't disrespect or bully people who "aren't like us."

But then sometimes we do stuff that we wouldn't do, most of the time. Stuff we "shouldn't" do, but we do anyway — some of the time.

Why do we act so schizoid? Why do there seem to be two different people inside our skins?

It's a sign of being off-center.

And how often do we seem to get pulled off-center by such things as pressure from our peers, as well as by the stuff we and they see every day online, or on TV, or at the movies. The whole culture seems to be conspiring to pull everybody off-center, over into our baser selves ...

... where the urge arises to fight, to snarl, to be snarky, to exhibit hostility ...

... and to behave sexually in less than a "chaste" way ...

... to act as if the world is out to hold us down, to keep us from the pursuit of what we imagine to be our happiness ...

... and so we get cynical about so-called "good" behavior. People who are good and generous and kind are simply pretending "the dark side" isn't there. They'll surely end up losers.


Whatever name you prefer to call "the dark side" of human nature and human behavior, it recedes into the background when individuals and the society as a whole are on-center.

A certain number of people today seem to have bought into the idea that the dark side might even conceivably "save the planet."

How ironic! When the phrase "the dark side" entered the language back in 1977, from the first Star Wars movie, no such idea was meant or implied. It's a sign that we have become ever more off-center that this notion of a heroic "dark side" has taken hold today.

We live in an age of irony. In every aspect of life, we feel like we serve two masters, the "Force" that Luke Skywalker learned to "feel" as a budding Jedi knight, and the "dark side" that the evil Darth Vader epitomized. We mostly triangulate between the two, which is manifestly the cause for our overarching sense of irony today.

Most of us surf those roiled waters just fine, thank you very much ... most of the time. We may not be centered in any spiritual sense, but we do manage to keep our balance.

But "balanced" and "centered" aren't the same thing.

Balanced and cynically ironic about it, are we: it's a sure sign that we need centering.

As individuals, being balanced between our inner Luke Skywalker and our inner Darth Vader clearly "works" for us ... most of the time.

I see the problem as the effect on the culture of too much balancing and too little centering. We often feel we are balancing precariously, with one foot hanging over the edge of chaos. Some of us occasionally go over the edge. Others of us go permanently over the edge.

These are the rapists and sex offenders, the serial killers and crazies with hair-trigger fingers and loaded semiautomatic weapons, the people whose terminal self-centeredness makes them stony-faced criminals and cheats. There are way too many of them because of too much balancing and too little centering in the broader culture.

What centers us? It used to be our spirituality that did it. Spirituality, that is, that was anchored in religion. Religion tethered us to an ethos, a shared sense of right and wrong. As we shared it with one another, our centering came from God. We were a God-centered people.

Now, not so much.

Now we often find we need to take extraordinary measures just to keep our balance. This is where the free-floating anger just under the surface of our lives comes from. For some of us, it's right on the surface a good deal of the time. We get righteously angry, and it makes us feel so much better for a while.

If that doesn't work, we can always try bullying someone.

Or stalking someone.

Or tearing someone to shreds in a "flame war" online.

How often that word, "war," crops up today! We hear of a "war on drugs," a "war on poverty," a "war on terror," a "war on women." Conflict and mortal combat are constant metaphors in movies, in television, in sports contests, in the video games we play.

It was not always thus. War/conflict/combat themes didn't used to be omnipresent. Throw a dart at the monthly program guide of the Turner Classic Movies channel and the chances of hitting a old movie where somebody gets killed are at most fifty-fifty.

There were the World War Two movies, of course. They were more about people sacrificing, people standing together, people serving with honor, than they were about superheroes — imaginary stand-ins for each of us personally — saving the world from Armageddon.

We used to have something that kept us on-center without our having to imaginatively enact our own personal mortal combat situations over and over and over.

That something used to be religion. What are we going to replace it with?

Where Does the Urge to Rape Come From?

Republican Congressman Todd Akin of Missouri (left) claims to have misspoken in saying — with reference to what he called "legitimate rape" — "from what I understand from doctors, [pregnancy from it] is really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." With those remarks he created a firestorm in American politics.

He later apologized, saying that he had misspoken and that he had meant to say "forcible rape" instead of "legitimate rape."

Advocates for women's rights continued to howl. "Forcible rape," they contended, is language that Republican lawmakers have tried to use, without much success, to narrow the legal definition of rape.

Women who are coerced to engage in sex acts — who are raped — don't always have a way to prove that they were "forced" into compliance: no cuts or bruises, no witnesses to testify that they cried out, etc. So what is or is not rape?

The whole question of the definition of "rape" has changed much during our history, says Estelle B. Freedman (left) in The Washington Post here. Freedman is the Edgar E. Robinson professor in U.S. history at Stanford University and the author of “No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women,” and a co-author of “Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America.”

She says rape and race have been intimately tied in American belief and practice, with rape laws in the Jim Crow South routinely defanged by the perceived need to look the other way re: forced sexual relations between white men and black women. Yet for a black man to be accused of sexually molesting a white woman was a hanging offense.

Freedman says:

In the 19th century, state laws around the country defined rape as the carnal knowledge of a woman when achieved by force by a man other than her husband. According to a principle known as coverture, a husband had authority over his wife’s person and property. Therefore, women could not withhold sex from their husbands. Similarly, enslaved women could not refuse sex with their masters or testify against them in court.

We've come a long way from coverture. Yet, even with the more liberal legal view that has prevailed since ...

... the late 20th century, [when] second-wave feminism generated an anti-rape movement that identified sexual assault as an abuse of power that has been central to women’s oppression ...

... rape is both widespread and underreported.

Even if it does get reported, it continues to be hard to prove that a rape has occurred. Karen Mulhauser (left), chair of the advisory council for the Women’s Information Network, had this to say on a recent Washington Post editorial page about the time she was raped.

Several years ago, Mulhauser was attacked by armed intruders who came into her home and who bound her, ransacked the dwelling for valuables, and raped her repeatedly for 2 1/2 hours. She didn't cry out for fear of waking her young son. She wound up with no bruises or other evidence of having been forced into having sex. She reported it anyway. She does not say whether the police were able to bring her assailants to justice.

The emphasis of the response to Akin's ill-considered, ill-founded remarks has been on the question of what rape consists of and what can be done in utmost justice to aid its victims — especially those who wind up pregnant because their bodies inexplicably failed to "shut that whole thing down."

My concern is different. My concern is to figure out why rape happens in the first place.

Freedman talks of "sexual assault as an abuse of power," and I think that description is right on point. Rape is not about sex, it's about power.

But most of us want to exercise power. And advanced opinion on sexuality today — see the writings of Michel Foucault (left) — says it can't be understood without reference to power relationships.

Sex can be a tender ceding of power over our bodies and souls to a marriage partner whom we love and who loves us. That there is a power relationship that exists between the spouses is normal. Ideally, it is a good thing.

But rapists want to exert power, not tenderly but forcibly. And there are a lot of them. I have read that nearly 1 in 5 surveyed women report having been sexually assaulted.

A rapist is someone whose power urge has gotten way out of bounds.

So the question-to-which-I-have-have-no-answer is: Why has this power urge gotten so far out of whack for such a sizable number of men that they so often commit rape?

Lessons from "The Sex Lady"

Deborah Roffman has been dubbed "The Sex Lady" for her strong advocacy for teaching kids about sex the right way. Here's an example:



Baltimore Sun columnist Susan Reimer, in "'The Sex Lady' offers lessons for parents" in today's edition, writes glowingly about Roffman and her new book. Roffman's book is titled Talk to Me First: Everything You Need to Know to Become Your Kids' "Go-To" Person about Sex. Reimer lauds Roffman for the way "she employs the fundamental elements of parenting — affirmation, information, clarity about values, limits and guidance — and applies them to a child's developing sexuality."

I don't claim to know much about teaching kids about sex. My reaction to Reimer's column is, however, one of great concern. Reimer writes that so much has changed in "the four decades Deborah Roffman has taught [children] about their bodies," and that:

... the only thing that hasn't changed is the discomfort of their parents when they try to talk about sex. Even the sex has changed, becoming casual and transactional, invasive and pervasive. Marketing and advertising have driven the mercury higher. Technology has put sex only a touch or a keystroke away. "The boundaries that used to separate children's lives from adults' lives have in many respects vanished," said Ms. Roffman ...

And, per Roffman:

"We spent the 20th century carving out the stages of child development, and marketers have managed to collapse them. Now 8-year-olds are just short 14-year-olds. And 14-year-olds are just short 20-year-olds."

I know this much: there was a time in human history when the line between childhood innocence and adult sexual maturity was a clear one. It was crossed at the appropriate age by virtue of initiation ceremonies that were once part and parcel of religions. For example, Jewish bar mitzvah ceremonies, as originally conceived, were when a young male of the species could finally say (in Hebrew) "Now I am a man" ... and mean it!

The treatment of young women was somewhat different, since the onset of menstruation is in itself a threshold. But the point is that there was a threshold, and religions enforced it.

Not today. Our religions seem to have yielded to the general culture and "dumbed down" the whole concept behind thresholds, confirmations, bar mitzvahs, and religious initiations in general. Or maybe it's that the secular culture has drowned out our religions' ancient messages.

So now we hear from Reimer that Hoffman:

... writes with candor about ... the 12-year-old who announces to her stunned father that she will be going to parties this school year and she will probably be performing oral sex when she gets there.

Say what? Seventh-grade girls going to parties and performing oral sex? When I was in seventh grade, at a class party in 1959, I kissed a girl (her name was Carol Scott) for the first time, and considered myself bold for having done so. My how times have changed ...

... for the worse.

I agree with Roffman in the video above that "abstinence only" sex education in schools is not the answer, and that an admirable goal is to bring up children to be able to think clearly about sex. The goal of "chastity," mentioned in passing by Roffman, is, I agree, not the same as the goal of "abstinence." As I define chastity, though, it is a matter of "just saying no" in specific situations because you have made a personal choice to do so. So I think I have to disagree with Roffman's words in the video, to the extent that she seems to believe "abstinence only" actually means "chastity" — which she thinks is an inappropriate goal.

I'd say there still needs to be a threshold of maturity on the early side of which "just say no" is a rule, not a choice. Our sex-drenched culture, as Reimer says, obliterates that threshold ... mainly, I'd say, because sex sells products (left).

So I think we need to make at least three changes in our culture. One, as Reimer and Roffman say, we need to teach our kids about sex the right way. Two, we need to give our pre-teen children back their childhood by insisting on the old-fashioned rules concerning bodies and sex. Three, we need to get our churches and religions back on the same page with us, and us with them, because without religion's underpinnings for sexuality's thresholds, there is no earthly reason why 8-year-olds should not consider themselves short 14-year-olds.

Uncommitted Sex? Just Say No!

I've been struggling to come up with a way to say how I personally feel about the rights and wrongs of sex. What I have finally arrived at is this, as at least Step 1 toward attaining the ideal of thoroughgoing chastity: Just say no to uncommitted sex.

Committed sex is, quite obviously, what is normally associated with a married heterosexual couple. In contradiction of Catholic orthodoxy, I would extend it to all committed couples, straight or gay, whether legally married or not.

Uncommitted sex is every other kind. According to my ethics for sex, extramarital sex is out. Premarital sex, unless the couple is in a committed relationship, is out. Recreational sex: out. Group sex: out. "Friends with privileges" sex: out. Pick-up Friday night sex: out. Pornography: out. Voyeurism: out. Masturbation: out.

That's Step 1. The next step, Step 2, would have to address the tender question of what exactly the couple's commitment entails. Is it a commitment to each other, and nothing more? Or is it a commitment to their existing (if any) and potential children? To their families, friends, and loved ones? To the larger society? To God?

The Catholic Church's answer: all of the above.

The Church forbids the couple — if obedient Catholics — to forestall pregnancy using artificial means such as contraceptive pills and condoms. Step 3 in the search for chastity would have to address this question.

My answer is a tentative one. I've never been married, never had to worry about pregnancy. If I were in that position, though, I think I'd hope my wife and I could agree to try for successful management of fertility via Natural Family Planning.

NFP, according to the Couple to Couple League, involves determining when the woman is fertile and able to become pregnant, and avoiding having sex during that time. Her body temperature and certain other symptoms of her fertile time of the month can be measured as clues to when not to have sex. Also, after a baby is born, breastfeeding can postpone the return of her monthly cycle for several months and thus postpone the possibility of another pregnancy.

Clearly, NFP is based on the couple willingly remaining chaste during her fertile periods.

Step 4? It would seem to be the time when we ask whether commitment demands an actual marriage ceremony. Ideally, I think it does, as long as it's seen as a way to cement the commitment that already exists between the two people.

All this says nothing about how sex is done, when it's done. That would be a matter for Step 5, which would take up the vexed questions of the appropriateness of:

1. Oral sex
2. Anal sex
3. Sado-masochistic sex
4. The use of sex toys
5. Phone sex
6. Internet sex
7. "Sexting"
8. Etc., etc., etc.

Getting back to Step 1, I think it's something we all need to think about. Our culture today tolerates — nay, encourages — sex without commitment. It's thought of as normal and natural, while looking for Mr. or Ms. Right, to have casual sex at the drop of a hat. When Mr. or Ms. Right comes along, though, we find it hard to break the habit. Result: lots of breakups, lots of divorces. Chastity, I think, demands that we choose to break the habit now, before it breaks up a happy relationship. Or, better yet, never acquire it in the first place.

Our Baser Selves

I've been blogging about the "procreative norm," an ideal that our sexual ethics once revolved around. I'm in favor of it, but the culture today isn't. It hasn't been since the 1960s and the "sexual revolution." That's the era of my rock 'n' roll youth. So why am I in favor of the procreative norm now?

The procreative norm, which comes from Catholic thought dating to at least St. Augustine, basically says no sex without being (a) married (to each other) and (b) "open" to procreation, i.e., to pregnancy, childbearing, and child-rearing.

I favor the procreative norm because it reins in our baser selves. By "baser" I mean those aspects of the natural human self that ought not be given free rein — sexual lust, aggression, hostility, greed, and an overweening concern for one's own self-preservation.

We also have our "higher" selves. Fellow-feeling, concern for others, altruism, loyalty, Christian love ... and romantic love, with its procreative and connubial sexual component. These are among our higher potentialities.

I think our culture has gotten way too cozy with the things that come from and, in turn, potentiate our baser selves. Look at the amount of time which our popular culture devotes to movies, video games, iPhone apps, etc. that celebrate and encourage violence. Recently in Aurora, Colorado, a heavily armed crazy invaded a movie theater and shot to death several innocent patrons. It was a theater where a new Batman movie was getting its premiere — a "Dark Knight" film in which the Caped Crusader, Batman, uses all violent means at his disposal to dispatch equally violent evildoers.

The Aurora shooter was crazy. But so, too, is a culture which lionizes good-guy superhero purveyors of violent aggression (Batman, X-Men, Spiderman, etc.) to the extent ours does. Such preoccupations have to do with aggression and hostility, true, but they also involve indulging our fears for our own self-preservation. However appealing they are to today's consumers of popular culture, they are, in my lexicon, on the baser side of the ledger.

Notice how there is usually a thinly disguised sexual undercurrent to much of this fare. In many cases, you can delete the words "thinly disguised." The image at right is of Wonder Woman, a popular superhero. It's one of the least "sexy" depictions of her that I can find on Google Images.

And so much of the popular culture today is about greed — as, for instance, the Tiny Tower iPhone app (left) that is popular today. It's a game that Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank calls:

... a business-simulation game that millions of people are using their iPhones and tablets to play capitalist, attempting to build ever larger towers with ever more businesses that generate ever more coins and “tower bux.” ... The game is devoid of business ethics; the goal is to maximize value by boosting output ... Tiny Tower nods to corporate responsibility: You improve your efficiency if you place bitizens in their “dream jobs.” But savvy players have discovered that you generate more tower bux if you fire people from their dream jobs and evict them from the tower after their birthdays pass.

Cold and heartless, yes, but within the rules — and in Tiny Tower, that’s enough.

It's greed with a thin veneer of corporate responsibility (placing "bitizens" in their "dream jobs"). Combining baser and higher motivations, though, Tiny Tower is an exercise in irony. Irony is big with the younger set today.

I can't prove it, but my belief is that when we jettisoned the procreative norm in the 1960s in the wake of the arrival of the birth-control pill, we opened up a Pandora's box of "base" behavior patterns and attitudes. Nowadays, each of us has to navigate the rapids of what is and is not behaviorally "appropriate," in view of the change from an earlier era in which sex and violence were constrained by notions of "common decency."

Back then we all knew what was "decent" and what wasn't. Not that we always did the decent thing. But if we transgressed, it had to be with stealth and secrecy. There was none of today's brazenness about flaunting the baser forms of human comportment and flouting the traditional norms of decent behavior.

My hope is that we can get back to the days of the lust-inhibiting, decency-provoking procreative norm. I think that if we do, a lot of today's evils will fly right back into Pandora's box.

The Procreative Norm

In Are We Just Wrong about Sex Today?, I said there used to be a core principle of our sexual ethics called the 'procreative norm'. That was before the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s. 'Procreative norm' is a fancy way of saying that sexual activity, in order to be moral, had to have a due reverence for the begetting and rearing of children.

So just sex — sex that was morally right — was in those days always to be between married spouses. It had to be 'open to procreation', meaning that no artificial means of avoiding pregnancy were to be used. The recently introduced (1960) birth control pill was forbidden to Catholics by church teaching. Pope Paul VI's encyclical letter Humanae Vitae in 1968 affirmed this teaching ... and many modern Catholics erupted in protest.

In 1973, the Roe v. Wade decision of the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion ... another way of keeping sex from yielding live babies.

Until now, I personally have had a hard time accepting the teaching of Humanae Vitae, since it has seemed to me that 'openness to procreation' is a slippery notion best left to individual couples to be put into practice in the light of their own consciences.


Arguably, though, severing the tether connecting sex to procreation has ushered in a raft of society-wide woes:

1. HIV/AIDS has killed over 25 million people worldwide since 1981, when AIDS was first reported.
2. Though abortion should, in President Clinton's words, be 'safe, legal, and rare', Abort73.com reports that 'In 2008, approximately 1.21 million abortions took place in the U.S., down from an estimated 1.29 million in 2002, 1.31 million in 2000 and 1.36 million in 1996. From 1973 through 2008, nearly 50 million legal abortions have occurred in the U.S.'
3. TopTenReviews.com reports that 'According to compiled numbers from respected news and research organizations, every second $3,075.64 is being spent on pornography. Every second 28,258 internet users are viewing pornography. In that same second 372 internet users are typing adult search terms into search engines. Every 39 minutes a new pornographic video is being created in the U.S.'
4. According to RAINN, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, 'Every 2 minutes, someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted ... There is an average of 207,754 victims (age 12 or older) of rape and sexual assault each year ... 54% of rapes/sexual assaults are not reported to the police [and] only about 3% of rapists ever serve a day in jail'.
5. In North America, according to Wikipedia, 'approximately 15% to 25% of women and 5% to 15% of men were sexually abused when they were children'.

I look at those woes as cancers in our midst. I can't prove it, but I say that going back to enshrining the procreative norm would radically shrink those cancers!