"Twerk" on MTV, Miley Cyrus Did

In 2013, 'twerk' was added to the Oxford Dictionary Online. The dictionary said the word had been around for 20 years, but the evidence for it to be included in the dictionary had tipped the scale when U.S. pop star Miley Cyrus gave a controversial and headline-producing twerking dance at the MTV Video Music Awards on August 25, 2013.

— Wikipedia          

The verb "twerk," says the Oxford dictionary, means "dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance."

Much debate ensued after Miley Cyrus "twerked" onscreen at MTV. Was her performance appropriate, the multitudes asked, or not?

Miley Cyrus on MTV

More Miley

I say not. My thought is that it extended a long-term trend a bridge too far. When I was in college at Georgetown in the late 1960s, the university enforced a rule against "public display of affection": no kissing or petting outdoors or in public view. The more general rule, at G'town and in society, was that sex is to be kept private. If it's sexual, hide it from public view.

The rule was coming apart at the seams even then. It had been doing so for decades, going back to the ending of the Victorian era of the final two-thirds of the nineteenth century. "Victorian morality can describe any set of values that espouse sexual restraint, low tolerance of crime and a strict social code of conduct," says Wikipedia. Strict restraints on sexual attitudes and behavior meant men and women wore clothes that covered all and that emphasized nothing that might arouse sexual feelings. Sex obviously happened, and a lot of it was downright illicit. There's no doubt about it. But it was done in private.

My generation was not the first to rebel, but in our own nineteen-sixties sexual revolution the gloves — and much else besides — came all the way off. Ample justification was given: that getting rid of repression and of hypocrisy would make society and its citizens all that much healthier.

Now we have a 20-year-old former child star looking to extend her something-very-like-a-career by a twerking display on TV. We have rampant sexual abuse in the U.S. military. "More than 70% of male Internet users from 18 to 34," according to Wikipedia, "visit a pornographic site in a typical month." Priestly child sexual abuse has racked the Catholic Church. Scandal after scandal has cut short a host of political careers and besmirched the memory of one of the most revered of college football coaches.

All because sex is, I believe, now more public than private. Not the act itself (at least for the most part) buts its hintings, simulacra, and accouterments.

You might think — and a lot of people actually do think — there's no reason why the loosening of nineteenth-century moral strictures that was supposed to make us saner would instead be making us sicker. You might think that between Queen Victoria's corsetings and Miley's MTV cavortings there ought to be a sweet spot which society can occupy, with only a few depraved outliers to either side of the sensible median strip.

It hasn't happened. The depraved outliers are everywhere. So I'd say we need to rein ourselves in. The only way to do that, I think, is to take sex back into the privacy of the boudoir an keep it under demure covers.

How might that happen? We need to start by shrinking the boundary of personal behavior that is considered appropriate. I have in mind, to begin with, a new reticence about stuff that really isn't all that naughty, in the grand scheme of things. For example: no posterior anatomy visible for guys with low-slung belt lines; no visible bra straps for gals. Start with tiny little things like those.

Start with making this taboo ...

... and this.

Whoa! I hear voices raised in protest already. These infractions are, to the extent they are sexual displays at all, very minor ones. They are matters of personal choice and free individual expression. Every generation since Victoria passed away in 1901 has shown more and more anatomy, more and more underwear, and where do you draw the line? Isn't this all just a Trojan horse for a thoroughgoing new Victorianism?

I hope not. But it isn't at all clear to me that there really exists a viable sweet spot between Victorian deprivation and no-holds-barred depravity — it has to be one that the bulk of us can hold to — unless it is also one that abhors (for example) hordes of us "sexting" up a storm or assiduously "tweeting our junk" at every conceivable opportunity. Such activities are not necessarily immoral but, as I hope we are learning, they straddle the increasingly invisible line between public and private. Which is why we all now know so well the name of former-Rep. Anthony Weiner.

So, no more "sexting." No more "tweeting our junk." No more peeking-out bra straps. No more visible vertical smiles. And no more of the many other "innocent" behaviors that put us on a slippery slope to less-minor infractions and then to much more that is far worse.

Notice that I am saying nothing about what can or ought to happen between consenting adults in their bedroom or boudoir. I make no claim to knowing what kinds of sex are quote-unquote bad, or, for that matter, good. All I am saying is give sexual privacy a fighting chance. Keep sex, its stand-ins, its simulacra, and its accouterments well out of public view, and we will see whether I am right and the abuses diminish.

On "Humanae Vitae"

In this The Connubial Couch series of posts, I've been blogging about my conversion to believing that heterosexual married couples gain admittance to an inner sanctum barred to homosexual couples. Within this sanctum, I have noted, marital intimacies give birth to an instantiation of something of nontarnishable beauty and universal worth. The "bliss secrets" of the connubial couch are, unlike "ordinary" human secrets, sacred and holy because, of all human secrets, they alone connect with an inner essence of timeless truth.

This was both something I "just knew" intuitively — despite my erstwhile support for gay rights and gay marriage — and something I was able to reason my way to, based on a philosophical analysis of the nature of secrets.

Then, having decided on that much, I asked where such thinking was bound to lead. As I was pondering that question, I picked up the Catholic Review and read the article "Pope urges church to help couples see beauty of natural procreation."

Pope Benedict XVI has, the article says, "asked why is it that the world and many Catholics still have a difficult time understanding the church's teachings 40 years after Pope Paul VI's encyclical on human life and birth control."

Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical "Humanae Vitae" ("On Human Life") in 1968, forbidding Catholics to use not only abortion but also artificial means of preventing pregnancy such as condoms and the Pill. Now, on the encyclical's 40th anniversary, the current Holy Father is pointedly reaffirming it.

I didn't do so before reading the article, but I think I now understand why the Church makes such a big deal about artificial contraception:

Pope Benedict said technical responses to "the great human questions" such as life and death often seem to offer the easier solution.

"But in reality (a technical solution such as artificial contraception) obscures the underlying question concerning the meaning of human sexuality" and the need for couples to exercise "responsible control" over their sexual desires so that the expression of those desires may become expressions of self-giving, "personal love," he said.

When talking about love between two people, technical responses cannot replace "a maturation of freedom," the pope said.

As I interpret that idea, the pope is saying that of all the available birth-control strategies, only the one popularly known as the rhythm method encourages couples to abstain from instant gratification of sexual desires at critical times of the month. Only a birth-control regimen consistent with so-called "natural procreation" fosters our learning of marital self-control. And self-control is a necessary constraint, if the intimacies of the connubial couch are to instantiate sacred, timeless truth.

I find that a compelling reason for the Church to counsel against artificial birth control, actually. Unfortunately, I still do not see why the Church forbids it outright, as opposed to merely deprecating it.

Be that as it may, here is what I consider to be a timeless truth: freedom in this world conspires with timeless forms and essences above and beyond this world to produce works of timeless beauty — but only when freedom is hemmed in by appropriate constraints, limits, boundary conditions. Otherwise, the result is chaos.


I have spent a number of years pondering the significance of recent scientific insights into chaos theory and its close ally, the theory of complexity. Scientists have discovered that certain fundamental physical processes are inherently chaotic and have developed ways to understand and model chaos. While those advances were taking place, other scientists looked into processes that, while not literally chaotic, occupy a nearby regime that has been nicknamed the "edge of chaos." The latter include the dynamical processes associated with life on earth as it has evolved, and continues to evolve. Earthly evolution has, of course, produced us.

Systems are capable of moving over and back out of chaos, it has been found. One of the ways to distinguish between truly chaotic systems and living systems that are typically at the edge of chaos is in terms of their "boundary conditions."

Mathematically, boundary conditions apply to systems being modeled by differential equations ... the sorts of equations that are necessary when dealing with nonequilibrium dynamical systems, which all living systems are. A system's behavior can be determined mathematically by means of solving the appropriate differential equations — sometimes not an easy task. But how the equations are to be solved depends also on a set of assumptions about boundary conditions. Change the boundary conditions, and the solutions to the equations change.

In other words, a system's future is determined not only by its equations but also by its boundary conditions.

Metaphorically, the same is true for us as living systems. The limits and constraints that are placed on our behavior shape our destinies.

But we humans are, within externally imposed limits and constraints, free. We have free will. One of the things we can do with our free will is to adopt self-imposed limits and constraints — additional boundary conditions of the soul, if you will.

When the Catholic Church asks us not to use "technical" or "artificial" means of birth control, we are being asked to place boundary conditions on our souls, as it were, as a strategy by which we can perfect our capacity for self-giving, personal love and thereby achieve a true "maturation of freedom."

Rightly or wrongly, the Church sees "Humanae Vitae" as a weapon we can all employ in the struggle against societal and cultural (not just personal) chaos.

More on the Connubial Couch

As I was saying in Secrets of the Connubial Couch, I think I have found a way to reason to something I previously resisted believing: that there is an inner sanctum of connubial bliss whose secrets are shared among married couples ... but only if they are heterosexual couples. There is an impenetrable barrier between heterosexual couples and homosexual couples that keeps their respective "bliss secrets," however similar on the surface, ultimately disparate.

There is a marital inner sanctum, I said, which contains secrets that are unlike any other sorts of secrets. Connubial intimacies alone produce something of timeless beauty, because their secrets alone possess an inner essence that renders them universal and enduring.

Now I would like to point out that the discussion in that prior post is founded on two separate pillars of thought. I'll call the pillars those of the "right brain" and the "left brain."

My "right brain" pillar relies on gut feelings and intuition. Somehow, though I've never been married, I "just know" it's true that marital intimacy is somehow unique. Further, I just know that a heterosexual couple and a homosexual couple can never be marital "sidekicks" with fully interchangeable knowledge of this connubial inner sanctum.

At that point, my "left brain" takes over with its skill at philosophical reasoning. It reasons that secrets either do or don't have an essence. (An essence, philosophers say, is the idea or form which unites objects that mutually partake of it. A table, for instance, like every other table, partakes of the form/idea/essence of Table-ness.)

Philosophers disagree as to whether forms and essences are in fact real or only imaginary, but as I said in On Secrets, I tend to agree with those thinkers who say this: timeless beauty is real, and it could never be incarnated as art if there were not a universal and eternal form or idea of Beauty.

So, supposing that there are forms and essences, I went on to ask whether our personal secrets possess them. In general, I think I was able to argue successfully that they do not. There is typically nothing intrinsic to a run-of-the-mill secret that makes it a secret.

Yet, as I hope I was able to demonstrate, the secret intimacies of the marital couch are an exception. Betrayals of those intimacies constitute a betrayal of more than the personal secrets of the respective individuals involved. The mingling on a marital couch of two individuals' bliss secrets instantiates something of eternal, timeless beauty. Ergo, couples' bliss secrets do, unlike other secrets, have an essence.

In that way the left side of my brain was able to ratify what the right side believed anyway.


The discussion concerning homosexual couples was similar to that first one. I began with an intuition that I ought to be able to devise an argument to the effect that homosexual couples are somehow barred from the inner sanctum to which all heterosexual marriages readily gain admission. Casting about for what precisely such an argument might be, I found this: it just "popped into my head" that extending the argument about secrets shared by two spouses in a single marriage to cover secrets shared between two married couples, as marital "sidekicks," might reveal the distinction I wanted to expose.

My right brain was feeding a button of thought into my left brain in hopes that the latter could sew a vest on it. And that's exactly what happened. I concluded that the inability to share inner-sanctum secrets make heterosexual and homosexual couples akin to oil and water: unable, in the final analysis, to mix.


That's the status of the discussion so far. Now I find myself wondering where it goes from here.

If there is something extraordinary about the intimacies of heterosexual marriage which turns the dross of ordinary sex into the gold of something untarnished, beautiful, and timeless, so what?

Of course, as a Catholic, I find that one of the first answers that presents itself for consideration is the one I think of as the "full Pope" position on matters sexual and familial. By this I mean what the late Pope John Paul II called the "theology of the body."

As all Catholics and most non-Catholics are surely aware, the Church has some fairly un-modern ideas about sex. The previous Holy Father gathered all the traditional strands of Catholic sexual morality into a unified teaching he dubbed the "theology of the body." Many of these strands are ones I have found myself in opposition to in the past.

Since one of the strands of traditional Catholic teaching is that homosexual relations are "gravely disordered," or words to that effect, and since I have in the past aligned myself with the contrarians who say the Church ought to sanction gay rights and gay marriages, for me now to doubt that erstwhile stance opens up the possibility that my new way of thinking implies a "full Pope" position on sexual morality.

More on that in the next post ...

Secrets of the Connubial Couch

In my last post I talked about sex and secrets. I said that secrets are strange: although two people may insist they share the same secret simply because the words that would be used to state one person's secret are identical to those used to state the other's, in reality all secret-originators are keeping their own personal secrets, distinct from everybody else's secrets, however alike.

It's a violation of trust for me to reveal a secret that you have shared with me, even if my own deepest, darkest, most intimate secret can be stated in exactly the same words as yours, and so would seem to be exactly the same secret. If your secret is that you are gay, and my secret is that I am gay, it would be a violation of trust for me to reveal your hidden sexual identity — even if I'm in the process of coming out of the closet myself.

I don't possess your secret, and it's not mine to give away.

Because this is so, I said that secrets in general have no "essence" of the sort philosophers talk about. They do not partake of any abstract form or idea that sets their need for secrecy from within, as it were. In general, there is nothing intrinsic to gayness or anything else that makes secrecy absolutely necessary. In a different world (such as that of the ancient Greeks, where homosexual behavior was rife) there would be no point to being in the closet.


I went on to say in my earlier post that we have no deeper secrets than those concerning sex. The secrets of the connubial couch, if we view them as being kept separately and individually by each marital partner alone, might seem to be his-and-hers secrets, not theirs. His unutterable delight might be his ephemeral own, as might hers also be.

In philosopher-speak, again, connubial secrets might accordingly seem to have no "essence," no universality. There would be no occasion of timelessness, of beauty, of transcendence. Put another way, the two partners' hidden, inner awarnesses might never mingle to make something enduring.

But that's not the way it is.

No, different rules apply to married couples and their shared secrets. A couple may, for instance, reserve from public awareness the fact that they use whipped cream for fun and games in the bedroom. I would be a betrayal for him to tell his buddies about the earthly delights of Reddi-Wip if she doesn't want him to, even if he doesn't see why everyone shouldn't know.

But the reason it's a betrayal is different from that of the previous example; it's their secret — "their" being a plural pronoun with a singular thrust.

In the earlier example, you and I are (we imagined) both hiding the fact that we are gay. We are not lovers; there is no connubial couch for us. Perhaps you are female, and thus a lesbian, while I am a male homosexual. We simply don't have eyes for each other. If either of us reveals the other's secret, it is a violation of trust ... but it is not a betrayal of connubial proportions.

On the other hand, if a wife tells a casual girlfriend about her husband's liking her to wear thongs under her business suits, what is being betrayed is a plural secret. What is being broken faith with is the timeless essence of connubial trust.

From something without an essence — the secrets of a sexual encounter, as kept separately by those individuals whose brief contact produces them — can, in marriage, become something with an essence, a universality, and a timelessness: the beauty of real sex. Real connubial bliss may be the only personal secret with a timeless essence.


Let's give our married couples names. The first couple, the one with the liking for whipped cream and other delights, are Sam and Diane. The second, with the racy underwear thing, are Chip and Dale.

Now, let's say the two couples are best friends.

That means, among other things, that it's now OK for Dale to let on to Diane that Chip likes her, Dale, to wear the skimpiest of undies. And Sam can tell Chip how Reddi-Wip puts spice in his and Diane's love life. Why? Because both couples are on the same exalted plane of marital intimacy, it is somehow not a violation for them to compare notes.

At the same time, these shared secrets cannot be blabbed to outsiders without it being a betrayal at the connubial level. If Diane tells her casual friend — call her Susie — about Dale's thong-wearing, it's not just a garden-variety breach of trust ... it's as bad as if Sam himself had done the blabbing.

Connubial secrets can be shared, but only with others who are personally known to share the same holy paradise of marital secrecy. All who enter the inner sanctum are alike. All who keep its secrets outwardly may share them inwardly.

Yet there are limits. It would utterly destroy the holiness if Sam were to sleep with Dale, or Chip with Diane. Nor is group sex allowed, à la the movie Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. The inner sanctum does have private compartments.


What if Dale were a he? Would everything I just said remain the same?

Of course, Dale's naughty secret might not involve the same kind of thong undies, owing to the idiosyncrasies of the male anatomy. But would all else remain as it was?

In other words, could Sam and Diane treat a male couple as fellow celebrants in the inner sanctum, with full privileges of note-comparing and shared intimacies?

I'm not sure that if I were Sam, I could. It would seem to be necessary that our imaginary "sidekick couple," mine and Diane's, be heterosexual. Somehow, the meanings of naughty underwear and dairy-oriented enhancements to bliss change when the respective partners don't match up, gender-wise.

You don't agree? Imagine if Sam and Diane's secret is the same as Chip and Dale's: in each case, the wife, Diane or Dale, wears naughty undies to work. The secrets here are not just alike, they're identical.

But if Dale's a guy, the twin secrets drop to the level of being "just alike." They're no longer identical.

You may object that the problem here is due to Sam, Diane, Chip, and a female Dale having imbibed the homophobia of the culture. Change the culture, and Dale could just as well be a guy.

I'm not so sure. Even in ancient Greece, I doubt a heterosexual pair could be marital "sidekicks" with a homosexual couple. But even if you're right and I'm wrong about that, there can be little doubt that as our culture stands right now, gay and straight couples can never occupy the same connubial inner sanctum.


Time for a summary: I am reasoning from a gut-level feeling that the secrets of the connubial couch are different from other secrets. They alone, if shared inappropriately, represent a violation of a plural entity's trust. Other secrecy violations violate only the trust of a single individual.

Moreover, my gut tells me that marital secrets can in fact be shared (at least, some of them) between married couples who know each other so well that neither one can doubt the other's right of admission into the inner sanctum of marital understanding. There is, in effect, a secret handshake that two married couples can use to validate one another's admissibility to the sanctum.

Third, this "secret handshake" is categorically unavailable if one of the couples is made up of two guys (or two gals).

On Secrets

A confession: I've been looking at porn on the Internet. Smut. Naughty stuff ... what used to be called, quaintly, "French postcards." Yet I've found that what you can see if you enter the right words in the Google Images search box goes way beyond naughty. And it isn't really all that much fun to look at, truth be told. The question is, why not?

An answer crossed my mind today as I pondered the nature of secrets.

Secrets are things we don't want to tell others, don't want them to see or know about. That much is unremarkable. What seems to me to be more remarkable about secrets is that each one is unique.

That's a big deal if you are like me and tend to agree with the protagonist of Muriel Barbery's award-winning novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Renée Michel is the concierge in a Parisian hôtel particulier who ponders thoughts above her station. At one point she glimpses the master's thesis of one of her tenants' daughters and is set to musing about the philosophy of William of Ockham.

Ockham held that there are no universals, just unique and particular entities that only seem to participate in a universal form or ideal. There is no such thing as the quintessence of table-ness, only this table, that table, this other table. The notion that the abstract idea of the table is real is a trick of the human capacity to use language, thereby to invent (non-existent) general categories.

But Renée Michel disagrees:

As far as Will of Ockham is concerned, things are singular, and the realism of universals is erroneous. There are only particular realities, generality is merely in the mind and to presume that generic realities exist is merely to make what is simple complicated. But can we be so sure? Was I not seeking congruence between Raphael and Vermeer only yesterday? The eye recognizes a shared form to which both belong, and that is Beauty. And I daresay there must be reality in that form, it cannot be a simple expedient of the human mind classifying in order to understand, and discerning in order to apprehend: for you cannot classify something that is not classifiable, you cannot put things together that cannot be together in a group, or gather those that cannot be gathered. A table cannot be a View of Delft: the human mind cannot create this dissimilarity, any more than it can invent the deep solidarity connecting a Dutch still life to an Italian Virgin and Child. In every table there is an essence that gives it its form and, similarly, every work of art belongs to a universal form that alone confers its seal upon the work. To be sure, we cannot perceive this universality directly: that is one of the reasons why so many philosophers have balked at considering essences to be real, for I will only ever see the table that is before me, and not the universal "table" form; only the painting, and not the very essence of Beauty. And yet ... and yet it is there, before our eyes: every painting by a Dutch master is an incarnation of Beauty; a dazzling apparition that we can only contemplate through the singular, but that opens a tiny window onto eternity and the timelessness of a sublime form.

Eternity: for all its invisibility, we gaze at it.

Yet, it seems to me, we can never gaze upon the essence of a secret, for a secret has no essence. A secret is what it is only by virtue of the intentions of the person who is keeping it.

Suppose you are gay, but keeping it a secret. Suppose also that you have a friend — not a lover — who is also in the closet. It may seem that you share the same secret, and that therefore secrets have universal essences.

But now imagine that your friend tells someone else that you and he (let's say your friend is male) are both gay. What will be your reaction? Isn't it apt to be that it's well and good for him to part with his own secret if he bloody well wants to, but he has no right whatsoever to betray your confidence?

Secrets belong only to their originators. Even if the gist of a secret is identical between two secret-keepers, each person's secret is an entirely separate entity. Ergo, secrets (though they have gists) have no essences.


It all has to do with consciousness. Animals don't have secrets, because they are not conscious. (Or, if they do possess consciousness at some level, it is only to that extent that they are capable of secrecy.)

Jung had it that human consciousness lies along an arc from the pre-conscious "participation mystique" of infancy to the advanced awareness of a guru on a mountaintop — which amounts to the same oceanic, all-is-one immersion, now at a fully conscious level.

If you are a pre-conscious infant, there can be no hiddenness, no secrecy. The same is true of the mountaintop guru, to whom all secrets are revealed. And the same goes for God, from whom no secrets can be kept. In fact, Jung spoke of the advanced stages of consciousness as the realization of the Self as the imago Dei, the image of God.

But most of us spend our days at stages of consciousness that are somewhere in between these endpoints. Everyday consciousness is secret-keeping consciousness. If our lives were open books to everyone who is not a baby or a guru, and their interior lives were equally open to our own view, life would be impossible to deal with.

I have often fantasized about what it would be like if one could see each innermost thought of another individual, blazoned on his or her forehead: "I don't really like Alice, but I have to pretend to since her husband is my husband's boss"; "I don't want the buddies I hang around with to know I like medieval French poetry"; "I'm planning to dump my girlfriend, but I'm not ready to tell her yet."

Those pieces of inner dialogue would be bad enough, if revealed to one and all. Far worse, though, would be thoughts about sex: "I'm sure horny today"; "I'm not horny, but would like to be — where can I score some Viagra?"; "I'm sleeping with my secretary and don't want my wife to find out"; "I can't keep my eyes off her breasts/his behind"; and so on.

Well, then ... why are thoughts about sex more secret than other thoughts? I think the answer is that secrecy is the essence of sex.


If not secrecy per se, then intimacy. Confidentiality. What goes on between us is nobody else's business. That sort of thing. Otherwise, it's just friction and heat, spanning and delving, pumping and orgasm.

The eternal essence of sex retches at the thought. The eternal essence of sex knows that sex involves holding, and being held, close. You aren't really holding someone close if you know that what the two of you are doing is being filmed and will wind up on the Internet.

So, from something without an essence — the secrets of the bedroom, as kept separately by those who share the bed — comes something with an essence and a universality: the beauty of real sex. Go figure.