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!

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.