Bad Catholic
My generation’s sitcoms still refer to sex as a fun, healthy, and fundamentally light activity — something between a pelvic workout and an exciting way to say, “hey, I totally respect your need for meaningful self-expression.” It is, as aging sexologists assure us, a normal behavior that we all ought indulge as a way of “relieving tension.” We may agree — who wouldn’t want it to be true? — but we nod with the sadness of a generation raised on divorced families, infidelity, immense sexual violence, and the cultural introduction of a death as a morally permissible outcome to our natural, healthy fun. The cliches are rotting. The sex-ed videos of the 90’s have an air of mildew about them. The “free love” movement is as aesthetically embarrassing as the sexist housewife ads of the 1950’s — full of a dorky optimism that died along time ago and can now only be seen as a dark sort of farce.
Not that we’re particularly ready to give up the fantasy that sex can be “simply enjoyed,” as a “fun, natural part of life.” We are, after all, the technological age, rather in love with the idea that, given enough gadgets, we can have difficulty-free anything — sex included. Give us a condom to avoid pregnancy, a pill to avoid condom-failure, an abortion to avoid pill-failure, surgery to avoid rejection, pornography to avoid boredom — who knows, maybe they’ll make a shot that prevents men and women from feeling attached to their sexual partners — and voila, sex is uncomplicated, natural fun!
But just as a crutch speaks of a broken leg, our gargantuan prop of technology speaks of something missing in our sexual praxis, a fact that becomes all the clearer when the darkness creeps, and our standard sexual-tech expands to include roofie-detectors, tasers, and audiovisual recordings to establish violations of consent. Perhaps, in the midst of an unspeakably broken culture, we’re ready to peer into the abyss, and say, with most of antiquity, that no, sexuality is not easy. No, it’s not a simple fact of human life. No, it’s not fun and tension-relieving, like a game of Pictionary one plays with the mild risk of herpes.
Christianity states this all rather unequivocally: Sex is good, but it is not light. Sex is a joy, but it is not easy. There is a darkness to sexuality that requires a light, a difficulty that will not let us “just enjoy ourselves.” It requires chastity, the “successful integration of sexuality within the person…a long and exacting work.” (CCC 2337)
The fact that “something that must be done” in order for sexuality to be freely enjoyed is hardly a Christianism — it is
written on the body. The sexual organs are not easily “enjoyable” organs. Only the hopeless optimism of a “difficulty-free sexuality” could gloss over the fact that, for all of known history, men have known no better way to be crude, ugly, and vulgar than to speak about the genitalia, and that even the boldest epochs of nude art deliberately altered the genitalia (making them blank, small, pre-pubescent, or symbolic) in their effort to represent the beautiful body. If I might be rude enough to say it in an age of profound insecurity — our sexual organs are ugly. One must work in order to “simply enjoy” them.
Merely “becoming aroused” is not enough to make the sexual organs acceptable. When we isolate the sexual organs into objects of arousal — seeing them as objects we want to touch and “take in” — we run the risk of disgust. For the sexual organs are simultaneously the site of excretion, urination and menstruation in the body — precisely that which we do not want to touch or “take in.” An arousal that isolates the sexual organ as a functional, pleasure-giving object must simultaneously repress the view of the same organ as an excreting object — it always runs the risk that the repressed view will reassert itself.
This is obvious within pornography. Pornography disgusts as soon as it ceases to arouse. Here, the “sexual” look is a sneer of contempt. The face of arousal mimics that of nausea. Eros never smiles. The language of pornography is violent and demeaning towards the sexual organs precisely because, in attempting to enjoy the isolated genitalia, it must fight them, overcome them, and continuously suppress their total meaning (if it does not simply give in, equate sexuality with disgust, and eroticize urination, defecation and the like).
Only a regard for the entire person takes the focus off the genitalia as objects in themselves. Only when the genitalia become part of a whole is the possibility of disgust eradicated. For, as expressions of the person, the genitalia are properly associated with what the entire person is doing (the sexual act) and not with the functionality of an organ considered on its own (which includes excretion). The sexual organs, then, are not finished, uncomplicated objects. They are objects that present themselves as a project. As long as they are unintegrated in the entire person and his or her acts, they remain difficult.
As it is with the body, so it is with erotic love as a whole. The phenomenon of shame prevents us from “simply enjoying” sexuality. We are naturally ashamed of exposing ourselves before the other until we are certain that we are seen in the entirety of our person. Let this come into doubt — let the gaze of love harden and suddenly appear to see us as a mere means to individual pleasure, an “outlet” for a drive, or one experience among many — and we feel the need to cover. Shame acts as what Max Scheler calls “the chrysalis of love” — its presence in our blushing bodies demands that we undergo the difficult work of purifying our intentions if we are to enjoy our sexuality without fear.
Christianity’s call to chastity, then, is no extrinsic addition of moral demands onto a pure, uncomplicated part of human life. Rather, it follows from the nature of sexuality which, forever flirting with the possibility of shame, disgust, and consequence, already demands labor from us. Acknowledging this difficulty in no way precludes us from rejoicing in sexuality as a positive good — it makes this joy possible.
If a student admits that learning Latin is difficult, he may grit his teeth, buckle down, tackle the giant, and end up enjoying both the labor and its fruits. If the same student pretends, perhaps out of pride, that learning Latin is a breeze, he will be forced to busy himself suppressing all signs to the contrary in order to maintain the illusion. He avoids difficult questions, make excuses for not understanding certain passages, changes the subject when the work gets tough, and constantly fears the examination. He cannot enjoy the subject precisely because he cannot admit that is difficulty. The illusion of ease is not easy.
So too with sexuality: By admitting the difficulty of sexuality one is enabled to enjoy it. By constantly pretending it is easy one renders it disappointing. True, there is a certain ease available to those who can believe our sexual pop-philosophies (and have the money required to buy the technology that make them livable). But if sexuality and erotic love really amount to a project that requires work from us, we would expect this ease to be shot through with fear and disappointment — a frenzied activity to maintain our ease on the one hand, and a horror and desperation whenever this supposedly “natural” security is compromised.
And is this not the story of our age? An unexpected pregnancy is a difficulty to everyone, but to the guy who believes in the absolute security of the condom — it’s a horror. Attachment, devotion and the longing for commitment are immense and frightening projects — but they are far more frightening to those indulging the sitcom-inspired illusion that such feelings are not associated with sex. Feelings of aversion and disgust are unwelcome in any sexual life — they are monsters to a culture that lauds sexuality as the one unequivocally, easily enjoyed experience. Regardless of where one lands on the issue of abortion, this much seems undeniable: When men and women perform acts they believe may make them murderers in order to avoid a difficult consequence of sexuality — the fun is gone. The effort to make sexuality a light, inconsequential, technologically manageable phenomenon has made it heavier and more stuffed with consequence than the darkest of puritanical proscriptions.
This is why I am skeptical of our culture’s basic movement of sexual ethics, even as I agree with details here and there: Erotic love is seen as a self-justifying reality that requires nothing “more” in order to become a genuinely fulfilling phenomenon. The LGBT+ reaction against a bigoted sexual ethics that would base the good on the “normal” seemed, at first, to open up a new era. It was a glimmer of light. In it, we saw the possibility of a human sexuality that succeeds, not on the basis of conformity to the typical, but on the basis of what one does with the diverse drives, affections, and attractions one is honestly given — a personalist sexual ethics. Here, each human being is called to live an unrepeatable adventure of “becoming whole” according to the radically unique desires and life-situations that form the “raw material” of his existence.
The hope disappointed. Now no sexual expression can be criticized, because — barring a few extreme cases — sexuality comes as a prepackaged, self-justified good. Our drives, desires and attractions are nailed to sexual identities, where they need no longer be viewed as material to be creatively educated and integrated into the total person — they simply “are who we are.” Our feelings of disintegration no longer indicate the need for a project of integration. If we feel we are in the wrong body, if we are filled with loathing for the sexual act, if our affections don’t match our drives — there is a sexual identity (transgendered, asexual, heterosexual-biromantic, respectively) to ease the sting of (almost) every disintegration. Love is no longer a passion that must be ordered, such that we might ask, with Saint Augustine — is your love good? It is now a self-justified experience indicating that no ordering is necessary, such that we may only say, with the general wisdom of MTV — you love, therefore, it is good. The task appointed to human sexuality is not to work, but to acknowledge what cannot be otherwise. Our anthem has devolved from an excitement over new possibilities into an sad attempt to squeeze a genuine sense of joy out of a biological and psychological determinism that precludes possibility — “I’m on the right track, baby, I was born this way,” “they’ll do it anyways,” etc.
Meanwhile, the reduction of all ethical requirements to “consent” and “adulthood” does away with the demand inherent in the sexual act to move beyond idiocy (from idios, meaning “one’s own”) and towards ecstasy (from ex-stasis, to “stand outside of oneself”). Love, respect, intimacy, fidelity, responsibility, family, children — these might be nice for some people, but they certainly aren’t demands inherent to the sexual act itself. Sexuality need not move beyond itself. Sexuality need not work. Enjoyment, given the green flag of consent, is sufficient. Perhaps these moves are what my generation needs to avoid the hurt we’ve inherited from Victorian silence, 70’s reductionism, virtue-less violence, and all the rest — but God, it’s getting boring.
In a culture that presents sexuality as a frozen phenomenon, unavailable to the creative violence of virtue, the deliberate complication of sexuality is an affront. But if the lessons of the body and the emotions are onto something, and sexuality really is a demand that “something be done,” then a classified, identified and calcified sexuality can only be fraught with the fear and anxiety of a man feigning ease in a complicated subject. In such an age, the radical prescription of the Catholic Church — that we work, and work hard — frees us from maintaining the illusion of being finished and invites to start again from the beginning. “Indeed it is through chastity that we are gathered together and led back to the unity from which we were fragmented into multiplicity,” and it is through this difficult work of chastity that my sorrow, and my generation’s, will turn to joy.
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