Tell
Your Children Not To Read This
Don’t let your children read
this. . . until you've read it yourself. It's long, but fascinating. The writing is lucid and easy to read. But giver yourself 20 minutes to soak it all
in. Enjoy.
Designed for Sex
What We Lose When We Forget What Sex Is For
by J. Budziszewski
Midnight. Shelly is getting herself drunk so that she can
bring herself to go home with the strange man seated next to her at the bar.
One o’clock. Steven is busy downloading pornographic images of children from
Internet bulletin boards. Two o’clock. Marjorie, who used to spend every Friday
night in bed with a different man, has been binging and purging since eleven.
Three o’clock. Pablo stares through the darkness at the ceiling, wondering how
to convince his girlfriend to have an abortion. Four o’clock. After partying
all night, Jesse takes another man home, not mentioning that he tests positive
for an incurable
Liberation Fatigue
Naomi Wolf, in her book
Promiscuities, reports that when she lost her own virginity at age 15, there
was “something important missing.” Apparently, the thing missing was the very
sense that anything could be important. In her book Last Night in
Desperate to find a way to
make it matter, some young male homosexuals court death, deliberately seeking
out men with deadly infections as partners; this is called “bug chasing.” At
the opposite extreme, some of those who languish in the shadow of the
revolution toy with the idea of abstinence—but an abstinence that arises less
from purity or principle than from boredom, fear, and disgust. In
Speaking of exhaustion, let me tell you about my students. In the ’80s,
if I suggested in class that there might be any problem with sexual liberation,
they said that everything was fine—what was I talking about? Now if I raise questions,
many of them speak differently. Although they still live like libertines, it’s
getting old. They are beginning to sound like the children of third-generation
Maoists.
My generation may have
ordered the sexual revolution; theirs is paying the price. I am not speaking
only of the medical price of sexual promiscuity. To be sure, those consequences
are ruinous: At the beginning of the revolution, most physicians had to worry
about only two or three sexually transmitted diseases, and now it is more like
two or three dozen. But I am not speaking only of broken bodies. I am speaking,
for example, of broken childhoods. What is it like for your family to break up?
What is it like to be passed from stepparent to stepparent to stepparent? What
is it like to grow up knowing that you would have had a sister, but she was
aborted?
A young man remarked in one
of my classes that he longed to get married and stay married to the same woman
forever, but because his own parents hadn’t been able to manage it, he was afraid
to get married at all. Women show signs of avoidance too, but in a more
conflicted way. According to a survey commissioned by the Independent Women’s
Forum, Norval Glenn and Elizabeth Marquardt of the
Institute for American Values found that 83 percent of college women say
marriage is a very important goal for them. Yet 40 percent of them engage in
“hooking up”—physical encounters (commonly oral sex) without any expectation of
relationship whatsoever.
Do you hear a little
cognitive dissonance there? Can you think of a sexual behavior less likely to
get you into marriage? The ideology of hooking up says that sex is merely
release or recreation. You have some friends for friendship and you have other
friends just for hooking up—they’re called “friends with benefits.” What your
body does is unrelated to your heart.
Don’t believe it. The same
survey reports that hooking up commonly takes place when both participants are
drinking or drunk, and it’s not hard to guess the reason why: After a certain
amount of this, you may need to get drunk to go through with it.
Not Designed for It
The fact is that we aren’t
designed for hooking up. Our hearts and bodies are designed to work together.
Don’t we already know that?
In “Friends, Friends with
Benefits, and the Benefits of the Local Mall,” a New York Times Magazine writer
who interviewed teenagers who hook up supplies a telling anecdote. The girl
Melissa tells him, “I have my friends for my emotional needs, so I don’t need
that from the guy I’m having sex with.” Yet on the day of the interview,
“Melissa was in a foul mood. Her ‘friend with benefits’ had
just broken up with her. ‘How is that even possible?’ she said, sitting,
shoulders slumped, in a booth at a diner. ‘The point of having a friend with
benefits is that you won’t get broken up with, you won’t get hurt.’”
But let there be no mistake:
When I say we aren’t designed for this, I’m also speaking of males. A woman may
be more likely to cry the next morning; it’s not so easy to sleep with a man
who won’t even call you back. But a man pays a price too. He probably thinks he
can instrumentalize his relationships with women in
general, yet remain capable of romantic intimacy when the right woman comes
along. Sorry, fellow. That’s not how it works.
Sex is like applying
adhesive tape; promiscuity is like ripping the tape off again. If you rip it
off, rip it off, rip it off, eventually the tape can’t stick anymore. This
probably contributes to an even wider social problem that might be called the
Peter Pan syndrome. Men in their forties with children in their twenties talk
like boys in their teens. “I still don’t feel like a grown-up,” they say. They
don’t even call themselves men—just “guys.”
Now, in a roundabout sort of
way, I’ve just introduced you to the concept of natural law. Although the
natural-law tradition is unfamiliar to most people today, it has been the main
axis of Western ethical thought for 23 centuries, and in fact it is
experiencing a renaissance.
The hinge concept is design.
I said that we’re not designed for hooking up, that we’re designed for our
bodies and hearts to work together. We human beings really do have a design,
and I mean that literally—not just a biological design, but an emotional,
intellectual, and spiritual design. The human design is the meaning of the
ancient expression “human nature.” Some ways of living comport with our design.
Others don’t.
Flouting the Design
From a natural-law
perspective, the problem with twenty-first-century Western sexuality is that it
flouts the basic principles of the human sexual design. By talking with you
about unexpected pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, a medical
scientist or public-health professional might highlight the consequences of
flouting the biological side of the human sexual design. By talking with you
about women who wake up crying and men who are afraid to grow up or get
married, a natural-law philosopher like me highlights the consequences of
flouting the other side of the human sexual design. These two sides of human sexuality
must be viewed together.
Now if we are going to be
serious about the human sexual design, then we have to attend to its purpose.
If it has more than one purpose, then these purposes have to harmonize. The
first question to ask about our sexual design, then, is, “What is its purpose,
or purposes? What is it for?” I’ll answer that question in a moment. Before I
can do so, I have to take time out to deal with two inevitable objections to
natural law.
The first objection is that
it is rubbish to talk about natural purposes, because we merely imagine them;
the purposes of things aren’t natural; they are merely in the eye of the
beholder. But is this true? Take the lungs, for example. When we say that their
purpose is to oxygenate the blood, are we just making that up? Of course not. The purpose of oxygenation isn’t in the eye
of the beholder; it’s in the design of the lungs themselves. There is no reason
for us to have lungs apart from it.
Suppose a young man is more
interested in using his lungs to get high by sniffing glue. What would you
think of me if I said, “That’s interesting—I guess the purpose of my lungs is
to oxygenate my blood, but the purpose of his lungs is to get high”? You’d
think me a fool, and rightly so. The purpose of the lungs is built into the
design of the lungs. He doesn’t change that purpose by sniffing glue; he only
violates it.
We can ascertain the
purposes of the other features of our design in the same way. The purpose of
the eyes is to see, the purpose of the heart is to pump blood, the purpose of
the thumb is to oppose the fingers so as to grasp, the
purpose of the capacity for anger is to protect endangered goods, and so on. If
we can ascertain the purpose of all those other powers, there is no reason to
think that we cannot ascertain the purpose or purposes of the sexual powers
too.
The second objection is that
it doesn’t make any difference even if we can ascertain the purpose or purposes
of the sexual powers, because an is does not imply an
ought. This currently unquestioned dogma, too, is false. If the purpose of eyes
is to see, then eyes that see well are good eyes, and eyes that see poorly are
poor ones. Given their purpose, this is what it means for eyes to be good.
Moreover, good is to be
pursued; the appropriateness of pursuing it is what it means for anything to be
good. Therefore, the appropriate thing to do with poor eyes is to try to turn
them into good ones. If it really were impossible to derive an
ought from the is of the human design, then the practice of medicine
would make no sense. Neither would the practice of health education.
Consider the young glue-sniffer again. How should we advise him? Is the purpose of
his lungs irrelevant? Should we say to him, “Sniff all you want, because an is does not imply an ought”? Of course not; we should
advise him to kick the habit. We ought to respect our design. Nothing in us
should be used in a way that flouts its inbuilt purposes.
What Is Sex For?
Now that I have warded off
the two inevitable objections, let us return to the question of the purpose or
purposes of the sexual powers. Common sense tells us that their main purpose is
procreation. Since common sense is no longer trusted these days, I’ll give an
explanation too. Forgive me for sounding like a philosopher, but the
explanation is clearer if I use letters as placeholders.
Two conditions must be
satisfied before you can say that the purpose of P is to bring about Q, and our
answer satisfies both of them. First, it must be the case that P actually does
bring about Q. This condition is satisfied because the sexual powers actually
do bring about procreation; that’s just birds and bees stuff. Second, it must
be the case that the fact that P does bring about Q is necessary to explaining
why P has come to be—why P exists in the first place. This condition is also
satisfied, because the fact that the sexual powers bring about procreation is a
necessary part of explaining why we have such powers.
To put this
another way, if it weren’t for the birds and bees stuff, then it would
be mighty hard to understand why we have sexual powers at all. Even a Darwinist
must concede the point. (By the way, if you have been worrying about a
population explosion, you can stop. In the developed countries, the net
reproduction rate is 0.7 and dropping, which means that the next generation
will be only 70 percent as large as this one. Demographers are beginning to
realize that the looming threat throughout most of the world is not explosion,
but implosion.)
Besides procreation, two
other purposes are also commonly proposed as the inbuilt purpose of the sexual
powers, so let’s consider each one. The first suggestion is that the purpose of
the sexual powers is pleasure. That their exercise is pleasurable can hardly be
doubted, but to call pleasure their purpose does not follow and is deeply
misleading.
To see why, consider an
analogy between sex and eating. The purpose of eating is to take in nutrition.
But eating is pleasurable too. Suppose we were to say, then, that the purpose
of eating, too, is pleasure. Then it would seem that any way of eating that
gives pleasure is good, whether it is suitable for nutrition or not. Certain
ancient Romans are said to have thought this way. To prolong the pleasure of
their feasts, they purged between courses. I hope it is not difficult to
recognize that such behavior is disordered.
The more general point I am
trying to make is that although pleasure accompanies the exercise of every
voluntary power, not just sex, it is never the purpose of the power. It only
provides a motive for using it—and a dangerous motive, too, which may often be
in conflict with the purpose and steer us wrong.
Unitive Intimacy
The other common suggestion
is that the purpose of the sexual powers is union: the production of an intimate
bond between the partners. This is a much more interesting suggestion, but only
half-true. What I mean is that it makes an intriguing point, but that it is not
correctly put.
Here’s what’s intriguing
about it. We aren’t designed like guppies, who cooperate
only for a moment. For us, procreation requires an enduring partnership between
two beings, the man and the woman, who are different but in complementary ways.
But this implies that union isn’t a different purpose, independent of
procreation; rather, it arises in the context of procreation and characterizes
the way we procreate.
A parent of each sex is
necessary to make the child, to raise the child, and to teach the child. To
make him, both are needed because the female provides the egg, the male fertilizes
it, and the female incubates the resulting zygote. To raise him, both are
needed because the male is better designed for protection, the female for
nurture. To teach him, both are needed because he needs a model of his own sex,
a model of the other, and a model of the relationship between them. Mom and Dad
are jointly irreplaceable. Their partnership in procreation continues even
after the kids are grown, because then they are needed to help them establish
their own new families.
Sociologists Sara S. McLanahan and Gary Sandefur
remark in their book Growing Up with a Single Parent that “if we were asked to
design a system for making sure that children’s basic needs were met, we would
probably come up with something quite similar to the two-parent ideal.” Of
course—for it is designed, though not by us.
Another sociologist, René König, explains in the International Encyclopedia of
Comparative Law that children, young ones especially, thrive less in orphanages
than in the average family—even when care is taken to make the institutions
homelike, and even when, to sociological eyes, they are better organized than
an average family in every respect, hygienically, medically, psychologically,
and pedagogically.
All this explains why the
longing for unitive intimacy is at the center of our
design. Without it, procreative partnerships could hardly be expected to endure
in the way that they must endure to generate sound and stable families. So, to
repeat, achieving union is a real purpose of the sexual powers, but it isn’t a
purpose separate from procreation; for humans, it comes as part of the
procreative package.
Blessed Incompletion
Let me explain a little more
about the nature of spousal union. Unitive intimacy
is more than intense sexual desire leading to pleasurable intercourse. The
sexes are designed to complement each other. Short of a divine provision for
people called to celibacy, there is something missing in the man, which must be
provided by the woman, and something missing in the woman, which must be
provided by the man. By themselves, each one is incomplete; to be whole, they
must be united.
This incompleteness is an
incredible blessing because it both makes it possible for them to give
themselves to each other, and gives them a motive to do so. The gift of self
makes each self to the other self what no other self can be. The fact that they
“forsake all others” is not just a sentimental feature of traditional Western
marriage vows; it arises from the very nature of the gift. You cannot partly give
yourself, because your Self is indivisible; the only way to give yourself is to
give yourself entirely. Because the gift is total, it has to exclude all
others, and if it doesn’t do that, then it hasn’t taken place.
We can say even more about
this gift, because the union of the spouses’ bodies has a more-than-bodily
significance; the body emblematizes the person, and the joining of bodies
emblematizes the joining of the persons. It is a symbol that participates in,
and duplicates the pattern of, the very thing that it symbolizes; one-flesh
unity is the body’s language for one-life unity. (The next two paragraphs are
closely indebted to the
In the case of every other
biological function, only one body is required to do the job. A person can
digest food by himself, using no other stomach but his own; he can see by
himself, using no other eyes but his own; he can walk by himself, using no
other legs but his own; and so on with each of the other powers and their
corresponding organs. Each of us can perform every vital function by himself,
except one. The single exception is procreation.
If we were speaking of
respiration, it would be as though the man had the diaphragm, the woman the
lungs, and they had to come together to take a single breath. If we were
speaking of circulation, it would be as though the man had the right atrium and
ventricle, the woman the left atrium and ventricle, and they had to come
together to make a single beat.
Now, it isn’t like that with
the respiratory or circulatory powers, but that is precisely how it is with the
procreative powers. The union of complementary opposites is the only possible
realization of their procreative potential; unless they come together as “one
flesh”—as a single organism, though with two personalities—procreation doesn’t
occur.
Sexual Landscape
Why do I spend time on these
matters? I do so in order to emphasize the tightness with which different
strands are woven together by our sexual design.
Mutual and total
self-giving, strong feelings of attachment, intense pleasure, and the
procreation of new life are linked by human nature in a single complex of
purpose. If it is true that they are linked by human nature, then if we try to
split them apart, we split ourselves. Failure to grasp this fact is more
ruinous to our lives, and more difficult to correct, than any amount of
ignorance about genital warts. It ought to be taught, but it isn’t.
The problem is that we don’t
want to believe that these things are really joined; we don’t want the package
deal that they represent. We want to transcend our own nature, like gods. We
want to pick and choose among the elements of our sexual design, enjoying just
the pieces that we want and not the others. Some people pick and choose one element,
others pick and choose another, but they share the illusion that they can pick
and choose.
Sometimes such picking and
choosing is called “having it all.” Having it all is precisely what it isn’t. A
more apt description would be refusing it all, insisting on having only a part,
and in the end, not even having that.
Think of our sexual
landscape as a square or quadrant with four corners, A, B, C, and D. Over in
corner A are people—mostly men—who buy into the
fantasy that they can enjoy greater sexual pleasure by instrumentalizing
their partners and refusing the gift of self. By doing so, they fall pell-mell
into what has been called the “hedonistic paradox”: The best way to ruin
pleasure is to make it your goal.
Pleasure comes naturally as
a byproduct of pursuing something else, like the good of another person. When I
talk with students, I illustrate the point with a Mick Jagger
song they’ve all heard, although they think the Rolling Stones are a bunch of
geezers. The song is “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” Nobody who has ever
listened to the song imagined that Jagger suffered
from a shortage of sex. The problem was that all that satisfaction wasn’t
satisfying anymore.
In corner B of the quadrant
are other people—mostly women—who try to substitute feelings of union for union
itself. We catch a hint of how common this is in the debasement of the language
of intimacy. In today’s talk, “I was intimate with him” means “I had sex with
him,” no more and no less. This euphemism is used more or less interchangeably
with another one, “I was physical with him,” and that tells you all you need to
know.
The parties have engaged in
a certain transaction with their bodily parts. There may have been one-flesh
unity—in other words, their bodies may have been acting as a single organism
for purposes of procreation—but there has not been one-life unity, because that
would require mutual and total self-giving. Even so, the bodily transaction
produces feelings of union, because that is what it is designed to produce.
One confuses these feelings
with the things that they represent and are meant to encourage, wondering
afterward why everything fell apart. After all, you “felt so close.” You
“seemed so committed.” You “had such a good thing going.” Yes, you had
everything except the substance of which these feelings are designed to be a
sign.
In corner C of the quadrant
are couples, who imagine that by denying the procreative meaning of sexuality,
they can enhance its unitive meaning—that by
deliberately avoiding the so-called burden of children, they can enjoy a deeper
intimacy. It doesn’t work that way. Why should it? The unitive
capacities of the spouses don’t exist for nothing; they exist for their
procreative partnership.
That is their purpose, and
that is the matrix in which they develop. Children change us in a way we
desperately need to be changed. They wake us up, they wet their diapers, they depend on us utterly. Willy-nilly, they knock us out of
our selfish habits and force us to live sacrificially for others; they are the
necessary and natural continuation of the shock to our selfishness that is
initiated by matrimony itself.
To be sure, the spouses may
try to live sacrificially for each other, but by itself, this love turns too
easily inward. Let no one think that I am referring to couples who are
childless through no fault of their own. For them, too, childlessness is a
loss, but the decisive factor is not sterility, but deliberate sterility. In
the natural course of things, if we willfully refuse the procreative meaning of
union, then union is stunted. We are changed merely from a pair of selfish me’s to a single selfish us.
In corner D of the quadrant
are people who think in exactly the opposite way. Instead of supposing that
they can affirm the unitive meaning of sexuality
without the procreative, they imagine that they can affirm the procreative
meaning of sexuality without the unitive. The full
shock of this way of life is not with us yet, but our technology allows it, and
in most jurisdictions, so does our law.
Meet Amber, who lives alone,
shares social occasions with Dave, in whom she has no sexual interest, and
sleeps occasionally with Robert, in whom she has no social interest. Amber
wants a child, but she doesn’t want the complications of a relationship, and
besides, she doesn’t want to be pregnant. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
She contracts with Paul as sperm donor, Danielle as egg donor, Brooke as
incubator, and Brian as visiting father figure to provide the child with
“quality time.”
Let us set aside our
feelings and attend to what has happened here. Among humans, procreation takes
place within the context of a unitive relationship.
To destroy the unitive meaning of the procreative act
is to turn it into a different kind of act. It’s no longer procreation, but
production; the child is no longer an expression of his parents’ love, but a
product. In fact, he has no parents. He was orphaned before his conception. His
relation to his caretaker is that of a thing bought and paid for to the one who
bought and paid for it.
The Counterrevolution
I’ve developed just four
themes in this article; allow me to review them. The first is that we ought to
respect the principles of our sexual design. Just as those ways of living that
flout the bodily aspects of our design sicken and kill us, so those ways of
living that flout the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual aspects of our
design ruin us and empty life of meaning.
The second theme is that the
human sexual powers have a purpose. As the purpose of the visual powers is to
see and the purpose of the ingestive powers is to
take in nourishment, so the purpose of the sexual powers is to procreate. This
purpose is not in the eye of the beholder; apart from this purpose, we would
have no way to explain why we have them. Moreover, if we try to make use of the
sexual powers in ways that thwart and violate this purpose, we thwart and
violate ourselves.
The third theme is that the
human design for procreation requires marital and family life. For guppies, it
doesn’t; they manage to procreate without them. For us, however, it does. To
put this another way, we are made with a view to
marriage and family, and fitness for them is one of our design criteria. No one
invented them, no one is indifferent to them, and there was never a time in
human history when they did not exist.
Even when disordered, they
persist. Spouses and family members who are divided by disaster commonly
undertake Herculean efforts to reunite with each other. Marriage and family are
not merely apparent goods but real ones, and the rules and habits necessary to
their flourishing belong to the natural law.
The final theme is that the
spousal bond has its own structure, which both nourishes and is nourished by
these institutions. Because it has its own structure, it has its own
principles. Among these principles are the following: Happiness cannot be
heightened by sexually using the Other; conjugal joy
requires a mutual and total gift of Self. Feelings of union are no substitute
for union; their purpose is to encourage the reality of which they are merely a
foretaste. The procreative and unitive meanings of
sexuality are joined by nature; they cannot be severed without distorting or
diminishing them both.
These principles are the
real reason for the commands and prohibitions contained in traditional sexual
morality. Honor your parents. Care for your children. Save sex for marriage.
Make marriage fruitful. Be faithful to your spouse.
Let the sexual revolution
bury the sexual revolution. Having finished revolving, we arrive back where we
started. What your mother—no, what your grandmother—no, what your
great-grandmother told you was right all along. These are the natural laws of
sex.
J. Budziszewski is a
professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin, and
the author, most recently, of What We Can’t Not Know:
A Guide (
Dick Anderson
