THE THEOLOGY OF PLEASURING

...As usual with revisionists, it turns out that St...

...He thinks incest is imprudent...

...And what is the ground for this broad permissiveness...

...In Ginder's book sex is "natural" and the doings of nature become paradigmatic for the understanding of sex...

...In sum, I commend the philosophers and think that even the Bible would be more help than Father Ginder in getting some decent view of sexuality...

...It may seem niggling to criticize taste but as we talk about sex, so shall we evaluate it...

...I quote my favorite of many unhappy turns of phrase: "It was the Jesuits who first fingered masturbation as a chink in the Church's barricade...

...Human beings have evolved out of some pretty nasty pasts...

...A pleasant grey haired lady filing down the aisle of the aircraft leaned over and said in a moderately loud tone, "You'll find more instruction in the Bible'" It's possible...

...By parity of reasoning, if the natural outcome of my desire is homosexual, it is immoral to interfere artificially with same by exhortation, admonition and threats...

...sex is even discussed as a "body language" in Robert Solomon's interesting dissection of perversion...

...it seems much more interested in war and peace, slavery, poverty, property and loyalty than in lust Having given Ginder that credit, I can find little else commendable in the book...

...Women are animals (chicks, birds, fillys, bitches) or playthings (babes, dolls) or are reduced from whole to part (ass, piece...

...Paul is the source of all the bad later teaching...

...Benedict XI was 14 on assuming the office and traded an archbishopric for marzipan...

...I would suggest that what is needed is an extended phenomenology of sexual acts...

...Ginder thinks it odd but would not object to this prurient interest in pasta...

...I suppose one can be latently homosexual but one cannot be latently tall or a closet digester...

...Because I think Ginder's book is maddening in method, inaccurate in interpretation, philosophically impossible and tasteless, let me point out one continuously good thing about the book...

...I read somewhere recently that some sexologist has decided that masturbation gives the most intense sexual pleasure (I suppose because one doesn't have the anxiety of messing around with another...

...Not all language (words or body) is communicative and reciprocal...

...The trouble with the body language notion is that at its best, body language is relatively unsubtle...

...In an article entitled "Pricks and Chicks: A plea for persons," Robert Baker points out much of the "gutsy" sexual language which someone like Ginder affects is demeaning to women...

...I never knew that device was named after Colonel Condom of the British Grenadier Guards...

...Sexuality may be a language but if so, it is a rather rudimentary-albeit extremely powerful-one...

...On Ginder's view and that of most other sexual hberationists the distinction of pleasure and meaning is lost...

...I think I can detect two arguments in Ginder's book...

...Ginder wants to say that the Popes are not infallible on sexual matters so we get a grab bag of odd data about odd popes: Pope St...

...My sexual arousal arouses the other, which in turn potentiates my sexual desire and so on...

...If a human being chooses to remain in the language possibilities of this gesture, is that like deciding the only proper form of speech is monologue...

...The text is a pastiche of bits and pieces from here and there with or without any relevance to the central argument of the book-if there is a central argument...

...Ginder is correct in condemning the capture of the sin field by sex to the detriment of a more diverse and pervasive moral conscience-at least this is true for traditional confessional box Catholicism...

...It seems doubtful that body language is wholly conventional...

...This "traditional" Catholic engrossment of sexuality as the sin for man is perhaps reaping its just reward in the current pop secular view that sex is the salvation for man...

...It seems very dubious to say that a person with homosexual genetic tendencies (if they exist) is a homosexual if he or she represses the tendency, choosing ascetic denial or grimly practicing heterosexual-ity...

...Biblical fantasy aside, Ginder's basic moral position is that sex is natural and what is natural is necessary and thus there is no moral problem with sex since one cannot command or commend the necessary...

...Of course there are times when we talk to ourselves, but that makes us like parasites-taking us away from others...

...All of the injunctions against sexual freedom are attributable to Paul which contrasts with Jesus' "cheerful philosophy of self-acceptance...

...Catholic moral instruction has sometimes made it appear as if the whole labor of God's creation, the vast-ness of galaxies, the turmoil of ages, the tragedies of history were designed to ward off teen-age masturbation...

...BOOKS THE THEOLOGY OF PLEASURING DENNIS O'BRIEN Binding With Briars: Sex and Sin in the Catholic Church RICHARD GINDER Prentice-Hall, $8.95 Philosophy & Sex EDITED BY ROBERT BAKER & FREDERICK ELLISTON Prometheus Books, $11.95 Sitting on the ground at Albany County Airport waiting for Allegheny to take off for Philadelphia, I was calmly reading through Philosophy & Sex at the behest of Commonweal...

...While there is no single paradigm in the philosophers, there is a repeated resort to the notion that sex is more like a language than like natural process...

...Something that Ginder would scarcely accept...

...In terms of the dominant metaphor of communication or sex-as-language, the sadist, we could say, is one who only uses the language of command...

...It has been argued in some quarters that nature sets the norm and if the natural end of a process is determined, e.g., conception, then it is immoral to interfere artificially with the natural outcome...

...If it is to be made silent so that chatter may cease and consciousness can become body, better by the kiss of a lover than the gag of the sadist...

...to digest our food, to lengthen our hair or nails, to grow tall, to be either heterosexual or homosexual...

...The general message of the book is clear enough under the debris of facts fascinating and dubious...

...Ginder is a well known Catholic controversialist-a long time columnist of conservative leanings for Our Sunday Visitor-and I fear his former readers will be scandalized to discover he has turned sexual liberationist with, as he says, gay liberation in the forefront...

...I do not imply that various "deviations" may not be intensely pleasurable and the exact moral measurement of these acts given the complex character of human interchange is difficult...

...Both views rather overrate the subject, in my judgment, and the dear lady on the plane was correct about the Bible in this respect...

...Even if that were the case, that would not settle the question of its value as gesture...

...A shrug of the shoulders or a caress with words, "So?," "Nice...

...Of course, the problem is that being homosexual is not at all like growing tall...

...And homosexuality...

...Commending premarital sex: "Never buy a horse until you've ridden her...

...I think it is worth noting that Ginder's book is tasteless and chauvinistic...

...In the case of sexual tendencies, it is obviously possible to choose against the tendencies and that creates a wholly different situation from what Ginder's argument suggests...

...While I am convinced that Ginder's naturalistic view is totally wrong and that the philosopher's suggestions about "body language" are helpful, I strongly suspect that much more needs to be done before we are clearer on the place and character of sexuality in human life...

...The idiocies of the Holy Office: "in 1635 Pedro Ginesta of Barcelona . . . was accused of having eaten bacon and onions on Friday" The book abounds in astounding facts: the average man produces 43 pints of semen in a lifetime...

...One meaning that homosexual bodily communication cannot imply is generation of children and the projection of my historical person into a future I will never see...

...How conversation in that language relates to our other conversations about science, the morning scandals, prayer, poetry, joking, lying and book reviewing should be worked out...

...That biological tendencies are not automatically to be honored seems at least prima facie worth considering...

...Perversion breaks the cycle of mutual embodiment...

...Basing his argument on Sartre, Nagel sketches a view of sexual interchange as reciprocal embodiment...

...Celestin V was an 80-year-old recluse who reigned only fifteen weeks...

...The Ginder book and the collection of philosophic essays can be very roughly contrasted in terms of two dominant settings for sexuality...

...Language is seriously truncated if it is only a language of command and becomes radically un-reciprocal (uncommunicative) when only one commands...

...Sadism, then, aims at the-embodiment of the other...

...It is general sexual liberationism...

...Father Richard Ginder in his volume subtitled "Sex and Sin in the Catholic Church" takes it upon himself to discover a true Biblical view on sex Had my fellow airline passenger read Father Ginder's account, she might have reconsidered her views about philosophy...

...If we accept the paradigm of the philosophers that sexual gesture is body language rather than Ginder's view that it is involuntary natural twitching, we at least begin to see how one could approach the relation between sex and human value...

...Alex Comfort reports in The Joy of Sex the case of a man who could only climax in a tub of spaghetti...

...Thomas Nagel's widely discussed article on "Sexual Perversion" attempts to prove that perversion is a possible concept...

...The biblical argument is patently absurd...

...One doubts that Casanova is to Sweeney as Shakespeare is to a jingle writer...

...He insists that concupiscence is "horniness...

...Is there a "natural" meaning to these exercises in body language...

...The body is a map of human meanings...

...The mouth means too much to the human being for food, for talk, to be treated anything but gently...

...The mere inanities of past pontiffs can hardly be a ground for dismissing moral teachings...

...Without entering into the murky complexities of what is "natural" and what is "artificial" about words, it is interesting to ask whether "body language" is merely conventional or whether there is something "given" about the meaning of gestures...

...Ginder is more or less for anything that pleasures and does no harm...

...What possible justification there could be for characterizing the preaching of Christ crucified as "a cheerful philosophy of self-acceptance" so totally eludes me that I will happily refrain from detailed criticism of the view...

...That may be its special attraction...

...bestiality isn't as common as it once was, and fetishism turns some people on...

...What is equally interesting for the discussion of sexuality and human value is whether there are particular expressions of body language which enrich or degrade the meaning of sexual activity...

...Can "eating" someone's sexual organs express the same range of meaning as more conventional sexual positioning...

...Without for a minute wanting to return to the damnation preaching about masturbation that marked the all too recent past, it seems that masturbation cannot bear the same meaning as reciprocal sexuality...

...As far back as Plato's Symposium, homosexuality is questioned because it involves the choice of non-generative sexuality...

...It would be a salutary corrective for the modern social Freudians with their celebrations , of sexuality as natural (and so to bed) to look over their shoulders at the Social Darwinites who argued that aggression was natural and thus war was the proper congress of mankind...

...As one philosopher has noted, modern philosophy seems more interested in indirect discourse than in intercourse and one would at least have to admit that the Bible shows some interest in sex even if its instruction is not always clear...

...Sexuality is a way in which communication occurs between persons...

...Take two forms of sexuality much in vogue these days, oral sexuality and homosexuality...

...The sadist does not merely use the words of command, however, he also uses body gestures of dominance...

...That argument is at least old-fashioned enough to be considered...

...Do we simply learn that a kiss is a gesture of affection and in another country tickling the feet would communicate the same meaning...

...there is a good deal more blood lust and anger left in the genetic package than we should celebrate just be, cause it is naturally given...

...Once sexual conduct is seen as communicative gesture, then it is important to see how we talk about sex since talk impinges on talk more obviously than talk alters nature...

...Paul was, says Ginder, "a negative thinker" who had "sex on the brain...

...Even if one admitted that homosexual preference was genetically determined (which case I do not believe is proved), being homosexual is a matter of chosen action...

...We do not choose...

...Can a slap be a gesture of love and acceptance...

...some language "says" things to other human beings that ought not to be said to human beings...

...Although he is not quite as explicit about all the other vagaries of human sexual taste, it appears to me that his general view is that various sexual behaviors are naturally determined and that it is simply perverse to thwart nature...

...One may argue that people ought not to choose against biological tendencies because of unhappy consequences or because nature is intrinsically blessed, but we are then into a realm of value choices...

...A man who always calls a woman "a piece" subtly changes his perception of her from a whole human being to a part in a f-----function...

...but in a manner which leaves the sadist outside the cycle of desire, a manipulating agent not available in embodiment to the other...

...The enrichment runs in both directions, to see the role of "taste...

...One might decide to go for something less pleasurable because it carried a richer human meaning...

...is an enriched situation of communication...

...The first is biblical, the second based on "natural law...

...The method, if one can use so dignified a term, would have to be described as hodge-podge polemical...

...There is a closure in homosexual activity that heterosexual conduct cannot promise with such certainty...

...The volume Philosophy & Sex edited by Baker and Elliston is a collection of essays by diverse hands but a thread which runs through many of the articles is the view of Ludwig Wittgenstein that "a form of language is a form of life...

...it is estimated (by Ned Rorem) that 75 percent of organists are homosexuals...

...That is why military trappings are often part of the sadistic scene...