SECOND THOUGHTS ON SEX
Steinfels, Peter
SECOND THOUGHTS ON SEX PETER STEINFELS In my last column I was lamenting the tendency of first-rate thinkers to write about recent changes in sexual mores from an Olympian distance- or should I...
...Gnosticism is something we are always being warned against, by everyone from Eric Voegelin to Daniel Moyni-han...
...Wherever we go with such an approach to sexual morality, it won't be back to the familiar place where we started...
...Against such a drift Cameron's essay can be taken as a valuable warning...
...Tragedy we will probably have aplenty in any case, though I grant the danger of an ethic that would blind us to its reality when it occurred...
...I don't know whether Cameron agrees, or even whether he wants us to become clearer about sex...
...Yet the real problem with this passage, and with Cameron's framework generally, is the implication that sex was "grave" in the Old era of taboo and guilt while it has become trivial and routine in the New era of the "interesting" and the experimental...
...That must be resisted because it would reduce humanity in a way more drastic than is expressed in the loss of "music...
...Does the Old really have this right to be so superior...
...History does move on...
...In several ways the sexual code of Deuteronomy attempts to protect the vulnerable...
...I'm methodical," said one of them, named Andy...
...We do not make or maintain social arrangements in order to foster satire or preserve tragedy...
...And "body language" may involve a high degree of givenness rather than, as with spoken tongues, so much that is conventional...
...A recent article in the New York Times Magazine reported on "over-40 singles...
...Very occasionally, perhaps, this is discussed, but with derision as modern chemists would talk about phlogiston...
...I don't know...
...still less is the notion ever canvassed of the possibility of there being in this field absolute interdictions...
...Having read neither of these books, I cannot dispute Cameron's negative judgment on them...
...His criticism then is very effective at the rhetorical level...
...Yet Macleish, taken literally, is wrong: a poem should mean and be...
...Andy was not the product of sexual liberation...
...Ruether are in any way symptomatic, the Catholic attitude, at any rate in North America, is beginning to shift...
...The "Biblical tradition" is neither so static nor so monolithic as Cameron implies, but what his representation of it lacks most is the recognition that it was intimately bound up with the preeminence of the reproductive and economic functions of the family...
...First, they present the kind of unnuanced history of sexual relations-in brief, up from machismo- that reformers since the Enlightenment have always been given to...
...For many, human life under such conditions would lose its music...
...Whether or not that is true -and I don't believe that it is-it hardly does justice to the shadow which long hung over all non-reproductive aspects of sexuality in Christianity...
...We had sex almost every night I was home...
...Now that would not be an unattractive image but for "rather jolly," a sixpenny sneer conjuring up Saint Nick and children's birthday parties...
...but also that the husband had to obtain the wife's permission to switch to an occupation entailing less frequent intercourse...
...There is little to be gained by romanticizing the past, and as for the present it deserves neither to be extolled nor denigrated...
...Alas, he finds that "if the books by Father Ginder, Mr...
...The New involves a cheerful confidence in technique, and hence the reduction of sex to the tractable, the domestic, the recreational, and ultimately the trivial...
...I married essentially to get it out of the way...
...Those lines are imposing at first, a ringing declaration...
...Cameron supports his view of the tradition by citing a passage in the Mishnah on the frequency of intercourse enjoined by the marital obligation...
...but in between there is small talk, banter, singing in the shower, and a thousand other legitimate uses of language...
...Second, they are guilty of a form of Gnosticism, the belief "that in a union of love between two people, personal, nonsexual relations are fundamental and that to these relations, between males and females, males and males, females and females, there may be added sexual relations, as relaxation, play, signs of affection, on occasion as means to procreation...
...But two things can be remarked about it from the start...
...How fairly Cameron represents the authors I cannot say...
...Professors of literature...
...The fact is that Cameron does not explicitly endorse the "Biblical tradition" in his article...
...But this is immediately undercut with: "They view marriage in the way now fashionable in much Catholic writing: ideally it is a rather jolly and affectionate relationship of equal comrades who recognize each other as persons in their own right...
...and "sex in the head" is worse...
...things do change...
...Ruether and Bianchi stand accused of an "excessively spiritual attitude," while Cameron and the Judeo-Chris-tian tradition end firmly on the side of a realistic earthiness...
...Cameron may simply move too fast for me-or he may have moved too fast for his subject-but I have ever the slightest sense of being witness to a party trick...
...Like Cameron's, it disposes of Father Ginder's Binding with Briars...
...After all, he had never been unfaithful...
...Continued on page 637) Steinfels (Cont...
...To begin with, the "Biblical tradition" or "Jewish-Christian prescriptions" are not quite the unity he assumes...
...O'Brien is aware of these limitations and of our uncertainty, in general...
...It contrasts with the "Biblical tradition," in which it is the sexual relation between man and woman that constitutes the relation of marriage, and the love of friendship . . . is an added grace that belongs to the perfection of marriage but isn't constitutive of it...
...Cameron admits that Bianchi and Ruether are not wide-eyed about sexual liberation "in any of the popular contemporary senses...
...Second, if he faults Bianchi and Ruether for an unduly negative history of Christian attitudes toward sex, his own view can certainly be faulted in the other direction...
...We need not founder, we need not drift...
...I doubt that such a case can be sustained...
...One may reply, with Archibald Macleish, that the poem of sex should not mean but be...
...No "serious person," he asserts, has ever maintained "that the justification for each sexual act is reproduction...
...Perhaps the key sentences in Cameron's article are found in his last paragraph: "If everything is interesting and nothing is grave, satire cannot bite and tragedy gives way to the social illness of maladjustment...
...From the volume Philosophy & Sex O'Brien extracts the theme of sex as language, as communicative gesture...
...But here he has hyphenated "Judeo-Christian" a little too tightly...
...Sex in the head" is even redolent of the complaint Catholic lay people used to make against that clerical moralizing which had lost all touch with the lived reality of sexuality...
...That is not the case...
...To defend the "Biblical tradition" on Law-rentian grounds of mystery, darkness, and dread won't work, no more than the romantic justification of established Christianity thrown up by Chateaubriand and other post-revolutionary conservatives...
...He merely sets it in a framework which could be called the decline from the Old to the New...
...This, says Cameron, sounds like what D. H. Lawrence called "sex in the head...
...I like home cooking...
...But it seems mistaken to me that we should approach the question as though nothing but fashion had shaken the ground upon which the "Biblical tradition" was built...
...Like Cameron's, it shows no enthusiasm for the bright ribbons of liberation, and is more concerned with locating reasonable rules and limitations than in abolishing them...
...Cameron's task is hardly easy...
...He must begin at the beginning, with all the common objections to consequen-tialism and cultural relativism...
...There is good reason for that fact...
...And second, while the "body language" approach may lead to important distinctions between classes of sexual acts, identifying some as better or more profound and others as entirely unworthy, it seems doubtful that we would end with the pattern of absolute prohibitions we now have...
...I strongly suspect that much more needs to be done before we are clearer on the place and character of sexuality in human life...
...Language is too flexible and variable for that: we use it to bind ourselves with the most profound pledges and we misuse it when we lie or slander...
...Yet unlike Cameron's, it seems much less assured of traditional answers and much more favorable to those seeking new ones...
...For whom will life lose its music...
...The Jewish tradition, like the Christian one, is patriarchal...
...But there is no use pretending that we are not at sea...
...One might expect that Cameron, having had to struggle to insert morality into the discussion at all, would be grateful for the two books which do make it central to their concern, Binding with Briars: Sex and Sin in the Catholic Church by Richard Ginder, and From Machismo to Mutuality by Eugene C. Bianchi and Rosemary Radford Ruether...
...At this point introduce Exhibit B. Exhibit B is a review written by Dennis O'Brien in the June 4 Commonweal...
...but it is far less anti-sexual...
...Caught reading Philosophy & Sex in an airplane, O'Brien is advised by grey-haired lady, "You'll find more instruction in the Bible...
...We do well to ward off the worst and sillier bouts of seasickness...
...Andy was shocked when his wife, perhaps unaware that sexual union even without friendship was constitutive of Judeo-Christian marriage, demanded a divorce...
...but fertility and the protection of "possessions," including women and offspring, are still the controlling concerns of its world...
...One should note in the Mishnah not only the detailing of marital obligations incumbent upon those in different walks of life (intercourse daily for those free of labor, weekly for ass-drivers, monthly for camel drivers, etc...
...I believe that is a watershed...
...To Professor Cameron's moral arguments I promised to return...
...Bianchi, and Ms...
...Is the alternative "sex in the head...
...And this girl had simply fabulous legs...
...The Old involves a deep sense of the uncanny power of sexuality, and hence the generation of myths, taboos, dread, and guilt...
...His fundamental disagreements with them are two...
...for purposes of argument let us presume he is accurate...
...Cameron wants, in some way, to defend "the old ethos set out in Deuteronomy," of which Catholicism has been the most public and militant representative...
...Language can be perverse or truncated or egoistic or confused-or reciprocal and communicative...
...He admits to himself "that the Bible shows some interest in sex even if"-and here he departs from Cameron-"its instruction is not always clear...
...There are some stars to steer by, and we may discover more...
...In this light, "what is needed is an extended phenomenology of sexual acts...
...Though this patriarchal world evolved and the tradition evolved with it, only in recent times have the links between sex and reproduction, marriage and economic accumulation been loosened...
...This approach strikes me as extremely promising...
...His argument is too easy on several counts, though perhaps that only reflects the constraints of a review-essay...
...at most these books exude a loose and complacent con-sequentialism: anything goes as long as no one in the immediate vicinity is badly lacerated or driven to suicide...
...Perhaps not as rapidly or as totally as the latest book always proclaims, but they do nonetheless...
...One could multiply examples...
...I was spending too much time thinking about girls, dating...
...For if sexual gestures are communicating something, we will have to attend to what they are communicating, and this, I suspect, may be at least as much "in the head" as in the loins...
...and this for the reason that in most of the books under review "there is no serious consideration of the moral problems that may be raised by changes in the sexual mores of our society...
...In regard to sexual mores we are not anchored as once we were...
...I have trouble falling asleep without sex...
...He devotes most of his energy to criticizing what is obviously the more serious volume, that by Bianchi and Ruether...
...It does not appear evident that taboos, dread, and guilt kept either medieval peasants or the middle-class of a few years ago from the routinization and trivialization of sex...
...Can one find a representative statement, or even any statement, quite like that in the Christian literature...
...Upon second reading, they become distressing...
...Exhibit A was a lengthy review-essay by J. M. Cameron in the New York Review of Books (May 13, 1976...
...SECOND THOUGHTS ON SEX PETER STEINFELS In my last column I was lamenting the tendency of first-rate thinkers to write about recent changes in sexual mores from an Olympian distance- or should I say more-than-Olympian, out of deference to the libidinal energies of the ancient pantheon...
...And one can reasonably ask whether a sexual union in which the love of friendship may or may not be present any longer makes sense, or even meets other Christian standards...
...That the tradition and the prescriptions have evolved with cultural and economic conditions even a cursory re-second chapters of Deuteronomy makes clear...
...O'Brien's review, like Cameron's, is intelligent and witty...
...First, it is "sex in the head" with a vengeance...
...More and more, however, I sense a danger in this position, the danger of conservative nostalgia...
Vol. 103 • September 1976 • No. 20
