Editorial
At home with sex Sexual revolutions, like thin or wide ties, baseball strikes, and popes, come and go. E.B. White wrote of the sexually tumultuous 1920s that "the literature of the period...
...Love is not blind...
...Where religion and custom had long channeled the sexual instinct toward marriage, the helping professions rushed in to defend individual rights...
...Sound familiar...
...on normative expectations, not on therapeutic understanding...
...White wrote of the sexually tumultuous 1920s that "the literature of the period blossomed with deep and lugubrious books on sex and marriage" and that the "heavy writers had got sex down and were breaking its arm...
...G.K...
...Sex education, not sexual morality, was the "rational" or "enlightened" approach to sexual responsibility...
...In an inspired effort to help sex "retain its high spirits," White and James Thurber wrote Is Sex Necessary?, a spoof of the attempt to articulate the inexpressible, or what they called "the strange bewilderment which overtakes one person on account of another person...
...Happily, most Americans appear to have a thorough knowledge of that connection—perhaps the most basic of the facts of life...
...So it was with something close to a continental sigh of relief that the nation greeted the release last month of a University of Chicago (NORC) survey that found Americans remain essentially monogamous (75 percent of men and 85 percent of women), remarkably "satisfied" (almost half say "extremely pleased and satisfied"), and relatively energetic (40 percent of married couples have sex twice a week...
...In the wake of the endlessly trumpeted sexual revolution of the 1960s—and especially after the advent of the birth control pill and legalized abortion—a lot more ink has been spilled in either celebrating or denouncing the presumed demise of "traditional" sexual morality...
...Home continues to be where the heart as well as where the sex is...
...What is so often lugubrious about the public conversation about sex and marriage is how little we seem to hear about the psychological and moral realism that has traditionally wed fidelity to sexual fulfillment...
...Those opposed to the loosening of sexual morality practice a hyperbole of their own...
...Advocates of "liberation" embraced a kind of laissez-faire attitude regarding the most socially volatile of human relations...
...Second, it seems that Americans by and large still link the idea of romance with the vocation of marriage...
...Married Catholics, it turns out, have the highest frequency of conjugal contact...
...In short, both sides of this controversy have once again endeavored to take the "high spirits" and much of the common sense out of sex...
...Several conclusions are suggested by the study's results...
...They have protested what seemed to be society's capitulation to a permissive sexual ethic, warning that cultural ruin follows inexorably on the heels of such sexual indulgence...
...No wonder Catholic reading is on the decline...
...Still, it is reassuring to learn that "the strange bewilderment" White and Thurber celebrated remains as potent and as binding as ever...
...and the more it is bound the less it is blind...
...Of course, it would be cavalier to be too sanguine about the drift of modern sexual morality...
...Sexual high spirits, it seems, have not been suppressed by either the false promise of permissiveness or the false asceticism underlying the church's rejection of contraception...
...The results have been decidedly mixed...
...In Catholic circles the phrase "the contraceptive mentality" has blossomed, and is being used in frankly promiscuous ways to link the use of artificial contraception to everything from adultery to consumerism to violence against women and (rather illogically) to the increase in children born out of wedlock and the number of abortions...
...First, as most married 3 Catholic couples know, contraception is not the first step on the road to marital breakdown and social chaos but often the opposite...
...Love is bound...
...The damage done by sexual repression was what needed to be combated...
...Chesterton wrote, "that is the last thing it is...
...A recent Atlantic Monthly (October) essay by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead on "The Failure of Sex Education," exposed the fallacy behind these innovations: Sexual responsibility principally depends on motivation not information...
...Sex continues to be exploited for economic and ideological reasons— and then there is always Original Sin...
Vol. 121 • November 1994 • No. 19
