Trivial Pursuit
Contracepting the natural end of sexual union and deconstructing its basic nature should leave people not with an exhilarating sense of freedom, but a disturbing sense of meaninglessness. What would the meaning of eating be in the absence of both hunger and nourishment, and the presence of mere will? Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the popular sex education “expert” enjoins people to have “good sex.” But all she means by this maxim is high-powered sexual performance. Where does this leave those who are less than sexually athletic? Love, the nature of the relationship, and its respect for God’s plan are all neatly factored out of the equation. The performance is the thing. But is this not the ultimate trivialization of sex? If you get a good swing at a baseball late in the game when your team is down by 15 runs, is the swing of any importance? Bereft of context, drama, and meaning, is it even worth the effort? Other observers of the sex scene were not blind to the fact that what some commentators were calling “liberation,” more closely approximated “trivialization.” Accordingly, author Gavin Reid notes:
“Copulation-centered thought about human sexuality seeks, in the name of liberation, to turn us into sexual virtuosos. ‘So and so,’ we hear people say, ‘is good in bed.’ Skill in love-making is extremely important to acquire, but when we make it an end in itself and remove the spiritual and total commitment aspects, we relegate sex to the same level as ‘she plays a good hand of bridge’ or “he plays a good round of golf.’”
The attempt to maximize sex as an end in itself leads logically to its ultimate trivialization, or dissociation from any overriding importance. But if all the importance of sex is compressed into how well it is performed, the inevitable outcome of many people will be what psychologists refer to as “performance anxiety.” Impotence and sexual anorexia are also the byproducts of too much emphasis on performance. Sex will be joyful, rather than jaded, when it is accompanied by a rich context of natural and human meanings.
Germain Greer, who once exhorted women to revel in their sexuality, after closely scrutinizing the casualties of the contraceptive revolution, now warns her followers that sex has degenerated into a social gesture that is as trivial as a handshake. She claims that contraceptive technology, instead of liberating women, has turned them into geishas who risk health and fertility in order to be readily available for meaningless sex. Taking the pill, says Greer, is like “using a steamroller to crush a frog,” and the intrauterine device turns the womb into a “poisonous abattoir.” A teenage girl with a packet of pills in her purse and a copy of The Joy of Sex on her bookshelf is a pitiable creature, according to Greer’s new perspective.
Betty Friedan, America’s elder stateswoman of feminism, also began singing a different tune to her legion of followers in a book she wrote 18 years after The Feminine Mystique. Having witnessed the negative side of contraception’s legacy of “sexual freedom,” she used The Second Stage to preach the importance of the family, an institution toward which feminists had been “strangely blind.” She notes that after two decades of the women’s movement, too many women are facing economic misery as a result of divorce and are devalued in the workplace “and sometimes even replaced by other women who got into the men’s world and sometimes took away their husbands.” The Second Stage redirects the meaning of sex to bolster the relationship between husband and wife so that they are better prepared to be good fathers and mothers. The family, she declares, “is the nutrient of our personhood.”
Trying to maximize sexual pleasure would rule out the possibility of ecstasy because the partners are too preoccupied with their own individual satisfactions. In his insightful critique of modern secularism, Chance or the Dance?, Thomas Howard argues that the void of meaning that plagues the modern world makes ecstasy virtually impossible. The myth sovereign in the old order, he writes, was that each thing means everything. The meaning of the sexual act, surely, was not restricted to the mere experience of the act by its performers. Accordingly, “a man went into a woman in private and uncovered her and knew ecstasy in the experience of her being.” The myth sovereign in the new order is that “nothing means anything.” In the new order, we are fragmented, isolated, abandoned, and bereft of ecstasy, despite the exponential multiplication of sex manuals and self-help books.
We are creatures who are made for meaning. The shades of boredom quickly descend on the artificial womb that we fabricate out of comfort and security. And what is boredom but the void that results when the union of love and life is no longer present?
To humanize sex is to give it its fullness, both with regard to space and time. Sex involves love, life, God, and community; it also has implications of commitment, responsibility, and permanence. Contraception prevents sex from being everything it can and should be. But it also devalues what it excludes, making the process of restoring the integrity of sexual union most difficult. The danger is that sexual union will be perceived as trivial in its essence. Advocates of contraception initially wanted to improve love-making between spouses. That early optimism is nearly moribund at present. We need to recover something of that optimism, but restore sexual union to its proper human quality, not through technology, but through respecting the values that are inherent in human sexuality.
Donald DeMarco is a regular columnist for Lay Witness. This article was condensed because of space limitations. For the entire text, call CUF toll-free at (800) MY-FAITH (693-2484).
http://www.cuf.org/LayWitness/online_view.asp?lwID=670
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