“Venus and Cupid” by Hendrick Van der Broeck, 16th century
The Church has always called its members to two committed, chaste expressions of their sexuality: the connubial and the celibate. For those not yet committed to either or only temporarily committed to the latter—a status whose duration is always in doubt—there is an awkwardness that is difficult, painful, and humorous. The humor of the struggle seems lost on many contemporary protestant evangelical youths, but not on Jeff Sharlet, who has written about them for Rolling Stone.
The goal of these young people is apparently to make chastity cool for rock’n’roll youth culture, and the result is much humor at their expense as they try to uphold their inherited notion of fornication as just about the worst sin there is while wearing “masturbation bracelets,” “snakeskin tights,” and “muscle shirts” while playing red guitars at parties in renditions of “Like a Virgin” and “I Want Candy.” (Mercy me, red guitars!) Sweet Jesu, this reminds me of certain wild Renaissance paintings with not-very-erotic farcical portrayals of sexuality. (And speaking of paintings, one of the most erotically-literate people I know is Sister Wendy, whose explications are often exquisitely and most properly arousing.)
Sharlet further profiles young writers like Anna Broadway, “part of an intellectual avant-garde of the purity brigades,” a group, Sharlet notes, “mostly of women.” Broadway currently has a contract with Random House for a book project arising out of her blog “Sexless in the City,” which chronicles her attempts to remain chaste in all sorts of compromising situations. Sharlet also points to Dawn Eden who is working on a book about “becoming newly chaste.” (What a remarkable euphemism!) Then there is the grand-dame of the once and future chaste, Lauren Winner and her latest book Real Sex, which completes her cycle from evangelical freewheeling fornicator to church lady.
Winner of the much-heralded cat’s eye glasses scored a real coup this summer, earning praise from both The New York Times and WORLD Magazine. Winner reassured the Times that she is not a Creationist, thinks George Bush is the worst president ever, and is “not really persuaded that [she has] any right to legislate against abortion in a pluralistic democracy.” At the same time, she’s back on the chastity wagon. Evangelicals from Andy Crouch to Gene Veith (and Catholics too) are falling over themselves to praise Winner’s book and glom onto the newfound chic of chastity as recognized by cultural barometers like the Times.
Hollywood has caught the bug as well. Perhaps this is the much awaited salutary effect of evangelical inroads into that din of evil. More likely both groups exist largely as the spawn of cultural fads. The Hollywood virgin kick has culminated in the recent box office hit The 40-Year-Old Virgin, a comedy that portrays its protagonist as a loveable, if somewhat nerdy man who, to the surprise of his decidedly not-virgin friends, is strangely attractive to the fairer sex. Discussing the rise of the celibate in Hollywood, Elayne Rapping, professor of pop culture and media studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo, says “all of this has become a new way to sell sex when sex has become commonplace and fairly uninteresting. It’s come full circle. There’s more intrigue when people identify themselves as virgins or celibate or whatever. People have gotten bored with the endless display of graphic sex.” But then she adds the key kicker, “but they pretty much have sex, anyway.”
The decisive impression I have from reading the Rolling Stone piece and from crashing several evangelical youth group meetings is that Rapping’s assessment pretty much holds true for the wanna-be-hot-virgin-Christian-crowd as well. Yet still the guardian of Christian virtue—the “Christian” (read: Evangelical) publishing industry—trumpets the Winnerizing of chastity as a boon for pure wedding nights everywhere. The relief that virgins finally have access to the universal coin of the American realm—“cool”—is palpable. I have read Winner’s Real Sex, and to be fair, her defense of chastity is real and I do not believe it to be an affectation or fad so far as she is concerned. But after a great deal of conversation with those like Anna Broadway who follow in her wake, it is increasingly apparent to me that Winner, as an artifact of her “community,” such as it is, personifies the deep sicknesses in the American Christian scene when it come to a proper understanding of “real sex.”
The most fundamental disease is the old American canard of “self-help.” Each of these purveyors of chastity follow the classic pattern of the self-help guru (described helpfully by Pantagruelist Patton Dodd in his recent review of SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement made America Helpless). Write a lot about yourself—mainly about your struggles to “help” yourself “grow” or “cope” in some way—and then after establishing audience attention, you turn to “help” them too. Winner claims her book is for “Christians”—to help “unmarried people who are trying to live in a Christian moral universe.” She begins by defining “Christian” sex over and against “illicit” kinds of sex—the kind western society is mad for; the kind where the instability and uncertainty of a relationship between two people enhances its capacity to arouse desire. Risk, the forbidden, the desire to live for the moment without concern for other obligations, attachments or goals—this is compelling stuff. It defines the “sexiest sex” because it brings in such intensity.
“Venus and Cupid” by Hendrick Van der Broeck, 16th century
Winner comments briefly on the problem of taking this “sexy” model of sex into marriage. Unfortunately she fails to realize that—married or not—it is a problem not chiefly because it creates false expectations or works against the stability of marriage by inclining people toward adultery with the idea that unstable, extramarital sex is the most gratifying. The most common and most damaging consequence of the “sexy-unstable” model among married and committed, monogamous couples is that their efforts to sustain it will induce in them the behavior of addicts. C. S. Lewis wrote about “the itch for repetition” on several occasions. When you become obsessed with controlling an experience—doing X to get Y result—over and over again, it turns sex, chocolate, alcohol, or any other thing into pornography. With regard to relational experiences like sex, the addict destroys the relational aspect and engages in narcissistic autoeroticism. The prevalence of this practice and notion of sex is bound up with the idea that marriage is primarily founded in mutual affection stripped of any tie to fecundity and a logical, normative end in childrearing and family life. Oddly this same sexual ethic unites gay marriage proponents and many, if not most, of their staunchest opponents.
Here Winner makes a serious mistake by assuming, like most Christians today, that the source of the instability ingredient in the very Dionysian “sexiest sex” is the lack of an established, permanent relationship. She is also wrong to imply that there is something intrinsically morally compromising about this “Dionysian” element and that it doesn’t belong in marriage, which has a highly “Apollonian” character.
Because of this assumption, Winner is forced to argue as a central thrust of her case for chastity that married sex, because it is part of a “stable” relationship, isn’t properly able to sustain the “sexiest sex” that she identifies as being rooted by less stable—because unmarried—relationships. But marriage and monogamy do not bring every couple into the same kind of uniform libidinal stability. Every couple, if honest, will have to admit of considerable instability in their affections and also much normal, healthy fluctuation in their libidos. Also, if they’re not so overcome by the addictive itch for repetition that they value sex-on-demand (a possibility on a massive scale now due to mass artificial contraception), there is plenty of waiting and self-denial which introduces a challenging and rewarding instability that parallels its precursor in the thrills and risks of courtship.
Even if all men were ready to have explosive sex all the time—which they’re not—and even if all women were too, even in well-broken in marriages, each time is different. It’s a mistake to think that the sexual excitement that comes from instability has to do with the formal nature of the relationship. It has to do with the mysterious visitations of Eros, who is not a tame goddess. Couples never really know when sex is going to be the “routine,” “comfort food” kind, as Ms. Winner describes it, and when they will be visited by Eros in such measure that neither of them will ever think then or later, “Gee whilikers, this would have been even better if we had just hooked up in a bar as strangers.” If Eros doesn’t show up much or at all, that indicates another problem, which in my experience usually has to do with couples enslaved to the “liberation” of sex-on-demand. They’re out of touch with nature then, and Eros is a very natural goddess. Fecundity is essential to her nature.
The Church’s teaching on the problem identified by Winner of addictive, intensity-obsessed sex is that it is a pathology generated and greatly encouraged by the separation of the procreative and unitive aspects of sex that artificial contraception enables. The problem is not solved by Winner’s view of marriage and of married sex. She notes the severity of this problem but then goes on to dismiss the Church’s teachings on it without ever explaining those teachings or investigating the matter in any depth. Instead she goes on to endorse a very vague stance, where married people are not at risk of sin if they are at some time “open” to procreation. Since she purports to be advising Christians in general, this is a flat-out encouragement for Catholics to disregard their Church’s teachings. Thus Real Sex is not really a book for “Christians” because it is no good for Catholics. It may do for your “evangelicals” and “Jesus freaks,” but even some of these separated brethren will agree with me.
The point of course that is so conspicuously missing from Ms. Winner’s book is that the chaste should not want what the unchaste want and have. “Make perfect your will.” Reminding yourself of this is the key to a solid resistance to sin. But if you fundamentally do want what they have, then you may as well heed Oscar Wilde and defeat temptation by giving in to it. It’s just a matter of time anyway if you can’t bring your will into less conformity with the world and the flesh. In the last resort, you could decide you are too intractably impressionable and minimize your social relationships with the unchaste as much as possible, or at least social contact where their unchastity is prominent. This is a good idea in any event, but not one even remotely being considered or attempted today by those morally wise twenty-somethings purporting to dispense advice on this subject.
As a result, I’m tempted to encourage the young evangelicals profiled by Sharlet, along with Broadway, Eden, and their ilk, to follow their leader’s advice and sin boldly if they can’t quit whining. From deliberate, conscious sinning they’ll either learn that the gratifications aren’t worth the costs with some character-forming damage sustained in the process, or (less likely) they’ll end up in hideous ruin. If they were really worried about falling into hideous ruin, the temptation to sexual sin would probably be less. And that’s why one should believe in mortal sins and fear punishment in not only this life but the life to come! Of course, if an evangelical starts thinking like that, there’s not much left for them, but to come home to Mother Church.
Much of the energy of the purity brigade is generated by the opposite notion—that it is the chaste, rather than the unchaste, who suffer. Thus, as opposed to their happy-go-lucky-rutting-round-the-clock counterparts, the chaste require “intentional communities,” as Winner makes it, for constant group therapy. Being consigned to a life cut off from human contact would entail suffering. But trying to avoid sin is hardship, not suffering. The idea that you are suffering is just your dirty “old man of sin” talking, as the Apostle names the bugger. You should want him to suffer and drop dead. His pain is your gain! But don’t try to make an epic tale out of it. In the history of the church, many people have truly suffered, but the struggle for chastity seems to rate as a particularly saintly, heroic enterprise only among the evangelicals and Jesus freaks—and only in recent decades. They need to grow up.
The idea of the suffering virgin (or the suffering married and temporarily abstaining) is at the root of all kinds of bad teachings and advice about community. The pop-devotionalist Selwyn Hughes once remarked that the “people who do the greatest work in the world are strongly-sexed people who subordinate sex to the ends for which they live. In marriage the sex drive must be channeled into procreation and the giving of pleasure to one’s partner. Outside of marriage, the sex drive must be sublimated and channeled into creativity in the kingdom of God. Remember — the strongly-sexed can strongly serve.” Hughes is absurd–and probably a great heretic. Despite Freud’s fall from any pretence of science, any tom-fool may yet utter a swarm of declarative statements about “sublimated desires.” So all work, including church-work, is sublimated sexual desire? This may be true in part for some religious and for some anti-sex sects like the Shakers, but as a general theory it is batty. Worse, it leads to a distorted understanding of “community” as an “intentional” instrumentalist structure within which we can be therapized to be “good” and still be called “into creativity in the kingdom of God.” Hog swill! Pure poppy-cock!
Marriage and family life, which includes the lives of the un-married, flow outward in their “energies,” or as I’d prefer, their arrows, fruit, and blessings. The more children a person has, the less concern she has for “giving of pleasure” to her “partner” in the inwardly-turned sense of pleasure Hughes clearly implies. The nature of pleasure and how it is expressed changes as a household grows and extends into the world with its members who are principally occupied with work in that world. I guess this is all “sublimation” if your assumption is that “natural” man would lay in bed all day with his woman. Or that Eden was all sex and eating but no work. Though he was an heresiarch, Milton’s conception is far superior: in his great epic our first parents are perpetually busy with the animals and with cutting back aggressively fertile foliage. If Satan had showed up later when the couple had built and populated a house, he would have had to tempt them with illicit farm machinery, gas-powered hedge trimmers, plumbing, indoor commodes, and toilet-paper. Our pater and materfamilias haven’t sublimated sexual desires–they’ve cultivated them and followed them to their mature fructification.
All of which brings us back to the subject of “community”—the real subject of Winner’s book, and the subject about which she is most wrong. The Christian fellowship groups Winner advocates exist as intentional groups because the people in them people lack friends and relations who are able and willing to be good friends and relations. If you have good friends and relations who are close enough to keep you on your otes, or if you are simply one who has mastered the problem of desire, then you don’t need this other stuff which is distinctly inferior.
I am skeptical of Winner’s counsel on and hopes for the benefits of Christian “intentional communities” because it is high on the good-feelies and low on clarity and concrete content, and because I have seen intentional communities formed on that basis–fuzzy theory; no real discipline, no praxis. But moreover I am disturbed by Ms. Winner’s indication that almost anything one might call a “Christian intentional community” is as good as another. Winner herself puts the lie to this idea, as the kind of community she values at the beginning and end of her book, reflecting on her own life, has a very specific identity and provenance.
The sacrament of confession is integral to her book and her experiences in her struggle for chastity and holiness as a member of the Anglican church. Not any church, but a specific church where the sacrament of confession has a very clear-cut theory and tradition of praxis. As an Anglican, she has benefited from the “legalistic nonsense” that other Protestants, chiefly “evangelicals,” have seen fit to extirpate from their churches, namely the sacrament of reconciliation (as it’s now called). (Sadly confession is deucedly rare even where technically allowed among Lutherans and Anglicans.) Having to keep clean and make good confessions to stay in communion with the Church does indeed do wonders, both as a sin-deterrent and sin-detergent, with no cheap-grace imitations. Winner is quick to soft-pedal the difference, making the accountability and communion enabled by confession a mere matter of confessing “to a brother or sister.” But Ms. Winner’s target audience is, as she shows again and again with her statistics and examples, far too weak to be left to pull itself up by its own bootstraps. At least she recommends breaking down age segregation in churches and one’s friendships. Yet this is easier said than done: most churches and the general culture are structurally predisposed to discourage and disable any attempt to eliminate the segregation required by our mass-media and marketting machinery with their so-called “demographics.”
The problem ultimately is that Winner samples tradition the way she likely samples artesian bread at the hip organic corner market. She may be “in” a tradition (for a while), but she is not of it. By her own admission, Winner is still a fairly new Christian. And as she notes, “conversion makes one a new Christian, not a mature one.” Learning “new Christian habits took time. Indeed, it is still going on.” Yet she also explicitly states, “this is a book about ethics.” With this combination I judge that Winner has scored a triumph in the genre of moderately harmful Evangelical pabulum. Her efforts to have it both ways—to offer significant ethical counsel to a wide audience and to hide from responsibility behind the excuse of a flawed existence—is pathetic on its face. Yes, she has good intentions and wants to help people, so she is a good good person and we should say goody goody things about her. Most Christian commentators have assumed that because she is young, inexperienced in marriage and Christianity, they should lower standards and “be nice” when she assumes the role of Evangelical ethicist, moral guide, or public intellectual. No, we should recognize she is a fish out of water. She is a historian, not a theologian. So what exactly justifies her book’s existence? The mere fact that she can trade on a name established with two memoirs with barely more than two decades of life on earth to write about? Rubbish! Ms. Winner has a PhD (or almost) in American religious history and is rumored to be seeking ordination in the Episcopal Church after a stint of study at Duke, home of America’s Tower of Isengard. (A better view is here.) Rigorous accountability is quite in order. I’ll leave the usual backslapping Babbitry to the Evangelicals. Would that they would stop claiming to speak for all Christians though!
It is a fact that Winner ignores very relevant Christian teachings of which she is aware. It is fact that she endorses a finessed interpretation of those teachings which is condemned by their custodians. It is a fact—and also relevant to her topic—that many Evangelicals and ex-evangelicals agree with those teachings. It is further relevant that Winner’s finessed interpretation of Catholic doctrine (and Wendell Berry for that matter) runs counter to her main philosophical argument against “individualism” and in favor of “community.” Christians and especially Catholics do not need such bad counsel, “companionship for the journey,” and weakness masquerading as strength.
Thus, Winner is guilty of unjustifiable and irresponsible omissions, and she is also encouraging Catholics to sin. I am quite sure Ms. Winner knows all this, though she may labor to deny and finesse the facts.
It may be that Ms. Winner’s book is a shining jewel amidst the mud of popular Evangelical sexual ethics literature. It may be that her “unself-righteousness” is not simply due to her talent for creative autobiographical subliminal arrogance and that she makes exciting references to “secular” pop culture. However, it troubles me that it doesn’t trouble any “popular” Christians to find such things so supremely important. Since Christ left the planet, many Christians (predominantly known as catholics) greater than Winner and I have written about sexuality and ethics. Winner claims her book is for all Christians, but does she really break out of the evangelical ghetto? Will a pleasing self-representation and pop-culture references be sure to make her book a lasting classic?
Here is the root problem Winner and the whole neo-chastity wave share, aside from the fact that they think “youths” need something they already know to be told to them in a special way by a special kind of person for the Christian establishment to feel like it might have a chance of influencing their behavior. What moral calumny!
Winner herself realizes that preaching chastity in a newer, better way is not sufficient because her counsel concerns a subject that is not merely or primarily intellectual. Thus she rightly asserts the necessity of self-discipline coming out of membership in and loyalty to the rule and authority of a community, albeit in the vague and attenuated sense of that word today in the decadent west. This is an insight common to all religions and civilizations that have served to order humanity for any decent length of time. The Catholic church, particularly through celibate monastics, is the primary site of the development of this insight for Christianity–as Winner notes. It is worth thinking about why something so rich, old and yet living has been lost to so many and appears only distantly in books like Real Sex.
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel 2.3.