It's interesting to see people picking up on that line, "Some desires are worse than others," because it's also something that stood out to me and I don't know that I think it's the best framing. Lol it hit me on the raw a bit! I've written a lot, both nonfiction and fiction, about the way sexual desire works kind of like a language, in which the "words" (the desires and the acts) can mean a lot of different things; we use desire to "say" a lot of things, and desire can be expressed in many different ways that aren't immediately obvious.
Imho on some level all (? almost all?) of our longings are longings for God, or at least prepare us to encounter God, and finding ways to express those longings which help us to love others and love God is often better than just trying to have better longings. I know in switching from "desires" to "longings" I'm cutting some corners, but with sexual desire too, I've really found that for myself and many others, trying to have better desires is harmful whereas trying to express our desires better is healing and transformative. "Some desires are worse than others" will mean, for some people, "*Your* desires are worse than others," and imho that framing usually imposes shame without hope. It doesn't actually guide or educate desire.
I'm sure it depends a LOT on which specific desires we're discussing, but I want to at least suggest that "Some desires are worse than others" is a framework which has the potential to foster self-hatred rather than humility, chastity, self-respect, or self-gift.
Is part of the problem the way desires feel like they are who we are, especially sexual ones?
For a non-sexual example, in light of Oscar events, I sometimes have violent desires—little imaginings about a time I would definitely be in the right and could fight someone and it would be ok. And, tbh, I don’t think these are good desires! They might be a longing to get to love justice in a self-sacrificial way (a bit generous to me!) but I do hope to relinquish them.
I think maybe one way to talk about what Christine is focusing on, while also talking about what I care about most lol, is to say you can ask questions at either end of the act-desire spectrum. You can look at the acts you're really performing, the sex you're really having, and ask, "Why am I doing this?" And your answers there might involve everything from love to misogyny to self-harm. I think Christine maybe is trying to give you permission to reject some of your reasons for thinking you have to have sex, or sex of a certain kind. Or you can ask, "What are the possible good expressions of my desires?", in which case you may notice that some of what you're really doing is out of harmony with what you consider good, but the question itself expands your imagination to envision good expressions. And here maybe Christine's work (which I haven't read yet but really want to!!) is about giving you permission to take your own conscience seriously, as well as your own feelings.
I like this question ("What are the possible good expressions of my desires?") very much, since I agree we do nothing except for the sake of a perceived good. But I think there are desires I have that are attenuated enough from their ends that acknowledging them and moving past them feels more appropriate than redirecting them. They just have a very long way to go up the ladder of love!
Arguably, desires rooted in an appreciation of God's created are always a bit further up the ladder than e.g. "Wouldn't it be exciting if violence were just for me to do?"
I don't know if you guys were specifically referring to Climacus here, but I will be That Person to quote it for the purposes of "common knowledge": "There was a man who, having looked on a body of great beauty, at once gave praise to its Creator and after one look was stirred to love God and to weep copiously, so that it was marvelous how something that could have brought low one person managed to be the cause of a heavenly crown for another."
I love both how amazing (TIL that Climacus himself described it as "an astonishing level of chastity.") what's described there is... but also, in my heart, I love to laugh at how alien it sounds. (both the wording, and that it would occur to a person to quickly take that wise action.) It's not mocking laughter, I hope.. just "Huh. It occurred to the guy (possibly Climacus?) to praise God in that situation. Just like I think it occurred to approximately 0 people before that!"
Also, I'm very amused by the wording "Wouldn't it be exciting if violence were just for me to do?" XD I find seeing myself as ridiculous helps me! All of a sudden, I'm not such a serious person, and the allure of the sin is not so captivating.
A lot of this discussion reminds me of the discussion we had a while back about shame. My argument then was that if we feel shame about something, we can't look at it clearly and we can't heal or move past it. Similarly, if we say a desire is 'better' or 'worse' rather than it 'is', can we understand that desire fully?
For *the slap*, it's one thing to say that it was a violent desire. But I think as we dig deeper, we see it was justice, and then we see it was anger, and then we see it was pain, and then we see it was love. That doesn't justify it! As one facebook friend said, "That path does not lead to liberation." What does lead to liberation is humility and honesty and compassion.
Two things I've learned from therapists over the years that resonate with your message: 1) Our brains can either experience shame or learning, but not both at the same time; 2) "Hard" feelings like anger are always protecting "softer" feelings underneath like love and fear.
You wrote: "finding ways to express those longings which help us to love others and love God is often better than just trying to have better longings" but I guess, there are a lot of longings where I really have no idea how you could express them in a way that helps you to love others? I am thinking primarily here of desires for sexual violence or other kinds of violence. I'm not sure how these could be expressed in a way that helps you to love others without just... becoming different desires altogether.
No, that's fair, obviously it depends on what kinds of desire we're talking about! But in this context I didn't get the impression that people were talking about the desire to do violence. With sex specifically I think the "get better desires!" framework is often a bad approach, though even w/r/t sex I'm sure it's sometimes the best or only way.
Yeah, it's interesting, because what I've noticed in this discussion is that some commenters take "some desires are better than others" to be dangerous/unsettling because to them it primarily evokes the desires of LGBT folks. Whereas I (and I think other commenters) have found it more liberating because to us it evokes a totally different set of sexual desires: desires to do things like hit, slap, or choke partners during sex, roleplay exploitative or violent scenarios, or as other commenters mention below, masturbate to teens on Instagram.
And I really do think Christine's permission to rank desires can be important or liberating for some! I have definitely been part of social contexts where I know I would get a huge amount of pushback for suggesting that it's wrong to hit a partner during sex even if both partners consented. It doesn't seem like much of a leap from there that some women feel pressured to consent to actually doing acts like this under a pretext that the desire itself is normal and healthy and it would be wrong to stigmatize it.
lol I think we're nearing the limits of what Leah wants to discuss on her substack but fwiw when I said I'd written fiction about the wide range of things people can do with desires, s/m was one of the desires in question. It seems like there's a big difference in how "Some desires are worse than others" comes across if you have the worse desires vs. if you need permission to say you do not have the worse desires. If you have them, the worse-desires framing is (imho!) usually going to provoke more shame and (/therefore) defensiveness than hope or guidance.
"What kind of sex-ed goes beyond just consent to focus on willing the good of the other?"
I think the next move beyond "safe sex" and "consensual sex" should be "wise sex." This would incorporate the first two but would also focus on responsibility for the well-being of one's partner and oneself, and any others whose lives might be affected by this sexual relationship. For the latter, I'm mostly thinking of any children one might conceive or might already have, but it would also encompass things like not being the person a cheating spouse cheats with. Some people argue that it's not that person's problem because they're not the one who's breaking a vow; but they're still responsible for their choice to help someone else do it.
I want someone to write a book titled "I & Thou & Sex". Too often I worry that “Some preferences are better or worse than others" is code for targeting gay/lesbian/bi/trans folks. At the same time, sexual practices that treat folks as a means to your own gratification rather than a whole person, an end in themselves, is obviously (imo) unethical.
Then again, in a society where people are exploited in nearly every aspect of their lives, exploitation in the bedroom is unsurprising.
It's interesting that's your first thought, because to me the phrase "Some preferences are better or worse than others" primarily makes me think of BDSM and its accompanied consensual violence during sex, acting out rape fantasies, etc. While in some roundabout way I think that those fall under the umbrella of treating people as a means to an end, they are more obviously wrong because they treat the desire to do wrong and violent things as something to be celebrated or indulged rather than mastered.
In the conversation Christine says, "Some desires are worse than others." I feel like this is one of the pillars of the sexual ideology she's attacking (provoking?) and it's one that can't be criticized. I have it stuck in my head how several years ago someone asked Dan Savage for his opinion about masturbating to images of random teenagers on Instagram, and he basically said that whatever you do in the privacy of your own mind is fine as long as you're not using child pornography. If some desires are worse than others, then a lot of people get offended and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.
Maybe a way to slightly reframe Emba’s point in order to get at this issue a little better is “indulging some desires corrupts you.”
Sure, Dan Savage, no child is actually being harmed by your masturbatory fantasies—but isn’t there a good argument to be made that *you* are being harmed?
Literally just came here to say something like this. A few months ago, I came across a short article in Prevention (I think; that or Reader's Digest) talking about sexual fantasies, and the gist of the article is that nothing is wrong with any fantasy you have, so don't worry about it, period. That bothered me for obvious reasons. Shortly after I saw that, a friend independently brought up her frustration with the same idea, which she encountered while reading a book on OCD (I don't know the title offhand). OCD sufferers who feel insecure in their relationships due to sexual fantasies shouldn't feel disturbed, supposedly; it's fine to have any fantasies about anyone you want, because it's all in your mind.
People with OCD need to be able to distinguish between problematic fantasies and unwanted intrusive thoughts, of course, but this sort of advice is definitely not only being targeted to people with OCD. And it's really odd, at a time when cognitive behavioral therapy is being recommended for many psychological problems, that suddenly we can't see a connection between thinking and behavior when sex comes up. No, not everyone who fantasizes about cheating or rape becomes a cheater or a rapist, but cheaters and rapists are generally going to have done certain kinds of fantasizing before they do anything physically.
On "Where do you encounter 'permission to be unhappy' about the current sexual culture?" the answer for me (as I know it is for some of the other folks here) "In my church."
I wish there were more than that, though. Any time there's a sort of closed monoculture, there's a danger that things inside get twisted, and the true and the essential get confused with what is not important. (Hello, The Village!) And so you get, in the midst of the awesomeness that is Catholic doctrine in general, weird fights about skirts v. pants, etc.
BUT at the same time, the consent-focused culture of the secular modern world is riddled with its own problems. There was that movie a few years back about human beings on a long space journey--one fellow's pod is faulty, and he wakes up early. After a struggle with temptation, he opens another pod--that of a woman he deems to be beautiful--so that he doesn't have to die alone on this long journey. (And maybe, ahem, enjoy a few perks along the way.) So the unfolding drama (spoiler alert!!!!!) is ...
... that while she initially thinks her pod "malfunction" was an accident like his, she eventually discovers he woke her for his own comfort/pleasure/friendship. Eventually she forgives him, and they sort of live happily ever after (or at least as happily as two marooned castaways can). And it was this forgiveness that the commentators on the movie couldn't abide: basically, he opened her pod without her consent, which is the unforgiveable sin in our current secular sexual culture. And that's just--a little weird, that *the victim herself is supposed to not forgive.* That's an odd sort of prudishness, or at least it struck me that way.
All of that is a round about way of saying that one of the problems I see in the current sexual culture is this inability for the secular world and the church to talk to each other in a fruitful way. The church gives me a space to be unhappy about certain things that I believe to be damaging, humanly speaking, e.g., sleeping around. But as long as the church and the world aren't dialoguing with each other (for lack of a better phrase) on these topics, Catholics like me are stuck in a weird place where both spaces seem slightly twisted and out of joint.
To your second question - in my experience, it's really helpful to have rules outside of oneself. Rules obviously can be done poorly but when done well they serve as a protection, especially for people who are more vulnerable (and I would include having a less assertive personality as a vulnerability). I remember in high school, a friend of mine wanted to copy my homework, and I was able to appeal to the morality we were both expected to live by, which protected me because I don't think I would have had the gumption to say no on my own authority. At one job I had in college, I turned down sex more than once because my answer was a flat no for which I (being a really awkward person to begin with) could rely on my religion. It wasn't an evaluation of the man who asked me or a decision I could be persuaded from. It was just plain no and that was the end of it, no matter how awkward I was about it. I didn't need gumption or self confidence or am assertive personality - I had none of these. Anyway, the guy that asked me first actually became one of my best friends at that job and I think it helped that I drew a clear line, because there was no "will she or won't she" it was just no, so let's talk about other things, and there are a lot of other things that can be talked about.
But again, rules can be done badly, and a good set of rules has a good and defensible philosophy behind it. Rules should not be the be all end all of sex ed, but we should also understand that teenagers are not going to grasp concepts with fully formed adult brains. I'm all for willing the good of the other, but without a certain level of maturity, it's hard to make that practical. Should I say yes because that will make him happy, even if it's a sacrifice for me? How is that different than donating my ice cream money to refugees? If I say no, am I being selfish? I couldn't have navigated those questions as a teenager and I don't expect many others could, either.
You know something else? It's okay to be awkward. So much of our society villanizes awkwardness. Teenagers (and others!) need to be told that social fluency is not the greatest good. If you don't want to have sex, it's better to say no awkwardly than to say yes and be cool. Even when we heroize (is that a word?) people who "swim against the current," they're portrayed as self-confident and clear-headed. But a lot of swimming against the tide makes you question yourself and feel uncomfortable, and it is totally acceptable to pay with social discomfort if that's what it costs to avoid something that is wrong, or that you just don't want to do.
I thought about a recent NYT Michelle Goldberg essay discussing the book. A quote from it:
"The problem — and I doubt Emba would disagree with this — is that many women are still embarrassed by their own desires, particularly when they are emotional, rather than physical."
My thoughts:
But isn't part of the problem that wanting romance and emotional connection before sex is seen as hopelessly naive, prudish, and conservative for this day and age? The irony is that sex positivity, as per the theorists, was supposed to be broad enough to include liberal as well as conservative choices. But that isn't how it worked in reality.
The one place where I see this being addressed, is not in a place many might think of or even be interested in.
It's in romance novels, and especially when they are on the conservative leaning side in terms of writing. Cultivating positive relationships as part of emotional intimacy, long before physical intimacy even becomes an issue, and that is even if the book even goest thre.
Maybe if more men and women were reading romance novels and not porn the reality would be different.
"But isn't part of the problem that wanting romance and emotional connection before sex is seen as hopelessly naive, prudish, and conservative for this day and age?"
I honestly don't know if it is, or if popular portrayals and hand-wringing articles just make it seem that way. (To be clear, I'm not counting this article in that assessment because it's about a different, though related, subject.)
I don't really know anyone of just-starting-to-date age IRL, but I play a video game that has a large Gen Z fanbase and I talk to the other players a lot. I certainly don't get the sense from them that wanting romance is naive, prudish, etc. They're not at all conservative, and they're a pretty romantic bunch. (This is a game where fan interpretations of the characters actually make up a large proportion of the content. It's complicated. But the point is, people are constantly writing romantic, loving interpretations of the characters' relationships.)
Now, that's a fairly specific group but to the extent the mentality you're talking about exists, it's far from universal, even among the most liberal/progressive young people. How all this manifests in their own lives I can't say, but the desire for romance is there and they're open about it.
Great conversation - thank you for putting this together for us! I look forward to reading her book. It seems like it would pair well with sociologist Mark Regnerus' book "Cheap Sex".
I would also say that, having learned more about they "whys" of NFP (as a Protestant!) I have come to see how much more wholistic and relational it approaches the good of sex in marriage. It's a daily and monthly ongoing conversation. It heightens the awareness of the good of the other in ways that sterilizing sex out of convenience (either temporarily or permanently) does not always do for a marriage. I've come to admire the approach which forces the unity and and communication of a married couple in beautiful, challenging ways.
I wish more Protestants considered married sex in more wholistic ways such as this — seeing the benefits of increased communication and learning of your spouse over merely "solving the problem of fertility." Having to learn the good of the other in ways that are not convenient, but sow rewards in other ways.
Fascinating transcript; I look forward to listen to the whole. I read Emba's book a few weeks back, and have a review coming out in Liberty Fund's Law and Liberty magazine. I'll be sure to share the link via The Herring Review when it's out. https://herringreview.substack.com/.
It's interesting to see people picking up on that line, "Some desires are worse than others," because it's also something that stood out to me and I don't know that I think it's the best framing. Lol it hit me on the raw a bit! I've written a lot, both nonfiction and fiction, about the way sexual desire works kind of like a language, in which the "words" (the desires and the acts) can mean a lot of different things; we use desire to "say" a lot of things, and desire can be expressed in many different ways that aren't immediately obvious.
Imho on some level all (? almost all?) of our longings are longings for God, or at least prepare us to encounter God, and finding ways to express those longings which help us to love others and love God is often better than just trying to have better longings. I know in switching from "desires" to "longings" I'm cutting some corners, but with sexual desire too, I've really found that for myself and many others, trying to have better desires is harmful whereas trying to express our desires better is healing and transformative. "Some desires are worse than others" will mean, for some people, "*Your* desires are worse than others," and imho that framing usually imposes shame without hope. It doesn't actually guide or educate desire.
I'm sure it depends a LOT on which specific desires we're discussing, but I want to at least suggest that "Some desires are worse than others" is a framework which has the potential to foster self-hatred rather than humility, chastity, self-respect, or self-gift.
Is part of the problem the way desires feel like they are who we are, especially sexual ones?
For a non-sexual example, in light of Oscar events, I sometimes have violent desires—little imaginings about a time I would definitely be in the right and could fight someone and it would be ok. And, tbh, I don’t think these are good desires! They might be a longing to get to love justice in a self-sacrificial way (a bit generous to me!) but I do hope to relinquish them.
Hmm, maybe that is part of it, I'm not sure!
I think maybe one way to talk about what Christine is focusing on, while also talking about what I care about most lol, is to say you can ask questions at either end of the act-desire spectrum. You can look at the acts you're really performing, the sex you're really having, and ask, "Why am I doing this?" And your answers there might involve everything from love to misogyny to self-harm. I think Christine maybe is trying to give you permission to reject some of your reasons for thinking you have to have sex, or sex of a certain kind. Or you can ask, "What are the possible good expressions of my desires?", in which case you may notice that some of what you're really doing is out of harmony with what you consider good, but the question itself expands your imagination to envision good expressions. And here maybe Christine's work (which I haven't read yet but really want to!!) is about giving you permission to take your own conscience seriously, as well as your own feelings.
I like this question ("What are the possible good expressions of my desires?") very much, since I agree we do nothing except for the sake of a perceived good. But I think there are desires I have that are attenuated enough from their ends that acknowledging them and moving past them feels more appropriate than redirecting them. They just have a very long way to go up the ladder of love!
Arguably, desires rooted in an appreciation of God's created are always a bit further up the ladder than e.g. "Wouldn't it be exciting if violence were just for me to do?"
I don't know if you guys were specifically referring to Climacus here, but I will be That Person to quote it for the purposes of "common knowledge": "There was a man who, having looked on a body of great beauty, at once gave praise to its Creator and after one look was stirred to love God and to weep copiously, so that it was marvelous how something that could have brought low one person managed to be the cause of a heavenly crown for another."
I love both how amazing (TIL that Climacus himself described it as "an astonishing level of chastity.") what's described there is... but also, in my heart, I love to laugh at how alien it sounds. (both the wording, and that it would occur to a person to quickly take that wise action.) It's not mocking laughter, I hope.. just "Huh. It occurred to the guy (possibly Climacus?) to praise God in that situation. Just like I think it occurred to approximately 0 people before that!"
Also, I'm very amused by the wording "Wouldn't it be exciting if violence were just for me to do?" XD I find seeing myself as ridiculous helps me! All of a sudden, I'm not such a serious person, and the allure of the sin is not so captivating.
A lot of this discussion reminds me of the discussion we had a while back about shame. My argument then was that if we feel shame about something, we can't look at it clearly and we can't heal or move past it. Similarly, if we say a desire is 'better' or 'worse' rather than it 'is', can we understand that desire fully?
For *the slap*, it's one thing to say that it was a violent desire. But I think as we dig deeper, we see it was justice, and then we see it was anger, and then we see it was pain, and then we see it was love. That doesn't justify it! As one facebook friend said, "That path does not lead to liberation." What does lead to liberation is humility and honesty and compassion.
Two things I've learned from therapists over the years that resonate with your message: 1) Our brains can either experience shame or learning, but not both at the same time; 2) "Hard" feelings like anger are always protecting "softer" feelings underneath like love and fear.
You wrote: "finding ways to express those longings which help us to love others and love God is often better than just trying to have better longings" but I guess, there are a lot of longings where I really have no idea how you could express them in a way that helps you to love others? I am thinking primarily here of desires for sexual violence or other kinds of violence. I'm not sure how these could be expressed in a way that helps you to love others without just... becoming different desires altogether.
No, that's fair, obviously it depends on what kinds of desire we're talking about! But in this context I didn't get the impression that people were talking about the desire to do violence. With sex specifically I think the "get better desires!" framework is often a bad approach, though even w/r/t sex I'm sure it's sometimes the best or only way.
Yeah, it's interesting, because what I've noticed in this discussion is that some commenters take "some desires are better than others" to be dangerous/unsettling because to them it primarily evokes the desires of LGBT folks. Whereas I (and I think other commenters) have found it more liberating because to us it evokes a totally different set of sexual desires: desires to do things like hit, slap, or choke partners during sex, roleplay exploitative or violent scenarios, or as other commenters mention below, masturbate to teens on Instagram.
And I really do think Christine's permission to rank desires can be important or liberating for some! I have definitely been part of social contexts where I know I would get a huge amount of pushback for suggesting that it's wrong to hit a partner during sex even if both partners consented. It doesn't seem like much of a leap from there that some women feel pressured to consent to actually doing acts like this under a pretext that the desire itself is normal and healthy and it would be wrong to stigmatize it.
lol I think we're nearing the limits of what Leah wants to discuss on her substack but fwiw when I said I'd written fiction about the wide range of things people can do with desires, s/m was one of the desires in question. It seems like there's a big difference in how "Some desires are worse than others" comes across if you have the worse desires vs. if you need permission to say you do not have the worse desires. If you have them, the worse-desires framing is (imho!) usually going to provoke more shame and (/therefore) defensiveness than hope or guidance.
"What kind of sex-ed goes beyond just consent to focus on willing the good of the other?"
I think the next move beyond "safe sex" and "consensual sex" should be "wise sex." This would incorporate the first two but would also focus on responsibility for the well-being of one's partner and oneself, and any others whose lives might be affected by this sexual relationship. For the latter, I'm mostly thinking of any children one might conceive or might already have, but it would also encompass things like not being the person a cheating spouse cheats with. Some people argue that it's not that person's problem because they're not the one who's breaking a vow; but they're still responsible for their choice to help someone else do it.
I want someone to write a book titled "I & Thou & Sex". Too often I worry that “Some preferences are better or worse than others" is code for targeting gay/lesbian/bi/trans folks. At the same time, sexual practices that treat folks as a means to your own gratification rather than a whole person, an end in themselves, is obviously (imo) unethical.
Then again, in a society where people are exploited in nearly every aspect of their lives, exploitation in the bedroom is unsurprising.
It's interesting that's your first thought, because to me the phrase "Some preferences are better or worse than others" primarily makes me think of BDSM and its accompanied consensual violence during sex, acting out rape fantasies, etc. While in some roundabout way I think that those fall under the umbrella of treating people as a means to an end, they are more obviously wrong because they treat the desire to do wrong and violent things as something to be celebrated or indulged rather than mastered.
In the conversation Christine says, "Some desires are worse than others." I feel like this is one of the pillars of the sexual ideology she's attacking (provoking?) and it's one that can't be criticized. I have it stuck in my head how several years ago someone asked Dan Savage for his opinion about masturbating to images of random teenagers on Instagram, and he basically said that whatever you do in the privacy of your own mind is fine as long as you're not using child pornography. If some desires are worse than others, then a lot of people get offended and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.
Maybe a way to slightly reframe Emba’s point in order to get at this issue a little better is “indulging some desires corrupts you.”
Sure, Dan Savage, no child is actually being harmed by your masturbatory fantasies—but isn’t there a good argument to be made that *you* are being harmed?
Literally just came here to say something like this. A few months ago, I came across a short article in Prevention (I think; that or Reader's Digest) talking about sexual fantasies, and the gist of the article is that nothing is wrong with any fantasy you have, so don't worry about it, period. That bothered me for obvious reasons. Shortly after I saw that, a friend independently brought up her frustration with the same idea, which she encountered while reading a book on OCD (I don't know the title offhand). OCD sufferers who feel insecure in their relationships due to sexual fantasies shouldn't feel disturbed, supposedly; it's fine to have any fantasies about anyone you want, because it's all in your mind.
People with OCD need to be able to distinguish between problematic fantasies and unwanted intrusive thoughts, of course, but this sort of advice is definitely not only being targeted to people with OCD. And it's really odd, at a time when cognitive behavioral therapy is being recommended for many psychological problems, that suddenly we can't see a connection between thinking and behavior when sex comes up. No, not everyone who fantasizes about cheating or rape becomes a cheater or a rapist, but cheaters and rapists are generally going to have done certain kinds of fantasizing before they do anything physically.
On "Where do you encounter 'permission to be unhappy' about the current sexual culture?" the answer for me (as I know it is for some of the other folks here) "In my church."
I wish there were more than that, though. Any time there's a sort of closed monoculture, there's a danger that things inside get twisted, and the true and the essential get confused with what is not important. (Hello, The Village!) And so you get, in the midst of the awesomeness that is Catholic doctrine in general, weird fights about skirts v. pants, etc.
BUT at the same time, the consent-focused culture of the secular modern world is riddled with its own problems. There was that movie a few years back about human beings on a long space journey--one fellow's pod is faulty, and he wakes up early. After a struggle with temptation, he opens another pod--that of a woman he deems to be beautiful--so that he doesn't have to die alone on this long journey. (And maybe, ahem, enjoy a few perks along the way.) So the unfolding drama (spoiler alert!!!!!) is ...
... that while she initially thinks her pod "malfunction" was an accident like his, she eventually discovers he woke her for his own comfort/pleasure/friendship. Eventually she forgives him, and they sort of live happily ever after (or at least as happily as two marooned castaways can). And it was this forgiveness that the commentators on the movie couldn't abide: basically, he opened her pod without her consent, which is the unforgiveable sin in our current secular sexual culture. And that's just--a little weird, that *the victim herself is supposed to not forgive.* That's an odd sort of prudishness, or at least it struck me that way.
All of that is a round about way of saying that one of the problems I see in the current sexual culture is this inability for the secular world and the church to talk to each other in a fruitful way. The church gives me a space to be unhappy about certain things that I believe to be damaging, humanly speaking, e.g., sleeping around. But as long as the church and the world aren't dialoguing with each other (for lack of a better phrase) on these topics, Catholics like me are stuck in a weird place where both spaces seem slightly twisted and out of joint.
To your second question - in my experience, it's really helpful to have rules outside of oneself. Rules obviously can be done poorly but when done well they serve as a protection, especially for people who are more vulnerable (and I would include having a less assertive personality as a vulnerability). I remember in high school, a friend of mine wanted to copy my homework, and I was able to appeal to the morality we were both expected to live by, which protected me because I don't think I would have had the gumption to say no on my own authority. At one job I had in college, I turned down sex more than once because my answer was a flat no for which I (being a really awkward person to begin with) could rely on my religion. It wasn't an evaluation of the man who asked me or a decision I could be persuaded from. It was just plain no and that was the end of it, no matter how awkward I was about it. I didn't need gumption or self confidence or am assertive personality - I had none of these. Anyway, the guy that asked me first actually became one of my best friends at that job and I think it helped that I drew a clear line, because there was no "will she or won't she" it was just no, so let's talk about other things, and there are a lot of other things that can be talked about.
But again, rules can be done badly, and a good set of rules has a good and defensible philosophy behind it. Rules should not be the be all end all of sex ed, but we should also understand that teenagers are not going to grasp concepts with fully formed adult brains. I'm all for willing the good of the other, but without a certain level of maturity, it's hard to make that practical. Should I say yes because that will make him happy, even if it's a sacrifice for me? How is that different than donating my ice cream money to refugees? If I say no, am I being selfish? I couldn't have navigated those questions as a teenager and I don't expect many others could, either.
You know something else? It's okay to be awkward. So much of our society villanizes awkwardness. Teenagers (and others!) need to be told that social fluency is not the greatest good. If you don't want to have sex, it's better to say no awkwardly than to say yes and be cool. Even when we heroize (is that a word?) people who "swim against the current," they're portrayed as self-confident and clear-headed. But a lot of swimming against the tide makes you question yourself and feel uncomfortable, and it is totally acceptable to pay with social discomfort if that's what it costs to avoid something that is wrong, or that you just don't want to do.
I thought about a recent NYT Michelle Goldberg essay discussing the book. A quote from it:
"The problem — and I doubt Emba would disagree with this — is that many women are still embarrassed by their own desires, particularly when they are emotional, rather than physical."
My thoughts:
But isn't part of the problem that wanting romance and emotional connection before sex is seen as hopelessly naive, prudish, and conservative for this day and age? The irony is that sex positivity, as per the theorists, was supposed to be broad enough to include liberal as well as conservative choices. But that isn't how it worked in reality.
The one place where I see this being addressed, is not in a place many might think of or even be interested in.
It's in romance novels, and especially when they are on the conservative leaning side in terms of writing. Cultivating positive relationships as part of emotional intimacy, long before physical intimacy even becomes an issue, and that is even if the book even goest thre.
Maybe if more men and women were reading romance novels and not porn the reality would be different.
"But isn't part of the problem that wanting romance and emotional connection before sex is seen as hopelessly naive, prudish, and conservative for this day and age?"
I honestly don't know if it is, or if popular portrayals and hand-wringing articles just make it seem that way. (To be clear, I'm not counting this article in that assessment because it's about a different, though related, subject.)
I don't really know anyone of just-starting-to-date age IRL, but I play a video game that has a large Gen Z fanbase and I talk to the other players a lot. I certainly don't get the sense from them that wanting romance is naive, prudish, etc. They're not at all conservative, and they're a pretty romantic bunch. (This is a game where fan interpretations of the characters actually make up a large proportion of the content. It's complicated. But the point is, people are constantly writing romantic, loving interpretations of the characters' relationships.)
Now, that's a fairly specific group but to the extent the mentality you're talking about exists, it's far from universal, even among the most liberal/progressive young people. How all this manifests in their own lives I can't say, but the desire for romance is there and they're open about it.
I've seen research that Gen Z is more empathetic than folks from other generations, and I don't find that to be surprising at all.
Great conversation - thank you for putting this together for us! I look forward to reading her book. It seems like it would pair well with sociologist Mark Regnerus' book "Cheap Sex".
I would also say that, having learned more about they "whys" of NFP (as a Protestant!) I have come to see how much more wholistic and relational it approaches the good of sex in marriage. It's a daily and monthly ongoing conversation. It heightens the awareness of the good of the other in ways that sterilizing sex out of convenience (either temporarily or permanently) does not always do for a marriage. I've come to admire the approach which forces the unity and and communication of a married couple in beautiful, challenging ways.
I wish more Protestants considered married sex in more wholistic ways such as this — seeing the benefits of increased communication and learning of your spouse over merely "solving the problem of fertility." Having to learn the good of the other in ways that are not convenient, but sow rewards in other ways.
Fascinating transcript; I look forward to listen to the whole. I read Emba's book a few weeks back, and have a review coming out in Liberty Fund's Law and Liberty magazine. I'll be sure to share the link via The Herring Review when it's out. https://herringreview.substack.com/.