This essay is the second in a four-part series. Click here to read part one.
Holly Lawford-Smith has written a thoughtful and provocative piece defending what she calls “sex-negative feminism.” According to this view, “sex,” by which she means “heterosexual sexual intercourse,” or “penetrative sex involving a penis and vagina,” is “morally bad.” Sex is only permissible, she suggests, when it is engaged with the intention to reproduce.
Ironically, this position seems to track an Augustinian strain of Christian sexual ethics, a view that was fiercely attacked by the pioneers of the sexual revolution as being pessimistic about the body, especially with respect to sexual desire and sexual pleasure. It is also a view of sex that Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla) sought to correct by appealing to a deeper understanding of the broader Christian tradition, Scripture, and the human person.
But if Lawford-Smith’s conclusions share something in common with Augustine, her premises do not. Whereas the weight of the Augustinian argument rests upon a deep suspicion of sexual desire and pleasure, Lawford-Smith assures her readers that she has “no issue” with “sexual pleasure, with intimacy, with interpersonal giving and receiving of pleasure,” and that she is not “anti-orgasm or anti-fun.” Instead, her argument rests on what she regards as the injustice of sex to women.
Thus, Lawford-Smith follows second-wave feminists like Andrea Dworkin in highlighting the tension between feminism and the sexual revolution. Feminism seeks to promote the equality and dignity of women, but the sexual revolution, which promotes sexual freedom without commitment, actually results in the domination and abuse of women. But she also shares with third-wave feminists a positive view of sexual desire and sexual pleasure. Her “sex-negative feminism,” then, can be understood as an attempt to better harmonize feminism and the sexual revolution.
In my view, this effort must always fail because the deep premises of feminism and the sexual revolution conflict with one another. It is only by stepping outside the framework set by the sexual revolution and into a wider, richer perspective that feminists will find the harmony of justice and happiness they seek. Such a framework, as I have argued elsewhere, can be found in Karol Wojtyla’s Love and Responsibility, written before he became pope.
In what follows, I hope to show not only why Lawford-Smith’s own arguments for sex-negativism fail, but also why her own premises point to better solution: what we might call “sex-positive personalism.”
Lawford-Smith’s Case for Sex-Negative Feminism
Before critiquing Lawford-Smith’s arguments, I want to note some important propositions I believe she and Wojtyla share: (1) Sexual differences between men and women are binary, biological, and not changeable; (2) Sexual morality involves more than consent, and actions can be morally wrong even when people fully consent to them; (3) Hookup culture, pornography, and prostitution are bad for women; (4) Female sexual pleasure is just as important and valuable as male sexual pleasure; (5) Sex is not “an essential human need,” and “agreeing to sex” should not be the default or expected response of women. Although they both adhere to each of these propositions, taken together, I believe the propositions serve to undermine Lawford-Smith’s “sex-negative feminism,” even as they strongly support Wojtyla’s “sex-positive personalism.”
Now, to her arguments. According to Lawford-Smith, “sexual intercourse,” as opposed to other “sexual activities” not involving intercourse, is “morally bad” because it is (1) “male-centered,” (2) “inegalitarian,” (3) “instrumentalizing,” and (4) “violates negative freedom.” I think Lawford-Smith fails to properly support any of these arguments.
Is Intercourse Male-Centered?
Lawford-Smith’s first claim is that “intercourse is male-centered.” Her argument seems to be that “sex” is historically defined as “intercourse” (rather than sexual activity more broadly) because intercourse “is more conducive to men’s pleasure than to women’s.”
But this seems patently false. Although it is true that men experience physical pleasure more often than women from sexual intercourse, this has nothing to do with the historical definition of sex. Rather, the historical definition of sex is based upon the momentous biological fact of reproductive dimorphism. The human species is divided into males and females whose differences are ordered to mating and to the reproduction and rearing of children. (Notably, the word “sex” is a past participle of the Latin word seco, meaning “to separate” or “divide.”) And there is no reason to think that sexual reproduction pe se is male-centered. If anything, the reverse might be true, since the female body is the center of conception, gestation, and birth.
Here and throughout her argument, Lawford-Smith treats sex in a reductive way, as a matter of mere “pleasure” or “penetration,” independent of its organic and reproductive significance and meaning. She only mentions the reproductive nature of sex at the very end of her essay. There she considers the objection that “intercourse is necessary to reproduction, and reproduction is necessary to the survival of the species.” Her response is that sex might be permissible when “trying to conceive.” Presumably in this case the asymmetrical pleasure of sex is morally acceptable as an unfortunate, unintentional side effect of the intention to procreate. This defense of sex, however, poses its own dangers of instrumentalization, not just in the imagined world of Handmaid’s Tales, but in the very real world of artificial reproductive technology.
In any case, the reductive view of sex leads to a deeper question: Why should we want other persons to be involved in sex at all? If sexual activity, including sex, is simply about pleasure, then masturbation seems perfectly suited to do the work, while eliminating troublesome concerns about equality and justice.
As I have argued elsewhere, if in fact we want other persons involved in sex, it can really only be for one of two reasons: Egoistic power or self-giving love. The false claim of the sexual revolution—namely, that sex severed from comprehensive commitment can be good—ensures that sex will always be about power, putting it in direct conflict with any authentic feminism.
Is Intercourse Inegalitarian?
Lawford-Smith’s second claim is that “Intercourse is Inegalitarian.” Here again Lawford-Smith’s focus is on the asymmetrical physical pleasure men and women experience in intercourse, what she calls “the orgasm gap.” She is right to notice this problem, although it does not necessarily constitute an argument against sex. She notes that, with respect to sexual pleasure, “hookup culture produces exceptionally bad sex for women, and yet is commonplace.” But the logic of this argument, that sex improves with commitment, points to the possibility of good sex with perfect commitment, which we call marriage.
But marriage alone is not enough to make sex good. Wojtyla notices the problem of the “orgasm gap” in 1960, decades before Andrew Dworkin or Holly Lawford-Smith. In Love and Responsibility, he insists that “intercourse must not serve merely as a means of allowing sexual excitement to reach its climax in one of the partners, i.e. the man alone, but that climax must be reached in harmony, not at the expense of one partner, but with both partners fully involved.” Wojtyla adds: “There exists a rhythm dictated by nature itself which both spouses must discover so that climax may be reached by both the man and the woman, and as far as possible occur in both simultaneously.”
Why does Wojtyla encourage not only equality of orgasm, but simultaneity? The reason, as we shall see, is that the deepest meaning and pleasure of sex is not transactional (in the words of the Bob Seeger song, “I used her, she used me, but neither one cared / We were gettin’ our share”); it is unitive.
Remarkably, Lawford-Smith never mentions the reproductive aspects of sexual asymmetry, which would strengthen her argument. The risks and burdens of sexual intercourse are always much higher for women because of their unique reproductive system. Not only is the woman at greater risk of infection due to her internal organs, but, unlike the man, she bears the asymmetrical costs of pregnancy and care for the young child. But here again, it is hard to see how either the sexual revolution, which requires women bear the full cost of sexual asymmetry and encourages them to wage a technological war on their bodies, or sex-negative feminism, which requires them to avoid sex altogether, is the moral solution.
Is Intercourse Instrumentalizing?
Lawford-Smith’s third claim is that “intercourse is instrumentalizing.” To “instrumentalize” means “to use another person as an instrument or tool in the achievement of your ends, rather than to treat them as a person.” Lawford-Smith illustrates this principle with two examples: a porn star who claims that porn sex is “like borrowing somebody’s body to masturbate with” and several males who express indifference to the pleasure of their hookup partners.
While many readers will intuitively recognize immoral instrumentalization in Lawford-Smith’s examples, the reasons are not clear. Buying food at a grocery market involves people using other people for their own private ends, but we don’t think these kinds of market transactions are immoral. Why should sexual transactions, assuming they are voluntary, be any different? Is it because the currency of the exchanges is different? But that cannot be the case. After all, market exchanges always involve different things, such as food for money. Does it have something to do with the currency of pleasure? But purchasing the pleasure of a massage doesn’t seem immoral. Why therefore is the purchase of sexual pleasure immoral?
People typically make exchanges because they value different things. As Lawford-Smith notices with some perplexity, many women keep having non-pleasurable sex, even though they do not receive the same physical pleasure as men. But the reason for this does not have to be some kind of neo-Marxist false consciousness, as she suggests. The simple reason may be that women experience from sex a unique psychic pleasure, such as being thought desirable by a man, or having power over his desire, or even a sense of intimacy. And within the terms of ordinary transactions, it is difficult to see how an exchange of female psychic pleasure (or even money) for male physical pleasure in sex is immoral. If this exchange is wrong, the reason must be that we think sex is different from ordinary transactions, that it is somehow special, that it is not simply about pleasure (physical or psychical) and/or “penetration.”
Does Intercourse Violate Negative Freedom?
Lawford-Smith’s last claim is that “Intercourse violates negative freedom.” Negative freedom typically means freedom from force or fraud, which would exclude consensual acts. But Lawford-Smith argues that consensual intercourse might violate a “weaker version” of negative freedom, insofar as women feel incredible social pressure to say yes to intercourse, which women somehow internalize into a kind of false consciousness. Lawford-Smith invites her female readers to consider how much, if they were by themselves, “penetration of any kind” would be involved in their arousal.
But this argument flounders for the same reason as the previous one. Why can’t the simple explanation for women agreeing to non-pleasurable sexual intercourse be that they receive in exchange other kinds of compensating pleasures? Lawford-Smith acknowledges this possibility, but she doesn’t explain why it is wrong.
Moreover, the default pressure on women to say “yes to sex” seems to be a natural result of the reductive view of sex that Lawford-Smith shares with the sexual revolution. After all, if sex is no more meaningful than a pleasant back scratch, it is difficult to appreciate why women (or anyone) would say no to it.
The Case for Sex-Positive Personalism
I have suggested some reasons why Lawford-Smith’s arguments do not support her conclusion. But her arguments do point to a very different kind of conclusion, what I am calling “sex-positive personalism.” Here, I will lay out the basic steps (see here and here for a more thorough treatment).
Step One: The Personalist Norm. Lawford-Smith states this norm in her treatment of instrumentalization. Put most simply, it states that persons are a kind of intrinsically valuable entity that must never be treated merely as a means to one’s own ends.
Step Two: Human sexuality uniquely involves the whole person. This is a step Lawford-Smith does not entertain, but it seems to be strongly supported both by human experience and law. Why do people feel uniquely violated and traumatized when their sexual parts are touched without their permission, as opposed to other parts of their body? Why do we have special laws for sexual assault, rather than, say, assault of the face? Why do people often feel “used” even in voluntary sexual relations? What is the motivation behind the #MeToo movement?
Sexuality uniquely involves the whole person. This is why “transactions” involving sex are intrinsically different from other transactions, why it is permissible to “rent” one’s hands, for example, but not one’s genitals. It is also the step Lawford-Smith needs to support her claim that voluntary sexual intercourse (in pornography, prostitution, and hookups) is still “instrumentalizing.”
Step Three: Sex is a uniquely organic bodily union. This is merely a biological claim, supported by natural science, and should be the least controversial step in the argument. It means that sex is not merely “penetration.” It is a “reproductive-type act” (although it does not always result in actual reproduction), in which sex organs of a man and woman function and coordinate as parts of a single reproductive whole. This biological reality is like the Rosetta Stone, the interpretive key for making sense of the whole domain of human sexuality.
Step Four: Sex is an organic bodily union of whole persons. This is merely the result of putting the last two steps together, but when it is combined with the first step, it has momentous consequences. For one thing, it means that any attempt to understand or explain human sexual morality in transactional terms is bound to fail. Sex is a coordinated good, like an orchestra, where the good of the parts is found precisely in their contribution to the whole. Marriage, understood as a comprehensive union of persons, is the only context which fully respects the personal reality of sexual intercourse. Sex outside of marriage is intrinsically instrumentalizing and self-alienating. Although sex within marriage can be abusive, all sex outside of marriage is abusive.
This is the conclusion of both Immanuel Kant and Karol Wojtyla, though for slightly different reasons. It is important to notice those differences, since Lawford-Smith seems to be working within the same personalistic moral framework as Kant and Wojtyla.
For Kant, sexual desire is directed to the “sex” of a person, and not towards the person as a human being. But because sex is connected to the whole person, to enjoy only the sex of the person is to treat that person as a thing. “The sole condition on which we are free to make use of our sexual desire,” Kant writes, “depends upon the right to dispose over the person as a whole,” and this happens only in marriage. “Matrimony is an agreement between two persons…to surrender their whole person to the other with a complete right of disposal over it.” And this total right includes therefore the partial “right to use that person’s sexual organs for the satisfaction of sexual desire.”
Among the many problems with Kant’s account of marriage as reciprocal property in persons is that it really doesn’t solve the problem. Sex itself remains an intrinsically instrumentalizing act, even if the instrumentalization is somehow permitted by the total ownership he calls marriage. Notably, Kant has nothing to say about sexual asymmetries within marriage, such as the asymmetry of pleasure, or of reproduction (which, remarkably, he never mentions).
For Wojtyla, on the other hand, sexual desire is not principally a desire for physical or psychic pleasure. It is a desire for a uniquely comprehensive, embodied, intimate union of persons. That union is constituted by mutual self-gift, not reciprocal possession. Sex “consummates” the union of marriage, meaning not only that it completes it, but that it perfects it. Sex is a natural language of the body which says, “I give my whole person to you.” Sex outside of marriage, therefore, is always a lie, with minds and bodies saying opposite things.
Thus, Wojtyla writes that “an actual sexual relationship between a man and a woman demands the institution of marriage as its natural setting, for the institution legitimates the actuality above all in the minds of the partners to the sexual relationship themselves.”
Wojtyla’s account of sex differs from Kant in another important respect: Because sex is self-giving love, Wojtyla is also concerned about sex within marriage. Marriage is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition, for sex to be morally permissible, truly loving, and truly good. Spouses who merely seek their own pleasure in sex wrongfully instrumentalize one another. The same is true of those who engage in sex merely for the sake of reproduction, a point Lawford-Smith misses in her essay.
Wojtyla’s concern for mutual pleasure is not only equality, which would make sex a kind of mutual masturbation rather than a unifying, self-giving act. Rather, the reason is that sexual pleasure is uniquely ecstatic, drawing persons out of themselves. Not without reason has sexual climax been called la petite mort, a “little death,” for it truly involves a kind of death to self. In mutual sexual climax spouses fully give themselves to one another through their bodies.
And this includes males. Lawford-Smith regards penetration in sex as male-centered. But seen through a different lens of experience, the male in sexual intercourse is consumed, enveloped, engulfed. He goes out of himself, and irretrievably loses a part of himself. This should be his gift of self to the woman.
Moreover, the asymmetry of sex for women is not merely pleasure, it is also and even especially the unique vulnerability of her internal reproductive system. Here, too, we can ask whether the radical feminist response to this asymmetry, shared by the sexual revolution, which expects women to deny and artificially suppress their most distinctive biology, corresponds to their dignity or their interests. Here, again, marriage as conceived by Wojtyla supplies what radical feminism and the sexual revolution both lack: a mutual care and concern for the unique sexual asymmetries of both men and women.
Thus, from many of Lawford-Smith’s legitimate concerns we reach a very different conclusion from her sex-negative feminism: Sex is good, but only in marriage. Why? Only in marriage can sex achieve the intrinsically personal meaning of human sexuality, the intimate, embodied union of persons. Only marriage promotes the equality and dignity of women by acknowledging and affirming the truth of sexual asymmetry in the context of life-long commitment. Only marriage provides both men and women the deep, if sometimes difficult, satisfaction and meaning of living in the full personal truth of their bodies, as compared to the false promises of hookups, pornography, and prostitution. Not surprisingly, as sociologist Brad Wilcox reports, both married women and married men are happier, healthier, and wealthier, than their unmarried counterparts.
All in all, there is much I agree with in Lawford Smith’s argument. Indeed, with one small change, we are in perfect agreement: Sex is “a supposedly fun thing you should never do again” …. outside of marriage.
