This essay is the last in a four-part series. Click here to see all four parts.
I want to thank Holly Lawford-Smith for this improbable exchange, and Fairer Disputations for hosting it. If a conservative Catholic man and a radical feminist woman can have a civil, public conversation about the morality of sex, there is still hope for liberal democracy.
Lawford-Smith and I share many significant areas of agreement. In her conclusion, she expresses concerns that I strongly share: “the subordinate status of women and the role sex plays in the maintenance of that status,” “expectations about sex,” “cultural representation of sex in film and television,” and “the possibility of exchanging sex for money, in prostitution and pornography.”
Throughout my professional career, I have given close attention these matters, beginning with my first publication (a letter to the editor of The Weekly Standard protesting Denis Prager’s endorsement of pornography) and continuing to the present in a course I designed and teach every year at Hillsdale College called “Philosophy of Love, Sex, and Marriage.” In that course we treat, among other topics, sexual ethics, feminism, pornography, prostitution, hookup culture, and marriage, from a philosophical perspective.
Philosophy, not Theology
I want to stress the word “philosophy” here, since in her final sentence Lawford-Smith suggests that my “vision of sex” rests upon theological grounds which “atheists, feminists, lesbian and gay couples, and those who feel no need to have their relationships recognized by the church or the state” have no reason to accept.
I am confused by this, since my arguments were purely philosophical in nature, and did not appeal to any theological sources. Neither the words “God” nor “church” appear anywhere in the essay. It is true that I rely upon arguments from a future pope, but Karol Wojtyla had a doctorate in philosophy and was a professor of moral philosophy when he wrote Love and Responsibility, which he describes in his introduction as “by and large, of a philosophical character.”
In fact, Lawford-Smith and I both appeal to the same philosophical premise, the Kantian personalist personalistic norm, which holds that using other people as a mere means to our own ends is morally wrong. But we reach very different conclusions from that premise. Lawford-Smith concludes that penetrative sex is immoral. I conclude that sex is only moral within a loving marriage, which is intrinsically heterosexual, monogamous, permanent, and exclusive. How is that we reach these competing conclusions from the same moral premise?
The reason, I suggested, is that Lawford-Smith is also largely, if not totally, committed to the reductive understanding of sex that was central to the sexual revolution. Although she claims that her “critique of sex is not a response to the sexual revolution,” her critique is based upon it. This, as I understand it, is her “proximate explanation of our current social practices around sex.” Those practices are based on the assumption that sex is merely a natural drive for pleasure, which is the assumption of the sexual revolution. In this view, sex has no intrinsic relationship to reproduction, and it has no intrinsic meaning that requires commitment. It has different meanings for different individuals.
According to this view, all sexual activity, including sex, is transactional. There is nothing special about sex that makes it different than any other commodity in a market exchange. Parties in market exchanges do in some sense “use” each other, but we do not typically regard this use as morally problematic unless it involves force or fraud. In sex, as in other market transactions, partners often have different preferences (for pleasure, power, money, intimacy, and so on) which they hope to satisfy. So long as there is no force or fraud, how can we possibly judge that such an exchange is unjust or immoral?
Lawford-Smith gives great weight in her argument to the asymmetry of physical pleasure between men and women in sex, but there is no reason why exchanges must involve things from the same categories in order to be just. Typically, they do not. The most common exchanges involve cash for commodities or services. What does it matter if both men and women experience psychological pleasure in sex, while only men experiences physical pleasure, if the woman’s psychological pleasure is more valuable to her, is different in kind, or is more intense? Who is Lawford-Smith to judge the morality of this transaction?
In my view, the reductive transactional view of sex simply cannot explain common intuitions about the specialness of sex. Nor can they justify sexual norms beyond consent. So, if one believes sex is somehow special (as Lawford-Smith seems to do), and if one believes that there are sexual norms in addition to consent, as Lawford-Smith clearly does, then that person will have to reject the assumptions of the sexual revolution.
As I have argued elsewhere, we will never get a “kinder, more equitable, more explicitly consensual sexual milieux” within the terms of the sexual revolution. So, if someone wants arguments that fit his or her moral intuitions about the specialness of sex and sexual morality beyond mere consent, he or she will have to think about sex in an entirely different way. The view I am defending is not simply the traditional view of sex, which I have criticized. It is a clarification and correction of that view, and it leads to some surprising results.
The Argument for Sex-Positive Personalism, Revisited
To make clear the necessity for this alternative understanding of sex, it will be useful to return to Kant. Kant concludes that sex is only permissible within marriage, so his conclusions are closer to my own, and further from those of Lawford-Smith. Yet his argument shares some of the same flaws as Lawford-Smith’s argument. Without further steps, the argument fails, but so does his ultimate conclusion. This is because Kant has nothing to say about the morality of sex within marriage, of how spouses should treat one another during sex.
The reason for this is that Kant’s understanding of the nature of sex is remarkably similar to that of the later sexual revolutionaries. For Kant, sex is fundamentally a desire for pleasure; it has no intrinsic relationship to either reproduction or intimacy, neither of which he even mentions. Thus, for Kant, as for Lawford-Smith, it is difficult to see why sex presents a special moral problem, and for Kant, why marriage solves it, since sex within marriage remains an egoistic, transactional good.
As I discussed in my first intervention, I believe Kant’s argument requires two additional premises: (1) There is a singular and intimate connection between human sexuality, especially the sexual organs, and the whole person; and (2) Sex is an organic bodily union. Neither of these premises are theological, and both are fully reasonable.
The first premise accounts for the otherwise strange facts that we have special laws against sexual assault, but not face assault, and it explains the pervasive experience of feeling “used” even when sex is consensual. Lawford-Smith denies this premise. She thinks sex can be separated from the whole person. For her, “sex is different things to different people.” To support this claim, she highlights Bonnie Blue, the apparently unflappable porn star who claims she broke a world record by having sex with 1,067 men in a single day.
It is difficult to know what Lawford-Smith means by this example, since it seems to be in dramatic conflict with Lawford-Smith’s own principles. Indeed, one can hardly find a more salient illustration of the asymmetry in sexual pleasure that Lawford-Smith objects to, or of the degradation of women that the sexual revolution leads to. Yet, remarkably, Lawford-Smith refrains from criticism.
Instead, Lawford-Smith seems to endorse Bonnie Blue’s claim that sex, for her, is merely a “hobby” or “sport.” But why should we take Bonnie Blue at her word? Lawford-Smith has written a book on prostitution. Surely she knows about evidence for the prevalence of psychological dissociation among sex workers, a tendency to detach from themselves in order to deal with fear and pain and to rationalize what they later come to deeply regret. In my estimation, the apparent indifference of a Bonnie Blue is outweighed by the overwhelming voices of sexually used and abused women, and men, across the ages.
The second step that sex is an organic bodily union is merely a scientific claim. But, when paired with the other steps, it turns into a moral claim. For humans, sex has an intrinsically personal and unitive meaning. This is the good at which sexual desire aims. Without this good, sexual desire and sexual pleasure are futile and depersonalizing. This is the meaning of “sex-positive personalism”: sex is good because, and insofar as, it actualizes the comprehensive union of persons.
Lawford-Smith seems to misunderstand the nature of the argument here. It is not that “sex is about reproduction,” as if good sex requires both the intention and the ability to reproduce, much less the fact of reproduction. Although Augustine makes this argument, neither Thomas Aquinas nor Wojtyla follow him here. Rather, the argument is that “sex is about reproductive type acts,” whether or not they actually result in reproduction. Why? Because sex is the only organic bodily union of whole persons. And only the institution of marriage—heterosexual, monogamous, permanent, exclusive—fully respects that personal and biological reality.
According to this argument, sex, involving as it does whole persons, can never be rightly understood or practiced in transactional terms, whether for pleasure or for reproduction. Rather, sex is a coordinated and complex good of self-giving. It is akin to the good of an orchestra, where the individual musicians find their own good through their different, though not necessarily unequal, contributions to the coordinated whole. Egoism in an orchestra, as in sex, destroys the good of both the whole and the part. As I pointed out in my first essay, this good includes the sexual pleasure of both spouses. But spouses should seek the sexual pleasure of each other, not as a transactional good, nor as a matter of equal justice, but as a constituent part of the music of married love.
A Healing Remedy
Lawford-Smith and I share much in common. We also arrive at some dramatic differences. Like Lawford-Smith’s argument that sex is immoral, my sex-positivist argument also reaches an unconventional, even radical, conclusion, especially in today’s moral culture: only married, loving sex is good. All sexual activity apart from this good is bad and immoral. This includes masturbation, same-sex activity, fornication, and, within marriage, selfishness and sodomy.
Doubtless some readers will perhaps find my conclusion even more shocking than Lawford-Smith’s. But it does not appeal to any theological premises. Even those who reject it are capable of understanding the argument. I think they can also appreciate it.
I am convinced that this vision of sex offers the hope, affirmation of personal embodiment, dignity, intimacy, friendship, and meaning that every human being longs for. Only this truth, in all its difficult and shocking beauty, can provide the healing remedy for the millions of victims wounded by the lies of the sexual revolution.
