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April 16, 2019 | The Valley Catholic
COMMENTARY
What We Haven’t Got Right About Sex
By Rev. Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Theologian, teacher, award-winning
author, and President of the Oblate
School of Theology in San Antonio, TX
Several years ago, in the question and answer
period after a public lecture, a rather disgruntled
young man asked me a question that carried with it
a bit of attitude: “You seem to write a lot about sex,”
he said, “do you have a particular problem with it?”
My lecture had been on God’s mercy and had never
mentioned sex so his question obviously had its own
agenda. My answer: “I write 52 columns a year and
have been doing that for over 30 years. On average,
I write one column on sex every second year, so that
means I write on sex, on average, every 104 times I
write. That’s slightly less than 1% of the time. Do you
think that’s excessive?”
I highlight this exchange because I’m quite con-
scious that whenever a vowed celibate writes about
sex this will be problematic for some, on both sides of
the ideological spectrum. Be that as it may, by refer-
ring here to two insightful quotes by Gary Gutting,
I want to suggest that our culture would do well to
courageously examine its views on sex to see where
our current ethos regarding sex might be not serving
us well. Here are the quotes:
Writing in an issue of Commonweal (September
23, 2016), Gutting says: “We do, however, need an
ethics of sexuality, and the starting point should
be the realization that sex is not ‘fun’. That is, it’s
not an enjoyable activity that we can safely detach
from things that really matter. Sex isn’t like telling a
joke, drinking good wine, or watching a basketball
game. It’s not just that sex is more intense; it also taps
emotional and moral depths that ordinary pleasures
don’t. Core human values such as love, respect, and
self-identity are always in play. ‘Casual sex’ is a
dangerous illusion. Sex is a problem for us mainly
because we conflate it with fun.”
Two years later, in another issue of Commonweal
(March 19, 2018), commenting on the moral outrage
that sparked the #MeToo movement, he writes: “Our
outrage may seems anomalous, particularly in the
Hollywood context, because the entertainment in-
dustry - along with advertising, the self-help indus-
try, and the ‘enlightened’ intellectual - is a primary
source of the widely accepted idea that sex should
be liberated from the seriousness of moral strictures
and recognized as just another way that modern
people can enjoy themselves. … I’m not a cynic,
but I do think it’s worth reflecting on the tension
between moral outrage over sexual harassment and
the ethics of liberated sexuality. The core problem
is that this ethics endorses the idea that sex should
typically be just another way of having fun. … This
ethics is open of course to the idea that sex can also
be an expression of deep, committed, monogamous
intimacy, but is still sees no problem with sex that
begins and ends as just fun.”
Can sex begin and end as just fun? Many within
our culture today would say yes. It seems this is what
we have evolved to.
In the short space of a half century we’ve wit-
nessed a number of paradigm shifts in how our
culture valuates sex morally. Until the 1950s, our
dominant sexual ethos tied sex to both marriage and
having children. Sex was considered moral when it
was shared inside of a marriage and was open to
conception. The 1960s excised the part about sex be-
ing tied to having children as birth control became
acceptable within the culture. But sex still needed to
be within a marriage. Pre-marital and extra-marital
sex, though prevalent, were still not seen as morally
acceptable.
The 70s and 80s changed that. Our culture came
to accept sex outside of marriage, providing it was
consensual and loving. Sex, in effect, became an ex-
tension of dating. Today’s generation was born and
raised inside that ethos. Finally the 1990s and the
new millennium brought still a more radical shift,
namely, “hook-up” sex, sex where soul, emotion,
and commitment, are deliberately excluded from
the relationship. For many people today, sex can be
understood as purely recreational – and still moral
- purely for fun.
What’s to be said about this? Can sex be purely
for fun? My answer is the same as Gutting’s. Sex
purely for fun doesn’t work because, try as might,
we cannot extricate sex from soul.
In the end, sex just for fun is not fun – except
in fantasy, in ideology divorced from reality, and
in naive novels and movies. For the sensitive, it in-
variably brings heartache, and to the insensitive it
invariably brings hard-heartedness. To everyone it
brings sexual exploitation. Most seriously, it leads to
a certain loss of soul. When soulfulness is not given
its rightful place within sexuality, worse still when it
is deliberately excluded, we end up selling ourselves
short, not properly honoring ourselves or others, and
at the end of the day this results in neither happiness
within ourselves nor proper respect of others.
Soul is a commodity worth protecting, particu-
larly in sex.
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