In the past few years, particular attention has been given to sex at Harvard
and Yale. In 2004, sophomores Camilla Hrdy and Katharina Cieplak-von Baldegg
decided to start a magazine entitled H-Bomb, which the Harvard
Crimson described as a “porn” magazine. The premiere
issue included erotic fiction, nude photos and poetry about sex. In 2004,
Eric Rubenstein, a Yale senior aiming for a Hollywood film career, organized
the university’s first Sex Week. On one hand, these efforts are
helping to address a topic of almost ubiquitous interest, but what view
of sex is being communicated?
Sex is an alluring topic, yet the whole picture of what sex
entails is seldom communicated in our popular culture. During orientation
Princeton University presents a mandatory session for freshmen called
“Sex on a Saturday Night” that tries to address the reality
of sex in college, warning of such dangers like date rape. Yet one program
can only hope to offer a cursory treatment of this topic and leaves
some important questions and perspectives about sex unanswered. This
past year, the newly formed Anscombe Society, the self-proclaimed pro-life,
pro-sex, pro-woman group, tried to address this deficiency by requesting
that the University include a chastity option during orientation. The
Anscombe Society addressed the need to have dialogue encompassing all
view points presented at the university regarding sex, a proposition
that I could not agree with more.
Too often, discussions on sex—whether at Harvard, Yale or Princeton
or in mainstream media—are driven by prevailing cultural attitudes
that assert that sex is free—free from emotional, relational,
and societal attachment or responsibility. Liberated by the sexual revolution,
revolutionized by the psychology of Sigmund Freud, sex has become primarily
about pleasure. This notion of guilt-free, “Sex in the City”-fashioned
sex is alluring, uncomplicated, provocative, but in reality, unworkable
and deeply damaging. The story that often goes unheard on campus is
that sex is not as simple as the popular culture would have you believe.
Rather, it can create deep emotional scars that are anything but liberating.
We are in desperate need of a holistic sex education on campus, one
that will speak the hard but tested truth that sex is much more than
just an act of pleasure, but the fruit of committed, covenanted love.
Why is it that people who engage in sex for the first time do not see
it as simply recreational pleasure, like soccer or swimming? Such people
are often surprised by the feelings of dependency and attachment that
they feel afterwards. If sex is indeed free, then why is it that many
people struggle with feelings of deep resentment? Some consciously or
subconsciously act as if it never happened and feel a psychological
need to block it out of memory. Many of these responses are self-defense
mechanisms as Jennifer Roback Morse, a contributor to Yale’s Sex
Week Magazine, writes in The American Enterprise, “We
might feel like a chump because the whole experience mattered more to
us than to the other person. If we allow sex to mean a lot, we leave
ourselves more open to being hurt. A person might resist letting sex
mean very much—by holding back, protecting herself from the potential
bad feelings that flow from vulnerability. But in the process, we’ve
‘protected’ ourselves from many potential good feelings
as well.” 1
Let’s face it. We are schizophrenic when it comes to sex. Our
culture touts free sex, but in reality life just does not seem to work
this way. Sex is not free. There is a cost and a sanctity to sex. The
almost inexplicable attachment or resentment or insecurity that arises
from sex leaves the individual enslaved. Let me attempt to exemplify
our culture’s schizophrenia. Imagine a college student, Bob, who
goes out to the street and after a few drinks begins to “hook
up” with Jill. Things begin to steam up, but Jill says, “I
think we should cool it down.” Bob says, “Why? We’re
having a good time, right? It’s not like sex is making love to
someone. We’re just two people having a good time with each other.”
The next day, Bob gets a call from his dad who says, “Your mother
and I have decided that we want to be liberated from tradition and have
decided to sleep with other people.” It is difficult to believe
that Bob would respond affirmatively, even encouragingly, saying, “I’m
really happy you feel that way because that’s how I feel too.”
No. The response would be of outrage and of disgust, a sense of violation
and betrayal. Why this moral outrage when they are merely living out
what Bob was preaching the night before? You see, our culture wants
sex to be free, but intuitively, we know that sex is a consecrated form
of love, commitment, and responsibility between two people. Is our culture
right? Is sex free? Sex is either free or it’s part of a larger
reality of committed love. Which one is it?
Some appeal to evolutionary biochemistry to explain the feelings of
attachment that arise in connection with sex. Jennifer Morse explains
how during sex, women secrete a hormone oxytocin which is the same hormone
secreted during the nursing of babies. Some call oxytocin the attachment
hormone, because “this hormone causes us to both relax and connect
with the person we are with. In the aftermath of sex, we relax and commit
to our sex partners. While we are nursing, we relax and connect with
our babies.”2 The argument could be made that the feelings of
attachment are the product of millions of years of evolution and should
be dismissed as survival-increasing chemicals with no deeper significance
than the propagation of our selfish genes. Yet, this explanation is
a bit unsatisfying because it diminishes sex in the larger scope of
human experience and needs. It reduces things like intimacy and romance
to nothing more than chemically-induced illusions in which ultimate
meaning is not found in higher concepts of love and affection, but rather
in our primal instincts of survival. Is this the worldview we must accept
to explain the felt attachments that sex seems to bring? The Christian
tradition communicates something profoundly to the contrary. There is
an inseparable union between body and soul, in which our hormones are
not just meaningless chemical processes but act in concert with the
larger reality in which we live. Pope Benedict XVI’s in his first
encyclical, “Deus Caritas Est” (God is Love) clarifies this
orthodox Christian perspective:
Christian faith, on the other hand, has always considered man a
unity in duality, a reality in which spirit and matter compenetrate,
and in which each is brought to a new nobility. True, eros tends to
rise ‘in ecstasy’ towards the Divine, to lead us beyond
ourselves; yet for this very reason it calls for a path of ascent, renunciation,
purification and healing.
Pope Benedict’s words speak against the cultural view that sex
is merely physical pleasure. He paints the picture of a reality that
extends beyond a reductionistic view of the body and unites the body
to the soul and ultimately to God. In this view, sex points to the reality
of God. The Christian view of sex is inextricably bound to God as our
Creator and Redeemer, and this forms the basis of
a more robust view of sex that accounts for both the experience of attachment
and the innate sense that sex is more than simply pleasure free from
moral responsibility.
Sex is the fruit of covenantal commitment.
God as Creator, defines the significance of sex and in Genesis
2 describes marriage as two becoming “one flesh”, the picture
of sexual union. Sex is by definition the consummation of covenanted
love and it is in this context that sex is fully realized and enjoyed.
Sex unencumbered by attachments is unnatural and emotionally violating.
If we look at sex, two people are bringing together the most vulnerable
and sensitive parts of their bodies. This is not just happening at the
physical level but corresponds to their emotional realities. This vulnerability
can be profoundly good and nurturing if expressed in the security of
commitment and love, as its exposure leads to a deep sense of intimacy
and trust. This level of vulnerability outside the context of commitment
is poisonous, feeding novel and latent paranoia, fear and insecurity.
Sex makes us profoundly vulnerable physically and emotionally. In the
context of marriage, this vulnerability nurtures two people to experience
deep intimacy while sex outside of marriage leads only to a nebulous
sense of dis-ease.
Sex is healing and redemptive.
God is not only our Creator who defines sex but is also our Redeemer
restoring the healing aspects of sex. We all know that most marriages
are far from life-long romances or self-giving love. The reality is
that we are fallen, selfish, self-centered people who love others more
for what they do for us than from a sincere love arising out of a desire
to serve the other. Yet, if we understand God as Redeemer we can see
how sex can be an act of reconciliatory power and love. To understand
this, we need to understand the Christian gospel. The God-Man Christ
was crucified on a cross so that the sins that separated humanity from
God have now been redeemed, paid for. This work of reconciliation becomes
the source of a profound healing through the grace that is given to
those who trust in Him. Our eyes are opened to see His redemptive love
and forgiving power communicated tangibly through the union between
husband and wife, and this for the apostle Paul is admittedly a “profound
mystery” (Ephesians 5:31-33). Sex for the Christian becomes a
deeply redeeming act renewing the heart, empowering a Christ-like, sacrificial,
other-centered love—a love that finds its delight in the joy of
the other. Sex then becomes a reminder of the reality of this redeeming
power that is at work enabling husbands and wives to keep those words
of matrimonial inauguration: “to have and to hold, for better,
for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love
and to cherish, until we are parted by death.” Perhaps this is
why the apostle Paul writes not to withhold sex from one’s spouse
(1 Cor. 7:3) for to do so would hinder a powerful affirmation of God’s
redeeming power and renewing love.
1 “Good Sex: Why we need more of it And a lot less of the bad
stuff”, The American Enterprise (April 2006), 18-29.
2 “Go Organic: Why to Quit Casual Sex,” Sway Magazine.
The Rev. David H. Kim is the director of Manna Christian Fellowship.
He received his M.Div. from Westminster Theological Seminary and is
currently pursuing his Th.M. in Christian Ethics at Princeton Theological
Seminary.