A Better Way to Write About Sexual Ethics, or, Why I'll Never Write About Sex

A Prolegomena To A Non-Existent Series

Why writing about sexual ethics is typically so bad, and a very different way forward for discourse: prayer. With help from Athanasius, Tertullian, and Jesus.

Writing About Sex: A State of the Union

To be frank, I think sex is pretty boring to read about, not only because it’s over-discussed, but it’s gotten fairly predictable. The aim of most discourse on sex is to carve out space for it in the modern world, and approaches its task in one of two ways.

1. Sex as Purely Private Behavior. In this mode, sex is understood as a deeply private act, intrinsic to what a person is, such that any discussion of it defers to the contours of personal identity. In this modality, consent is the floor, but hopefully not all there is.

2. Civic Affordances. In this mode, sex is understood to be one of those things that humans do, and do in a variety of ways, befitting a pluralist society. W/hat is needed, thus, is the creation of laws which prohibit that which is detrimental to the public good, while allowing for the plurality which makes up modern societies.

These two modes of discussion ultimately dovetail together, but first, let’s briefly state how each one wobbles.

The private behavior mode of defense turns on sex as the intimate decision made by two consenting persons. In the process, it tends to make so much of consensual behavior that it frequently makes sex just one more consumer choice, and a choice about what is never entirely clear. But in leaning so hard on the consent argument, it wobbles by not having a way to posit what limits there might be to sex as such. The reason why Jeffrey Epstein is a thing is not only because people’s sexual appetites can make them into vicious predators, but because once you make consent your benchmark, you don’t have a consistent way to push back if a 10 year old says its fine.

Defending sex in the public realm as something to offer civic affordances for also struggles. It’s true that culturally accomodated sexual behaviors have differed wildly across cultures and time, with cultural institutions emerging to help sustain or deter those practices. But a culture making room for something is not the same as it being something which there should be room for. Conventionalist arguments—that morals are cultural conventions—died a hard death in the segregationist South. At this point, consent usually comes along to help out: if a particular population has agreed to the norm, so be it. The contours of accepted sex mark out what it means for a person to be a full member of society.

What is at stake in both of these accounts, I think, is that sex is that which marks a person’s visibility. In speaking of sex, we are speaking of a stand-in for the total sum of a person, and their ability to be seen both as a 1) private person capable of making private choices, and 2) as a public and full member of society.

From the vantage point of Christian ethics, I want to give one cheer to what happens here: sexuality is an intimate part of what a person is, and frequently, it takes form in various ways in particular lives, and across the human spectrum. To take one example from Scripture, in 1 Corinthians 7-8, Paul speaks with specificity about widows, the single, and the married, acknowledging that the shape of sex is not a one-sized-fits-all phenomenon. He writes about allowances for what happens to our bodies over time, and how sex in a marriage in particular moves in rhythms which are fully known only to the two who have been made one. There is, for Paul, a need to acknowledge that sex has something to do with the kinds of people God has made us to be.

But the problems with the two forms of discourse above, I think, are two-fold. In the process of their arguing, they make sex do too much work, trusting that sex will make visible who and what we are.

A Christian account of sex opts for weighing what sex reveals very differently.