When I was 11, in the sixth grade, my classmates and I attended a school function called an “assembly.” Except as sixth graders, anytime we had an assembly, we interpreted that as an extra recess, as it was usually the chance to congregate with our best friends in the school auditorium, while we giggled and goofed around about whatever “serious topic” the school had chosen for us to learn (or pretend to vomit over): school lunches and the food pyramid, how to avoid stranger danger, the history of Thanksgiving, Christmas concerts, student government debates (usually about school lunches!)… you get the idea.
And during this one fine assembly, the topic for discussion was Our Changing Bodies and, well, the “birds and the bees”. This, of course, is the king of all topics for kids to point and laugh at uncontrollably. Which is exactly what happened when the school faculty passed out pamphlets with explicit cartoon drawings of how boys and girls physically develop, and which used terms that make most people cringe: erection, vulva, intercourse, ejaculate…yes, all the words that even make adults laugh and cringe as well to this day.
Keeping in mind that I was in sixth grade at the time, I was just starting to notice girls (I no longer believed they had “cooties”), puberty was quickly taking its hold on me, and all while I had almost no understanding about sex. In fact, the little exposure I did have to it – which amounted to one of my friend’s stealing a magazine from his sexually adventurous parents’ porn collection, and then, during a quite memorable recess, quickly flashing pics of couples playing around with each other’s genitals — made me turn green and queasy. How could anyone want to do that with each other? (Again, I was in sixth grade.)
Now, with pamphlet in hand, after having had receiving the elementary school take on the world of sex, I didn’t know whether to feel ashamed about what I had learned, whether I should tell my parents about my school holding that type of assembly in the first place, or just hope that my parents hadn’t done that same “thing” in order to create me. That made me even queasier!
I decided to take that brave step forward and show my parents the pamphlet when I arrived home from school. Judging from the look my parents gave me, they appeared just as queasy as I was about the topic at hand. However, instead of brushing it away, my father came into my room after dinner and we had the more “official” talk on the “birds and the bees”.
Which brings this whole story to what my father emphasized repeatedly throughout his talk with me: “When a man and woman truly fall in-love with each other — and*after* they are MARRIED in the Catholic Church – the two become one under God. And because marriage is a Sacrament, it is first and foremost about building a lasting, sacred relationship with each other, under the eyes of God. To express their union – and for the primary purpose of creating a family – the man and woman have sex. And while sex can be an amazing experience, it should always be about the love between a man and a woman and building a family together.”
Now, imagine giving that same talk to kids in our current day and age: The talk my father gave me, now 37 years ago, turned into an ironically apocalyptic sign – that is, an opposite worldview that would eventually shove away sexual morality and lead us to today: a now heavily secular society filled with broken families, broken thinking, and broken souls.
Why?
Here is one glaring reason – and probably the most significant one: We have replaced the real meaning of sex with a hook-up culture that expects sexual compatibility and experiences to be must-have for a relationship to work.
This doesn’t mean it is wrong to enjoy sex. Sure, sex can feel mind-blowingly pleasurable with a partner who wants to make the best of the experience with you. However, as I once heard Alice Cooper (yes, THE Alice Cooper, who is not only a rock star, but also a devout Christian) say about hyper-focusing on sexual experiences (including in the music industry): Is it really worth potentially turning your whole life upside down, or ripping your family apart, or hurting any future chances at a healthy relationship, just for an orgasm?
Think about it: Should our whole existence, our main purpose in life, be based on how much attention our genitals get? Isn’t this why there are so many sexual perversions in the first place: because we can’t imagine life without making our genitals a priority in it? And is really possible to say there is no correlation between this and the destruction of the nuclear family, the exponential divorce rate, and the mass number of people who become even more jaded because of epidemically perverse behavior across dating apps?
Christopher West, on his YouTube channel, Theology of the Body, takes on this topic with sheer boldness: He does not shy away from calling out the widespread problems with human sexuality in our society. Specifically, and as he covers in my recommended video and reading for this week, West shows that sexual vices in our culture have become so normalized — and which are now compounded with gender identity politics, intersectional feminism, and watered-down understandings of morals and values — we have effectively stripped away much of the value that makes the nuclear family crucially necessary for a healthy society.
By drawing on the *must-read* essay linked below, and also linked in the recommended video, West quotes key points from the essay, by Edward Feser, a professor of Philosophy in Pasadena, California. I have added a few of my own takeaways to this list:
- “The fundamental way in which we are social animals is by being “familial” animals. And sex – both in the sense of there being two sexes, and in the sense of the sexual act – exists for the purpose of creating families.”
- “If we did not reproduce in a way that required fathers and mothers, there would be no males and no females. Hence there would be no sex organs, no sexual arousal, and no sexual act.
- “The making of a new rational social animal is not completed with birth, but only when the children have matured to the point that they are capable of leaving home and beginning families of their own. To have sex is to carry out an action that has all of that as its teleology, just as for a beaver to gnaw at a tree is to carry out an action that has the sheltering of the beaver’s family as its teleology. And in both cases, the larger teleological context determines what counts as healthy or dysfunctional.” (As you will read in the essay, Feser uses other parallels to beavers – which may sound strange at first, but will make even more sense when you read the entire essay).
- “The pleasure of sex has its own teleology, just as the pleasure of gnawing trees or eating nuts and the like does. In both cases, the end or point of the pleasure is to draw the animal toward carrying out an action with which the pleasure is associated. But here too, it is the *whole* teleological picture that must be kept into view, not just the sexual act considered in isolation
(Case in point: I love chocolate protein shakes. And because I love chocolate, I get the added benefit of enjoying it while drinking the protein shake. Yet ultimately, I am drinking the protein shake to build up my health and overall wellbeing – not just so I can have as much chocolate as I want. If I become hyper-focused on chocolate, regardless of what is included with it, then I am only serving the pleasure and not the greater purpose of taking good care of my health.)
- “Repeated indulgence in and rationalization of fornication dulls the intellect’s capacity to see the natural end of sex and the will’s capacity to pursue it, making sexual pleasure an end in itself rather a facilitator of a larger purpose.”
- “One effect (of fornication) has been widespread fatherlessness, which has trapped millions of children in poverty, drug addiction, gang activity, and other criminality.
- “Another effect has been the widespread denial of this reality. To be sure, academic social scientists and political commentators occasionally acknowledge the ill effects of fatherlessness. But very few are willing to draw the conclusion that the Sexual Revolution was a mistake and that the social stigmas it swept away ought to be restored. The tendency is to blame the resulting pathologies on other things – racism, government spending, and so on – when the true cause is starting them in the face.
- “The mainstreaming of fornication as a way of life has also harmed women, and even men. Having made themselves sexually available throughout their fertile years but also practicing contraception and abortion, large numbers of women find themselves without husbands, childless, and lonely when those years are past. Large numbers of men have become aimless and prone to risky behavior without the purpose and discipline that the role of the husband and father provides.
- “The influence of feminism has massively eroded the once commonsense understandings that women are by nature directed toward a maternal/wifely role and men are by nature directed toward a paternal / husbandly role. Transgenderism has eroded this understanding even further, and popularized the idea that sex roles are entirely conventional, fluid, and option.
- “As habituated and rationalized sexual vice becomes widespread, it inevitably takes a toll on the stability of the family, as individuals no longer see it as the end for which sexual desire exists. Instead of seeking to restrain and reform disordered sexual desire in a way that will be conducive to strengthening the institution of the family, they seek to alter the institution of the family in a way that will be conducive to indulging whatever disordered sexual desires they happen to have.”
West discusses this last key bullet in the recommended video – and this point encapsulates the entire issue at hand. And this leads back to my earlier question: “Should our whole existence, our main purpose in life, be based on how much attention our genitals get?”
We are seeing the result of that in real time. Are we ready to restore the true meaning of sex? Are we ready to restore the nuclear family? Do we understand that if we continue on this path, Western society *will* completely collapse?
“Why the Family is Falling Apart”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXsH9OQ4l5A
“The Politics of Chastity” by Edward Feser: https://stpaulcenter.com/07-nv-19-4-feser/