SEX

In Honor of a Conversation I Had With Josh

Let me float a proposition here: the real difference between liberals and conservatives in this country is that conservatives think sex is very, very important and liberals think sex is essentially trivial. Note what I didn't say. I didn't say that conservatives think sex is dirty and liberals think it's wonderful. Conservatives think some sex is good and some is bad, and so do liberals. They even share some of the same ideas of what makes bad sex. Both sides condemn rape in particular and coercion in general. Both sides condemn adults who force or seduce children or adolescents. Both think deception and cheating in relationships is wrong. Both recognize that sex can be deeply corrupting under at least some circumstances. It's not so much the particulars that are at issue--although some of those are, inevitably, as well--but the centrality of sex to morality. Conservatives think that sex and sexual behavior are at the very heart of what makes us moral or immoral human beings. Liberals think that, except in those few cases that are "bad" sex, sex and sexuality are minor issues that have nothing at all to do with whether we are morally good people.

By now, all six of you who read these essays are probably jumping up and down, ready to kill me, because I've simplified the situation beyond recognition. That's true, to an extent. There are a lot more takes on sex out there than I'm giving weight to here. There are even some conservatives who think sex is dirty, and some liberals who think "if it feels good, do it" is a moral philosophy. There are sex-positive and sex-negative feminists. There are gay advocates of chastity and straight advocates of masturbation only. Tim and Beverly LaHaye--he's one of the founders of the Moral Majority and one of the authors of the Left Behind series; she's his wife and the founder of Concerned Women for America--have written a pair of sex manuals for conservative Christians called Act of Marriage and Act of Marriage After Forty. Andrea Dworkin--who is a gay leftist feminist--wrote Intercourse, which pretty much says all heterosexual sex is equivalent to rape. There are straights, gays, transsexuals, transvestites, sexual healers, polygamists, and the North American Man-Boy Love Association, which everybody thinks is deeply icky, but that conservatives like to pretend liberals support. There are seniors who move in together without getting married because getting married would complicate their Social Security payments. There are teenagers who join True Love Waits and promise never to have sex with anybody but the one person they marry for life. Most Americans still lose their virginity on their senior prom night.

All that said, however, I'll stick with my original assertion: the real difference between liberals and conservatives, at least when it comes to the culture war, lies in the fact that conservatives think sex is desperately important and liberals think sex is trivial. Maybe it's not so surprising that we spend so much time screaming at each other. It's instinctual to raise your voice when you're speaking to somebody who doesn't speak your language. When conservatives and liberals talk about morality, they're not even talking about the same subject.

Let's start where all conversations about sex and public life have to start these days, by looking at the whole damned mess that was Bill and Monica. In a way, the Monica Lewinsky scandal is the paradigmatic public event in the American culture war, and just as important for what didn't happen as for what did. The bare bones of the basic story are not in doubt. Monica Lewinsky was an intern at the White House who had been superficially acquainted with Bill Clinton for some time. Clinton flirted with her--but then, Clinton seems to have flirted with everybody, including potted plants. At some point, one of them--nobody has ever said who--decided to push the "relationship" to the next level. Eventually, Monica was doing things like flipping up her skirt to show the President her thong while she delivered papers to the Oval Office, and letting Bill help her get acquainted with the more esoteric uses of cigars.

As stories go, it didn't amount to much. Something pretty similar could probably be discovered in the careers of half the members of the House of Representatives, Republican as well as Democrat. Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Eisenhower all had much more complicated relationships with mistresses than Clinton had with Lewinsky. Henry Hyde, Newt Gingrich, Dan Burton, Lyndon Johnson, Tim Hutchinson, Bob Dole--powerful men are not famous for their efforts on behalf of marital fidelity. John Kennedy's affair with Judith Campbell Exner compromised national security, and nobody tried to impeach him. Dan Burton's reputation for partying with prostitutes--and his decades-long support of the illegitimate child that resulted from one of his extramarital affairs--hasn't stopped him from thundering about family values on the floor of the House of Representatives. Looking back on it, it's difficult to see what was so special about Clinton's behavior that it required a special prosecutor, an impeachment trial, 435 pages of prurient pettiness, and tens of millions of dollars of the taxpayers' money.

The answer, of course, is that there was nothing so special about Clinton's behavior, and nobody would ever have mentioned it if it hadn't been for the convoluted provisions of Arkansas's sexual harassment law. It wasn't just the fact that the law allowed Paula Jones to sue Clinton for sexual harassment. It was the fact that the law was written in such a way that a plaintiff could provide evidence in her favor by showing that the defendant had a pattern of having sex with employees. It didn't matter if the sex was consensual. It only matter that it happened, and happened often enough to constitute something like a habit. That meant that any sexual contact Clinton had ever had anywhere with any employee at any time, past or present, became relevant information for presentation at trial.

It's unclear how much of this the American public ever got their minds around--a lot of journalists had trouble keeping it straight--but however much it was, it did the work it had to do. It gave Republicans the foundation for claiming that the issue wasn't really Bill Clinton's sex life, but his lying under oath in the Jones trial. It didn't matter what Bill Clinton did or didn't do in his private life, Kenneth Starr claimed. What mattered was that he committed perjury, and perjury is an impeachable offense.

Looking back on it, it's hard to understand how anybody was ever able to make this assertion while keeping a straight face, never mind how they're still able to make it now. The issue may have been "perjury," but all anybody was talking about was sex. Thongs, cigars and fellatio all had their fifteen minutes of fame on CNN, but the perjury issue was pretty much restricted to talking heads debate shows and the conservative press. Kenneth Starr may have been interested in perjury. Mr. and Mrs. Middle America wanted to know if it was, you know, like, dangerous to use a cigar like that. Kenneth Starr thundered about honor and the rule of law. Women's magazines served up article upon play-by-play how-to article on the available varieties of oral sex and the really fascinating objects people sometimes used as impromptu dildos. Protestations of high-mindedness aside, there were really only two sides to the Bill and Monica debate: the side that thought it really mattered that Bill Clinton had been less than entirely faithful to his wife, and the side that truly did not understand why anybody would care.

Let's keep one thing straight here: the people who didn't care about Clinton's infidelities weren't condoning adultery. Most of them responded to polls by saying that adultery should be grounds for divorce, and that adultery was never or almost never justified, and that adultery should be punished. They just didn't see what the issue of adultery had to do with how well Clinton was doing his job. Adultery was bad, but not nearly as bad as murder, or even theft. It would be nice if everybody could keep to the straight and narrow all the time, but you didn't fire the best software designer in the department or the best salesman on the floor because he was cheating on his wife. Besides, a person who was having an affair could easily be an upright, morally exemplary person in every other way. No outsider ever knew for sure what was going on in somebody else's marriage. There could be reasons the general public knew absolutely nothing about.

For the people who did care about Clinton's infidelities, however, adultery was not just adultery, and whether or not it interfered with Clinton's ability to negotiate trade treaties or make decisions about the disposition of nuclear waste was beside the point. Marriage vows were the most important promise most individuals would ever make, and a man who could not keep that promise could not be trusted in any other area. An elected official's adultery was not about his private life. It was about his fitness for office, his ability to lead, his qualifications as a representative of the people of his country.

The first thing that happened, of course, was that neither side believed what the other side said was its take on this case. To conservatives, liberals were just excusing what they knew to be Bill Clinton's bone-deep moral corruption for political reasons. To liberals, conservatives were just making a media mountain out of a moral molehill for political reasons. Conservatives thought liberals were morally relativist pond scum. Liberals thought conservatives were tenth-rate Machiavellian hypocrites.

If you want to see this same principle at work, take a look at the movement to install abstinence-only sex education in American public schools. It's a movement with legs. It has the support of President George W. Bush, and a federal law not only mandates that all schools that want federal money must teach it, but that they must teach it as a set of very particular assertions. Abstinence only, says the legislation, is "the only certain way" to avoid pregnancy, STDs, and AIDS. Sex outside marriage is "likely to have psychologically and physically harmful effects." Sex restricted to "a monogamous relationship within the context of marriage" is the standard of behavior for all people. That's not all. Schools teaching abstinence-only sex ed may not teach anything at all about how to use any form of contraception, and may not present abortion as one possible response to an unwanted pregnancy. As for gay sex--well, let's just say it's better off not mentioned.

Now, anybody with a practical nature is likely to look at the above and be completely bemused. Is it actually true that the standard of behavior for all people--or even most Americans in the 21^st century--is sex restricted "to a monogamous relationship within the context of marriage[?]" No, of course not. Most adult Americans have had sex outside of marriage at least once, and the vast majority of American couples who marry have had sex with each other before their wedding. Is it actually true that sex outside marriage is "likely to have psychologically and physically harmful effects[?]" It's exactly as likely to have psychologically and physically harmful effects as sex inside marriage. It's the nature of the relationship, not its legal status, that determines whether or not the partners will look back on it fondly or with distaste. It is true that complete abstinence is the "only certain way" of avoiding unwanted pregnancy, STDs and AIDS, but only in the sense that it is also true that the "only certain way" to avoid a heart attack is to be dead.

A look at some of the programs used to implement abstinence-only sex education is enough to give anybody pause, because most of them seem to be operating in a world devoid of context. Take Sex Respect, possibly the most popular of the bunch, in use in dozens of school districts nationwide. Developed by "Dr." Coleen Kelly Mast, the program asserts that premarital sex "breaks up couples or causes them to have bad relationships" and leads to "unhappiness, divorce, extramarital affairs and dissatisfaction." Its "information" on contraception is both peculiar and deceptive. Condoms, properly used, do in fact provide significant protection against unwanted pregnancy, many STDs and AIDS. The "failure rate" the program uses to say otherwise includes in its numbers the "failure" of intending to use the contraception but not actually using it. And in spite of the ducking and weaving Mast does when asked if the program is religiously based, it is, in fact, religiously based. It began as a Catholic program, and its web site still includes such areas as "Why Jesus is better than Santa" and "Love and Life: A Christian Sexual Morality Guide for Teens." If all that wasn't enough, there's the matter of Mast's credentials to produce any kind of a program at all. Although her website lists her as "Dr." Mast, her only "doctorate" is an honorary one in Humane Letters from Quincy University, a small, third-tier Catholic college in Illinois. Her highest earned degree is a master's in Health Education from Western Illinois University.

Over at Me, My World, My Future and Sexuality, Commitment and Family, things aren't much better. Produced by the conservative organization Teen-Aid, Inc, the programs (the first for junior, the second for senior, high) read like the scenario for a disaster movie. The "majority of...sexually transmitted diseases are incurable[,]" its FAQ says solemnly, and its resident expert, Dr. Matthew Porter (who at least seems to actually be an M.D) intones ominously that "...teen sex, regardless of condom use, is about as safe as Airline Al-Qaida." What's more, the woods are full of enemies who will trick parents and educators into watering down the abstinence-only message in a thousand devious ways. "Beware Changes in Language" one area of the site warns. Even the term "abstinence only" itself is suspect.

It's this--this underlying theme that the world is a dangerous place and sex is the most dangerous thing in it--that is the most significant marker of the abstinence-only movement. In spite of the sugary-sweet paeans to sex within marriage that punctuate these programs like dots of chocolate icing on a sour garlic pickle, the view of sex they present is of something dark, destructive, and essentially subhuman. Children "don't have to behave like animals" Teen-Aid insists, on a page devoted to answering the critics of the abstinence-only movement. The wages of behaving "like animals" are death. "Sexually active teens are more likely to be depressed and commit suicide," another page says and yet another outlines the seeming inevitably of acquiring STDs for people who have sex outside marriage and then goes on to say that STDs "...can lead to death, cause infertility, and be passed down to your offspring." When critics accuse the programs of being based on fear, the programs are unapologetic.

Critics of the abstinence-only movement tend to concentrate on the misinformation these groups put out--I don't think I've ever seen a more tendentious use of statistics, anywhere--or on their relentless attempts to create a climate of terror around all things sexual. What strikes me about them, though, is how adolescent they all are. There is a time in everybody's life when he contemplates sex as The Most Important Issue In the Universe, with Life and Death Implications for everything from nuclear war to what he had for breakfast. It's between the ages of twelve and eighteen, when the whole idea of sex is new, and he hasn't had any yet. That's why Romeo and Juliet makes sense, and why it often seems overwrought and silly when produced with fully adult actors.

But there's somewhere else where sex is invested with this sort of feverish hyper-importance: in societies where its expression is heavily restricted by custom, taboo, and religion. A Muslim woman must cover herself from head to toe because the sight of something as inconsequential as a woman's cheek can make a Muslim man mad with lust and imperil his immortal soul. In Crete as late as the beginning of the 20^th century, girls were removed from the company of their fathers as soon as they showed signs of reaching puberty. For the rest of their lives--or at least until they were so old that they were no longer perceived as female--they would never again be left alone with a man who was not their husband or their son.

It's not surprising that the foundations of the abstinence-only movement are religious, or that so many of the people who truly believed that Clinton should have been impeached over the Monica Lewinsky scandal grounded that belief in their religious faith. Throughout history, religion has been one of the means by which societies restricted and controlled sexual activity among their members. Modern American religious movements preserve a sense of human sexuality that is at once highly charged and deeply problematic. They also place a lot of emphasis, and enormous moral significance, on the ability of individuals to control their responses to all things sexual. It's no wonder they feel almost continually under assault from a culture they think is saturated with sex. The drive for sex is a hard-wired human instinct. Sexual behavior can often be channeled or restricted. Sexual desire is out of human control under the best of circumstances. If you believe that your status as a moral person rests on your ability to remain chaste, and you're surrounded by sexual imagery, you're not going to be a happy camper.

Then there is the way this sensibility runs into a wall in the larger culture, because there's a curious thing about attitudes to sex. People who believe that sex should be carefully restricted and controlled are more likely to respond to sexual cues in the environment than people who think that sex is neat but no big deal. The people who thought Clinton should be impeached and the people who thought he shouldn't be weren't even walking down the same streets, even when they were side by side on the pavement. Sex-is-trivial people literally don't see a lot of what the sex-is-important people see. Billboards of women in tight clothing selling cars and liquor, Christina Aguilera videos, porn pop-up ads on the Internet, Janet Jackson's nipple--sex-is-trivial people tend perceive them, if at all, as nothing but white noise in the background. Sex-is-important people find their attention drawn to each and every one.

Abstinence-only sex education, like the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton, is a stand in for a larger issue, an attempt to change the entire culture, to wrench it back to a time when sex-is-important people think it would have been more comfortable for them to live in. They're wrong--the Fifties were a lot more sex saturated than they remember--but the effect of their movement is just what it would have been if they had been right: to fix our attention on sex as the central issue of modern politics.

By now, it has to be obvious that I'm a sex-is-trivial, not a sex-is-important kind of person. It's not that I don't recognize that there are times when sex can be important, or that I haven't noticed that sex can sometimes be destructive. Of course it can, on both counts, and I'm no more interested than Beverly LaHaye in seeing my children sexually active in high school. The problem, for me, is that when we make sex of central importance in morality, we distort and eventually destroy morality. Janet Jackson's nipple is not more reprehensible than the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Monica Lewinsky's cigar is not more corrupt than the systematic selling out of a generation of American jobs to benefit your buddies in the finance industry. Morality is more--and a lot more serious--than whether or not some politician or the other knows how to keep it in his pants.

Back in February, 2003, Thomas Byrne Edsall wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly on sex in politics, and in it he noted this: "The demographic reality is that as currently constituted, liberal Blue America is growing and conservative Red America is in decline." In other words, the sex-is-important people are shrinking in numbers and importance. That's the best political news I've had in years. Morality is about so much more than sex, and moral corruption is measured not by the number of partners a man has had in bed but by the extent to which he has put his own interests ahead of those of the people he has been elected to serve. A morally decent person is not a virgin, although he might be. A morally decent person is someone who can put aside selfishness and honor the full human dignity of all people, including the ones he doesn't like. I don't care if the President of the United States has been keeping a Las Vegas showgirl in an apartment in Foggy Bottom for the last ten years. I do care if he's tweaking the tax code to make sure his friends get out from under their tax obligations while garage mechanics and elementary school teachers have to dig more deeply into their pockets to take up the slack.

Almost twenty-five hundred years ago, a man named Aristotle produced one of the most influential works of moral philosophy ever written. It's called the Nichomachean Ethics, and another man, named Thomas Aquinas, made it part of Christianity through the Summa Theologica. It's the basis of much of what we think of as our "Judeo-Christian values," including our ideas about personal responsibility.

The interesting thing is--it has almost nothing to say about sex.

Copyright © 2004 Jane Haddam. All rights reserved.

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