What is sex actually for? In this episode, I explore whether there’s an objective reality to our sexual powers and why true “sexual sanity” means living in accord with the procreative and unitive meaning built into human sexuality itself. Drawing from philosophy, natural law reasoning, and Catholic thought, I episode challenge modern assumptions about sex, pleasure, love, and human flourishing—offering a deeper vision of why sex is ordered toward both union and new life.
Transcript:
Is there a real world when it comes to sex and our sexual powers—a reality to sex that we ought to reverence and live in accord with?
The answer to that question determines whether there’s such a thing as sexual sanity.
Stick around—because that’s what we’re going to talk about in today’s episode.
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Intro
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Alright! Let’s begin with this idea of sanity.
Sanity is to see what is (reality) and live in accord with it. If your grandfather thinks leprechauns are jumping in his butter dish and he gives them his butter knife to use as a springboard, then his sanity is defective.
He mistakes a hallucination for what is real and behaves accordingly. As he tells you about this phenomenon at the dinner table, you probably would invite him to become a citizen of the real world and see reality as it is and live in it.
I use this example to prompt the question, “Is there a real world when it comes to sex and our sexual powers?” In other words, is there a meaning to sex that is independent of what you or I make sex out to be? Is there a reality to sex, and thus our sexual powers, that we ought to reverence and live in accord with? Is there a real world when it comes to sex that we could invite someone to live in? Is there such a thing as sexual sanity?
If sex doesn’t have any sort of intrinsic meaning (a purpose independent of human contriving), then it would be impossible to be charged with sexual insanity. How could one be mistaken about the reality of sex if there is no reality about which to be mistaken?
But if sex does have an objective reality (intrinsic meaning and purpose), and we don’t make it up as we go, then how we relate to sex will determine our sanity just as much as how we relate to butter dishes and leprechauns.
In order to determine if sex has an objective meaning (meaning and purpose independent of our intentions), we must do what modern man does not do; namely, think about sex.
Now, I know what’s going on in your mind, “How can you say modern man doesn’t think about sex? Just watch the commercials—from shampoo to yogurt to cleaning supplies, everything is sexualized.”
I agree—everything in our culture is hyper sexualized. But this is not thinking about sex.
I can’t put it any better than Frank Sheed. In his book Society and Sanity, he writes:
The typical modern man practically never thinks about sex. He dreams of it, of course, by day and by night; he craves for it; he pictures it, is stimulated or depressed by it, drools over it. But this frothing, steaming activity is not thinking. Drooling is not thinking, picturing is not thinking, craving is not thinking, dreaming is not thinking. Thinking means bringing the power of the mind to bear: thinking about sex means striving to see sex in its inner most reality and in the function it is meant to serve (pg. 107).
To think about sex is to ask, “What’s it for?” This is the first principle of intelligent use for anything. For example, if I don’t know what a microphone is for, I may be inclined to use it to hammer some nails while building something. But, of course, this would destroy the microphone.
Similarly, to intelligently use our sexual powers we must know their innermost reality and the function they are meant to serve—the proper activity of sex. And that tells us the purpose.
For example, the proper activity of a knife and its purpose is one and the same: to cut. Sight is the purpose of the eye, but it is also its proper activity. For if an eye is defective and blind, then it isn’t acting (functioning) properly.
So what is sex for? What is its proper activity?
Someone might say, “Sex is for pleasure.” Although sex does involve pleasure, and this may be an individual’s subjective motive for having sex, it doesn’t stand up to the scrutiny of reason as an intrinsic purpose of sex (nature’s ultimate goal for sex).
For starters, consider that one can attain sexual pleasure in many ways:
- A man can rape an unconscious girl that he drugged at the bar.
- A doctor can sexually abuse a woman in a persistent vegetative state.
- The sports star may bed as many women as he can in order to gain the pleasure of conquest and bragging rights in the locker room.
- The married airline pilot can sleep with stewardesses on his long trips.
- As one woman said in an on-street interview that Catholic Answers conducted some time ago, “Someone could marry their donkey for all I care”— which of course, implies certain types of pleasurable behavior with the donkey.
Anybody of good will recognizes that such behaviors are not appropriate human sexual behavior. Therefore, there must be something other than pleasure that makes for proper sexual activity—that is to say, sex must be for something other than pleasure.
Moreover, pleasure is not the ultimate purpose of sex any more than pleasure is the ultimate purpose of eating or breathing. Have you ever experienced being suffocated? I bet it wasn’t so pleasurable. The pleasure of breathing serves the ultimate end (goal) of breathing: namely, to keep you alive.
Eating is also pleasurable, but it is clearly not for pleasure. Pleasure is subordinate to the intrinsic purpose that it serves—nourishment of the human body.
The same line of reasoning can be applied to sex. When we bring the power of the mind to bear on our sexual powers, we see that sexual pleasure is subordinate to the end (goal) for which nature intends humans to engage in sex: to reproduce. As the philosopher Edward Feser writes in his book Neo-Scholastic Essays, “To emphasize pleasure would be to put the cart before the horse” (pg. 389).
In his book On the Meaning of Sex, the natural law philosopher J. Budziszewski identifies two conditions that must be met in order for some E (effect) to be the purpose of some P (power)—and the act A that follows from it. Guess what? Procreation meets both of them.
First, it must be the case that P actually brings about E. Do the sexual powers of male and female bring about children when used in sexual activity? Yes.
Second, E must explain why we have P in the first place. Does procreation explain why humans have sexual powers? Yes. Without the begetting of children, our sexed bodies would be unintelligible. To put it another way, if we weren’t meant to reproduce, then we wouldn’t have sexed bodies.
This is not to say that procreation entails sex, since there are some species that reproduce asexually. Rather, the claim is that sex entails procreation. Procreation is that for the sake of which sex exists.
So, regardless of what man may use sex, and consequently his sexual powers, for—whether it is for the expression of romantic love alone or the giving of bodily pleasure in recreational activity—childbearing is sex’s own purpose (intrinsic purpose) and thus its proper activity. It is the end toward which sex is ordered.
Once again Frank Sheed puts it succinctly in his previously mentioned book:
If we consider sex in itself and ask what Nature had in mind in giving sex to human beings, there can be only one answer: Sex is meant for the production of children, as lungs for breathing or the digestive organs for nourishment…it would be monstrous to deny…that that is what sex is meant for, that is why we have sexual powers. The fact that man can use sex for other, sterile purposes of his own choosing does not alter the certainty that child-bearing is sex’s own purpose (Society and Sanity, 110).
So, as we use reason to see what is there concerning sex and check our sanity, we can conclude that it has its own intrinsic ordering to procreation.
Now, at this point, one might ask: “Aren’t you reducing sex to mere biology and mechanics by saying sex is for begetting children? Where’s the love man
(I wanted to say that with Filmore’s voice from Cars. But I’ll spare myself the humiliation).
That charge of reducing human sex to mere biology might have force if and only if producing children were the end of the story. But it’s not.
There is another purpose of sex intrinsic to making babies: the physical and emotional drawing together of spouses. Catholic moral philosophy calls it the unitive dimension of sex.
There are two ways to see the intrinsic connection between the procreative and unitive dimensions. The first sees the spousal friendship as finalizing the procreative dimension in as much as it makes sex a human reproductive act. The second sees how the unitive is bound to the procreative for the sake of rearing children.
Let’s start with the first way and see how the unitive makes sex properly human.
The natural end of begetting children follows from the animality of human beings. It’s our sexed bodies—our reproductive organs—that order sexual activity toward procreation. We have this in common with other animals.
But we know that human sexual activity is different than animal acts of reproduction.
-No one in their right mind refers to two dogs “making-love.”
-Mares don’t don lace nighties to enhance the equine sex experience.
-Ranchers don’t dim the barn lights and put on Barry White music for their cattle to breed.
So what is it that transfigures reproductive acts in human beings and makes them distinct in the animal kingdom? What is it that makes sex properly human?
We can begin to get a glimpse of the answer by considering other human acts. Take the act of looking at a tree. When a girl and her dog, walking along a country road, look at a tall plant with a trunk and branches and leaves, they both see a tree. But they see it in essentially different ways. The dog sees only a particular thing with a certain shape and colors. The girl not only sees everything her dog sees; she sees it as tree.
In other words, the girl is able to abstract the essence or nature of what the thing is and form the universal concept of tree-ness. She is then able to judge that the object before her is a tree, along with the other trees in the meadow, and reason to certain conclusions about trees—that they are material and subject to corruption, etc.
Notice that the girl’s power of sight is radically transformed by her ability to reason. As Feser explains,
“A human visual experience is a seamless unity of the rational and the animal…we (unlike non-human animals) conceptualize what we receive through sensation”
(that’s from his Neo-Scholastic Essays, 395).
Or take the act of eating. All animals share the drive to eat for the sake of self-preservation. But, far from being merely an animal activity, eating for humans is infused with rationality.
Theologian Paul Gondreau describes the human dimension of eating like this:
[E]ating serves a profound human function, indeed, it becomes an art, in as much as we prepare our meals with the highest of nutritional, gustatory and even aesthetic quality in mind, we observe proper etiquette when consuming our food, and, typically the preferred occasion of shared human fellowship, mealtime satisfies deep social (i.e., rational) needs
That’s from his 2010 Nova Et Vetera article, “The Natural Law Ordering of Human Sexuality to (Heterosexual) Marriage: Towards a Thomistic Philosophy of the Body.” You can find that article in Vol. 8, No. 3 of the journal.
What these examples show is that our animal sentience become human only when integrated with our rationality. It’s the same for sex.
For sex to be genuinely human, it must be integrated with our rationality, which involves knowledge and love. And where is knowledge and love united but in friendship or interpersonal communion.
The bodily union between man and woman that is ordered to begetting children therefore finds its human perfection in what Aquinas calls the “indivisible union of souls” that exists between spouses (Summa Theologiae III:29:2).
We might say that the unitive dimension of sex is to the procreative dimension what the rational soul is to the human body. Just as the rational soul makes our bodies human bodies as opposed to animal bodies or vegetative bodies, the spousal friendship (communal living) makes our procreative inclinations properly human, integrating them into the rational part of our human nature.
So, the unitive dimension of sex is connected to the procreative insofar as the unitive perfects the procreative, making it properly human.
A second way in which we can see the intrinsic connection between the procreative and unitive dimensions of sex is that the unitive is necessary for the sake of rearing children.
Unlike other species in the animal world, human infants cannot care for themselves. Nature has ordained them to be radically dependent on others for their needs, and for a long period of time.
And the needs for human offspring go beyond the mere physical. Because humans are rational animals, children also depend on others for what Aquinas calls “the training of the soul” (SCG III, 122). Children’s minds need to be formed in what is true. Their wills need to be directed toward what is good. They need help in learning how to live in community with others.
It is here where the union between husband and wife comes into play. Nature ordains that both man and woman be needed for the child to come into existence and then to be reared.
It is difficult for a mother to protect and provide for herself and her children when she is pregnant and/or attending to her offsprings’ needs. So, naturally, a father has to provide and protect the woman and the children with whom he has had the children. Both parents are also needed to bring their children to full maturity as members of the human race. Frank Sheed explains,
Humanity is not man or woman, but both in union. A child brought up by a father only or a mother only is only half-educated. He needs what the male can give him and what the female can give him. And he needs these two not as two separate influences, each pushing him its own way, so that he moves on some compromise line that is neither, but as one fused influence, wholly human, male and female affecting him as conjoined not as competing influences (Society and Sanity, 105-106).
So, the unitive dimension of sex is related to the procreative insofar as it is necessary for the rearing of the children.
Alright! Let’s sum everything up:
Just as a human being is both body and soul, human sex is both procreative and unitive. Nature has made it so that both aspects are essential to human sexuality—that’s the objective reality of sex.
Our sexed bodies are ordered toward the begetting of children. But because we’re human, the procreative end necessarily involves an interpersonal union of knowledge and love. The unitive dimension of sex tells us that sex is for union with another person. But the procreative dimension tells us that sex is for a union between a man and woman.
So, there is a reality to our sexual powers, and thus the sexual act itself. And if that’s the case, then there is such a thing as sexual sanity. It involves reverencing and living in accord with the procreative and unitive dimensions of sex, engaging in sex only in ways that are going to be consistent with this reality. Sexual acts that conflict with or go against this reality—acts that would intentionally thwart the procreative and/or unitive aspects of sex—would be sexual insanity.
That’s not meant to be a condemnation on those who due to no fault of their own are ignorant about the reality of sex and consequently fail to live in accord with it. Rather, it’s a statement about what is objectively real about sex and an invitation to live in accord with it as a rational being.
To get this content in written form, check out my articles at catholic.com: “Bringing Sanity to Sex” Parts I and II.
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