Book Review: Bringing Sex Into Focus by Caroline Simon

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"Bringing Sex Into Focus: The Quest for Sexual Integrity" is a new offering from Caroline J. Simon. It is an interesting read on Christian sexuality and a manageable length at less than 200 pages. Simon uses throughout the metaphor of vision -- employing a visit to the optometrist and the various diagnostic lenses they employ in order to allow us to see clearly.

Simon creates a typology of "lenses" through which we view sexuality. These include two Christian lesnses, the covenantal and procreative ones, and four "sexular" ones: expressivist, romantic, power, and plain sex. She is clear throughout that we never use just one lens when viewing sexuality, nor should we. I'm a fan of typologies, although I can understand how some may find them too subjective or ambiguous for ethical work.

Overall, I liked the book quite a bit. Simon comes from an evangelical perspective and not surprisingly ends up further on the conservative side of the spectrum than I personally do. Nonetheless, most of her arguments are cogent and well presented. While I am at times quite critical, especially in my last disagreement, this should not mean I do not recommend the book. I do.

There are three points of contention (perhaps too severe a word?) for me in her work, though. The first is simply on the name "covenantal." Simon uses this throughout as the main Christian but not Catholic lense of sexuality, yet she hardly touches on what the word "covenant" means. She briefly mentions how God made a covenant with the Israelites which was then transfered to Christians (I realize I'm being theologically imprecise right now, but the specifics aren't important). What she DOESN'T mention is that "covenant" means "contract." They are synonyms. To say we have a "contractual lens" when viewing sexuality would sound bizarre indeed. When speaking of marriage, the covenantal lens can prove extra problematic. Not once does Simon touch on the "Biblical view of marriage" (to use a phrase made famous in the Chik-Fil-A debates) as one of a property contract. As I've discussed in my thesis (for the four people who read it -- my committee and my father), marriage in the Hebrew Bible was strictly a property exchange between father-of-the-bride and groom. So to invoke a "contract lens" with marriage is certainly not in keeping with 21st century Christian ethics. Granted, I am not saying this is what Simon means when she mentions a covenantal lens, but she did not spend any ink on the topic.

My second issue with the book is her reliance on the untenable axiom "abstinence in singleness, fidelity in marriage." This may have made sense long ago when the average age of marriage for women was menarche, but with record high ages upon first marriage in the US, it has now become a false dilemma. Where in this axiom do those graduate students who have been in long-term relationships with their partners for 6 years fit? I would argue that they are neither single nor married. Yet surely they are closer to married than single! What about the couple that has been married for 20 years but is waiting until their youngest child graduates high school to divorce? This axiom also places an unneeded emphasis on genitals. Does abstinence mean no coitus? Does it mean no genital contact? What about "second base"? How about phone sex in a committed yet long distance relationship? With all of these contemporary issues that are neither coitus nor hand-holding along with the false dilemma of single vs. married, Christian sexual ethics needs a lot of conversation about these in-betweens, not simply a regurgitation of a hackneyed axiom.

Lastly and most significantly, Simon presents these six lenses almost as value-free. She certainly makes it clear that she prefers the covenantal lens, but also argues (and rightly so) that civil discourse calls for us to listen to ALL perspectives, including the secular views. This does not mean, however, that we should accept them uncritically as "valid." Yet she does just this in the chapter on homosexuality. In taking another philosopher to task on the label of "connubial bigot" for those who oppose same sex marriage, she points out that the procreative lens views all sex that cannot possibly result in conception to be sinful. That means coitus is the only ticket in town. Sorry to the homosexuals. This is simply appalling. The first and only lens that matters is the lens of justice. When considering the procreative lens through the lens of justice, it becomes obviously clear that those who view the orthodox Catholic teaching on sex to be on the opposite side of justice. Simon argues, however, that those who view homosexual activity as sinful are not bigots, but merely are consistent in their views on sexuality. I wonder if Simon would argue that the Christians that argued that slavery was theologically just or that denying the franchise to women was morally accepted would be simply "consistent" as opposed to racist and misogynist.

Book Review: Michel Foucault's "The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume I"

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I've read bits and pieces of this from readers as well as excerpts for courses. This is the first I've read it from beginning to end. Overall, Foucault attempts to make three very broad points. The first is that there was never any sexual repression in the Victorian age to present. In fact, the exact opposite happened. Instead of forcing various sexualities underground to the point of non-existence, Victorian culture produced these sexualities through discourse. They talked about what hadn't before been talked about: "If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression" (6). Within this broad argument against repression, Foucault lays out three inner arguments:

One can raise three serious doubts concerning what I shall term the ‘repressive hypothesis.’ First doubt: Is sexual repression truly an established historical fact? . . . Second doubt: Do the workings of power, and in particular those mechanisms that are brought into play in societies such as ours, really belong primarily to the category of repression? . . . A third and final doubt: Did the critical discourse that addresses itself to repression come to act as a roadblock to a power mechanism that had operated unchallenged up to that point, or is it not in fact part of the same historical network as the thing it denounces (and doubtless misrepresents) by calling it ‘repression’? (10)

The first two he answers in the negative. A perfect example of the social construction of sexuality, as opposed to the social repression of an already existent sexuality, can be found in the medicalization of sex. Here is a perfect example of how physicians and psychiatrists helped to "expose" what had before not even existed:

So too were all those minor perverts . . . entomologized by giving them strange baptismal names: there were Krafft-Ebing’s zoophiles, and zooerasts, Rohleder’s auto-monosexualists; and later, mixoscopophiles, gynecomasts, presbyophiles, sexoesthetic inverts, and dyspareunist women. These fine names for heresies referred to a nature that was overlooked by the law, but not so neglectful of itself that it did not go on producing more species, even where there was no order to fir them into. The machinery of power that focused on this whole alien strain did not aim to suppress it, but rather to give it an analytical, visible, and permanent reality . . . (43)

Foucault spends a good deal of time focusing on confession and penance within the Christian traditional as an important discursive act that constituted sexuality in the 17th-19th centuries. It is through this pivot that Foucault shifts to his second major exploration -- that of power. Confession and power are intimately linked, as he shows by stating that "the confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile . . . (61-62). For me, it is the section on power that is the most interesting. For Foucault, power is not something that is possessed and disposed of. It is something that exists in relationships. All parties can act out power, but there is often a dissymmetry of power. When that dissymmetry is consistently lop-sided, oppression results. It is also on power where Foucault is most easily understood. A series of aphorisms prove the point:

Power’s condition of possibility . . . must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty . . .

[What makes power possible is] the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable.

[Power] is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society (93).

Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations. Relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter; they are the immediate effects of the divisions, inequalities, and disequilibriums which occur in the latter, and conversely they are the internal conditions of these differentiations; relations of power are not in superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition or accompaniment; they have a directly productive role, wherever they come into play.

Power comes from below; that is, there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations, and serving as a general matrix—no such duality extending from the top down and reacting on more and more limited groups to the very depths of the social body (94).

What is also important about discourse in power is that the hegemonic theme can often be turned against it. Power often has an amorphous motivation which can easily flip and become counter-hegemonic. Foucault illustrates the repression of homosexuality as an example:

There is no question that the appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and ‘psychic hermaphrodism’ made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of ‘perversity’; but it also made possible the formation of a ‘reverse’ discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or ‘naturality’ be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified (101).

Last of Foucault's major point is an abstract exploration of what he would come to call bio-politics. Here he refers to sex not for its desire or passion, but rather for its reproductive and economic ends. The state came to view reproduction as an economic technique. From this comes to focus on demography as well as the attempt to confine sex to reproductive ends. For more on this side of sexuality, I highly recommend the College de France lecture series "The Birth of Biopolitics."

Thesis Now Available Online

For those extremely bored, my thesis, Just Sex: Sexual Ethics for Twentyfirst Century Christians, is now available online through digital commons. Here is the abstract:


This thesis addressed nonmarital sex from a Christian perspective. It questioned the traditional rule of “no sex before marriage” and attempted to define a broader guideline for moral sex that is not dependent on one's marital status. It drew upon five sources for ethical reflection: Scripture, tradition, secular knowledge, experience, and moral discernment. By examining the Biblical commandments concerning sex, this thesis found that the inspiration behind many of the commandments limiting sex to marriage is androcentric and patriarchal. Because of this, the commandments should no longer be accepted with little reflection. Drawing on James Nelson's work, the importance of mutuality and proportionality in relationships was developed. Proportionality presumes that the level of sexual activity in a relationship is commensurate with the level of commitment. Mutuality combined with proportionality provide the foundation for an ethic that allows for nonmarital sex so long as these two concepts are present.

Romanticizing Outliers

So I've been watching a lot of How I Met Your Mother since Christmas break started. Netflix streaming has revolutionized watching TV. How else could you watch an entire 6 seasons worth of TV in a couple weeks? (Well OK, my wife watched 6 seasons of Bones in about 1 week -- but she made it a full time job. She doesn't read my blog so I can say that :)).

I love the show. Very funny. Neil Patrick Harris is great. But here's the problem: these people drink a ton and have a lot of sex. And I just said NPH is great -- he has the most sex. As an adult, I watch the program and I realize how silly those parts of it are. But at times while I stream it my teenage stepsons watch with me. And it occurs to me: do they think this is what REAL adults do? Are they going to think that people like Barney really are cool? Or that drinking a lot everyday is normal? That kind of scares me.

Surely there are people that drink that much and have that many sexual partners, but they're outside of the bell curve. They're outliers. Does the curve shift, though, if the bell thinks those outliers are "normal"? Some research shows it does. Market studies on sex on campus are an example (see Premarital Sex in America and here). But if we don't romanticize outliers, who are we going to romanticize? Life inside the bell simply isn't exciting enough, now is it? ;)

Chapter Outline of My Thesis

 I. “On the Ethics of Free Milk: From Torah to Today”

This chapter will introduce the thesis and examine the morality of premarital sex from scripture and the present. It will provide an overview of sexual injunctions in the books of Moses, the Gospels, and the epistles while also examining contemporary concepts of sex such as recent developments in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. It will also introduce the themes of delayed marriage, hookups, cohabitation, and serial monogamy.

II. “Purity and Property Contracts to Egalitarianism: Marriage in Scripture and Modernity”

This chapter will examine the ideal marriage as described in scripture as well as the rules and traditions surrounding it. It will describe how marriage was viewed as a property transaction between a father and a future husband with the need to guarantee the “new vs. used” nature of the goods being exchanged.

This contrasts with the modern ideal of marriage includes mutual love, submission, and intimacy. The contractual nature of marriage, if still evident at all, is found taking place between the husband and wife as opposed to the husband and father of the bride This will draw heavily on Nelson, Gudorf, and St. Paul.

III. “21^st Century Sex: To Infinity and Beyond”

While much has been written on sex throughout historical periods, this thesis will focus on contemporary ideas of sex – specifically from the second half of the 20^th century to the present. This period has seen a liberation of sexuality. Conservatives have often turned to a slippery-slope argument to counter this trend. It is important to consider at what point liberalization becomes self-righteousness or idolatry and to define the limits of what is permitted. While this thesis will argue for yet another “deregulation” of sex, the same conditions that should apply to sex for non-married couples should also apply to married couples. Thus, it could also be considered an increase in regulation. This thesis will also examine how a focus on egalitarian relationships could help increase “sanctification” as opposed to decrease it.

IV. “Conclusion: Returning to Scripture”

As mentioned above, while looking to scripture for approval is not feasible, holding conclusions up to the light of scripture for evaluation is important.  Instead of prima scriptura I'm actually attempting an ultima scriptura in the hopes that it will strengthen a hermeneutic of suspicion and negate any hermeneutic of consent I may have. This section will be taking my hypothesis on nonmarried sex and seeing if it can hold water against scriptural injunctions against it. 

Done with the I of I/O

Finally done with all the reading I wanted to do for the thesis. I hope I took good notes. Now onto "coding" them so I can retrieve citations easier. I use a program that was designed for qualitative data analysis, but it works pretty well for what I need. I'll go through all the quotes I've gotten from reading, and code them according to argument and chapter. With WeftQDA I can just select an argument or chapter and it will show me every quote that fits. Possibly more work than it needs to be, but it works for me.

So far, there seem to be three broad social narratives that contribute to the topic (premarital sex in case you've forgotten).

• Since the end of WW2 or so, the ideal marital relationship has been based on romantic and intimate love. The concept of a "soul mate" gets introduced and (probably) greatly affects peoples' decision in a marriage partner.
• Going back a little further, we've seen an increasing "deregulation" in sex. This (probably) started with first wave feminism, proceeded to homosexuality, and now gets turned onto premarital sex. Slippery slope arguments abound and often with good reason.
• Marketing geniuses have found out how easy it is to sell a mundane product by using sex. This commodification of sex has transferred sex from something relational (something that happens between two people) to a product to be consumed (relationship has no part in the equation--solely orgasm [or at least the hope for one]).

Neck Deep in Thesis

I've been up to my eyeballs in sexual ethics reading. Hence the no-posting for awhile. Here's what I've read so far. I admit to a compulsion to having to read all of a book or article. I'm told by successful academics that this will not be possible in the future, but so long as I'm a part-time student, I will give in to my vice and read from the roman numeral pages to the end.

Finished:

Ethics in the Community of Promise: Faith, Formation, and Decision by James Childs 

Not a sexual ethics book, but I wanted to make sure to read something specifically by a Lutheran on ethics in general. Very good book. I'm a fan of Childs and this book provides an easy to follow method for moral discernment.

Sexuality in the New Testament: Understanding the Key Texts by William Loader

I'll be honest, I don't remember much of this book. Definitely dry. Definitely exegesis. I'm glad I took notes for later perusal. 

Body Sex and Pleasure: Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics by Christine Gudorf

Full disclosure, Dr. G is my thesis advisor. That said, this is one of my top 3 books so far. Excellent look at Christian ethics from a liberal Christian point of view that is still well informed and well argued. Mutual pleasure is at the heart of the work. I can dig it. 

Dirt Greed and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and Their Implications for Today by William Countryman

This is the second driest read of the group. It's very good exegetically and connects the dots between purity, property, and sex. I can appreciate his general findings (that anything related to purity laws is not binding on Christians; that most of the sexual injunctions in the Bible have a property right reasoning), but cannot agree with some specific findings (on bestiality and polygamy for instance).

Embodiment: An Approach to Sexuality and Christian Theology by James Nelson

Add this to the canon. It's that good. An excellent look at late 20th century Christian ethics. Only parts of it appear dated (written in 1978, it still has to address some of the "sexual revolution" things). Worth reading by anyone regardless of their level.

In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza

Excellent excellent excellent. I read this for an overview of her hermeneutics of suspicion methodology. But like I said, I had to read the whole thing. What was very surprising is that she didn't throw out Paul and the seeming "misogynist" authors, but rather embraced them and explained how those excerpts seemingly subordinating women could be reinterpreted based on the social ethos of the time to support a "discipleship of equals."

Sexual Fulfillment: For Single and Married, Straight and Gay, Young and Old by Herbert Chilstrom and Lowell Erdahl

Bingo! Sexual ethics AND specifically Lutheran. Unfortunately this does not live up to Gudorf or Nelson -- but it's also directed at a different audience. No footnotes, no acadespeak, etc. It's a good book if you don't want all that extra stuff. But if you want more than meat and potatoes it might not live up to expectations.

Currently reading:

Love Does No Harm: Sexual Ethics for the Rest of Us by Marie Fortune

This is where I'm at now. On chapter 3. So far I am very impressed by her methodology. With rule-based ethic and situation ethic on either pole, she argues for an ethic of moral agency which approaches discernment from principle rather than set in stone rules. I think I'll continue liking this through the end.

What Is Consent After All?

This came from an assignment where I was supposed to say two pages worth of something interesting about a Foucault interview ("Politics and Ethics: An Interview" for those really interested). I don't know much about Hannah Arendt, but the interviewer asked Foucault about her theory of power compared to his. That part isn't all that interesting, just the very last part of his answer when, concerning power relations, he says “perhaps one must not be for consensuality, but one must be against nonconsensuality.” This is a response to Arendt's concept of consensual power, but I believe there are many questions that can be mined from it. How do we define consent? Is consent the presence of a “yes” or the absence of a “no”? This is a foundational question regarding the definition of consent that I believe is immediately difficult to answer.

If we take this question and turn to a topic Foucault was fond of, sex, we can complicate things even further. In the realm of sexual relations, how is consent obtained? Do the conditions under which it is obtained affect the nature of consent, or even whether consent exists at all? Does the presence of a “yes” with an understanding of a quid pro quo in some way diminish the “yes”?

“Honey I'd like to do x tonight.”
“Eww, I hate x.”
“Well if you let me do x tonight I'll let you do y tomorrow night.”
“OK that's fine.” 

From quid pro quo it is not a big jump to coercion. Is the absence of a “no” when obtained under coercion consent? “I don't know how much longer I can hold out baby.” Do threats, even if implicit, of leaving a relationship if sex is not consented to diminish the “amount” of consent when it is given? And from coercion it is not a large jump at all to exploitation. Can a 14 year old Greek boy truly give consent to a 28 year old man? Can a young girl in rural France consent to a “harmless” game of curdled milk? At what point does coercion become exploitation?

These are all questions that I believe would have been fascinating to hear Foucault address in the course of this interview. I believe they continue to be important today – possibly even more so. Given the amount of questionably consensual sex on college campuses, these questions are not merely exercises in theory – they are materially important. I think it is important, however, that in trying to answer them we do not lose sight of the specific in attempting to provide broad rules of conduct.