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."