What we all used to know
Reflections of a Dutch Uncle
“Still, wars and lechery! Nothing else holds fashion.” So said Thersites, commenting upon what all the major characters are getting up to in Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare’s play on the confusion between love and lust set in the midst of the Trojan War. I quote “the deformed and scurrilous Grecian” simply to point out that the emotions and tangled relationships we agonize over today have been agonized over for as long as people have been people. By and large, human behavior in this regard has changed but little. So allow me to point out some things about sex, in particular, that we all used to know.
Men and women think about sex and pursue sex differently. For men, sex is primarily an experience. For young men, especially, the pursuit of all kinds of experience, in as heightened a degree as one can find it, is part of their nature. This is not to say that the sex partner is irrelevant to the man, young or old, but simply to point out that sex is considered an experience in itself. Sharing it with the right partner no doubt makes it better, but as George Will once put it in comparison to some baseball pitch it’s nice to be able to throw, even when it’s not so good, it’s still pretty good.
Women primarily think about sex as part of a relationship. Whom one makes love to is more important than the thing as an experience; still less, as a technique. This doesn’t mean that how it turns out isn’t important to the female partner – as Dorothy Sayers said, the first rule of Bed is that a good time shall be had by ALL – but the identity of the partner remains paramount. At the same time, women risk far more by their sexual behavior than men do. The possibility of pregnancy – particularly, an unsupported pregnancy – has always been part of the equation; whereas men can always find somewhere else to be.
This is why, for as long as there has been human society, one of the great organizing principles of society has been that of the marriage covenant: the lasting pair-bond in which children can be nurtured until they are able to care for themselves. The old saying goes that men will give love in order to get sex, but women will give sex in order to get love. And as long as “love” includes the promise and protections of marriage, that works. When it doesn’t, then we have a problem.
When the sexual revolution came along – which actually started a generation or two before the Sixties and the development of the birth control pill – this began to change. As women were freed from the fear of being tied down by an unexpected pregnancy, they were able to compete more effectively with men in the economic realm. They also thought to claim the freedom that men had always enjoyed: to treat sex as an experience, one aspect of a relationship but certainly not the thing that constituted it. In other words, women thought they could act like men and be made happy thereby. But they were not made happy thereby, for even if they didn’t need to fear pregnancy any more, since they were not men, the satisfactions peculiar to men didn’t fulfill them. And they learned that there was a thing called a biological clock, ticking away. They also learned that taking hormones is not a simple switch you can turn on and off in all cases. There are risks as well as benefits to sexual freedom.
Meanwhile, men loved it that women weren’t nagging them about marriage any more. They had hit the jackpot: sex without complications. (We call it “friends with benefits.”) Which also didn’t please the women in their lives as much as those same women thought it would. Women gained a great deal from the Sexual Revolution, but men gained a great deal more. This is not fair, but it is what it is. If you want fair, go where they’re frying elephant ears.
And along the way, there was another, darker element: abortion. Abortion, too, has always been with us, as long as people have had children they didn’t want. Abortion without practical limits posed itself as the answer to the remaining question of the Sexual Revolution: What do I do if I screw up? If I didn’t take precautions or the precautions failed or something else happens? Well, you have the Right to a mulligan, said the oracle of abortion. The problem here is that it caused all kinds of people to see children as a problem, instead of an opportunity. Our society has been very anti-child ever since (the whole rhetoric of the child as burden, etc.).
And other things came with the whole sexual freedom package, like STDs. These, too, have been around a long time, but in a society where people – particularly, young people – think that consequence-free sex is the norm, then you find these diseases spreading. Another thing we all used to know is, that when you go to bed with Person A, you go to bed with everyone that Person A has ever been to bed with. This is not merely a medical observation, by the way; this is also a matter of experience. Instead of discovering all things in the arms of each other, there are things remembered from previous attempts that sometimes get in the way. Even young men sometimes discover when they finally find “the One” they were looking for, that all those other, passing relationships are now seen in a different light.
And in their search for ever more experience without inconvenient complications, and ever greater personal advancement without sacrifice, we also see that people can’t stay married for sour apples. Which leads to all kinds of “blended families,” which turn out not to be as good for kids as we all tell them it should. Certainly, the biggest predictor of child abuse is growing up in a family without one’s own biological father. This allows the intrusion of other males, adult or near-adult, in various combinations, into the family. And while many of these other males are fine fellows and a great influence on their step-children/siblings/cousins/whatever,
Life doesn’t always work out the way you’d like It to. And I’m certainly not blaming people for everything that happens to them. But if you want life to work out for you, there are certain things that are tried-and-true in their impact. Wait for sex. Don’t snatch and grab at relationships. Think long-term. Demand commitment. These principles are, I know, left largely for women to enforce. I’m sorry to say that is so. We old men try our best to tell young men these things. But you know what, young men listen to young women a helluva lot better than they listen to old men.
In C.S. Lewis’s hilarious sendup of the Sexual Revolution, “Ministering Angels,” the problem of dealing with sex in a research facility on Mars is posed. The commander says, “Whoever tried to live clean, except a minority who had a religion, or were in love?” They’ll try it on Mars just as they tried it on earth; the rest will take their pleasures where they can get them. These are the great inhibitors of the quest for male sexual experience: sincere religious belief and the desire to please one particular woman. Well, those of us who teach religion do our best to instill Christian values in people, including young men. But where the love of God fails to move them, the love of woman has to – and there, the only thing that works is to say, “Not until you put on a ring on it.”
“Still, wars and lechery! Nothing else holds fashion.” So said Thersites, commenting upon what all the major characters are getting up to in Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare’s play on the confusion between love and lust set in the midst of the Trojan War. I quote “the deformed and scurrilous Grecian” simply to point out that the emotions and tangled relationships we agonize over today have been agonized over for as long as people have been people. By and large, human behavior in this regard has changed but little. So allow me to point out some things about sex, in particular, that we all used to know.
Men and women think about sex and pursue sex differently. For men, sex is primarily an experience. For young men, especially, the pursuit of all kinds of experience, in as heightened a degree as one can find it, is part of their nature. This is not to say that the sex partner is irrelevant to the man, young or old, but simply to point out that sex is considered an experience in itself. Sharing it with the right partner no doubt makes it better, but as George Will once put it in comparison to some baseball pitch it’s nice to be able to throw, even when it’s not so good, it’s still pretty good.
Women primarily think about sex as part of a relationship. Whom one makes love to is more important than the thing as an experience; still less, as a technique. This doesn’t mean that how it turns out isn’t important to the female partner – as Dorothy Sayers said, the first rule of Bed is that a good time shall be had by ALL – but the identity of the partner remains paramount. At the same time, women risk far more by their sexual behavior than men do. The possibility of pregnancy – particularly, an unsupported pregnancy – has always been part of the equation; whereas men can always find somewhere else to be.
This is why, for as long as there has been human society, one of the great organizing principles of society has been that of the marriage covenant: the lasting pair-bond in which children can be nurtured until they are able to care for themselves. The old saying goes that men will give love in order to get sex, but women will give sex in order to get love. And as long as “love” includes the promise and protections of marriage, that works. When it doesn’t, then we have a problem.
When the sexual revolution came along – which actually started a generation or two before the Sixties and the development of the birth control pill – this began to change. As women were freed from the fear of being tied down by an unexpected pregnancy, they were able to compete more effectively with men in the economic realm. They also thought to claim the freedom that men had always enjoyed: to treat sex as an experience, one aspect of a relationship but certainly not the thing that constituted it. In other words, women thought they could act like men and be made happy thereby. But they were not made happy thereby, for even if they didn’t need to fear pregnancy any more, since they were not men, the satisfactions peculiar to men didn’t fulfill them. And they learned that there was a thing called a biological clock, ticking away. They also learned that taking hormones is not a simple switch you can turn on and off in all cases. There are risks as well as benefits to sexual freedom.
Meanwhile, men loved it that women weren’t nagging them about marriage any more. They had hit the jackpot: sex without complications. (We call it “friends with benefits.”) Which also didn’t please the women in their lives as much as those same women thought it would. Women gained a great deal from the Sexual Revolution, but men gained a great deal more. This is not fair, but it is what it is. If you want fair, go where they’re frying elephant ears.
And along the way, there was another, darker element: abortion. Abortion, too, has always been with us, as long as people have had children they didn’t want. Abortion without practical limits posed itself as the answer to the remaining question of the Sexual Revolution: What do I do if I screw up? If I didn’t take precautions or the precautions failed or something else happens? Well, you have the Right to a mulligan, said the oracle of abortion. The problem here is that it caused all kinds of people to see children as a problem, instead of an opportunity. Our society has been very anti-child ever since (the whole rhetoric of the child as burden, etc.).
And other things came with the whole sexual freedom package, like STDs. These, too, have been around a long time, but in a society where people – particularly, young people – think that consequence-free sex is the norm, then you find these diseases spreading. Another thing we all used to know is, that when you go to bed with Person A, you go to bed with everyone that Person A has ever been to bed with. This is not merely a medical observation, by the way; this is also a matter of experience. Instead of discovering all things in the arms of each other, there are things remembered from previous attempts that sometimes get in the way. Even young men sometimes discover when they finally find “the One” they were looking for, that all those other, passing relationships are now seen in a different light.
And in their search for ever more experience without inconvenient complications, and ever greater personal advancement without sacrifice, we also see that people can’t stay married for sour apples. Which leads to all kinds of “blended families,” which turn out not to be as good for kids as we all tell them it should. Certainly, the biggest predictor of child abuse is growing up in a family without one’s own biological father. This allows the intrusion of other males, adult or near-adult, in various combinations, into the family. And while many of these other males are fine fellows and a great influence on their step-children/siblings/cousins/whatever,
Life doesn’t always work out the way you’d like It to. And I’m certainly not blaming people for everything that happens to them. But if you want life to work out for you, there are certain things that are tried-and-true in their impact. Wait for sex. Don’t snatch and grab at relationships. Think long-term. Demand commitment. These principles are, I know, left largely for women to enforce. I’m sorry to say that is so. We old men try our best to tell young men these things. But you know what, young men listen to young women a helluva lot better than they listen to old men.
In C.S. Lewis’s hilarious sendup of the Sexual Revolution, “Ministering Angels,” the problem of dealing with sex in a research facility on Mars is posed. The commander says, “Whoever tried to live clean, except a minority who had a religion, or were in love?” They’ll try it on Mars just as they tried it on earth; the rest will take their pleasures where they can get them. These are the great inhibitors of the quest for male sexual experience: sincere religious belief and the desire to please one particular woman. Well, those of us who teach religion do our best to instill Christian values in people, including young men. But where the love of God fails to move them, the love of woman has to – and there, the only thing that works is to say, “Not until you put on a ring on it.”