When the Body Speaks

A post on "Rethinking Sex: A Provocation." In my defense, I was provoked!

I’ve read a lot of books about the disappointments of sexual liberation. It turns out that social pressure to have sex is also bad—Consent is not the only important thing in sex—Porn has damaged our relationships—The sexual revolution was won by the worst impulses in men—We’ve created a consumerist sexual culture where we treat one another like fungible goods on a shelf—Is this freedom, or just loneliness? “VIRGIN: Teach your kids it’s not a dirty word!”

Some of these books are Christian and some of these books are feminist (and some of these books are deploying feminism selectively in the service of Christianity, which is fine, I’m down, it just isn’t, like, pure uncut powder feminism, they’ve stepped on it a little). When I heard that my friend Christine Emba would be adding to these toppling stacks, I trusted that she would add something unique and needed. I’m gonna be real critical here but I want to say first off that I was right; she did.

There’s a traditional style for books in this genre, and Rethinking Sex: A Provocation shows that Emba has mastered it: by turns chatty and academic, dancing lightly from campus party conversations to theology to social science, all in a been-there-kissed-that voice, your favorite RA. (If you went to college. As everybody in this book does!) It has, I think, three huge strengths, even though they’re tied to the book’s biggest weakness.

The first strength is that authorial voice. Emba is unusually confident in her willingness to speak only to her actual target audience and not to outsiders. I’m not that target audience even slightly. This is a book written for secular, educated straight women, with v. normal sexual desires, too young to remember the Cold War. While I do have a college degree, I am also a fanatical Gen X lesbian who likes Garth Greenwell. This is a book whose cultural touchstone for women’s friendships is Sex and the City, not The Golden Girls. I often felt like an eavesdropper—which is a sign of the book’s acuity. I saw on Twitter that one woman had bought this book so she and her daughter could read it together, and that’s maybe the ideal here, using the book as a way for the daughter to articulate her own experience against the cultural landscape Emba depicts. My impression is that younger, more heterosexual readers have found this book’s depiction of sexual culture recognizable, its insights illuminating and either new, or at least unusually well-phrased. She gets great quotes from her interviewees, which suggests that she really gets where they’re coming from. If you’re in the target audience, or know somebody who is and who might be interested in this book, I’d recommend it!

Most books of this kind have a covert purpose. The focus on young women’s sexual dissatisfactions is only the key that the authors hope will open the door to their real worldview: Catholicism, Conservative Judaism, progressive feminism, or what have you. Rethinking Sex may be the only book I’ve read in this genre without that subterranean pressure. Emba is trying to articulate the Normal Woman’s actual sexual desires, experiences, beliefs, and longings, for the purpose of discerning how to fulfill them. That’s it.

The thing she ends up with is, for me, underwhelming. You could summarize this book as 200pp about how it’s okay to be nice to the people you sleep with, and it’s okay to expect them to be nice to you. “Please treat me as a person, even in sex.” Two hundred pages! But I think she’s right that a lot of people nowadays do need permission to ask that. That’s striking in itself, and “have I-Thou sex, not I-It sex” (as I think a commenter at Leah Libresco’s place put it) is an ethical mandate at once basic and challenging. If you need permission to listen to your longings and your conscience, this book is strengthening. If you worry that the people who talk about a sexual ethic that goes beyond mere consent are covert purity-culture warriors, this book is reassuring.

And Emba bluntly argues that having I-Thou sex would likely mean having less sex. That seems right (unless it just means you get married younger!), and imho people who try to do things Emba’s way will find that it’s hard and they’re ill-equipped. I think the path she proposes will be a humbling one for many people, and will require habits of self-knowledge, listening, and placing others’ good above one’s own desires. There’s a lot of sex as self-medication going around, and without that way of soothing your anxieties and relieving your loneliness, you’ll need to find others. Emba notes early on that sex can bring “beauty and restoration and awe,” but then by the end she’s saying we can “transcend our biology” and “nobody ever died of sexlessness.” Like true, but also, people do die of loneliness. They do die of feeling themselves and their lives and their futures unchosen and unbeautiful. Those hungers too will need some fulfillment in the less-sex world. Emba argues that good sex is about not just consent and pleasure but care; and I don’t think you get there without learning at least some ascetic habits.

It’s common knowledge that the greatest temptation of the ascetic is pride. And the flip side of Emba’s agendalessness is that it isn’t resting on anything firmer than her own sense of self. There is a confidence here that if we engage in self-reflection, we will discover that we too are normal women who want good sex—that is, sex of the kind and under the circumstances desired by Emba herself. A “balance”: “neither total abstinence [until marriage] nor assimilation to mainstream sexual culture.” Nonmarital sex is good, but it’s gotta be caring and thoughtful. Consider the community (we shtup in a society!), but don’t be weird about God.

This is simultaneously humble and kind of… not! There’s a humility in acknowledging that you haven’t found some grand truth, that you also are fumbling around and trying to modulate between analysis and vibes. And you’re exposing something very personal to others’ judgments. It isn’t my place to criticize Emba’s life; she knows what I believe and I know at least some of where we differ, and that’s life in the big city, I’m a stranger here myself. But Emba is also leveling some pretty pointed critiques of others’ lives, and when she concludes that her own way is best, it’s hard not to hear the Church Lady’s voice: “How conveeeenient!” (My understanding is that this book’s audience would make a Cardi B reference instead?)

There are early hints of the underlying issue here. Emba contrasts the Protestantism she grew up with, which taught that “sex should be saved for marriage, on pain of… something,” and the Catholicism to which she converted, in which “[t]he capacity to both desire and experience pleasure was a human endowment; sexuality expressed our belonging to the embodied and biological world and was woven into our very fabric.” The thing is that you could read this whole passage and never realize that Catholicism also very much does teach that sex outside of marriage is sinful. I’m always here for a Catholicism that heals and guides and shapes rather than uproots and condemns; but like, we do actually believe in the Ten Commandments, you go to Confession even if he really loves you. The parts of the catechism Emba doesn’t quote are as important to its vision of sex as the parts she does.

My objections crystallized in lol the one chapter I didn’t want to write about here, viz. “Some Desires Are Worse Than Others.” I don’t want to just be talking about kinky stuff all the time! But on reflection, it is really the chapter where the book’s weakness gets exposed.

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I Thank God That My Sins Are Not As the Sins of Armie Hammer, Or Even That Ho Over There

“SDAWTO” starts with a conversation at a party, in which a tipsy girl wants Emba’s permission to be upset that her boyfriend keeps choking her during sex. There are a lot of places you could go from here, and one problem is that Emba wants to go to all of them. She wants to say, You never have to put up with sex you hate (very true!), and, Porn has warped our beliefs about sex (also true!), but her real point is the chapter’s title. “There are sexual acts that clearly eroticize degradation…. In any arena other than the sexual, it would be clear that these desires reinforce oppressive structures and stereotypes, and that by breathing more life into them we are likely to make society worse for us all.”

And here I, too, want to go in multiple directions. In order from most self-righteous to most self-exposing:

Do we really need a heterosexual reenactment of the 1980s - 90s Lesbian Sex Wars? Cannot we all just make the straights read Dorothy Allison and then call it a dang day?

Who is this chapter for? The rest of the book is tightly-targeted but this chapter swings wildly from addressing women who don’t wanna be sexy choked, to men who want to choke women, to men who maybe are just doing that because of porn, to women who wanna be sexy choked because they have whatever the Youth of Today say instead of “false consciousness.” This is too many audiences, especially since Emba only understands the first one.

Imho it is basically always better to say, “Some expressions of desire are better than others.” Emba’s framing inevitably collapses into “Some people’s desires are worse than other people’s,” which provokes condescension and judgment in the good-desires people and fatalism and shame in the bad-desires ones. Lots of people have already tried to just have better desires! I guarantee you many people have already asked how their weird sex stuff “reflect[s] on their personal psychology.” This chapter toggles between “just askin’ questions!” and lecturing you on which desires are bad and why. It’s just all a bit galling from someone who transparently doesn’t have any of the desires she’s naming as worse. You don’t even know what helps!

And… a lot of this book’s power comes from its willingness to say that the body speaks its own truth, rather than holding only whatever meaning we choose to impose on it. Sex has an allegorical side, not just a novelistic side of desires and thoughts. This is the strength of the Theology of the Body: its insistence that we can lie with the body or we can tell the truth. For my own part I am convinced that sex that intentionally incorporates unequal power, humiliation, or degradation is a form of lying with the body. Sex should be a mutual cry of delight at the experience of the imago Dei in your partner, not an effacement—however desired, however playful, however temporary—of that image in oneself or in her.

But I say that because I’m committed to the allegorical view of sex more generally. There’s a more novelistic view, or let’s say theatrical, where sex can use fiction to speak truth about the partners’ connection, their communion. And lol bdsm stuff seems actually much more like theatrical truth-in-fiction than the standard Catholic examples of ignoring the body’s meaning, e.g. contraception or nonmarital sex. So Emba’s position ends up coming across real “allegorical for thee, novelistic for me.” My sex life has the meaning I discern in it, and your sex life has the meaning I discern in it. I don’t think this was the inevitable result of rejecting an outside standard set by the Church/the Lord, but it was always an obvious danger.

There’s a line from Vanilla Sky, a movie I’ve never seen, that goes, “Don’t you know that when you sleep with someone, your body makes a promise, whether you do or not?” This is a sweeter, less Roman-damaged version of I Cor 6:16. It’s resonant; it fits with everything else Emba wants to say here; but it also pushes beyond normalcy, beyond just a more confident articulation of what normal women already want.

If the body always carries its inherent meaning like a gift, I suspect all of us have earned judgment for how we’ve mistranslated and misused Sister Flesh. All of us will have to adjust ourselves to morality, and offer ourselves for mercy.

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The Mountain Goats, “Choked Out.” At one, for once, with the universe…

Empty bed via Wikimedia Commons.