An Opening Case
Though probably only about 20 percent of the college population engages in 80 percent of the activity known as “hooking up” or having “friends with benefits,” it certainly feels to many on college campuses like everyone is “doing it.” The young heterosexual women who are a part of this scene have sex often but frequently do not describe these encounters as pleasurable, sensuous, or even exciting. Few report ever having had a significant boyfriend. Additionally, a double standard appears to be alive and well in certain cases, with “highly desirable” males enjoying access to a harem of female sexual partners. So, why do many Christians find this problematic? What’s the big deal? What is sex for? How do you think we should order our sexual lives?
During the second half of the twentieth century, there was an extensive reevaluation of Christian attitudes toward sexuality. Some traditional perspectives were labeled “antisexual,” and considerable efforts were directed toward the development of a more positive interpretation of the body self. This negative attitude toward sexuality is often traced to certain passages from the letters of Saint Paul or to the writings of Saint Augustine of Hippo. This negativism in the tradition is epitomized by the fact that the two words sex and sin have been so closely united in Christian thinking that many of the faithful regard them as synonymous!
Theologians generally agree that the “culprit” in this situation is the still prevalent notion that humans are divided beings, consisting of a spiritual part (the heart or mind) and a physical part (the body). The spiritual part, on the one hand, has been misidentified with the essence of the human person, which bears the image of God, and is therefore good. The body, on the other hand, has been seen as only the physical “garment” in which the self is clothed and from which the “evils” of desire and passion emerge. Against this dualistic view, Christian writers today stress that the human being is a psychosomatic unity, a bodily self who cannot be divided without distortion. Moreover, the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ reveals that our whole being—body and soul—is essential to who we are as sons and daughters of God. We have reason to thank God for our physical as well as our spiritual being. It follows that because sexuality is essential to human beings, it too should be celebrated as God’s gracious gift rather than being mortified as an instrument of the devil.
These insights have had a salutary impact on current Christian anthropology and on the larger culture, but they have also encouraged a certain naïveté or excessive optimism concerning our sexual selves. To “celebrate” our sexuality became the new imperative, with the accent on Christian freedom, and the goodness of our sexuality encouraging a more open attitude toward sexual expression and experimentation. We have been embarrassed by the negativism in our tradition and in reaction have let the pendulum swing to the other extreme.
Many contemporary Christians challenge the traditional sexual ethic of abstinence in singleness and fidelity in marriage, as well as the message of sexual shame that often accompanied this rule. Those particularly impressed with the potential goodness of sexuality are inclined to see restrictions—especially those that limit sexual relations to heterosexual marriage and/or link them inseparably to procreation, for example—as unwarranted. They argue that the quality of a sexual relationship will determine whether it is life-enhancing or destructive.
At the same time, there have always been those who have sought a more balanced response, informed by both the positive affirmation of sexuality as God’s good gift and the recognition of our capacity for the lustful exploitation of each other. The theological doctrines of both the goodness of creation and universal effects of “the fall” help Christians recognize the ambiguity of our actual experience of human sexuality. The desire for and the experience of pleasure can help people establish delightful relationships of mutual interdependence, gracious support, and intimacy; the threats they pose can also drive us to objectify others, reducing them to mere instruments of pleasure.
Perhaps no one has given better voice to the vulnerability that accompanies sexual desire than the archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, whose essay opens this chapter. The essay that follows, by Kari-Shane Davis Zimmerman, analyzes today’s “hookup” scene with an eye toward its double standards for both men and women, and its impact on our ability to build and sustain sexual relationships based on mutual intimacy and trust. Dennis Hollinger’s essay gives powerful voice to the traditional Christian view that morally legitimate sexual activity “is found only in the marriage of a man and a woman.”
The essay by Karen Lebacqz is both more cautionary about the threats sexuality poses and yet in theory, at any rate, open to positive evaluations of nonmarital sexual relationships. She argues that the way women often experience the links between sexuality and violence necessitates the development of a new sexual ethic under a different rubric. Because their very survival is at stake, heterosexual women must explore what it means for them to love an “enemy.” Finally we draw your attention to a scourge linked to sexual desire, the global trafficking of women and children into sexual slavery. Despite its romantic mystification in movies like Pretty Woman, the reality of prostitution in the United States is such that it warrants our consideration. Elissa Cooper thoughtfully explores several Christian responses to it.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The essay is very dense; every sentence counts. It repays two or three readings; and you have understood it when you get the jokes. I call your attention to two widely separated paragraphs that hold together the main points of the essay. You understand it, too, when you see how these paragraphs fit together.
Grace, for the Christian believer, is a transformation that depends in large part on knowing yourself to be seen in a certain way: as significant, as wanted. The whole story of creation, incarnation, and our incorporation into the fellowship of Christ’s body tells us that God desires us, as if we were God, as if we were that unconditional response to God’s giving that God’s self makes in the life of the Trinity. We are created so that we may be caught up in this, so that we may grow into the wholehearted love of God by learning that God loves us as God loves God. The life of the Christian community has as its rationale—if not invariably its practical reality—the task of teaching us to so order our relations that human beings may see themselves as desired, as the occasion of joy.
. . . The body’s grace itself only makes human sense if we have a language of grace in the first place; this in turn depends on having a language of creation and redemption. To be formed in our humanity by the loving delight of another is an experience whose contours we can identify most clearly and hopefully if we have also learned, or are learning, about being the object of the causeless, loving delight of God, being the object of God’s love for God through incorporation into the community of God’s Spirit and the taking-on of the identity of God’s Child. It is because of our need to keep that perspective clear before us that the community needs some who are called beyond or aside from the ordinary patterns of sexual relation to put their identities directly into the hands of God in the single life.
Why does sex matter? Most people know that sexual intimacy is in some ways frightening for them, that it is quite simply the place where they began to be taught whatever maturity they have. Most of us know that the whole business is irredeemably comic, surrounded by so many odd chances and so many opportunities for making a fool of yourself. Plenty know that it is the place where they are liable to be most profoundly damaged or helpless. Culture in general and religion in particular have devoted enormous energy to the doomed task of getting it right. In this essay, I want to try and understand a little better why the task is doomed, and why the fact that it’s doomed is a key to seeing more fully why and how it matters—and even seeing more fully what this mattering has to do with God.
Best to start from a particular thing, a particular story. Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet is full of poignant and very deep analyses of the tragedies of sexuality: the theme which drives through all four novels and unites their immense rambling plots is Ronald Merrick’s destruction and corruption of his own humanity and that of all who fall into his hands. That corruption effectively begins at the moment he discovers how he is aroused, how his privacy is invaded, by the desirable body of a man, and he is appalled and terrified by this. His first attempt to punish and obliterate the object of his desire is what unleashes the forces of death and defilement that follow him everywhere thereafter. Sexual refusal is dramatized by him in enactments of master-slave relations: he humiliates what he longs for, so that his dominion is not challenged and so that the sexual disaster becomes a kind of political tragedy. Merrick is an icon of the “body politic”: his terror, his refusal, and his corruption stand as a metaphor of the Raj itself, of power willfully turning away from the recognition of those wants and needs that only vulnerability to the despised and humiliated stranger can open up and satisfy.
Interwoven with Merrick’s tragedy is the story of Sarah Layton, a figure constantly aware of her powerlessness before events, her inability to undo the injuries and terrors of the past, but no less constantly trying to see and respond truthfully and generously. At the end of the second novel in the sequence, Sarah is seduced, lovelessly but not casually: her yielding is prompted perhaps more than anything by her seducer’s mercilessly clear perception of her. She does not belong, he tells her, however much she tries to give herself to the conventions of the Raj. Within her real generosity is a lost and empty place: “You don’t know anything about joy at all, do you?”[1]
Absent from the life of the family she desperately tries to prop up, absent from the life of European society in India, Sarah is present fully to no one and nothing. Her innate truthfulness and lack of egotistical self-defense mean that she is able to recognize this once the remark is made: there is no joy for her, because she is not able to be anywhere. When she is at last coaxed into bed, as they “enact” a tenderness that is not really that of lovers, Sarah comes to herself: hours later, on the train journey back to her family, she looks in the mirror and sees that “she had entered her body’s grace.”[2]
What does this mean? The phrase recurs more than once in the pages of the novel that follow, but it is starkly clear that there is no lasting joy for Sarah. There is a pregnancy and an abortion; a continuing loneliness. Yet nothing in this drainingly painful novel suggests that the moment of the “body’s grace” for Sarah was a deceit. Somehow she has been aware of what it was and was not: a frontier has been passed, and that has been and remains grace; a being present, even though this can mean knowing that the graced body is now more than ever a source of vulnerability. But it is still grace, a filling of the void, an entry into some different kind of identity. There may have been little love, even little generosity, in Sarah’s lovemaking, but she has discovered that her body can be the cause of happiness to her and to another. It is this discovery which most clearly shows why we might want to talk about grace here. Grace, for the Christian believer, is a transformation that depends in large part on knowing yourself to be seen in a certain way: as significant, as wanted.
The whole story of creation, incarnation, and our incorporation into the fellowship of Christ’s body tells us that God desires us, as if we were God, as if we were that unconditional response to God’s giving that God’s self makes in the life of the Trinity. We are created so that we may be caught up in this, so that we may grow into the wholehearted love of God by learning that God loves us as God loves God.
The life of the Christian community has as its rationale—if not invariably its practical reality—the task of teaching us to so order our relations that human beings may see themselves as desired, as the occasion of joy. It is not surprising that sexual imagery is freely used, in and out of the Bible, for this newness of perception. What is less clear is why the fact of sexual desire, the concrete stories of human sexuality rather than the generalizing metaphors it produces, are so grudgingly seen as matters of grace, or only admitted as matters of grace when fenced with conditions. Understanding this involves us in stepping back to look rather harder at the nature of sexual desire; and this is where abstractness and overambitious theory threaten.
In one of the few sensible and imaginative accounts of sexual desire by a philosopher, Thomas Nagel writes:
Sexual desire involves a kind of perception, but not merely a single perception of its object, for in the paradigm case of mutual desire there is a complex system of superimposed mutual perceptions—not only perceptions of the sexual object, but perceptions of oneself. Moreover, sexual awareness of another involves considerable self-awareness to begin with—more than is involved in ordinary sensory perception.[3]
Initially I may be aroused by someone unaware of being perceived by me, and that arousal is significant in “identifying me with my body” in a new way, but is not yet sufficient for speaking about the full range of sexuality. I am aroused as a cultural, not just a biological being; I need, that is, to bring my body into the shared world of language and (in the widest sense!) “intercourse.” My arousal is not only my business: I need its cause to know about it, to recognize it, for it to be anything more than a passing chance. So my desire, if it is going to be sustained and developed, must itself be perceived; and, if it is to develop as it naturally tends to, it must be perceived as desirable by the other—that is, my arousal and desire must become the cause of someone else’s desire.
For my desire to persist and have some hope of fulfillment, it must be exposed to the risks of being seen by its object. Nagel sees the whole complex process as a special case of what’s going on in any attempt to share, in language, what something means. Part of my making sense to you depends on my knowing that you can “see” that I want to make sense. And my telling you or showing you that this is what I want implies that I “see” you as wanting to understand. “Sex has a related structure: it involves a desire that one’s partner be aroused by the recognition of one’s desire that he or she be aroused.”[4]
All this means that in sexual relation I am no longer in charge of what I am. Any genuine experience of desire leaves me in this position: I cannot of myself satisfy my wants without distorting or trivializing them. But in this experience we have a particularly intense case of the helplessness of the ego alone. For my body to be the cause of joy, the end of homecoming, for me, it must be there for someone else, must be perceived, accepted, nurtured. And that means being given over to the creation of joy in that other, because only as directed to the enjoyment, the happiness, of the other does it become unreservedly lovable. To desire my joy is to desire the joy of the one I desire: my search for enjoyment through the bodily presence of another is a longing to be enjoyed in my body. As Blake put it, sexual partners “admire” in each other “the lineaments of gratified desire.” We are pleased because we are pleasing.
It is in this perspective, Nagel says, that we can understand the need for a language of sexual failure, immaturity, even “perversion.” Solitary sexual activity works at the level of release of tension and a particular localized physical pleasure; but insofar as it has nothing much to do with being perceived from beyond myself in a way that changes my self-awareness, it isn’t of much interest for a discussion of sexuality as process and relation, and says little about grace. In passing, Nagel makes a number of interesting observations on sexual encounters that either allow no exposed spontaneity because they are bound to specific methods of sexual arousal—like sado-masochism—or that permit only a limited awareness of the embodiment of the other because there is an unbalance in the relation such that the desire of the other for me is irrelevant or minimal—rape, pedophilia, bestiality.[5] These “asymmetrical” sexual practices have some claim to be called perverse in that they leave one agent in effective control of the situation—one agent, that is, who doesn’t have to wait upon the desire of the other. (Incidentally, if this suggests that, in a great many cultural settings, the socially licensed norm of heterosexual intercourse is a “perversion”—well, that is a perfectly serious suggestion.)
If we bracket, for the moment, the terminology of what is normative or ideal, it seems that at least we have here a picture of what sexuality might mean at its most comprehensive. And the moral question, I suspect, ought to be: How much do we want our sexual activity to communicate? How much do we want it to display a breadth of human possibility and a sense of the body’s capacity to heal and enlarge the life of others? Nagel’s reflections suggest that some kinds of sexual activity distort or confine the human resourcefulness, the depth or breadth of meaning such activity may carry: they involve assuming that sexual activity has less to do with the business of human growth and human integrity than we know it can have. Decisions about sexual lifestyle, the ability to identify certain patterns as sterile, undeveloped, or even corrupt, are, in this light, decisions about what we want our bodily life to say, how our bodies are to be brought into the whole project of “making human sense” for ourselves and each other.
To be able to make such decisions is important. A purely conventional (heterosexual) morality simply absolves us from the difficulties we might meet in doing so. The question of human meaning is not raised, nor are we helped to see what part sexuality plays in our learning to be human with one another—to enter the body’s grace—because all we need to know is that sexual activity is licensed in one context and in no other. Not surprising, then, if the reaction is often either, “It doesn’t matter what I do (say) with my body, because it’s my inner life and emotions that matter” or, “The only criterion is what gives pleasure and does no damage.” Both of those responses are really to give up on the human seriousness of all this.
They are also, like conventional ethics, attempts to get rid of risk. Nagel comes close to saying what I believe needs saying here, that sexual “perversion” is sexual activity without risk, without the dangerous acknowledgment that my joy depends on someone else’s, as theirs does on mine. Distorted sexuality is the effort to bring my happiness back under my control and to refuse to let my body be recreated by another person’s perception. And this is, in effect, to withdraw my body from the enterprise of human beings making sense in collaboration, in community, withdrawing my body from language, culture, and politics. Most people who have bothered to think about it have noticed a certain tendency for odd sorts of sexual activity to go together with political distortion and corruption (the Raj Quartet’s Merrick again—indeed, the whole pathology of the torturer). What women writers like Susan Griffin have taught us about the politics of pornography has sharpened this observation.
But how do we manage this risk, the entry into a collaborative way of making sense of our whole material selves? It is this, of course, that makes the project of “getting it right” doomed, as I suggested earlier. Nothing will stop sex being tragic and comic. It is above all the area of our lives where we can be rejected in our bodily entirety, where we can venture into the “exposed spontaneity” that Nagel talks about and find ourselves looking foolish or even repellent, so that the perception of ourselves we are offered is negating and damaging (homosexuals, I think, know rather a lot about this). And it is also where the awful incongruity of our situation can break through as comedy, even farce. I’m tempted, by the way, to say that only cultures and people that have a certain degree of moral awareness about how sex forms persons, and an awareness therefore of moral and personal risk in it all, can actually find it funny: the pornographer and the scientific investigator of how to maximize climaxes don’t as a rule seem to see much of the dangerous absurdity of the whole thing.
The misfire or mismatch of sexual perception is, like any dialogue at cross-purposes, potentially farcical—no less so for being on the edge of pain. Shakespeare (as usual) knows how to tread such a difficult edge: do we or don’t we laugh at Malvolio? For he is transformed by the delusion that he is desired—and if such transformations, such conversions, were not part of our sexual experience, we should not see any joke.
And it’s because this is ultimately serious that the joke breaks down. Malvolio is funny, and what makes him funny is also what makes the whole episode appallingly and irreconcilably hurtful. The man has, after all, ventured a tiny step into vulnerability, into the shared world of sexually perceived bodies, and he has been ruthlessly mocked and denied. In a play which is almost overloaded with sexual ambivalence and misfiring desires, Malvolio demonstrates brutally just why all the “serious” characters are in one or another sort of mess about sex, all holding back from sharing and exposure, in love with private fantasies of generalized love.
The discovery of sexual joy and of a pattern of living in which that joy is accessible must involve the insecurities of “exposed spontaneity”—the experience of misunderstanding or of the discovery (rapid or slow) that this relationship is not about joy. These discoveries are bearable, if at all, because at least they have changed the possibilities of our lives in a way which may still point to what joy might be. But it should be clear that the discovery of joy means something rather more than the bare facts of sexual intimacy. I can only fully discover the body’s grace in taking time, the time needed for a mutual recognition that my partner and I are not simply passive instruments to each other. Such things are learned in the fabric of a whole relation of converse and cooperation; yet of course the more time taken the longer a kind of risk endures. There is more to expose, and a sustaining of the will to let oneself be formed by the perceptions of another. Properly understood, sexual faithfulness is not an avoidance of risk, but the creation of a context in which grace can abound because there is a commitment not to run away from the perception of another.
When we bless sexual unions, we give them a life, a reality not dependent on the contingent thoughts and feelings of the people involved; but we do this so that they may have a certain freedom to “take time” to mature and become as profoundly nurturing as they can. We should not do it in order to create a wholly impersonal and enforceable “bond”; if we do, we risk turning blessing into curse, grace into law, art into rule-keeping.
In other words, I believe that the promise of faithfulness, the giving of unlimited time to each other, remains central for understanding the full “resourcefulness” and grace of sexual union. I simply don’t think we would grasp all that was involved in the mutual transformation of sexually linked persons without the reality of unconditional public commitments: more perilous, more demanding, more promising.
Yet the realities of our experience in looking for such possibilities suggest pretty clearly that an absolute declaration that every sexual partnership must conform to the pattern of commitment or else have the nature of sin and nothing else is unreal and silly. People do discover—as does Sarah Layton—a grace in encounters fraught with transitoriness and without much “promising” (in any sense): it may be just this that prompts them to want the fuller, longer exploration of the body’s grace that faithfulness offers. Recognizing this—which is no more than recognizing the facts of a lot of people’s histories, heterosexual or homosexual, in our society—ought to be something we can do without generating anxieties about weakening or compromising the focal significance of commitment and promise in our Christian understanding and “moral imagining” of what sexual bonding can be.
Much more damage is done here by the insistence on a fantasy version of heterosexual marriage as the solitary ideal, when the facts of the situation are that an enormous number of “sanctioned” unions are a framework for violence and human destructiveness on a disturbing scale; sexual union is not delivered from moral danger and ambiguity by satisfying a formal socio-religious criterion. Decisions about sexual lifestyle, to repeat, are about how much we want our bodily selves to mean, rather than what emotional needs we’re meeting or what laws we’re satisfying. “Does this mean that we are using faith to undermine law? By no means: we are placing law itself on a firmer footing” (Rom. 3:31, NEB). Happily there is more to Paul than the (much quoted in this context) first chapter of Romans!
I have suggested that the presence or absence of the body’s grace has a good deal to do with matters other than the personal. It has often been said, especially by feminist writers, that the making of my body into a distant and dangerous object that can be either subdued or placated with quick gratification is the root of sexual oppression. If my body isn’t me, then the desiring perception of my body is bound up with an area of danger and foreignness, and I act toward whatever involves me in desiring and being desired with fear and hostility. Man fears and subdues woman; and—the argument continues—this licenses and grounds a whole range of processes that are about the control of the strange: “nature,” the foreigner, the unknowable future. This is not to assert uncritically that sexual disorder is the cause of every human pathology, but to grant, first, that it is pervasively present in all sorts of different disorders, and second, that it constitutes a kind of paradigm case of wrongness and distortion, something that shows us what it is like to refuse the otherness of the material world and to try to keep it other and distant and controlled. It is a paradigm of how not to make sense in its retreat from the uncomfortable knowledge that I cannot make sense of myself without others, cannot speak until I’ve listened, cannot love myself without being the object of love or enjoy myself without being the cause of joy.
Thinking about sexuality in its fullest implications involves thinking about entering into a sense of oneself beyond the customary imagined barrier between the “inner” and the “outer,” the private and the shared. We are led into the knowledge that our identity is being made in the relations of bodies, not by the private exercise of will or fantasy: we belong with and to each other, not to our “private” selves—as Paul said of mutual sexual commitment (1 Cor. 7:4)—and yet are not instruments for each other’s gratification.
All this, moreover, is not only potentially but actually a political knowledge, a knowledge of what ordered human community might be. Without a basic political myth of how my welfare depends on yours and yours on mine, a myth of personal needs in common that can only be met by mutuality, we condemn ourselves to a politics of injustice and confrontation. Granted that a lot of nonsense has been talked about the politics of eroticism recently, we should still acknowledge that an understanding of our sexual needs and possibilities is a task of real political importance. Sexuality-related “issues” cannot be isolated from the broader project of social recreation and justice.
As I hinted earlier, the body’s grace itself only makes human sense if we have a language of grace in the first place; this in turn depends on having a language of creation and redemption. To be formed in our humanity by the loving delight of another is an experience whose contours we can identify most clearly and hopefully if we have also learned, or are learning, about being the object of the causeless, loving delight of God, being the object of God’s love for God through incorporation into the community of God’s Spirit and the taking-on of the identity of God’s Child. It is because of our need to keep that perspective clear before us that the community needs some who are called beyond or aside from the ordinary patterns of sexual relation to put their identities directly into the hands of God in the single life. This is not an alternative to the discovery of the body’s grace. All those taking up the single vocation must know something about desiring and being desired if their single vocation is not to be sterile and evasive. Their decision (which is as risky as the commitment to sexual fidelity) is to see if they can find themselves, their bodily selves, in a life dependent simply upon trust in the generous delight of God—that Other who, by definition, cannot want us to supply deficiencies in the bliss of a divine ego, but whose whole life is a “being-for,” a movement of gift.
Sebastian Moore remarks that “True celibates are rare—not in the sense of superior but in the sense that watchmakers are rare.”[6] Finding a bodily/sexual identity through trying to expose yourself first and foremost to the desirous perception of God is difficult and precarious in a way not many of us may realize, and it creates problems in dealing with the fact that sexual desiring and being desired do not simply go away in the single life. Turning such experience constantly toward the context of God’s desire is a heavy task—time is to be given to God rather than to one human focus for sexual commitment. But this extraordinary experiment does seem to be “justified in its children,” in two obvious ways. There is the great freedom of the celibate mystic deploying the rhetoric of erotic love in speaking of God; and, even more important, there is that easy acceptance of the body, its needs and limitations, which we find in mature celibates like Teresa of Avila in her last years. Whatever the cost, this vocation stands as an essential part of the background to understanding the body’s grace: paradoxical as it sounds, the celibate calling has, as one aspect of its role in the Christian community, the nourishing and enlarging of Christian sexuality.
It is worth wondering why so little of the agitation about sexual morality and the status of homosexual men and women in the church in recent years has come from members of our religious orders. I strongly suspect that a lot of celibates indeed have a keener sensitivity about these matters than some of their married fellow Christians. And anyone who knows the complexities of the true celibate vocation would be the last to have any sympathy with the extraordinary idea that homosexual orientation is an automatic pointer to the celibate life—almost as if celibacy before God is less costly, even less risky, for the homosexual than the heterosexual.
It is impossible, when we’re trying to reflect on sexuality, not to ask just where the massive cultural and religious anxiety about same-sex relationships that is so prevalent at the moment comes from. In this final section I want to offer some thoughts about this problem. I wonder whether it is to do with the fact that same-sex relations oblige us to think directly about bodiliness and sexuality in a way that socially and religiously sanctioned heterosexual unions do not. When we’re thinking about the latter, there are other issues involved, notably what one neo-Marxist sociologist called the ownership of the means of production of human beings. Married sex has, in principle, an openness to the more tangible goals of producing children; its “justification” is more concrete than what I’ve been suggesting as the inner logic and process of the sexual relation itself. If we can set the movement of sexual desire within this lager purpose, we can perhaps more easily accommodate the embarrassment and insecurity of desire: it’s all for a good cause, and a good cause that can be visibly and plainly evaluated in its usefulness and success.
Same-sex love annoyingly poses the question of what the meaning of desire is—in itself, not considered as instrumental to some other process, such as the peopling of the world. We are brought up against the possibility not only of pain and humiliation without any clear payoff, but, just as worryingly, of nonfunctional joy—of joy, to put it less starkly, whose material “production” is an embodied person aware of grace. The question is the same as the one raised for some kinds of moralists by the existence of the clitoris in women: something whose function is joy. If the Creator were quite so instrumentalist in “his” attitude to sexuality, these hints of prodigality and redundancy in the way the whole thing works might cause us to worry about whether “he” was, after all, in full rational control of it. But if God made us for joy . . . ?
The odd thing is that this sense of meaning for sexuality beyond biological reproduction is the one foremost in the biblical use of sexual metaphors for God’s relation to humanity. God as the husband of the land is a familiar enough trope, but Hosea’s projection of the husband-and-wife story onto the history of Israel deliberately subverts the God-and-the-land clichés of Near Eastern cults: God is not the potent male sower of seed but the tormented lover, and the gift of the land’s fertility is conditional upon the hurts of unfaithfulness and rejection being healed.
The imagery remains strongly patriarchal, not surprisingly, but its content and direction are surprising. Hosea is commanded to love his wife “as I, the LORD, love the Israelites” (Hos. 3:1, NEB)—persistently, without immediate return, exposing himself to humiliation. What seems to be the prophet’s own discovery of a kind of sexual tragedy enables a startling and poignant reimagining of what it means for God to be united, not with a land alone, but with a people, themselves vulnerable and changeable. God is at the mercy of the perceptions of an uncontrolled partner.
John Boswell, in his Michael Harding Address, made a closely related observation: “Love in the Old Testament is too idealized in terms of sexual attraction (rather than procreation). Samuel’s father says to his wife—who is sterile and heartbroken because she does not produce children—‘Am I not more to you than ten children?’ ” And he goes on to note that the same holds for the New Testament, which “is notably nonbiological in its emphasis.”[7] Jesus and Paul equally discuss marriage without using procreation as a rational or functional justification. Paul’s strong words in 1 Corinthians 7:4 about partners in marriage surrendering the individual “ownership” of their bodies carry a more remarkable revaluation of sexuality than anything else in the Christian scriptures. And the use of marital imagery for Christ and the church in Ephesians 5, for all its blatant assumption of male authority, still insists on the relational and personally creative element in the metaphor: “In loving his wife a man loves himself. For no one ever hated his own body” (5:28-9, NEB).
In other words, if we are looking for a sexual ethic that can be seriously informed by our Bible, there is a good deal to steer us away from assuming that reproductive sex is a solitary norm, however important and theologically significant it may be. When looking for a language that will be resourceful enough to speak of the complex and costly faithfulness between God and God’s people, what several of the biblical writers turn to is sexuality understood very much in terms of the process of “entering the body’s grace.” If we are afraid of facing the reality of same-sex love because it compels us to think through the processes of bodily desire and delight in their own right, perhaps we ought to be more cautious about appealing to scripture as legitimating only procreative heterosexuality.
In a church that accepts the legitimacy of contraception, the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous biblical texts, or on a problematic and nonscriptural theory about natural complementarity, applied narrowly and crudely to physical differentiation without regard to psychological structures. I suspect that a fuller exploration of the sexual metaphors of the Bible will have more to teach us about a theology and ethics of sexual desire than will the flat citation of isolated texts; and I hope other theologians will find this worth following up more fully than I can do here.
A theology of the body’s grace which can do justice to the experience of concrete sexual discovery, in all its pain and variety, is not, I believe, a marginal eccentricity in the doctrinal spectrum. It depends heavily on believing in a certain sort of God—the trinitarian Creator and Savior of the world—and it draws in a great many themes in the Christian understanding of humanity, helping us to a better critical grasp of the nature and the dangers of corporate human living.
It is surely time to give time to this, especially when so much public Christian comment on these matters is not only nontheological but positively antitheological. But for now let me close with some words from a non-Christian writer who has managed to say more about true theology than most so-called professionals like myself.
It is perception above all which will free us from tragedy. Not the perception of illusion, or of a fantasy that would deny the power of fate and nature. But perception wedded to matter itself, a knowledge that comes to us from the sense of the body, a wisdom born of wholeness of mind and body come together in the heart. The heart dies in us. This is the self we have lost, the self we daily sacrifice.[8]
I know no better account of the body’s grace, and of its precariousness.
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Many of today’s college-bound young adults arrive onto a college campus with high hopes of fulfilling their vocational aspirations and making a difference in the world. For some, there is even a romantic notion still operating that suggests college is the place in which they will find a significant other in which to build a future life. Regarding this latter belief, many twentysomethings come to realize within the first few months of their college experience that a new kind of “dating” model is operating on today’s college campuses in which some (certainly not all) participate. Moreover, they are learning a hard truth, and that is, the effects of participating in what Kathleen Bogle dubs a “subculture with a complex set of rules and expectations” is wreaking havoc on some of their lives.
This essay explores further Bogle’s claim by looking closely at the practice of hooking up, as well as commenting on the physical, emotional, and psychological damage that can result, especially for women, when one participates in the “hookup” culture. I argue that hooking up involves practicing skills that work directly against the kinds of practices needed to sustain a marriage—a relationship goal many practitioners of hooking up admit to desiring at some point in their future adult life.[9] I also argue that there is a double standard based on gender in the practice of hooking up. Before I begin, however, let me say a few words about what exactly the term hooking up means.
. . . First, hooking up can involve an array of physical activity with another individual (from kissing to genital intercourse) who might be a friend, an acquaintance, or in what appear to be rare cases, a complete stranger.[10] Second, hooking up also can happen virtually anywhere on a college campus: a bedroom, dance floor, bar, bathroom, auditorium, or any deserted room on a college campus. Third, most hookups are unplanned (although this does not always have to be the case); that is, they are spur-of-the-moment get-togethers that seem to happen most often following the end of some sort of group social gathering that involves significant consumption of alcohol. Lastly, contributing to the ambiguity of the practice is that a hookup between two consenting individuals may lead to the start of something like an exclusive dating relationship or nothing at all. Thus, according to Laura Sessions Stepp, author of Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both (2007), “hooking up” is really all about the ability to “unhook” from a partner at any given time, as well as from the social expectations that coincide with many young adults’ views of what it means “to date” a person of the opposite-sex.[11]
Clearly one step involves determining how far to take things sexually. Here again Bogle’s research suggests more is at stake than simply consulting one’s own moral beliefs and sense of self. She writes, “Perception of what peers do sexually also affects the level of sexual interaction.”[12] That is, even though the term hooking up appears intentionally vague and ambiguous, what students believe is “normal” within the context of the hookup culture also affects how men and women conduct themselves during a hookup.
For example, if there is one norm specific to the hookup culture, Bogle notes, it is that some students admit they would go further sexually in a hookup if they did not really like the person or think there was any chance for a relationship. On the surface, this rationale appears illogical because why would students be more sexually intimate with someone they did not really like? The irony, according to Bogle, is that many college students in her study admitted it was not a smart idea to become overly sexual with a hookup partner if one actually wanted to begin a relationship with the partner. In other words, if someone really likes another person, the operating (and dominant) social consensus is to “take it slow.” Thus, it appears socially acceptable to do “whatever” with someone sexually who is “just a hookup,” but the situation changes if one is potentially interested in forming a relationship post-hooking up.
This latter point is noteworthy for at least two reasons. First, it demonstrates an anti-hooking up logic within the actual hookup culture, and second, it also gives credence to Bogle’s findings that there appear to be rules attached to the hooking up script.[13] Case in point: if the two hookup partners are friends (or even acquaintances) before the encounter, chances remain high that their status will remain unchanged post-hooking up. However, one can never be sure both parties involved are on the same page concerning what should or should not happen following a hookup. Perhaps the one-time hookup will lead to a repeat hookup or even to what is deemed “going out,” being “together,” or “seeing each other.”[14] When the latter happens, exclusivity is one of the defining features of the relationship and hooking up with someone else is considered cheating.
Becoming exclusive with a partner, however, is oftentimes socially shunned, especially early on in one’s college experience. Yet, older students in Bogle’s study, primarily women, repeatedly acknowledged wanting (and thus looking for) an exclusive relationship.[15] This desire to have a relationship form from a hookup may be what actually keeps the hooking up script intact. She writes, “One can hope that a hookup is going to lead to something more (i.e., some version of a relationship). Although college students generally realized that there are no guarantees, promises, or ‘strings attached,’ the hope of a hookup leading to a relationship may loom large in the minds of some who decide to take part in hooking up.”[16]
Given what constitutes hooking up, one can see that for some college-aged young adults today, the script outlining how to form intimate relationships with a person of the opposite sex has changed from the more traditional dating script previously operative on most college campuses.[17] The latter script encouraged limited sexual interaction, especially until one was married or at least until there was some sign of future commitment such as an engagement declared or family approval had been given. In contrast, hooking up reverses many of the steps within the dating process, especially the timing and meaning of sexual activity.[18] Put differently, hooking up works against fostering any sense of mutual trust between two partners, even though most hookups take place between friends or at least semi-acquaintances rather than mere strangers. In addition, it is difficult for hookup partners to establish any sense of real physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual intimacy with each other.
Yet for a marriage to succeed, one needs to have developed skills at sustaining mutual trust and intimacy. These capacities are important because at the heart of Christian marriage is a mutual love that needs fostering over the course of the relationship, especially in times of tension and ambiguity. Moreover, in order for married love—which includes characteristics such as romance, sex, friendship, and commitment—to flourish partners need experience practicing mutual trust and intimacy, as one cultivates such habits over time. Hooking up works against the cultivation of such skills.
Such a reversal in relationship scripts and practices is morally significant for many reasons. I am not suggesting that “one night stands” or “casual sex” never took place in the past. Both were alternatives to the more dominant dating script that was present and operating.[19] Today, however, hooking up not only is more socially acceptable, but more importantly, it functions as the typical site for college-age men and women to begin a romantic relationship. Because of this, hooking up may be understood not as an alternative to the dating/relationship script, but an uncertain potential prelude to it! According to Stepp and Bogle’s research, this is troubling for some women who hook up because they remain eager and hopeful that from a hookup a future relationship may develop. Yet evidence suggests that the truth behind hooking up is this: when one decides to hook up, he/she attempts to control one’s mind and heart because hooking up in its most basic form, according to Laura Sessions Stepp, is about the ability to become unhooked from one’s partner.[20] That is, in order to successfully become unhooked during a hookup, one must practice being intentionally uncaring toward the other and thus view his/her hookup partner’s body as an object to be used for the sole purpose of sexual gratification and nothing more.
Such an approach fails to honor the human person’s innate human dignity as created in the image of God, a foundational claim within Christian ethics. Furthermore, within Christian sexual ethics specifically, the principle “do no harm” indicates one must never use another’s body simply for one’s personal sexual satisfaction.[21] Finally, Christian tradition affirms there is a unitive (and procreative) end to sex. In simple terms, this means sex is supposed to unite two people on several different levels—physically, emotionally, spiritually, etc. What happens after a hook up, however, is not intrinsic to the practice itself because one strives to become unattached to his/her hookup partner. Openness to and vulnerability before the other is eclipsed in favor of a posture of reticence. Rather than learning to approach the other with openness, the practice of hooking up encourages one to draw near to the other with distrust, doubt, and fear. The skills cultivated during a hookup therefore are not the skills one needs in order to enter into and sustain the practice of marriage. Marriage entails at the most basic level a commitment—mutual promises.
While some students appear to be at least vaguely aware of this above-mentioned disconnect, the question that lingers for some observers is this: If hooking up is the dominant way to identify personal relationships on a college campus, and yet some young adults admit there is a disconnect between their actions and their future intentions to marry, then why do it? A large part of the answer begins to take shape if we consider hooking up as a practice within a larger tradition, i.e., the tradition of male power over women.
The hookup culture places at least three unusual burdens on women. First, as Stepp’s analysis of hooking up demonstrates, the aftermath of participating in the hookup culture is both real and can include serious physical and emotional risks for women. In her research, for example, she discusses what she calls the “medical math” associated with the practice of hooking up. Despite a recent trend indicating falling pregnancy rates for young women age fifteen to nineteen since 1990, the incidence rates of these same women contracting a sexually-transmitted disease (STD) remains persistently high. “More young women than young men now contract STDs, and the medical community’s concerns have shifted from men in their late twenties to teenaged girls.”[22] Therefore, in addition to worrying about whether her hookup partner will call the next day, or whether she may be pregnant, Stepp contends a young woman also has to worry about how many other people her hookup partner may have slept with and whether he has given her a disease with lifelong implications. She may also worry about how many people she sleeps with and whether she may be passing on a disease she does not yet know she has contracted.[23]
Second, Stepp also notes the emotional risks associated with hooking up, especially depression. She writes, a girl “can tuck a Trojan into her purse on a Saturday night, but there is no such device to protect her heart.”[24] In other words, one wonders how attachment-free a hookup actually is if one has to work hard at censoring the natural feelings of connection that develop when two persons engage in sexually intimate behavior (even something as supposedly risk-free as kissing). To complicate matters more, Stepp identifies a connection between hooking up and depression for women. That is, if a woman initiates a hookup or hookup relationship and it goes nowhere, then she cannot hold the man completely responsible. She may even receive little sympathy from anyone, even her closest female friends. If she turns around and hooks up again, then chances are high she has not taken the time to analyze what happened in the previous encounter or to recover from a disappointment she doesn’t want to acknowledge. Thus in the end, the control some women seek in the practice of hooking up turns out to be an illusion; instead feelings of self-doubt and severe loneliness are fueled.
Third, beyond the numerous physical and emotional hazards one must navigate, there is a strong sexual double standard operative in the hookup script. Bogle notes in her research the lingering presence of the “good-girl” image in today’s hookup culture despite the attempts of the women’s movement of the late 1960s and 1970s to encourage all women to embrace their sexuality.[25] That is, when most men and women arrive on college campuses their first year, many students are on the same page. . . . In other words, the hookup script continues to work for most men after their first year; therefore, many do not want another alternative. Women, on the other hand, tend to become more outspoken about wanting hookups to turn into relationships. As a result, Bogle argues that the intimate side of college life can easily become a “battle of the sexes.”[26]
One possible reason why some women begin to seek relationships during college is that they are more interested in marrying a few years after graduation than men. Many of Bogle’s female interviewees often mentioned wanting to be married by the age of twenty-five. A stronger possibility, however, as to why some women seek to form relationships from hookups during college is because women have considerably less sexual freedom in the hookup script than men. This is because oftentimes peers evaluate each other based on the context in which sexual relations with another take place. Bogle explains that in the hookup culture, “men and women are permitted to (and do) engage in sexual encounters that are, by definition, outside of the context of a committed relationship. However, there are prejudices against women who are seen as being too active in the hookup scene.”[27] In contrast, there are few rules for college men who want to participate in the hookup script. Therefore, due to the ambiguous nature of the term “hooking up,” women quickly learn they must act with caution. They must avoid the potential pitfall of hooking up with two different men who know each other well (especially if both men are members of the same fraternity). They also must consider the time span between hookups. Daring to hookup too soon and not allowing for a “reasonable amount of time” to pass between hookups is grounds for possibly being labeled a “slut.” In addition, other behaviors such as dressing too seductively (and thus being called “easy” or “stupid”) or hanging around a certain fraternity house (these women in Bogle’s study were seen as the “lowest of the low”) can potentially lead to being negatively labeled. If, on the other hand, a college-aged woman is able to participate in a dating relationship, then Bogle notes she is freer to engage in sexual activity and thus faces less of a chance of being socially shunned.
Hooking up is not simply a meaningless phase with no long-term consequences some college-age men and women are going through today. Rather, some young adults are giving and receiving distorted lessons in how not to foster relationships of mutual intimacy and trust. Much of the temptation to hook up resides in the illusion that when practiced, one remains in control of his/her mind, heart, and body but that is only really the case in theory. In reality, men and women who hook up learn skills that deter them from knowing what it means to be truly present and mindful of another person’s desires, because they themselves remain shutdown emotionally and psychologically during a hookup. What appears to matter most in the practice of hooking up is the ability to unhook from a partner with ease and with as few strings attached as possible. Yet many practitioners of hooking up, especially women, desire just the opposite from a hookup. Many seek to form real intimate relationships with their hookup partner.
Related to this is the overall concern that within the hookup culture, yet again another double standard remains in effect for women. As is usually the case in matters of sex/sexuality, women may initiate contact with a member of the opposite sex; however, most women soon discover—perhaps the hard way—that their actions may not be judged by their peers in quite the same manner as their male counterparts. . . . Until the practice of hooking up is seen for what it really is, young adults risk damaging their chances at learning basic relationship-building skills like mutual trust and intimacy that are the cornerstone of the practice of marriage, but also wounding their own minds, hearts, and bodies in the process.
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Issues in sexual morality have been around for a long time. A cursory reading of the book of Genesis shows that humans have struggled with their sexual impulses and longings since Adam and Eve took matters into their own hands. At one level, the challenges before us today are nothing new.
And yet some things have changed that put issues like premarital sex, pornography, and homosexuality before us more intensely and in new ways. For example, the media and the internet place sexual innuendos, imagery, and explicit sexual immoralities before us in unprecedented ways. We feel more intensely than ever the compulsions and passions of our sexual drive. And beyond that, worldview paradigms about sex are constantly changing.
Dale Kuehne, a professor of politics, argues that what we face are not just changing patterns of sexual ethics, but whole new ways of understanding the human self and human relationships. “Marriage and the extended family were the relational foundation of the tWorld [traditional world over several thousand years]. . . . The tWorld was constructed on relationships of obligation.” But we now live, says Kuehne, in an iWorld “predicated on a foundational belief that the expansion of individual rights will lead to increased happiness and fulfillment.”[28] With a framework of individual rights linked to personal happiness as the highest good, traditional understandings of sex are challenged.
As the church responds to the changing patterns of sexual thinking and behavior, we need to move beyond the simplistic “Thou shall not” to the essential meaning of sex. That meaning can in part be garnered through human reason and experience. Millions of humans throughout history have understood something of the meaning of this act, the significance of procreation, the importance of fidelity, and the realities of what infidelity does to a marriage and family. But it is in the biblical story that we find a larger narrative that helps us understand and embody most fully God’s design for our sexuality. In particular, we understand sex in light of the biblical story and Christian worldview of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation. Beyond that framework our ethic must flow from the intended purposes or ends of sexual intimacy. I have set forth this approach in The Meaning of Sex: Christian Ethics and the Moral Life (Baker, 2009).
Perhaps the most important thing Christians should say about sex is that it is a good gift of God from creation. In Genesis 1, God pronounces as good a very physical/material world. The creation story is then climaxed with a very special creative act that includes sexuality and sex:
So God created human beings in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.” (Gen. 1:27-28)
Immediately following, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (1:31).
In Genesis 2, Adam and Eve are brought together as male and female into a unique relationship of marriage: “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame” (2:24-25). Jesus himself affirmed this good creation and the sexual/marital paradigm (Matt. 19:4-6), and Paul challenged false teachers who sought to undermine it (1 Tim. 4:2-4).
Unfortunately, the church has often struggled with this theological affirmation of the goodness of sex. Asceticism with its denigration of the human body and things physical made a powerful but unfortunate impact upon the early church’s understanding of sex. Some Church Fathers taught that sexual intercourse resulted from the fall, others believed that marriage with its sexual intimacy was second-rate compared to a life of celibacy, and some early Christians even questioned the full humanity of Christ in the incarnation because of its bodily implications. Such asceticism is evident in Jerome in the 4th and 5th centuries whose translation of the Bible into Latin became the “authorized version” for over a millennium. He once wrote, “He who . . . in the married state renders his wife her due cannot so pray. Either we pray always and are virgins or we cease to pray that we may fulfill the claims of marriage.”[29] Through the Protestant Reformation and really up to the 17th-century Puritans, the church struggled with the notion of sexual goodness, seeing procreation as its primary and often only legitimate good.
If the church for 1500 years struggled to affirm the goodness of sex, today we struggle to affirm two other realities about sex—its finitude and its fallenness. All of God’s good creation is finite, and as such has very specific purposes and ends. Created realities like sex are not ultimate and are not intended to be the primary source of joy, meaning, and identity. Today sexual relations are given far greater significance than is warranted by their finitude. In so doing we have turned sex into an idol, thereby distorting its full meaning and beauty.
Because pleasure has become so vaunted today, some researchers find that humans are losing the capacity for pleasure in sex. Psychologist A. Hart writes: “Today we have taken the pursuit of pleasure too far, and in so doing we have lost the ability to experience the very pleasure we are pursuing. . . . Consistent overuse of the brain’s pleasure circuits causes us to lose our capacity to experience pleasure.”[30] All of this stems from a failure to grasp the finitude of this good gift of God, and hence its role in human life is given undue proportion.
But of course Christian anthropology posits another reality about the human condition: we are also fallen creatures. All of God’s good gifts were distorted in the Fall. Human sexuality is still a good gift of God, but it is now marred in its longings, expressions, and goals. The story of “the fall” in Genesis 3 portrays four distortions that affect every area of life including the sexual realm. There is first a distortion in relationship with God so that we now seek our own meanings and patterns outside of God’s designs. Second, there are distortions within the human person bringing self-deception, guilt, hardened hearts, and disproportionate sexual desires called lust. Third, there are distortions in relationships so that sex can become a vehicle to control, manipulate, and harm the other. And finally, there are distortions in nature in that the whole of the natural world, including human genes, chromosomes, cells, and hormones are impacted, leading sometimes to sexual anomalies and distortions within the body and mind of a person.
The fallenness of our sexuality and sexual drives means that we cannot depend on what we feel within to determine our moral norms. Coupled with the fallenness of society and culture that further distort our perceptions and actions, it is clear that we must return to God’s created designs to determine the norms for our sexual lives. When we look to God’s created designs we find that there are very specific purposes for this good, albeit finite and fallen gift. It is in these purposes that we find the norms, directions, and limits of sexual expression.
From both special revelation and natural revelation (i.e., reason, experience), we can discern four major ends or purposes of sex. God’s intention is that sex be experienced within the context of these four purposes. As will become clear, these purposes point to only one proper context—the marriage of a man and a woman. In providing insight into the meaning of sex, these purposes implicitly provide the moral norms.
The closest we have to an explicit definition of marriage in the Bible is Genesis 2:24: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.” This is a paradigmatic framework for marriage as evidenced by its use in other parts of the Bible, from Malachi to Jesus to Paul. It embodies three major components of marriage: a change of status recognized by the community (i.e., leaving father and mother), a covenant commitment (i.e., being united to each other), and a consummation through the sexual union (i.e., becoming one flesh).
Becoming one flesh is an explicit reference to sexual intercourse and consummates or completes the other elements of a marriage. The union of two bodies and souls sets this relationship apart from all other relationships. By nature, people sense that sexual intimacy is so profound that the relationship is never again the same. The apostle Paul argues against sexual immorality by noting that it embodies a life-uniting act without a life-uniting intent: “Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, ‘The two will become one flesh’ ” (1 Cor. 6:16).
The sexual union thus creates a new reality whereby the two become one, and this consummates their commitment and their change of status in the community (which is usually accompanied by legal procedures, religious ritual, and public celebration). It is the ultimate act of trust and self-giving to the other. As ethicist L. Smedes once put it, “The physical side of sexual intercourse is a sign of what ought to happen on the inside. It is the final physical intimacy. Two bodies are never closer: penetration has the mystique of union, and the orgasmic finale is the exploding climax of one person’s abandonment to another.”[31]
It is clear from both nature and Scripture (Gen. 1:28) that sex is the means by which every new human life begins and by which life on earth continues. So that children are the fruit of marital love, God designed that a person comes into the world through this profound, one-flesh intimacy. Of course today many will contend that we need not think of sex as procreative, for we have the technical means to both control procreation and prevent it. The separation of sex from procreation is one of the most profound changes in the past century. Modernity, fixated on human control over the physical and biological world, has rendered sexual intimacy a non-procreative reality. Moreover, the new reproductive technologies have the capacity to separate reproduction from sex so that we cannot only have sex without children, but also children without sex.
From Genesis it is clear that sex and procreation belong together. We may debate whether every couple must intend to have children, but we must recognize that every sexual act is by nature a procreative act. Although I believe that we can make a case for stewarding our role in this area, and thus, utilizing ethical means of contraception, we ought not think of sex apart from procreation. Every sexual act carries with it during our fertile years the potential of bringing new life into the world. And even after fertility, it is still by nature a generative act that in principle points beyond the couple’s intimacy to the social dimension of sexual union.
It is obvious by nature that when a man and woman love each other deeply they long to express it physically. Sexual intercourse is the most physical and intimate means of saying, “I love you.” It is of course not the only way a couple expresses their love, but it is a necessary means, which in turn further deepens their love.
Because the word eros is not used in the Bible to describe love, some have assumed that erotic or sexual love is secondary or even opposed to agape love. But the very fact that Scripture has one whole book devoted to the joys of love, including physical love, demonstrates its significance. The Song of Songs has sometimes been an embarrassment to the church and the Song has often been allegorized into a metaphor of God’s love for the church. But the Song’s vividness speaks for itself: “Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest is my beloved among the young men. I delight to sit in his shade, and his fruit is sweet to my taste. Let him lead me to the banquet hall, and let his banner over me be love” (2:3-4).
Nor is this reality lost in the New Testament. First Corinthians 13, the great love chapter, is usually seen as the embodiment of Christian agape love. But this love is not far removed from the love of conjugal relations. “Love is patient . . . is not self-seeking” (vv. 4-5)—these words are directly applicable to sexual relations and demonstrate that agape love and eros love must go hand in hand in marital intimacy. Part of why God gave the gift of sex is for husband and wife to express and nurture their love.
Pleasure is not the invention of the devil. God is a God of pleasure not only in the eternal or spiritual sense, but within the created physical world. God created humans with bodily parts that have no other function than pleasure in the sexual act: the clitoris in the female and the glans penis in the male. An orgasm is evidence that we were wired for pleasure.
The pleasure dimension of sex is clear in Scripture. In the Song of Songs the bridegroom finds pleasure in the bride: “How delightful is your love, my sister, my bride! How much more pleasing is your love than wine. . . . Your lips drop sweetness as the honeycomb, my bride” (4:10-12). In encouraging sexual fidelity the Proverbs put it this way: “May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth. A loving doe, a graceful deer—may her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be intoxicated with her love” (5:18-19). And the book of Revelation describes the final triumph as a delightful wedding, “I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband” (21:2).
It is important to note that, while God gave sex in part for pleasure, such pleasure is never isolated from the other purposes of sex. A morally legitimate sexual act brings together the consummation of marriage, procreation, love, and pleasure. And such is found only in the marriage of a man and a woman.
Sexual enticements are nothing new, but their pressures are experienced in new and more powerful ways than ever before. Thus, the church must respond by getting to the heart of the meaning of sex. It is a good and splendid gift of our Maker, but it is also finite and fallen. In contrast to the currents of our world, sex is not ultimate, unbounded, and free to follow its own whims and natural fallen desires. As a gift of God it finds its purpose as a created good in divine designs and purposes. It is only in the context of these purposes that we experience all that God intended when he made us sexual beings.
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Dear Abby: A friend of mine was picked up and arrested for raping a 24-year-old woman he had dated twice. He had sex with her the first time he took her out. He said she was easy. The second time . . . she gave him the high-and-mighty act and refused to have sex with him. He got angry, and I guess you could say he overpowered her. Now he’s got a rape charge against him which I don’t think is fair. It seems to me that if she was willing to have sex with him on the first date, there is no way she could be raped by him after that. Am I right or wrong?—A Friend of His[32]
This letter to “Dear Abby” highlights two problems. First, a young man has “overpowered” his date, forcing sexual contact on her. Second, the “friend” who writes this query is confused about whether such forced sex constitutes rape or whether it simply constitutes sex.
These two problems represent two dimensions of sexuality and violence in women’s experience. First, violence in the sexual arena is a commonplace occurrence. Women are raped and experience forced sex with considerable frequency. Second, “normal” patterns of male-female sexual relating in this culture are defined by patterns of male dominance over women. Hence, “our earliest socialization,” argues Marie Fortune, “teaches us to confuse sexual activity with sexual violence.”[33]
In this essay I argue that an adequate Christian sexual ethic must attend to the realities of the links between violence and sexuality in the experiences of women. It must attend to male power and to the eroticizing of domination in this culture. Because domination is eroticized, and because violence and sexuality are linked in the experiences of women, the search for loving heterosexual intimacy is for many women an exercise in irony: women must seek intimacy precisely in an arena that is culturally and experientially unsafe, fraught with sexual violence and power struggles.
Typical approaches to sexual ethics are therefore inadequate because they presume an equality, intimacy, and safety that does not exist for women. Rather, heterosexual women need to operate out of a “hermeneutic of suspicion” that does not ignore the role conditioning or status of men and women in this culture. I will use the term “enemy” as a role-relational term to highlight the need to be attentive to the dangers built into heterosexual sexuality. The attempt to form a heterosexual relationship can then be seen as an exercise in “loving your enemy.” From African-American reflections on living with the enemy, I then draw two norms for a heterosexual ethic: forgiveness and survival.
Statistics on rape are notoriously unreliable, but most observers now agree that a conservative estimate suggests that at least one out of three women will be raped or will be the victim of attempted rape in her lifetime.[34] Rape and fear of rape are realities for many if not most women. Violence is directly linked with sexuality in the experience of many women.
What is particularly troubling is the context in which rape occurs. Popular images of the rapist perpetuate the myth that rape is an attack by a stranger. Indeed, the myth that rape is only committed by strangers may encourage men to attack the women with whom they are intimate, since—like the “friend” from “Dear Abby”—they do not believe that they can be charged with rape for forcing sexual intercourse on someone they know.
Rape is not committed only by strangers. In a study of nearly one thousand women, Diana Russell found that only 11 percent had been raped (or had been the victims of attempted rape) by strangers, while 12 percent had been raped by “dates,” 14 percent by “acquaintances,” and 14 percent by their husbands.[35] Thus, while roughly one woman in ten had been attacked by a stranger, more than one woman in three had been attacked by someone she knew. Rape or attempted rape does not happen just between strangers. It happens in intimate contexts, and in those intimate contexts it happens to more than one third of women. In a study of six thousand college students, 84 percent of the women who reported being attacked knew their attackers, and more than 50 percent of the rapes occurred on dates.[36] Moreover, these rapes are often the most violent: Menachem Amir found that the closer the relationship between the attacker and the victim, the greater was the use of physical force; neighbors and acquaintances were the most likely to engage in brutal rape.[37] Thus, not only are women not safe on the streets, they are not safe in presumably “intimate” contexts with trusted friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and even spouses.
The picture is even more complicated if we look not at the number of women who experience rape or attempted rape but at the number of attacks, the picture changes dramatically. Of the total number of rapes reported by Diana Russell, wife rape accounted for 38 percent of all attacks. Nearly two fifths of rape crimes are perpetrated within the presumed intimacy of heterosexual marriage.[38] Thus, it is not only in public places that women must fear for our safety: the nuclear, heterosexual family is not a “safe space” for many women. Moreover, while violent rape by a stranger is something that most women will not experience more than once in their lives, violent rape by a spouse is clearly a repeated crime. Some women live with the daily threat of a repeated experience of rape within the most “intimate” of contexts: marriage.
The net result is that sexuality and violence are linked in the experience, memory,[39] and anticipation of many women. Those who have experienced rape or who live with a realistic appraisal of it as a constant threat may eventually come to live with “a fear of men which pervades all of life.”[40] Beverly Harrison charges that “a treatment of any moral problem is inadequate if it fails to analyze the morality of a given act in a way that represents the concrete experience of the agent who faces a decision with respect to that act.”[41] If the concrete experience of so many women facing the realities of heterosexual sexuality is an experience of violence and fear, then any adequate Christian sexual ethic must account for the realities of rape, violence and fear in women’s lives.[42] Heterosexual women must formulate our sexual ethics within the context of understanding the ironies of searching for intimacy in an unsafe environment.
The problem is not just that rape occurs or that women experience violence and fear in the arena of sexuality. A treatment of any moral problem must not only represent the concrete experience of the agent(s) involved, but must also understand that experience in its social construction.[43]
The problem is not just that a man raped his twenty-four-year-old date, though this is serious enough. The problem is not only that rape is common, though it is. The problem is that the rapist’s friend, like many others in this culture, does not think that what happened was rape and does not understand the difference between sexual violence and ordinary heterosexual sexuality.[44] The “friend” who writes to “Dear Abby” is not alone. Of the college women whose experiences of attack fit the legal definition of rape, 73 percent did not call it rape because they knew the attacker. Only 1 percent of the men involved were willing to admit that they had raped a woman. In another survey, over 50 percent of male teenagers and nearly 50 percent of female teenagers deemed it acceptable for a teenage boy to force sexual contact on a girl if he had dated her several times or if she said she was willing to have sex and then changed her mind.[45] Thus, in circumstances similar to those reported to “Dear Abby,” a large number of young people would not consider forced sex to constitute rape.
Nor is it only teenagers who think it acceptable for men to force sexual contact on women. In another study, nearly 60 percent of “normal” American men said that if they could get away with it, they would force a woman to “commit sexual acts against her will.” When the vague phrase “commit acts against her will” was changed to the more specific term “rape,” 20 percent still said they would do it if they could get away with it.[46]
In fact, men do get away with rape. Forcible rape has a lower conviction rate than any other crime listed in the Uniform Crime Reports.[47] A few years ago, a jury acquitted a man of the charge of rape even though the woman’s jaw was fractured in two places as a result of her resistance; the acquittal rested on the finding that “there may have been sexual relations on previous occasions.”[48] The confusion as to whether it is possible to rape a woman once she has consented to sexual relations therefore seems to be reflected in the law.[49] Given the attitude “I would do it if I could get away with it” and the fact that people do get away with it, it is no wonder that one out of three women will be raped or will be the victim of attempted rape.
Thus, violence has been structured into the system itself, structured into the very ways that we experience and think about heterosexual activity. Sexuality is not a mere “biological” phenomenon. It is socially constructed.[50] Sexual arousal may follow biological patterns, but what we find sexually arousing is culturally influenced and socially constructed. In short, there is a social dimension to even this most “intimate” of experiences, and in this culture sexuality, imbalances of power, and violence are linked. As Marie Fortune so pointedly puts it, “the tendency of this society to equate or confuse sexual activity with sexual violence is a predominant reality in our socialization, attitudes, beliefs, and behavior.”[51] Thus, it is not only the actual experiences of violence and fear that we must address in order to have an adequate sexual ethic. We must also address the social construction of sexuality that creates the climate of violence and fear that permeates women’s lives and confuses sexuality and violence.
Why is sexuality linked with violence in our socialization and experience? The social construction of heterosexual sexuality in this culture has been largely based on patterns of dominance and submission in which men are expected to be dominant and women are expected to be submissive. Men are expected to disregard women’s protests and overcome their resistance. When a man “overpowers” a woman, is he raping her or is he simply being a man in both his eyes and hers?
Social domination is linked to cultural patterns in which men in general have more power than women do. Men are not only physically larger in general, but they also possess power to control social, legal, financial, educational, and other important institutions. We are accustomed to male power because it surrounds us. However, the point of interest is not simply that men have power. Rather, the key factor is that male power has become eroticized. Men and women alike are socialized not only to think that being a man means being in control but also to find male domination sexually arousing. The overpowering of a woman is a paradigm for “normal” heterosexual relations at least among young people and in segments of popular literature.
Studies of pornography demonstrate the eroticizing of domination in this culture.[52] Andrea Dworkin, Nancy Hartsock, and others argue that pornography is a window into one of the primary dynamics of the social construction of sexuality in this culture: “we can treat commercial pornography as . . . expressing what our culture has defined as sexually exciting.”[53] Pornography would suggest that men are socialized to find both male power and female powerlessness sexually arousing.[54] In pornography, domination of women by men is portrayed as sexy. It is the power of the man or men[55] to make the woman do what she does not want to do—to make her do something humiliating, degrading, or antithetical to her character—that creates the sexual tension and excitement. Dworkin puts it bluntly: the major theme of pornography is male power, and the means to achieve it is the degradation of the female.[56] Since power-as-domination always has at least an indirect link with violence, this means that there is at least an indirect link between sexual arousal and violence in this culture.[57] In pornography, women are raped, tied up, beaten and humiliated—and are portrayed as initially resisting and ultimately enjoying their degradation. No wonder many real-life rapists actually believe that women enjoy sadomasochistic sex or “like” to be forced;[58] this is the constant message of pornography.
Pornography is big business.[59] While pornography may not reflect the active choices of all men in this culture, it reflects a significant dimension of the socialization of both men and women.
However, it is not only men in this culture who find male power or female powerlessness sexy. Women in this culture (even feminist women, as Marianna Valverde so devastatingly demonstrates)[60] are attracted to powerful men, whether that power is defined in macho, beer-can-crushing terms or in the more subtle dynamics of social, economic, and political power.[61] Women also link violence and sexuality. In Nancy Friday’s classic study of women’s sexual fantasies, “Julietta” gives voice to this pattern: “[W]hile I enjoy going to bed with some guy I dig almost any time, I especially like it if there’s something in the air that lets me think I’m doing it against my will. That I’m forced by the male’s overwhelming physical strength.”[62] Julietta is sexually aroused, at least in fantasy, by the thought of being overpowered. Nor is she alone. In Shared Intimacies: Women’s Sexual Experiences, Lonnie Barbach and Linda Levine report that women’s most frequent fantasies are “variations on the theme of being dominant and submissive.”[63] Not all women link domination and eroticism, but the pattern is there.
Since men and women alike are socialized both to expect men to overpower women and to find the exercise of power sexually arousing, it is no wonder that the boundary between acceptable “normal” sexual exchange and rape has been blurred. The letter to “Dear Abby” exposes the confusion that arises in a culture that links dominance with eroticism and implies that sexual arousal and satisfaction involve a man overpowering a woman. The “friend” assumes that the woman secretly likes to be forced and that rape is acceptable on some level because on some level it cannot be distinguished from regular sexual contact.
It is plain, then, that to be adequate, Christian sexual ethics must deal not only with the realities of rape and fear in women’s lives, but also with socialization patterns in which both men and women are socialized to find male power and female powerlessness sexually arousing. It must deal with the realities of the link between violence and sexuality in this culture, and it must understand the ways in which the social construction of sexuality contributes to the lived experiences of women and men. Only in this way will we truly link the personal with the political; only in this way can we bring moral reflection on sexual behavior into line with the fact that sexual relations are political and not merely personal.
To be adequate, Christian moral reflection must begin with real experience, not with romantic fantasies about love, marriage, and the family. We must name the realities of sexual violence in women’s lives. We must take account of the fact that women often experience their sexuality in a context of rape, date rape, acquaintance rape, forced sexual contact and spousal rape. If nearly 40 percent of rapes happen within heterosexual marriage then a sexual ethic for heterosexuals must account for this real, lived, concrete experience of women. A Christian sexual ethic must have something to say to the man who raped his twenty-four-year-old date, to the woman who was raped, and to the friend and everyone else who is confused about what constitutes acceptable sexual contact between men and women.
To be adequate, Christian sexual ethics must carry out cultural analysis and mount a cultural critique. We must attend not only to the differences in power between men and women in a sexist culture, but also to the distortions that such differences in power have brought to the experience of sexuality itself. An ethic based on assumptions of mutuality and consent falls short of dealing with the social construction of sexuality in terms of the eroticizing of dominance and submission.
To be adequate, Christian sexual ethics must develop a role-based model of personal sexual relations because only a role-based model is adequate to the moral complexities that are exposed when we begin to take seriously the degree to which our sexuality and our sexual interactions are socially constructed. Women are not respected in the sexual arena, but are raped, attacked, and treated as objects. At the same time, heterosexual women seek to trust, love, and be intimate with those who have the power to rape, attack, and be disrespectful.[64] The twenty-four-year-old woman who was raped by her date must now struggle to find intimacy with those who will represent for her the violence in her memory and life. Other heterosexual women will “make love” to spouses who have raped them before and will rape them again. All heterosexual women seek partners from among those who represent the power of male domination in this culture. There are ambiguities and ironies in the search for intimacy in all these contexts. An adequate Christian sexual ethics must attend to these ambiguities and ironies.
The first step for such an ethic will certainly be a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” The distortions of culture must be exposed for what they are. This means that we ask first whether patterns of sexual arousal based on male domination and female submission are trustworthy patterns.
To say that women eroticize domination in fantasy is not to say what happens when women actually experience sexual domination. Since the issue of forced sex came up repeatedly in her interviews, Shere Hite finally asked women whether they were afraid to say no to a man’s overtures, and if so, how they felt during and after the act of intercourse. Uniformly, the women indicated that they did not find sex pleasurable under such circumstances and that they experienced anger and feelings of powerlessness.[65] Whatever their fantasies may be, women do not in fact like being forced and do not enjoy sex when it happens against their will. Barbach and Levine put it bluntly: “What women enjoy in fantasy and what they actually find arousing in reality are two very different things.”[66]
The famous “Hite report” on women’s sexuality found evidence that many women who are fully capable of orgasm and frequently do achieve orgasm during masturbation do not in fact have orgasms during heterosexual intercourse. Why, Hite asked, “do women so habitually satisfy men’s needs during sex and ignore their own?”[67] Her answer is that “sexual slavery has been an almost unconscious way of life for most women.” One of Hite’s subjects put it bluntly: “Sex can be political in the sense that it can involve a power structure where the woman is unwilling or unable to get what she really needs for her fullest amount of pleasure, but the man is getting what he wants.”[68] Hite concludes that lack of sexual satisfaction (perhaps better: lack of joy, pleasure, the erotic) is another sign of the oppression of women.
The first step toward an adequate Christian sexual ethics for heterosexual people, then, is to expose cultural patterns in which sexuality becomes a political struggle and in which domination is eroticized. The first step is an active hermeneutics of suspicion.
If the first step for such an ethic is a hermeneutic of suspicion, I believe that the second step is a recovery of the significance of role and status. . . .
What we need is an approach to sexual ethics that can take seriously the power that attaches to a man in this culture simply because he is a man (no matter how powerless he may feel), the power that he has as representative of other men, and the power that he has for women as representative of the politics of dominance and submission and as representative of the threat of violence in women’s lives. . . .
I use the term “enemy” to indicate the man’s role as representative of those who have power in this culture. I am aware of the dangers of labeling anyone as the “enemy.” In her recent book, Women and Evil, Nel Noddings argues that when we label someone as the enemy, we devalue that person’s moral worth.[69] It is not my purpose to return to a labeling and condemnation of men that often characterized the feminist movement a number of years ago; neither do I wish to devalue the worth of men.[70] Many men today are working hard to divest themselves of the vestiges of sexism that affect them. Not all men experience their sexual arousal along patterns defined by traditional pornography with its degradation of women. “Enemy” is a strong term, and to suggest that it can be used to designate the role of men because of the power of men in a sexist society is to run the risk of misunderstanding. Nonetheless, in the situation of the young woman who was raped, it is not unwarranted to suggest that her date has proven himself to be her “enemy,” to be one who will vent his anger and use his power against her by using her for his own ends without regard for her person, her feelings, or her needs. Similarly, for the 25 percent of college women who also experience rape or attempted rape, we need a strong word. Precisely because the term “enemy” is strong, and even problematic, it will force us to take seriously the issues involved.
If we understand men and women to be in power positions that can be characterized by the role designation “enemy,” then an examination of the meaning of “love of enemies” may contribute something to an ethic for heterosexuality. While I believe that the meaning of love of enemies can usefully illumine the moral situation from both the man’s and the woman’s side, I will focus here on the woman’s plight and on what love of enemy might mean for her.
I will frame this discussion with two words drawn from reflections of black Christian ethicists. African-Americans in this country have had reason to struggle with what it is to be in relationship with those who stand in the role of enemy and to explore the meaning of “love of enemies.” I will therefore take the words of a black man and the words of a black woman as each offering insight into the meaning of ethics in a context of “enemies.”[71] These two words set boundaries within which a new approach to heterosexual sexual ethics as an exercise in “loving your enemy” might take place. . . .
According to [Martin Luther] King, forgiveness means that the evil act no longer serves as a barrier to relationship. Forgiveness is the establishment of an atmosphere that makes possible a fresh start. The woman who has been raped and who then begins to date again—taking the risk that she will be able to find a safe space with a man, even though he represents the power of men and the very violence that she has experienced—is exercising “forgiveness.” She is declaring her willingness to enter relationship.
In short, while forgiveness means that “the evil deed is no longer a mental block impeding a new relationship,”[72] the stress here needs to be on new relationship. To forgive does not mean going back to the relationship the way it was or accepting the evils perpetrated within it. Love of enemies, for King, begins in forgiveness, but forgiveness itself begins in the recognition of something that needs to be forgiven and, therefore, in the recognition of injustices that need to be redressed. Love of enemies requires justice.[73] Indeed, Paul Lauritzen argues that, in the absence of repentance, forgiveness may even be “morally objectionable” because it can involve “an unjustifiable abandonment of the appropriate retributive response to wrongdoing.”[74] The stress in forgiveness is on recognition of the evil. The evil must be named for what it is, and the participants must be willing to establish a new relationship that does not incorporate that evil. Forgiveness means that we must be willing to set things right so that there can be a fresh start. Forgiveness is essentially restorative.[75] Where there is a concrete evil fact such as rape, forgiveness may require repentance; where the man is not himself one who rapes but simply one who represents the power of men in sexist society, forgiveness requires a willingness to establish a relationship based on justice. . . .
This brings me to the second word, survival. Women who have been raped often speak of themselves as “survivors.” This word then seems appropriate for a heterosexual ethics directed to women who are aware of the dynamic of male dominance and violence in their lives.
For an explication of survival, I draw on Katie Cannon’s work. “Throughout the history of the United States,” declares Cannon, “the interrelationship of white supremacy and male superiority has characterized the Black woman’s moral situation as a situation of struggle—a struggle to survive. . . .”[76]
Cannon’s perspective seems important to me because it does not postulate what Hartsock calls “an artificial community of formal equals”[77] whose sexual relations can be described in terms of consent and mutuality. Rather, Cannon recognizes that all people do not have equal power and that issues of unequal power are central to ethical decision-making. Ethics must be done with attention to the social construction of experience and to the ongoing history of a community.
As forgiveness, with its implicit recognition of injustices that need rectification, is the first word to illumine love of enemies, so survival with its hard-nosed realism is the second.
The twenty-four-year-old woman who has been raped should forgive her attacker (enemy) only if he acknowledges wrong-doing, repents, and seeks a new relationship free of power, domination, and violence. She should seek relationship with those men who are actively struggling to combat the legacy of a sexist culture. She should love her enemies, both specific and representative, but she should not lose sight of the fact that she is dealing with “enemies,” understood in a role-relational sense.[78] Her survival should be central to the meaning of love of enemies. . . .
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
For seventy-two hours last fall, FBI agents and local police targeted truck stops, casinos, night clubs, and adult entertainment spots in thirty-six American cities to rescue teenagers being trafficked for sex.
During the October raids, law enforcement rescued fifty-two minors (children under age eighteen) trafficked into either prostitution or adult entertainment. Nearly 700 people, including 60 pimps, were charged. Since June 2003, the task force has recovered 886 minors from the sex industry. The raids have resulted in 510 convictions and $3.1 million in property seizures.
Despite these victories, new research indicates that the sex-trafficking problem in the United States is more widespread and more severe than previously thought.
Shared Hope International, a Christian anti-trafficking nonprofit group founded by former Congresswoman Linda Smith in 1998, received a federal grant to survey domestic sex trafficking of minors. The survey found that many sex-trafficking victims were being misidentified and wrongly prosecuted as criminals. In some cases, the survey found, children as young as nine years old were being sold for sex by parents or boyfriends in exchange for illicit drugs. Organized crime networks are now using sex trafficking because the risk of prosecution is so low. The survey determined that a high percentage of teens rescued from trafficking return to the system due to the strong bonds they form with their pimps.
“Most Americans do not realize that child trafficking is a major problem on Main Street USA,” said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, at a February congressional hearing. “These kids are victims. This is twenty-first-century slavery.”
Researchers estimate that between 100,000 and 300,000 American children are trafficked within the U.S. each year. There is credible evidence, based on arrest statistics and field research, that sex trafficking is getting worse and that U.S. children under age eighteen compose the largest segment of trafficking victims in the U.S.
Experts note that one of the greatest unmet needs is effective, long-term treatment for survivors. In one horrific case, authorities mistakenly released a teen victim into the custody of her pimp, who immediately put her back to work.
In recent years, a handful of Christian activists, mostly volunteers, have moved beyond advocacy and legislation, fighting for better enforcement of existing anti-trafficking laws. They play an active role in helping victims leave the commercial sex industry.
Long-term treatment for trafficking survivors—which for some victims takes many years—is where many Christians are also focusing their energy. Late last year, one of the newest residential facilities, located in Asheville, North Carolina, granted Christianity Today access to its group home.
Most residential homes for trafficking survivors are secular and draw upon the larger community for volunteers. But Hope House is distinct for being faith-based, running entirely on charitable giving and Christian volunteers.
Beads and jewelry-making tools litter the dining room table of a well-furnished home in North Carolina. A side table holds finished pieces made by “Jordan,” a fifteen-year-old girl who lives at Hope House. The seemingly commonplace scene is anything but. Fewer than fifty beds are available in the country for teens escaping sex trafficking, and Hope House has room for no more than five girls. As a teenage survivor of domestic sex trafficking, Jordan has defied the odds.
A chronic runaway, Jordan was drawn into trafficking by her much older “boyfriend,” who lured her with shelter, food, and affection. He even called her his fiancée. But weeks after they met, he forced Jordan, then fourteen, into prostitution. She was beaten frequently by family members of her pimp and had a miscarriage as a result. Eventually, she was arrested and thrown into jail, where an agency that works with sexually exploited teens found her and helped place her at Hope House.
International human trafficking often involves crossing a national border. But under U.S. federal law, trafficking is defined as “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining [of] a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act where such an act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained eighteen years of age.”
Thus, any child younger than eighteen involved in forced commercial sex acts is being trafficked, since the child is below the age of consent, even though the age of consent in most states is sixteen. Pimps are well aware of the age-of-consent laws and frequently provide counterfeit identification to prostituted children, who are coached to lie about their age.
Pimps also use extreme forms of mind control to force children to take part in sexual activity day after day. Police say repeated rape, beatings, isolation, branding with tattoos, and death threats are some ways pimps maintain their control. Over time these techniques create extreme dependence and form what experts call a “trauma bond.” Such bonds are likened to the Stockholm syndrome, in which a traumatized hostage assumes the perspective of the kidnapper in order to survive.
“Some girls are locked in and can’t leave, and some girls can go out in the streets. But they are scared to death,” Emily Fitchpatrick, founder of Hope House, told Christianity Today.
When Jordan first came to Hope House, she put up a tough front. Only slowly did she begin to share more of her life. Today she regularly journals and meets with a Christian counselor but still has nightmares about her past.
“She’s still a kid,” Fitchpatrick says, “but the things she’s been through are some things even adults don’t go through.”
Survivors of sex trafficking are not required to enter residential treatment. Before Jordan arrived, another resident stayed only three weeks. Five other girls were supposed to come but backed out. “It’s such a challenge to even get them to treatment,” Fitchpatrick says.
Hope House is a project of On Eagles Wings, a ministry to hurting women founded by Fitchpatrick in 2007. After a rowdy adolescence involving alcohol, drugs, and sex, Fitchpatrick gave her life to the Lord and was given the idea for a ministry geared toward women. For years she prayed and waited for direction on the ministry’s focus.
Fitchpatrick later joined forces with Kim Kern, a co-worker at the Billy Graham Training Center at the Cove in Asheville. Still unsure of their mission, they initially worked with homeless women, until Fitchpatrick sensed that God was directing them to strip-club outreach and issues related to women at sexual risk.
When Fitchpatrick went on a short-term mission to Bangkok, Thailand, she learned about the extent of human trafficking and the sex tourism industry. When she returned to North Carolina, she researched domestic trafficking and realized how little long-term residential care was available for survivors. That led to the creation of Hope House. Kern continues to work full-time at the Cove in addition to being vice president of On Eagles Wings. Fitchpatrick serves as its paid full-time president.
Trained volunteers make up the core of Hope House’s ministry. Volunteers like Maureen Hagar and Dee Schronce draw on their own traumatic experiences to help trafficking survivors. Hagar belonged to a motorcycle gang in which she witnessed violence towards women, and endured it herself. After being badly injured in a gang fight, Hagar entered a long period of recovery. During that period, a friend took her to church, and Hagar immediately gave her life to Christ.
“It’s very hard to get out of that lifestyle, and that’s how I relate to the girls here,” Hagar told CT. Hagar still finds that many people struggle to grasp the extent to which prostituted girls are victims.
Schronce was sexually abused as a child and passed through a number of institutions before running away at age seventeen. If there had been a place like Hope House, she says, she would have gone there. Instead, a couple she befriended drugged her and began trafficking her. She eventually escaped, but it took Schronce twenty-five years before she could talk about it; there’s a “certain stigma and shame that goes along with being a victim,” she told Christianity Today.
Despite all that she suffered, Schronce says, she is “glad everything [she] went through wasn’t in vain.” She never thought her experience would be useful.
All over North America, faith-based organizations similar to On Eagles Wings are rising up:
Shared Hope’s Smith believes the toughest spiritual battle is that sexually trafficked girls come to believe they are worthless and will never be accepted. Smith says that the church needs to be right there with “open arms, hope, and acceptance.”
Until recently, researchers largely overlooked the demand side of sex trafficking. In 2008, Shared Hope, with another federal grant, conducted twelve months of field research on the demand for commercial sex in Japan, the Netherlands, Jamaica, and the U.S.
The research on the U.S. reveals a well-established business model for illicit sexual services. It mimics a shopping mall in offering the buyer variety, flexible pricing, and individualized service. Multimedia and Internet technology is the single greatest facilitator driving growth; pimping, for example, is frequently glamorized in popular music, films, and videos, and prostitution is treated like a recreational activity. “The only way to impede sex trafficking is to end demand—to stop buyers from buying,” the report concludes.
Toward this goal, on Father’s Day 2006 a group of men from the Pacific Northwest started a campaign, “She Has a Name.” Its goal is to raise awareness at truck stops, sporting events, and tourist areas about sex trafficking. The group created a website, TheDefendersUSA.org, that invites men to commit to not have any part in the commercialized sex industry. Outside truck stops, they demonstrate with signs that read REAL MEN DON’T BUY SEX.
Elsewhere, similar awareness campaigns are taking shape. Since September 2009, a team of five young Christian filmmakers has traveled across the country to make the documentary Sex + Money. Executive producer Morgan Perry said increasing awareness means helping the general public understand that sex trafficking is widespread and market driven. Film narrator Scott Martin noted that “many Americans look at this as a victimless crime. What we’re realizing is that prostitution is not a victimless crime.” The feature-length film debuted in October 2010. The filmmakers also provide a state-by-state anti-trafficking online directory to help people get involved in their own area.
In the meantime, Congress has pressed for more resources to fight domestic trafficking. President Obama recently signed legislation that adds $12.5 million to the fight. In late February, the Senate held a hearing, “In Our Own Backyard: Child Prostitution and Sex Trafficking in the United States.”
But while the government’s involvement to end trafficking is important, the church’s involvement is even more so, says Kern.
“Maybe it’s not [God’s] plan that the government do more; maybe it’s his plan that his church do more,” says Kern. “When the government gets involved, you can’t talk about Jesus. Maybe instead of lobbying Congress, we need to lobby the church.” Even though faith is crucial to Hope House, Fitchpatrick says, “We are not here to shove religion down their throats.” Church attendance is encouraged but not mandatory. For the girls who do want religious guidance, the On Eagles Wings board carefully selects its partners, volunteers, and churches for the girls to attend.
At its 2009 Christmas party, an On Eagles Wings board member told Jordan, “If you’re the only person to come through this house, and we were able to make some sort of difference, then mission accomplished.”
Five months later, Jordan continues her rehabilitation work at Hope House, guided by staff using the Hands That Heal curriculum developed by Christian educators. The curriculum is used by believers worldwide to help trafficking survivors. “She recognizes that God is blessing her and that there’s more to life than what she knew on the streets,” Fitchpatrick says.
But the man who trafficked Jordan walks free, and has yet to face criminal charges.