The End of Sex
What is sex for? Or, 'A Tale of Two Topias'
Utopian Sex
Each new morn
New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows
Strike heaven on the face1
What if they didn’t? Imagine a new morn where…
No cries from abused children drift up.
No soldiers bleed into the black soil.
No sewer waste or plastic rings that strangle sea turtles float in the streams.
No parents telling their kids about the impending divorce.
No pastors resigning in disgrace.
No cancer ravaging a mother’s body.
The creeping light, the orange buzz humming over the horizon brings (and hears) no heartache.
The world remains pristine, unsullied, (literally) Edenic.
A young man is out doing his morning chores when a young woman walks by. He notices her. He notices that he notices her. There is a strange magnetism that pulls his head up from his work, as if he is seeing the opposite sex for the first time. She is beautiful. She smiles at him. A thrill shivers up and down his chest. He smiles back, his cheeks flush, he opens his mouth but says nothing. She keeps walking, and the moment passes.
Nothing has happened to him, but everything has happened.
A tide has gently risen within, lifting his attention to the hard-to-define feeling of desire. What does he do? He will not reduce the young lady into an object through lust. He will not seek out pornography or self-gratification or voyeurism. He will not seek out any illicit expression of the desire he feels—there are none. As hormones and heart rate increase, there will be a happy, inner restraint.
But this restraint will not be because the sexual urge he experiences is inherently wrong. Nothing is inherently wrong here.
Everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer. - 1 Tim 4:4-5
God made this world, made our bodies, made marriage, made sex. Nothing is to be rejected, but received with gratitude and holy submission. This means that, far from being denied or despised, the thrill of sexual desire would be used, even as it is restrained. How? This new passion would be harnessed and bridled like a horse being hitched to a wagon; a power channeled to a specific end. So too, the arousal of romantic desire, the sexual urges this young man feels, are driving him to a specific end.
Where would this desire take our young man in a sinless world?
Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. - Gen 2:24
Our young man would know that this new desire in him is a stream taking him towards the end of marriage. He would know that if he is to receive this with thanksgiving and make it holy with word and prayer, he must begin a process of making himself eligible for marriage. Meaning, he would need to become a certain kind of person: a man worthy of marriage; a man this beautiful woman would want to marry.
What would that look like?
Let’s start with the basics. The next time the pretty young lady walks by, our young man will want to look presentable. He will need to shower and brush his teeth and wear clothes that don’t have sweat stains. This takes modest self-control and discipline. He also needs to restrain his sexual desire. This takes more serious discipline.
He needs to consider who this girl is: what she is like, her interests, her tastes. In fact, he will need to learn to how to relate with the opposite sex. This takes curiosity, creativity, and discernment. He also knows she may be uninterested, so he needs a willingness to initiate even if she turns him down. This takes courage and grace. He also knows that if he wants to pursue her, he will need to be able to one day provide for her and future children, so he must work. This takes industry and fortitude.
More profoundly, for him to enter into a relationship he must be able to trust and to commit, to say “yes” to her means to say “no” to all others. This takes faith. He has no certainty that things will work out, but he must approach her with arrogant-free confidence. This takes hope. He must learn how to live his life with a self-giving commitment that delights in the good of the other over the convenience of the self. This takes love. Further, marriage will eventually produce children, which will summon even more character formation.
The romantic and sexual desire that are raising the heart-rate of the young man are the initial rumblings of an engine that will help form this man into a virtuous human being. In this world, the end of sex is to make us into better human beings, more selfless, more responsible, more faithful, more loving—more like God.
Dystopian Sex
Let’s imagine an alternative world.
Imagine a world of thorns and thistles and serpents and porn and affairs and divorce. (Shouldn’t be too hard for you). It is a world that has attempted to peel sex out of the context of covenant and commitment—even out of relationship itself—and pursue the physical pleasure as an end of itself.
Robotics and artificial intelligence and silicone-flesh have advanced at dizzying rates. Realistic, robot girlfriends are now as affordable and ubiquitous as iPhones. Just as the stigma around porn eventually faded into a (maybe) regrettable, but inevitable reality, so too has the shame of using a sex-robot. Now, a young man is free from the cumbersome task of having to win the attention or affection of a woman, of learning about what makes her a unique person, of sublimating his preferences and desires for the sake of another, of summoning the courage to approach her and to fail with grace. Now, sex is as simple as “Buy Now with One-Click.”
The entire virtue-formation process of the utopian world is wholly sidelined. Here is how one author puts it:
Why bother getting a job, going to the gym, or maintaining your personal hygiene if your sex robot doesn’t care either way? If a sterile piece of plastic can keep a young man sexually sated, he doesn’t need to go out and meet real women. Of course, he will never acquire a spouse or children and will be left in the end with only his sex robot for companionship. But he will arrive at that lonely state having been emotionally cushioned by the reliable dopamine hit won from playing the sexual equivalent of a slot machine game over and over again.2
And, much more troubling, not only are the virtue-formation muscles left to atrophy, he now has the option of a customizable girlfriend. He can choose her personality, her body type, her voice, her jaw-line, her hair, her sexual appetite—he could even program her to not always say “yes” to sexual advances to even further mimic reality. She is infinitely malleable because she is not a she, but an it. And at any point, the man could reach into the soulless shell and change the program once again. He thus grows as a kind of idiot-savant: an impossibly scrutinizing palate that has never actually eaten real food.
If this seems too far fetched (why would anyone choose this over an actual romantic encounter?), then you are probably unaware of just how bizarre sexual habits have become,3 or how close to reality this scenario actually is.4
Aside from the many immediate concerns we may have with this scenario, the question we are interested in right now is: what would happen to the character of our young man living in this world? And then, what would happen to the wider community, the society as a whole?
In this world, the end of sex is not about you growing into a person who is worthy of the full-orbed expression of sexual desire: marriage and family. The end of sex here is about the quickest and simplest way to have an orgasm as often as one wants.
The first view sees a design in sex and submits to it, thereby becoming a more virtuous person.
The second sees sex as an urge to gratify, and asks the world to submit to those self-centered desires, thereby becoming, by definition, a more selfish person.
In the first, the young man knows he cannot demand sex. He must make himself worthy of it by becoming worthy of marriage, by becoming faithful, honest, brave, disciplined, and kind. Even within marriage, the husband must woo and romance his wife, not assert his own desire.
In the second, the young man has found an object that exists for the sole purpose of his sexual demands. The only hard work required is coming up with a couple thousand dollars to buy the sophisticated masturbation device.
Sex is a powerful, powerful force in the moral formation of a person, and society as a whole. As a person’s individual virtue goes, so goes sex; as sex goes, so goes marriage; as marriage goes, so goes the family; as the family goes, so goes society. And what happens to a society where all of the young men have stepped out of the normal process by which they become good, moral people?
We don’t live in utopia. Nor can we pretend to. We carry a sin nature in our hearts that leaves us tempted and tried. But grace restores nature. Through the grace of God, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and the communion of saints, Christians can reject the dystopian vision of sex as commodity and embrace the ennobling vision of sex as an engine of virtue formation.
We need not reject the good that God has created—sex included. By God’s grace, we should receive it with thanksgiving and make it holy with word and prayer, pursue its consummation in marriage. And, even further, we can look beyond marriage to the true and final consummation of all romance, love, and desire: the sacred and divine marriage, the wedding supper of the Lamb.
Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 3
Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, p. 109
Louise Perry documents much of this in her important, but upsetting book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. For instance, she documents the rise in young men experiencing erectile dysfunction through compulsive masturbation and extreme porn use. ED now affects between 14 to 35 percent of young men, in contrast to perhaps 2 or 3 percent at the beginning of this century. For these young men, “Even if they are motivated to seek out sex with a real person…they cannot become aroused by someone whose body isn’t exactly like that of a porn star. Compulsive porn users expose themselves to so much sexual stimulation that they literally become impotent.” See pgs 108-111.
For conscience sake, I will not link to news reports about breakthroughs in sex robots or specific companies, lest I lead anyone to stumble into a perverse place. Suffice to say, the scenario I have described is not incredible or fantastic; it is a few years away.