Making Love Just: Sexual Ethics for Perplexing times

Chapter 1: Why Do We Have to Keep Talking about Sex All the Time?

7 Chapter 1 Why Do We Have to Keep Talking about Sex All the Time? Serious talk about sexuality is inevitably about society. Thomas Laqueur1 A s a Christian ethicist, my short answer to this question of why we must keep talking about sex, sexuality, and sexual ethics is because harm is being done. This harm burdens both individuals and the community, and it causes suffering . Moreover, this harm is caused by injustice. In order to bring healing and hope, we must pursue a broad social justice agenda that embraces a passionate commitment to sexual justice. To begin with, in cultures strongly influenced by traditional Christian norms about purity, women, and sexuality, as one social theorist has quipped, sex is “presumed guilty until proven innocent.”2 Given this negativity, it is hardly surprising that many people try to avoid this topic altogether, or when they do manage to talk about sex, they often become defensive, reactive, and judgmental. As many people attest, fearful and shaming messages about sex have had all sorts of negative consequences in their lives, but silence about these matters can be just as debilitating if not more so. For this reason, Peggy Brick, a sexuality educator, has dedicated her book to adolescents and young adults this way: “To the young people of this nation who must find their way to sexual health in a world of contradictions—where media scream, ‘Always say yes,’ where many adults admonish, ‘Just say no,’ but the majority just say . . . nothing.”3 That we keep talking matters. But why? 8 | making love just n  Because a cultural crisis is disrupting sexuality and conventional mores Remaining silent or becoming speechless does little to curb the mindless chatter about sex and sexuality, much less stop the negative messages, because these tend only to escalate during times of disruptive cultural change when moral panics surface about loss of moral certainty, sexual immorality, and the disintegration of family life. Currently, as we witness a worldwide crisis of literally global proportions, we are encountering not only a tumultuous time of rapid change, but more significantly a protracted and very difficult period of structural transformation in which social relations at every level are being altered, from economic arrangements in a globalizing economy to the reordering of power between men and women in the family and throughout the social order. In the midst of this historic restructuring, cultural battles over sexuality, gender, and family are raging everywhere as deeply contested personal and social struggles about the human good, normative patterns for family life, and the legitimacy of cultural authority. What are the rules for sexual intimacy, and who gets to define and enforce them? These questions are at once highly personal and highly political. As sociologist James Davison Hunter explains, “Cultural conflict is about power—a struggle to achieve or maintain the power to define reality.”4 Therefore, sex and sexuality are far from frivolous or inconsequential matters that only detract attention from the so-called weightier matters of poverty, racism, war, and ecological degradation. Rather, these “intimate matters,” far from being sealed off from larger sociocultural dynamics, are embedded in, and reflective of, these more global transformations. For this reason, at a time when human suffering nearly exceeds our moral imagination’s ability to grasp, we must regain moral perspective about our lives-inrelation from the global to the intimate, especially at a time when many people, out of pain and fear, are either turning inward and blaming themselves for their suffering and bewilderment or turning outward to look for enemies and scapegoats who can serve as the culprits for their upset and misery. Attending to sexuality has become morally imperative these days because, as Gayle Rubin puts it, it is at times like this when “people are likely to become dangerously crazy about sexuality.” Therefore, she cautions, “sexuality should be treated with special respect in times of great social stress.”5 n  Because the way we talk about sex, sexuality, and sexual ethics can lead to justice or injustice While it is imperative that we speak, we must exercise great care about what we actually say about these tender matters. Making a compelling case that harm is being done and that the appropriate response is sexual justice requires us to “change the Why Do We Have to Keep Talking about Sex All the Time? | 9 subject” in two distinctive ways. First, we need to...