WHAT SEXUAL ETHICS ARE ALL ABOUT

'...a "crisis" in sexual ethics is never simply that; it is a crisis in our understanding of what it means to be a person. Are we beings characterized most of all by will and choice, beings who confer meaning and value on our acts by our choices? Or are we beings who discover meaning and value in the embodied life God has created? Because the latter is the truth, the church can offer to the world something more hopeful than the idea that what is good depends largely on our own choosing.'

Gilbert Meilaender, Thy Will Be Done: The Ten Commandments and the Christian Life, p.21.

THE PURPOSE OF SEXUALITY

'The fire of erotic impulse, intrinsic to human nature, can brighten and warm our lives as a source of gladness and fruitfulness. It can also erupt in conflagrations of deadly passion. In a Christian optic, eros is an impulse towards the divine, but it not itself divine. It has its part to play in ordering human existence towards its true goal, the knowledge and love of God. It must not be mistaken for the goal.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.160.

THE ESCHATALOGICAL LIMITS TO BINARIES

'There is an eschatological thrust in the desire to overcome binary oppositions. Christ came to make the two one (cf. Ephesians 2.14, Galatians 3.28). Trouble ensues when human beings try to accomplish overcoming unaided. Christianity entertains hope of transcending human dichotomies not through pendular alterations, but through a transfiguration in love that realizes our thirst for infinity through graced communion with Infinite Being.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.124.

CHASTITY DEFINED

'...chastity is not a denial of sex. It is an orientation of sexuality, of the whole vital instinct, towards a desired finality. It is a function of the wholeness sought and healing found.'

Erik Varden, Chastity: Reconciliation of the senses, p.17.

CHASTITY IS NOT REPRESSION

'When an adolescent or an adult is engaged in resisting a conscious desire, he is not dealing with a repression nor is he in the least danger of creating a repression. On the contrary, those who are seriously attempting chastity are more conscious, and soon know a great deal more about their sexuality than anyone else. They come to know their desires as Wellington knew Napoleon, or as Sherlock Holmes knew Moriarty; as a rat-catcher knows rats or a plumber knows about leaky pipes. Virtue - even attempted virtue - brings light; indulgence brings fog.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.102.

EVIL IS A PARASITE

'...badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled. We call sadism a sexual perversion; but you must have first had the idea of a normal sexuality before you talk of its being perverted...'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.44.

DESIRES NOT A MATTER FOR BLAME

'It is perfectly possible to think of desires as no matter for blame, and yet be persuaded that their literal enactment cannot be their true fulfillment.'

Oliver O'Donovan, A Conversation Waiting to Begin, p.113.

INTERPRETING DESIRE

'Sexual desire in particular is notoriously difficult to interpret; the biblical story of Ammon and Tamar (cf. 1 Sam 13) is just one of many ancient warnings of how obscure its tendency might be. It is characteristically surrounded by fantasy, and fantasies are never literal indicators of what the desire is really all about, but are symbolic revealer-concealers of an otherwise inarticulate sense of need. But the point holds also for many kinds of desire - let us say, the desire for a quiet retirement to a cottage in the countryside, or the desire to own a faster racecar. We cannot take any of them at their face value. "It wasn't what I really wanted!" is the familiar complaint of a disappointed literalism. To all desire its appropriate self-questioning: what what wider, broader good does this desire serve? How does it spring out of our strengths, and how does it spring out of our weaknesses? Where in relation to this desire does true fulfillment lie?'

Oliver O'Donovan, A Conversation Waiting to Begin: the churches and the gay controversy, p.112.

THE CASE AGAINST THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION

'We need to re-erect the social guard rails that have been torn down. And in order to do that, we have to start by stating the obvious. Sex must be taken seriously. Men and women are different. Consent is not enough. Violence is not love. Loveless sex is not empowering. People are not products. Marriage is good.'

Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, p.189.

THE NEW SEXUAL TECHNOLOGY WE NEED

'The task for practically minded feminists, then, is to deter men from the cad mode. Our current sexual culture does not do that, but it could. In order to change the incentive structure, we would need a technology that discourages short-termism in male sexual behavior, protects the economic interests of mothers, and creates a stable environment for the raising of children. And we do already have such a technology, even if it is old, clunky and prone to periodic failure. It's called monogamous marriage.'

Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, p.181.

OUR SEXUAL MORALITY NEEDS MORE THAN THE PRINCIPLE OF CONSENT

'When we strip bask all sexual morality to the bare bones, leaving only the principle of consent, we leave the way clear for some particularly predatory pikes. As the example of pedophilia advocacy shows, the consent framework is nowhere near robust enough to protect the vulnerable from harm. Given the profound importance and complexity of sexual relationships, a much more sophisticated moral system is required...'

Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, p.64.

SOME FORM OF SEXUAL REPRESSION IS NEEDED

'Sexual repression is a blunt instrument, but it is not one that we can do away with altogether. as the errors of the 1970s show. The radical desires of sexual liberals do not work in a world in which human sexuality is not always beautiful but often wicked and repulsive.'

Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, p.64.

THE CENTRAL FEMINIST QUESTION WHEN IT COMES TO SEXUALITY

'...the central feminist question ought not to be "How can we all be free?" but, rather, "How can we best promote the wellbeing of both men and women, given that these two groups have different sets of interests, which are sometimes in tension?"'

Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, p.35.

THE DOWNSIDES OF THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION

'We have smoothly transitioned from one form of feminine subservience to another, but we pretend that this one is liberation.'

Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, p.20.

THE IMPORTANCE OF STRUCTURE

'...the students talked loudly about wanting to be free to dance, to make love, to be themselves. So do I. So we left literature and talked about the body, and I kept asking questions: what is it in you which gives you freedom? Finally one of the young men, with great reluctance, pulled out the word: skeleton. It is our bones, our structure, which frees us to dance, to make love. Without our structure we would be an imprisoned, amorphous blob of flesh, incapable of response. The amoeba has a minimum of structure, but I doubt it has much fun.'

Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet, p.123.

HOW GENDER EFFECTS SAME-SEX SEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS

'Men and women tend to conduct their relationships differently and exhibit different preferences in their relationships. When the partnership diverges from sexual complementarity - that is, a man and a woman in relationship - decidedly sex-typed preferences are consolidated, not moderated. It means that same-sex couple are ironically more subject to deep-rooted gendered patterns and habits, their stated egalitarian attitudes aside. There is nothing political about this; it is just the empirical reality, one that sexual economics make ready sense of. If the sexes were a simple social construction, utterly malleable, we should see very little distinction in how men and women pursue relationships, how they act within them, how they act apart from them, what they prioritize about them and how they conclude them. But we see all of that.'

Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex, p.158. 

HOW SEXUAL LIBERATION HAS FAILED TO LIBERATE

'According to its claims, sexual liberation ought logically to have brought in a time of "naturalness," ease, and candor between men and women. It has, on the contrary, filled the country with sexual self-consciousness, uncertainty, and fear.'

Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, p.141.

THE POLICING OF SEXUALITY

'...not long ago conservatives policed discourse concerning human sexuality, today liberal voices have replaced them. The only thing that has remained constant is the presence of policing.'

Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex: the transformation of men, marriage, and monogamy, p.19.

THE PUZZLING POWER OF SEXUALITY

'It seems to me we walk around all the time feeling these absurdly strong impulses and desires, strong enough to make us want to ruin our lives and sabotage our marriage and careers, but nobody is really trying to explain what the desires are, or where they come from. Our ways of thinking and speaking about sexuality seem so limited, compared to the exhausting and debilitating power of sexuality itself as we experience it in our real lives.'

Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You, p.92.

SEXUALITY IS ABOUT MORE THAN SEX

'I wish there was a good theory of sexuality out for me to read. All the existing theories seem to be mostly about gender - but what about sex itself? I mean, what even is it? To me it's normal to meet people and think of them in a sexual way without actually having sex with them - or, more to the point, without even imagining sex with them, without even thinking about imagining it. This suggests that sexuality has some "other" content, which is not about the act of sex. And maybe even a majority of our sexual experiences are mostly this "other". So what is the other?'

Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You, p.91.