Are you “sex positive”? If not, get ready to be called a closed-minded bigot. Theologian Angela Franks, from St. John’s Seminary in Boston, gives us a Catholic critique of the “sex positivity” movement.
Cy Kellett:
Hello, and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers Podcast for living, understanding, and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host, and today, a very special opportunity to get to talk with Dr. Angela Franks, who is a professor of theology at St. John’s Seminary in Boston, and a well-known speaker and author, as a matter of fact, a speaker, much in demand, and we’re just delighted that she’s out here in Southern California doing some speaking for us and for some related apostolates here. Dr. Franks, thank you for being with us.
Angela Franks:
Thanks for having me.
Cy Kellett:
You teach at a seminary.
Angela Franks:
That’s right.
Cy Kellett:
But you’re known for Theology of the Body, all that kind of thing.
Angela Franks:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
How’s that go over there at the seminary?
Angela Franks:
Oh, they want that kind of material. The seminarians recognize that they’re real cultural problems. They feel a little bit inadequate to meet them, and they know that they have to up their game, and so they’re actually very eager to take those classes.
Cy Kellett:
I hadn’t thought of that, but that makes perfect sense. If you’re a priest, you’re going to deal with every kind of question relating to the body, and there’s a lot of them these days, and you better have something to come back with.
Angela Franks:
There’s a lot, yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. Well, I want to talk with you about a phrase that I began to hear a few years ago. The phrase is sex positivity. The way that it’s presented, at least in my understanding, in various, where people write or blog or podcast, that kind of thing, is a basic cultural idea that you can have a positive view of sex, but this positive view, it seems to me that it’s primarily libertine, that it’s positive in the sense of do what you want and have no hangups. Are you familiar with this term and the spirit of the thing?
Angela Franks:
Yeah. I’m familiar with it as a subset of feminism, and I think in feminism, it was probably a reaction to ’60s, ’70s, ’80s feminism that maybe tended a little lesbian and tended to be kind of anti-male, and maybe sort of anti-sex, and also, of course, people think they’re being very rebellious against the dominant culture when they’re being sex positive, even though it’s not the case at all. It’s the exact opposite.
Cy Kellett:
I know. Yeah. It seems odd that this is thought of as some kind of rebellion against something, but what are you rebelling against? We’re 70 years into the sexual revolution now.
Angela Franks:
Yeah. We have a totally porn-saturated culture, and so we’re not exactly rebelling against anything.
Cy Kellett:
But, for example, ’cause this is where I have run into this, is you might write something or say something on the air about pornography, and people will accuse you of not being sex positive, and they’ll school you in a more sex positive thing, and that, oh, you’re just bringing a negativity to it, and so that is where I encounter it, is that people want to say, “Well, what’s wrong with looking at a pornography? Why don’t we just have a positive view of sexuality as a Catholic?” I think, “Well, that’s not a positive view of sexuality.”
Angela Franks:
Exactly. Right. What it’s really claiming is that it’s really casual sex positive.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, yes.
Angela Franks:
In other words, sex outside of marriage positive, and this idea that you can healthily engage in all sorts of sexual activity of various kinds outside of marriage, and that is in and of itself a healthy thing to do. That’s the assumption, that you and your questioners do not share, but that’s precisely the thing you have to debate. It doesn’t end the argument to say, “Why don’t you be more sex positive?”
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Angela Franks:
It really is beginning it, because then, the question is, “Well, what do you mean by sex and what do you mean by positive?”
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Angela Franks:
That’s the conversation to have.
Cy Kellett:
Right. So if you hear a man and woman say, “We’re in a sex-positive relationship,” then often, that’s a signal for, “We’re not faithful, or faithfulness is not a consideration in this relationship.” Again, that seems to me, like you said, there’s a kind of begging the question or answering the question before you’ve had the conversation, “Is that, in fact, sex positive, or is that actually destructive of those two partners?”
Angela Franks:
Yeah. There’s an assumption, in a sense that, that quantity of sex is an intrinsically good thing. What I think we know pretty thoroughly from the sexual revolution is that that’s just not the case, that especially for women, but this is actually also true of men, the studies indicate, that sex outside of emotionally committed and faithful relationships, that’s not a positive experience. It’s, in fact, very much less physically pleasurable, especially to women, but it’s also significantly emotionally unsatisfying. The reason is because, I think, people who talk about sex positivity ignore the fact that the sexual act or sexual adjacent things make you very vulnerable to someone else.
They think that we can sidestep the vulnerability of sex, and that’s just a huge error, because once we assume we can act as though sex does not make you vulnerable to another human being, now you’re basically setting people up to walk into dangerous situations with people that they don’t know very well, that they really shouldn’t be trusting, based on how much they know them, and we’re really encouraging people, especially women, to walk into these vulnerable situations with their guard down. So I think in that sense, it’s actually a very negative kind of movement, and it’s actually really negative about sex in that sense.
Cy Kellett:
It does seem like that there’s a kind of … I mean, an equalizing or an equating of male and female sexuality, that it’s just a fantasy, that these are … I mean, if you just began with pregnancy, you would see these are not equal or equatable undertakings that a man and woman engage in, but if you look just at, say, the films of the 1930’s and ’40s and ’50s, there’s a game of romance in all these Hollywood films, which actually, to me, suggests something permanent about human nature, and the game is the man is trying to romance the woman. His desire for sex with her, it doesn’t meet an equated partner, it meets a different kind of partner who has different requirements, and so the game has to be played. Even in a bawdy movie, everyone knows you have to play this game because men and women are not the same. It seems to me you couldn’t make that movie now because we’ve destroyed the woman’s role in that little drama, in that little game that’s played.
Angela Franks:
Yeah. We’ve told women that it will be fine if you pretend that you can engage in sex like a man does, and that meaning, like a man does, meaning that this is consequence-free sex. Like we’ve sold this vision, this kind of bill of goods to women, of consequence-free sex. So it doesn’t work on all kinds of levels. It doesn’t work on the physical reproductive level because birth control is not 100% effective, and abortion is a really traumatic thing to ask a woman to do, and so this is what my friend, Erika Bachiochi calls an asymmetry, that-
Cy Kellett:
That’s what I was looking for, asymmetry.
Angela Franks:
Exactly.
Cy Kellett:
Yes.
Angela Franks:
There’s an asymmetrical burden that women just naturally are going to have to bear from the consequence of sex.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Angela Franks:
They’re the ones who get pregnant, and you can’t get rid of that asymmetry. What we’ve tried to do in the sexual revolution is use technology to eliminate that asymmetry, but it doesn’t work. And what’s, in fact, happened is that we’ve made it worse, so we have more unwanted pregnancy. There’s interesting studies that show that the more adolescents use contraceptives, the more abortions there are in that population.
Cy Kellett:
Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Angela Franks:
Yeah, the reason is because people are engaged in more risky sexual behavior with people who are not committed to them, and so what we have as the net result is more pregnancy, but that’s just the physical reproductive side, which is really important, but there’s also the whole emotional, social, psychological side, the spiritual side, where people, women especially, but men too, are really being wounded by being used sexually by other people.
Cy Kellett:
Well, as a married man myself, and lots of friends who are married men, I think one thing that men know is that at a certain point, the relationship with their spouse is what grew them up, is what got them out of, “We couldn’t have done it on our own. We needed a woman to get us out of,” and you maybe think you can do it on your own, or maybe you don’t even think it’s a problem, it’s she who points out to you that permanent adolescence is a problem, but once it’s pointed out to you, it … Like I have friends who’ll say, “It was my second year of marriage. My wife told me I had to stop smoking marijuana, that I had to grow up now.” Well, okay, so it’s just the marijuana, but what that is, is a common experience to all men, that at some point, she needs you to be there for her, for children, and that grows the man up.
This society we have now, I wonder if there’s any mechanism for growing men up. So, I mean, you’re talking about the harms to women, but I think the harm to men is permanent adolescence.
Angela Franks:
That’s really well-put. I think that’s absolutely a problem, and very astute observers have been noticing this. Like this isn’t a secret that we have a problem with men growing up, so the kind of permanent absence from the workplace of a lot of men of working age and all of these problems, the drug use, the kind of excessive, addictive gaming and the pornography, of course.
Cy Kellett:
Right, right.
Angela Franks:
So there are problems. How do we help people to grow out of it? And I think that the bill of goods that men have been sold is that you don’t actually need relationships, and part of it, there’s more truth to that bill of goods than the first one I mentioned because, precisely because of the contraceptive, abortion revolution. It is the case that today, a man can get a woman in bed a lot more easily than he could, say, in the 1950’s, where she could say, “No, I’m not going to sleep with you because I don’t want to get pregnant.”
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Angela Franks:
And what contraception and abortion did was to take away that defense from women, and so now, they feel like they have to play the same game. Maybe they don’t want to be very sexually active, have multiple partners or whatever, but they feel like they have to play this game in order to get a man, and so what we have is that what Mark Regnerus calls the sexual gatekeeping that women used to do and generally want to do, because they want the intimacy overall more than the physical sex, that sexual gatekeeping has been made a lot harder. And so women who do do that, like I know many women like this, who, wonderful, very marriageable, very beautiful women, can’t get a date or can’t find a man who really wants to commit to marriage, right? So there’s just all of this fallout here that’s impacting both the men and the women negatively. I think the women are sometimes more aware of it than the men.
Cy Kellett:
Well, I don’t think men … It’s easier to live in an adolescent world and think you’re doing just fine, I think. There’s a certain thing about life is an amusement park for the permanently adolescent man in a way that it can’t be for a woman, or it’s much harder for that, because, I mean, even any group of men and women, you’ll get the jokes about how women talk more than men do. Well, they’re more social. Men can isolate in a certain way, shut down their social side, and actually think they’re doing fine when they’re not doing fine, but they think they’re doing fine.
Angela Franks:
Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s really true. Yeah, so I think we have a lot of walking wounded.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Angela Franks:
To get kind of back to your original point about sex positivity, it just ignores all this. It’s very unsettled. Really, it wants us to treat sex like eating a good meal or something.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Angela Franks:
I just had lunch in the conference room with you and many other colleagues, and there’s a certain kind of vulnerability to eating with someone, but it’s pretty minimal, and they just totally forget how sex is just a completely different kind of act, that really requires trust for it to be a good act, not to be virtuous, but also to even just be emotionally and physically good. It requires a certain level of trust. It’s not like just snacking at a snack bar.
Cy Kellett:
Right. Right. Okay. So I’m imagining now that priest that takes your classes and goes out to minister, he’s going to come face-to-face with young women who will say to him something like, “Well, you just want to control women’s bodies,” and now he’s in a position, because he doesn’t actually want to control women’s bodies, but what does he say? What possible thing can a priest respond to a woman who’s involved in this ideology of sex positivity? How might he break through that, or can it be broken through?
Angela Franks:
I think it can be. Sure, because I think what came out with the #MeToo stuff about … What was it now, five years ago or something? A lot of things came out, but one thing that came out is that there’s a lot of people who are really unhappy with the sexual status quo, and they might not articulate it very well, but a lot of women suddenly started saying, “You know, I’m really not happy with the sexual dating scene. I’m not happy.” A lot of it, without their really knowing, I think a lot of what they don’t like is how porn and porn-like behaviors have crept into that scene.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Angela Franks:
Yeah, there’s just a lot that’s kind of dangerous and ugly out there. So I think we can trust that, as is unfortunately always the case, sinful behaviors do not make us happy, and it does not mean that people connect the dots. It doesn’t mean that they say, “Oh, the reason I’m not happy is ’cause in my basement all the time, not interacting with humans,” or they don’t necessarily figure it out on their own, but I think that’s the thing we have to have faith in. I always encourage the seminarians to focus on what people are saying yes to. Along the way, to live a moral life, we have to say no to a lot of things that are bad, and so that’s certainly true in the case of sexual ethics, but we’re also saying yes to something, right?
We’re not just simply saying, “No, no, no,” “No to fornication,” “No to porn,” but why do we say no? ‘Cause we’re saying yes to love, and commitment, and beauty. We’re saying yes to a lot of things that for a lot of people, those things are even just fairytales. Like it’s hard for them to believe it’s even true, but I think helping people come to terms with the fact that they’re not satisfied, and then recognize that there’s good things that you say yes to in living a virtuous life, I think that was always John Paul II’s strategy, I think to emphasize the beauty of truth and goodness, instead of just kind of being like, “Here’s your list of things not to do.”
Cy Kellett:
I wonder if this late in the sexual revolution for a girl, for example, maybe her grandparents were divorced, her parents were divorced, and if this priest says to her, “What you want is what you’re made for, and what will bring happiness to you is a faithful relationship with a man.” If she can even, like you said, imagine that that’s possible, she may be utterly traumatized against even accepting that that’s available, that it could happen.
Angela Franks:
Yeah, and that’s the kind of sensitivity that priests need to have and that laypeople need to have to people who are struggling with these issues, who are maybe even violently opposed to the Catholic position and very angry and so forth. I worked for a long time in the pro-life movement, and one of the things that I learned from that is that when I was dealing with somebody who was so beside themself with rage and emotion over the pro-life issue, that I was quite likely dealing with somebody who had some sort of abortion experience.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Angela Franks:
And to always remember that just always really helped me, because it helped me from getting sucked into kind of the anger and the back and forth of the argument, and realize like, “Her problem is not what she’s saying her problem is.” Right? And so I think that when we recognize, “Yeah, we have a lot of broken people around us. We, ourselves probably have a lot of these same experiences,” and that can help us be more compassionate and help us to identify … So I sometimes tell my students, “Find the question beneath the question.” Right?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Angela Franks:
You have your angry atheistic cousin or something at Thanksgiving who’s saying, “And the church does this.” Well, probably this, whatever it is, is not the real question.
Cy Kellett:
That’s not … Yeah. Right, right.
Angela Franks:
And so it’s like, “Can you find the real hunger?,” the real question kind of underneath the rest of it.
Cy Kellett:
One thing, when you talk about these marriageable women, I think that pornography has made young men question whether they’re marriageable. That is a young man who’s been exposed to pornography since he was 10, 11, 12 years old, has developed habits around that and actually doesn’t know, “Are those habits permanent now?” Can he overcome those habits? He doesn’t feel marriageable either, but he’s not expressing it in the way the woman does.
Angela Franks:
Yeah, that’s a really good point. I mean, this is something we’ve had to grapple with in the seminary, I think all seminaries, right? We get men who are coming from the culture, and a lot of them have had exposure to porn or have had problems with porn, and so yeah, I think it’s really important to say that there is healing, like you can rewire your brain.
Cy Kellett:
Right, right. Yup.
Angela Franks:
It’s hard work. It’s much better not to need the healing, not to fall into it, but if people do, that there is healing that can happen. But yeah, I think you’re right. I think that a lot of men do feel that way. In fact, despite our sex-saturated culture and so forth, in fact, a lot of sociologists have pointed out we’re experiencing what they call a sex deficit, that fewer people are actually engaging in sex, and so part of it is, like if there’s a million naked women available online like, “Why-“
Cy Kellett:
Why do all the social things that I have to do?
Angela Franks:
Exactly. I might have to buy her a meal or something. Good heavens.
Cy Kellett:
Or have a conversation.
Angela Franks:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Angela Franks:
Right. So I think porn explains a lot on the male side. I think on the female side, I think it’s a similar thing to the adolescent girl attraction to going trans, to becoming a guy. I think on the female side, you see a lot of women saying, “Heck with this.” Right? “If this is what sex is all about-
Cy Kellett:
I don’t want to-
Angela Franks:
“Heck with this. I don’t I don’t want anything to …” If it involves choking, and no thank you, and so they’re like, “Well, what can I do? Oh, I’ll take testosterone so I’ll be stronger.” Like, “I’m not going to be a rape victim. I’m going to be stronger.”
Cy Kellett:
Oh, right. Right. So I’ll actually alter my own body to not be the choked partner in the pornographic scenario.
Angela Franks:
Exactly. Not be vulnerable. Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Right. Right.
Angela Franks:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
So let me put it this way. Is there a sex-positive Catholic? Do you see what I’m saying?
Angela Franks:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Or would that be an oxymoron?
Angela Franks:
It’s not an oxymoron as long as you’re defining your terms, right?
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Angela Franks:
So obviously, we’re not talking about casual sex, like outside of marriage sexuality, but I think in the Theology of the Body, John Paul II really tried to present sexuality from a different angle, where he was not foregrounding the nose, although he certainly believed that you have to say no to adultery, and porn, and masturbation and all of that, but instead, he’s trying to foregrounding the yes, like the beauty of the sexual relationship. It’s certainly is the case, that there are some more minor traditions, small T traditions within Christian theology that were not … Some theologians back in the Patristic era viewed sex as part of the punishment of the fall.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, yeah.
Angela Franks:
So you do find that in the Christian tradition. It was never embraced by the mainstream tradition.
Cy Kellett:
But we have those streams in the great-
Angela Franks:
Yeah, there are those streams.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Angela Franks:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Okay.
Angela Franks:
And so when John Paul II said, “Okay, no. I’m really here, magisterially affirming that God created male and female from the beginning, that was part of His plan, and that the sexual relationship between them and marriage was created from the beginning as God’s plan, and that this relationship that was there from the very beginning is then perfected and elevated in the relationship of Christ with the Church. And so for John Paul II, therefore the male-female relationship that most ordinarily is expressed in marriage, that’s really at the foundation of the salvific plan for God in history, that it has a real salvific purpose. And so it’s not just this kind of awkward thing that God did as kind of like a quick fix like, “Okay, you guys sinned. All right. Let’s give this quick fix.”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Angela Franks:
It actually was very intentional, and that’s a kind of sex positivity that’s not this sort of degraded, casual sex stuff that you’re talking about.
Cy Kellett:
Before I conclude with you, I want to ask you about the social dimension about all of this, because one thing I think about, if you think of sex positivity in this way that we started with, you destabilize society, and even on basic things like men and women no longer know how to interact with one another because nobody knows who’s a potential sex partner and who’s not, whereas in a world where, say, faithfulness and marriage is assumed, there’s a kind of relaxation socially because we’re not all on the prowl for everybody all the time. And that’s just one way in which that society is more stable, but certainly for children who have the stability of their parents in a relationship. We’ve talked about the personal consequences, but there are social consequences to getting sex wrong.
Angela Franks:
Yeah, that’s a very important point. I think pretty universally in the pre-modern world, it was understood that marriage is primarily about children, which means that sex is primarily about children. It doesn’t mean, obviously, that children come out of every sexual relationship and certainly not out of every sexual act, but that its trajectory, the whole purpose of it is to bring a man and a woman together to procreate a child. With the sexual revolution, you have this shift where sex is now supposed to be about adults and adults only, and this manifests itself in very weird ways. There was just something recently, there’s some academic paper that argued that, “Transmen.”
So this means women who identify as men who are on testosterone. It has happened that sometimes these women get pregnant, and this paper argued that women who are taking testosterone should continue to take it, even though it would have serious effects on the developing baby, because it’s just more important that this person, this adult be able to affirm … It’s be too traumatic for this person not to affirm her chosen gender identity. That’s just one kind of bizarro sort of example of how we’ve reframed sex to be about adults, which means that they’re … So Helen Alvare has been complaining about this for a long time, that U.S. family law … The family law is about the adults, and it neglects too often the children, and that’s because we think, because of the sexual revolution that sex is about adult recreation, it is not about family procreation. So yeah, I think it’s had a huge social impact, negative.
Cy Kellett:
Wow. And if family law is about adults, then children are utterly defenseless.
Angela Franks:
Right.
Cy Kellett:
There’s no one left to defend them.
Angela Franks:
Right. Exactly.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Yeah.
Angela Franks:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Well, that’s …
Angela Franks:
Sorry to end on that note.
Cy Kellett:
That’s not sex positive, though.
Angela Franks:
Yeah, exactly.
Cy Kellett:
I mean, that’s a disintegration of what should be integrated. The mother should be about the child, the father should be about the child, not even on a supernatural, on a natural level.
Angela Franks:
Exactly.
Cy Kellett:
That’s what we are.
Angela Franks:
Yeah. That’s healthy humanity. Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
And somehow, we’ve broken that healthy bond. Yeah. Well, Dr. Angela Franks, I really appreciate you talking about this because we do … It’s odd how many comments we’ll get. If we come across as stern about pornography or about sexual issues, there’s a very strong pushback these days.
There’s a real strong pushback that somehow that’s oppressive or enslaving our view, and I appreciate you having the intellectual heft to provide some basis for what I’ve emotionally believe, which is no, that’s not enslaving, that’s liberating. That’s freedom, the Christian approach to sexuality.
Angela Franks:
Amen. Happy to affirm you, Cy.
Cy Kellett:
That’s the main thing. It’s about me. That’s the main thing. Dr. Angela Franks has been our guest. She doesn’t do a huge amount of speaking, so when she’s around, you should come here.
She’s very, very good. And if you’re going to seminary and you want a great professor, then go to St. John’s Seminary in Boston. I don’t know what it means that you’re a senior fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute.
Angela Franks:
It’s very mysterious. You’re not … And it’s-
Cy Kellett:
Really?
Angela Franks:
Yeah. No, I’m kidding.
Cy Kellett:
[inaudible].
Angela Franks:
No, it’s an organization near Harvard that serves the Harvard undergrads and kind of providing them with a fuller education.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, oh, how wonderful.
Angela Franks:
It is. It really is.
Cy Kellett:
All right. I always think of Abigail Adams as don’t forget the ladies or don’t-
Angela Franks:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Is that what she said, “Don’t neglect the ladies?”
Angela Franks:
Yes. Yeah. And Abigail Adams has the Wollstonecraft Project, which is run by my friend, Erika Bachiochi, which focuses on providing education on sex and gender in a really humanistic, kind of healthy way. So check it out if you’re interested.
Cy Kellett:
And thank you for checking us out here at Catholic Answers Focus. As always, if you’d like to support us financially, it takes a few dollars to keep the lights on, and you can provide that at givecatholic.com. If you want to communicate with us, send us an email focus@catholic.com. You can comment on this episode, maybe suggest a future episode. And if wherever you’re listening, if you would give us those five stars and give us a review that helps to grow the podcast, and we would appreciate your help in that.
Once again, I’m Cy Kellett, your host. Thanks for joining us. We’ll see you next time, God willing, right here on Catholic Answers Focus.