Recently, I saw clips of a documentary about an online prostitute and pornographer who had sex with 100 men in a single day—and “plans to” up the ante to 1,000 men in a day—to promote her “brand.”
I’m grateful that most people, even non-religious ones, experienced the same disgust I felt at learning about this. But if those people sat down and really thought about what sex is for, they’d see that having sex with even just one random person is also revolting. Both acts are sexually disordered; one is just so much more obviously disordered that it becomes easier for average people to see the problem.
Debating sexual ethics is difficult, because ethical arguments often go like this: You believe in X? Well, X logically entails Y, and Y is crazy, so believing X is crazy, too.
The problem is that what used to be considered crazy is now considered normal. In the 1950s, many arguments against contraception relied on the claim that approving contracepted sex entails approving homosexual acts. That was literally crazy then, given that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-3, said homosexual conduct indicated a mental disorder. But an aggressive propaganda campaign changed this in 1973 and future editions of the DSM . . . so good luck making an argument like that against contraception today.
So we have to reach way out to the boundaries of sexual behavior to find a morally repugnant enough “Y” to prove that “casual view X” about sex is wrong.
For example, let’s say sex is like photography: all that matters is that you get consent from the person you photograph. There’s nothing weird you can take a picture of, like a tree, or even a dead body, if you have that aesthetic preference. (Consider pictures of incorruptible saints.) But if sex were like photography, then there would be nothing weird about being sexually attracted to trees (dendrophilia) or dead bodies (necrophilia). But morally sane people know that these acts are perverted, which shows that sex has an intrinsic purpose beyond mere pleasure.
Now, some people may say that our disgust with stunts like having sex with a hundred men in a day has nothing to do sexual morality; rather, it is related to someone risking her health and body. I don’t buy that, because most people who hear about this experience express moral disgust, not biological disgust.
How we feel about gross promiscuity isn’t like the anxiety we feel when we see daredevils risking their lives for a stunt. It’s also not like the queasiness we might feel while watching someone break the world record for eating hot dogs (eighty-three in ten minutes, in case you’re wondering). And if you are morally disgusted by that, you identify the sin as gluttony—too much of a good and natural thing. We don’t view it with the contempt we have for people who misuse sex, which shows that sex is not a mere biological process, like eating, but has serious moral components.
Perhaps these stunts are disordered because sex is for “expressing love,” which is still compatible with casual sex with one person. But if sex were just about expressing amorphous concepts of love and emotion, then that still doesn’t explain why bestiality is wrong, since lots of people love their pets, even more than other people.
Nor does it explain why adult incest is wrong—and before you say birth defects are the answer, you still have to explain the wrongness of homosexual adult incest, which doesn’t cause birth defects, and the non-wrongness of pregnancy in older women, who are more likely to have children with birth defects.
As I said, sexual ethics isn’t fun to talk about, because you have to pick crazier and crazier “Ys” to explain why “principle X” is wrong. But one Y that’s easy to talk about is this: if sex only expressed love and emotion, then why does sex usually ruin friendships? This happens by turning the friends into either committed lovers (e.g., When Harry Met Sally) or estranged friends.
The reason this happens is that sex objectively communicates a kind of permanent bond that is incompatible with mere friendship.
What bonds friends are things that exist beyond them, like shared interests, hobbies, or social circles. When these external factors change, friendships often change, or go away, and that’s okay. But what bonds lovers is something intrinsic to them—the other person—and the hope is that the bond dies only when the person dies. Most people don’t expect the love of a friendship to last a lifetime, but they often desire the love that accompanies sex to last that long. So when you introduce the permanent bond, created through sex, to the temporary bond inherent in friendship, it creates an uncomfortable dissonance.
When a person has sex with 100 people in a day, the contrast between this extreme transience and the permanence of the sexual bond becomes blindingly obvious. But the same discord exists in any sexual act that takes place outside the marital bond. That’s because sex just is for the expression of marital love. We say sex is “making babies” and “making love” because sex is for expressing the kind of love that makes babies: marital love.
Of course, people copulate and procreate outside marriage all the time. These may be physical acts that produce children, but they are not examples of the genuine love from which children ought to proceed.
Since human beings are made in the image of God, we don’t say human beings “reproduce” like animals or photocopy machines. Instead, they procreate, or partner with God’s creative act that brings a unique human being with an immortal soul into existence. God is the one who ultimately decides if the child will be the fruit of the marital act. The Catechism says,
A child is not something owed to one, but is a gift. The “supreme gift of marriage” is a human person. A child may not be considered a piece of property, an idea to which an alleged “right to a child” would lead. In this area, only the child possesses genuine rights: the right “to be the fruit of the specific act of the conjugal love of his parents,” and “the right to be respected as a person from the moment of his conception” (2378).
To summarize, when discussing sexual ethics, we need to explain why certain sex acts are almost universally considered good, and others, even involving consenting adults, are considered universally bad. To do that, we need to answer the question What is sex for? Saying it isn’t for anything, and even saying it is for expressing love and emotion, fails to explain deep-seated views about sex that most people have.
But saying sex is for the expression of marital love explains why we can condemn gross promiscuity and the commercialization of sex through things like OnlyFans. It explains why we are repulsed by infidelity even if it is disguised as polyamory. It explains why sexual disorders involving consenting adults, or inanimate objects that don’t need consent, are still disordered. It explains why people refer to sex as “making love” and “making babies”: it’s for the kind of love that makes babies, and it is for that love even if God doesn’t bless you with a baby.
The love itself is still valuable and good for society, and so society should reverence it . . . by denouncing evils against it like fornication and outlawing the commercial enterprises that peddle this filth to the masses.