A Return to Another Theology of the Body, Part 3--What Does Our Biology Really Tell Us?
One of the core claims advanced by advocates of the Theology of the Body is that our biology, by which they mean our sexual biology, discloses God's moral and ethical vision for sexual activity. In doing so, they are working out an application of "natural law"--facts about the natural world reflect the plan of God. The job, on this reading, is to interpret facts about the natural world in order to discern God's purposes encoded in the design of the natural world and extrapolate that into our concrete circumstances.
There are a number of directions from which one might object to this from a methodological point of view, and I understand and agree with those objections. But, I think there is something valuable to be learned from the design of our sexual biology which can provide clues as to the proper way to think about developing norms and rules for our sexual activity. My objections to the conclusions drawn from the Theology of the Body not just about method but also about the underlying factual predicate that acts as the foundation for the theology analysis. We saw this when talking about intersex people--the "natural" that is used as the basis for formulating the "law" of "natural law" is often not an accurate description of the way the natural world actually is.
Here is another example of bad factual premises. TOB asserts that it is apparent that procreation is inexorably linked to the sexual act. "According to the criterion of this truth, which should be expressed in the language of the body, the conjugal act signifies not only love, but also potential fecundity." (Pope John Paul II, General Audience of 22 August [1984], paragraph 6). It is from this predicate that the conclusion "[t]herefore [sex] cannot be deprived of its full and adequate significance by artificial means" is drawn (paragraph 7). In order words, our sexuality is designed to be procreative at a baseline level. In Pope John Paul II's writings, the evidence marshaled for this conclusion is primarily Scriptural (more on that in a future post), but other TOB advocates will point to biological facts to defend this idea.
And it is here, on the biology, that I think Pope John Paul II's thesis falls apart. I would argue that human reproductive biology, and more specifically human female reproductive biology, points to exactly the opposite conclusion. Human female reproductive biology can be said to be optimized for non-procreative sex in a way that is almost unique in the animal kingdom. If you really dig into and think about the way human women work sexually, it suggests that God designed us (or at least women) to have sex in a way that is outside of the procreative context.
How so? One way that I have discussed before is the existence of the clitoris, an organ of sexual pleasure with no reproductive function. But, on further reflection, it's more than simply the existence of the clitoris that is relevant, but the way the clitoris interfaces with the procreative dimensions of female sexuality that challenges the sex-is-for-procreation thesis. The only naturally procreative sexual act is penis-in-vagina sex, and penis-in-vagina sex is one of the least effective ways to stimulate the clitoris to produce sexual pleasure. If you were God and wanted to design a sexual biology that was exclusively for procreation but also contained a pleasure component, logically you would tie the pleasure to the procreation so as to reward the behavior you wanted. What you would not do is locate the primary locus of sexual pleasure on the outside of the body, in a spot that cannot be effectively stimulated during procreative sex. That's just bad design.
But the design problems don't stop there. Most of our mammalian cousins have a female sexual biology based on an estrus cycle, where the female is sexually receptive only during fertile periods. If one were designing sexuality to have procreation as an essential component, this is clearly the most logical design--mammals who have an estrus cycle, as a general rule, simply do not have sexual contact outside of the fertile period. So, if we were like most mammals, human women would simply not be interested in sex when they were fertile, and perhaps even physically unable to have sex outside of fertility. But, of course, that's not the way it works. And, revealingly, one of the characteristic traits of primates is a lack of an estrus cycle. Thus, the evolutionary arc of human sexuality as embodied in our primate cousins is away from structures that would ensure only procreative sex and toward the possibility of non-procreative sex. That's a puzzling design decision if your design goal is that sex should and must have a procreative component.
Even more puzzling is the phenomenon of concealed ovulation. The only approved method of the regulation of births for the Roman Catholic Church is NFP, which basically boils down to methods of determining when a woman is fertile. This requires some sort of technological intervention, or otherwise parsing ambiguous and non-intuitive physical signs. But, if our sexual biology were that of our closest cousins the bonobos, NFP would be trivially easy, as bonobo females display "perineal sexual swellings on their rumps" during fertile periods. Keep in mind that bonobos engage in a wide spectrum of non-procreative sexual activity, including oral sex, manual stimulation, and same-sex contact. But human evolution shed fertility signaling traits held by our closest cousins, in favor of an almost completely concealed ovulation. Thus, in a sense, human beings are less designed to ensure, or even know if they are having, procreative sex than even the notoriously horny bonobos. Again, the evolutionary trend line is away from those structures that would facilitate procreative-only sex and toward structures and processes that would facilitate non-procreative sex.
So, human women, perhaps uniquely among all creatures God made, can be said to be designed to have non-procreative sex--precisely the opposite of what is asserted by Theology of the Body advocates. And, if you believe that our design reflects God's purposes, then the logical conclusion is that God is A-OK with non-procreative sex.
I think the evidence on this point is pretty clear. So clear, in fact, that it is worth asking the question "how did they get this so wrong?" In part, I think this points to the way Theology of the Body is really a complicated effort to dress up traditional black-letter rules about sex (predicated on very different philosophical and theological pre-suppositions) in modern clothes. Theology of the Body is basically a renovation project, and like most renovation projects if you look carefully you can see the seams and the patches between the old and the new.
But I think the more fundamental answer is the simplest--Theology of the Body acts as if male sexuality is human sexuality, full stop. I am not aware of any serious engagement by Theology of the Body thinkers with female sexuality, or the ways in which the differences between male and female sexual functioning implicate Theology of the Body analysis. If you gloss over the differences, and just pretend that men and women are the same, much of the problem disappears. If your only point of reference is male sexuality, where the procreative act of ejaculation and the maximum pleasure of orgasm are generally speaking linked, then this idea that procreation is an inherent part of sex becomes much more plausible. But a thesis that only adequately describes half of the human population is a bad thesis if it purports to explain the whole. A 50 out of 100 is usually a failing grade, after all.
The irony of all of this is that Theology of the Body advocates spend so much time arguing for a whole host of essential and unchangeable differences between men and women, but ignore what for me is the most clear and unambiguous difference between the sexes--their sexual biology. Female sexual function is just different from men on a fundamental level, it is much more complex, and it points toward a much more ambiguous relationship between procreation and sex than can be extrapolated from looking only at men. All of that strikes me a significant, and useful for our reflection as to the proper role of sexuality in our lives.
But it is hard not to conclude that Theology of the Body folks ignore it because our biology does not tell us what they want to hear.
There are a number of directions from which one might object to this from a methodological point of view, and I understand and agree with those objections. But, I think there is something valuable to be learned from the design of our sexual biology which can provide clues as to the proper way to think about developing norms and rules for our sexual activity. My objections to the conclusions drawn from the Theology of the Body not just about method but also about the underlying factual predicate that acts as the foundation for the theology analysis. We saw this when talking about intersex people--the "natural" that is used as the basis for formulating the "law" of "natural law" is often not an accurate description of the way the natural world actually is.
Here is another example of bad factual premises. TOB asserts that it is apparent that procreation is inexorably linked to the sexual act. "According to the criterion of this truth, which should be expressed in the language of the body, the conjugal act signifies not only love, but also potential fecundity." (Pope John Paul II, General Audience of 22 August [1984], paragraph 6). It is from this predicate that the conclusion "[t]herefore [sex] cannot be deprived of its full and adequate significance by artificial means" is drawn (paragraph 7). In order words, our sexuality is designed to be procreative at a baseline level. In Pope John Paul II's writings, the evidence marshaled for this conclusion is primarily Scriptural (more on that in a future post), but other TOB advocates will point to biological facts to defend this idea.
And it is here, on the biology, that I think Pope John Paul II's thesis falls apart. I would argue that human reproductive biology, and more specifically human female reproductive biology, points to exactly the opposite conclusion. Human female reproductive biology can be said to be optimized for non-procreative sex in a way that is almost unique in the animal kingdom. If you really dig into and think about the way human women work sexually, it suggests that God designed us (or at least women) to have sex in a way that is outside of the procreative context.
How so? One way that I have discussed before is the existence of the clitoris, an organ of sexual pleasure with no reproductive function. But, on further reflection, it's more than simply the existence of the clitoris that is relevant, but the way the clitoris interfaces with the procreative dimensions of female sexuality that challenges the sex-is-for-procreation thesis. The only naturally procreative sexual act is penis-in-vagina sex, and penis-in-vagina sex is one of the least effective ways to stimulate the clitoris to produce sexual pleasure. If you were God and wanted to design a sexual biology that was exclusively for procreation but also contained a pleasure component, logically you would tie the pleasure to the procreation so as to reward the behavior you wanted. What you would not do is locate the primary locus of sexual pleasure on the outside of the body, in a spot that cannot be effectively stimulated during procreative sex. That's just bad design.
But the design problems don't stop there. Most of our mammalian cousins have a female sexual biology based on an estrus cycle, where the female is sexually receptive only during fertile periods. If one were designing sexuality to have procreation as an essential component, this is clearly the most logical design--mammals who have an estrus cycle, as a general rule, simply do not have sexual contact outside of the fertile period. So, if we were like most mammals, human women would simply not be interested in sex when they were fertile, and perhaps even physically unable to have sex outside of fertility. But, of course, that's not the way it works. And, revealingly, one of the characteristic traits of primates is a lack of an estrus cycle. Thus, the evolutionary arc of human sexuality as embodied in our primate cousins is away from structures that would ensure only procreative sex and toward the possibility of non-procreative sex. That's a puzzling design decision if your design goal is that sex should and must have a procreative component.
Even more puzzling is the phenomenon of concealed ovulation. The only approved method of the regulation of births for the Roman Catholic Church is NFP, which basically boils down to methods of determining when a woman is fertile. This requires some sort of technological intervention, or otherwise parsing ambiguous and non-intuitive physical signs. But, if our sexual biology were that of our closest cousins the bonobos, NFP would be trivially easy, as bonobo females display "perineal sexual swellings on their rumps" during fertile periods. Keep in mind that bonobos engage in a wide spectrum of non-procreative sexual activity, including oral sex, manual stimulation, and same-sex contact. But human evolution shed fertility signaling traits held by our closest cousins, in favor of an almost completely concealed ovulation. Thus, in a sense, human beings are less designed to ensure, or even know if they are having, procreative sex than even the notoriously horny bonobos. Again, the evolutionary trend line is away from those structures that would facilitate procreative-only sex and toward structures and processes that would facilitate non-procreative sex.
So, human women, perhaps uniquely among all creatures God made, can be said to be designed to have non-procreative sex--precisely the opposite of what is asserted by Theology of the Body advocates. And, if you believe that our design reflects God's purposes, then the logical conclusion is that God is A-OK with non-procreative sex.
I think the evidence on this point is pretty clear. So clear, in fact, that it is worth asking the question "how did they get this so wrong?" In part, I think this points to the way Theology of the Body is really a complicated effort to dress up traditional black-letter rules about sex (predicated on very different philosophical and theological pre-suppositions) in modern clothes. Theology of the Body is basically a renovation project, and like most renovation projects if you look carefully you can see the seams and the patches between the old and the new.
But I think the more fundamental answer is the simplest--Theology of the Body acts as if male sexuality is human sexuality, full stop. I am not aware of any serious engagement by Theology of the Body thinkers with female sexuality, or the ways in which the differences between male and female sexual functioning implicate Theology of the Body analysis. If you gloss over the differences, and just pretend that men and women are the same, much of the problem disappears. If your only point of reference is male sexuality, where the procreative act of ejaculation and the maximum pleasure of orgasm are generally speaking linked, then this idea that procreation is an inherent part of sex becomes much more plausible. But a thesis that only adequately describes half of the human population is a bad thesis if it purports to explain the whole. A 50 out of 100 is usually a failing grade, after all.
The irony of all of this is that Theology of the Body advocates spend so much time arguing for a whole host of essential and unchangeable differences between men and women, but ignore what for me is the most clear and unambiguous difference between the sexes--their sexual biology. Female sexual function is just different from men on a fundamental level, it is much more complex, and it points toward a much more ambiguous relationship between procreation and sex than can be extrapolated from looking only at men. All of that strikes me a significant, and useful for our reflection as to the proper role of sexuality in our lives.
But it is hard not to conclude that Theology of the Body folks ignore it because our biology does not tell us what they want to hear.
Comments