Sex as a How Do You Do?

Last updated on: March 4, 2014 at 11:47 am by Leah Libresco

Sex as a How Do You Do? 2014-03-04T11:47:01-05:00 Leah Libresco

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I was having a conversation about sex and sensibility with a friend the other afternoon, and she raised a social objection to the Catholic position on chastity. She’s not Catholic (or Christian generally) herself, but had been contrasting a more fallow sexual period with a more recent choice to “sleep with everyone I wanted to sleep with.” She said the latter course of action was a lot less lonely, and she got to know more people more deeply than she did when she was chary about hooking up.

I think the scripted response is to say, “Ah, well, despite your own understanding of your subjective experiences, you were truly lonelier when hooking up, for lo, there is a kind of higher loneliness that your sex-having merely camouflaged, but could not sate.”

I didn’t say this to my friend, as it seems questionably true and supremely unhelpful in any case. And besides, I thought it quite likely that she was telling the truth.

There aren’t many social scripts for making an acquaintance a friend, but there are a lot of ways to try to turn an acquaintance into a sexual partner and, from there, if you like, a friend. If I like the question someone asks at a lecture, it’s not quite clear how I should platonically pick them up. If there’s no reception at which to chat them up, asking them for coffee is likely to be assumed to be a come on. Actually, even if I do chat them up at a reception, an invitation will still probably be interpreted as making a play for my interlocutor.

Accepting that framework and using eros as the way to open the door for philia is hardly ideal, but it’s understandable. It proceeds from a praiseworthy desire for intimacy and connection and can’t be written off as mere lust. Nor is it any good to just tell my friend or the people like her that she ought to do things differently. Social norms are a collective action problem, and there are costs to being the first mover.

What I actually said to her was, “Did that mean you wound up mostly connecting with guys? Did you work out an alternate strategy for getting to know women?”

She paused, thought it over, and said, “No,” and then we went on to talk about how sex, regardless of its intrinsic moral content, wasn’t a good enough social solution. We could both be allies in trying to figure out how to change the culture so that it was easier to start platonic friendships, regardless of whether we planned to go on to have sex with some of those people. But starting a conversation with condemnation or a presumption that hookups aren’t meeting any need of your conversation partner is condescending and unproductive. It would have precluded the chance to explore alternatives or to understand why those options didn’t seem realistic or desirable.

If the culture doesn’t make it easy to form intimate, chaste friendships, it’s very odd to ask the people who don’t feel they have a dog in the fight to do most of the work of building up an alternate one.

Part of the work can be just pitching an alternate idea (as I tried to do in this conversation), but it’s probably just as valuable to just break scripts by chatting people up, however awkward it is, or facilitating friendships by having three person coffees or book clubs for two friends you’d like to connect. The goal is to normalize what now seems foolish.

DarwinCatholic is praying a novena for Ordering Lives Wisely by St. Thomas Aquinas, that will end on Ash Wednesday. If you’d like to join her and me, you can find the prayers here.

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