Our National Sex Day

by  Caitlin Seery

within Culture

February 14th, 2013

To persuade people effectively that a sexual morality does indeed exist, we need to help them arrive at that conclusion on their own by asking thought-provoking questions and treating them with dignity, love, and respect, not by force-feeding them arguments and statistics.

Valentine’s Day is here again, as stores have been telling us for the past month, with piles of red-cellophane-wrapped chocolate and heart-shaped doilies in every window. This holiday—once an opportunity for husbands and wives to show their love and affection for each other, to bring back some of the romance that so easily disappears between diapers, bills, and driving lessons—has been transformed into a national day of sex.

Or at least that’s what the Victoria’s Secret ads and the local card shop’s red-tinted stock seem to indicate. I’m told to “indulge” myself in erotic lingerie, experience the world’s sexiest chocolate, make Valentine’s Day all about me by buying myself (of course) more unmentionables. It’s hard to find a Valentine’s Day card whose purchase could be recounted to your mother without embarrassment. But it’s all too easy to stock up on the day’s essentials—like fuzzy handcuffs—at the local CVS.

There’s something morally bankrupt about a culture that allows sex to be divorced from love and commitment, that embraces the mutual use of persons’ bodies as an ideal form of self-expression, and encourages its youth to turn their bodies into tools for their own pleasure—and objects for others’ gratification. The moral wrongs of our culture’s embrace of casual sex have already been expounded philosophically and empirically.

Dr. J. Budziszewski, for example, presents a philosophical case for chastity inOn the Meaning of Sex, in a style reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. Dr. Patrick Fagan has shown the benefits of chastity and marital fidelity to individuals and to families through social science research. Dr. Miriam Grossman has exposed the psychological and biological harms of casual sexual activity in her books Unprotected and You’re Teaching My Child What?

There’s no doubt that we need these arguments and resources to handle intellectual battles about sexual morality. We need to fight bad philosophy with good philosophy, and pseudo-science with honest science.

Read More at Public Discourse.