dissecting the sexual contract
Michael Stipe (2013)
Having grown up a devout Catholic, I spend a lot of time unlearning.
I stopped calling myself Catholic in my first year of high school, a year after I took the sacrament of “Confirmation”, in which twelve-year-olds are asked to recommit their entire lives to membership in the church (having been committed involuntarily at birth through baptism). About three months after embracing non-Catholicism, I took the label of atheist, thanks to some of the essays of science writer Natalie Angier. But it wasn’t until about 12 years later that I really left the church, having spent a lot of that time playing piano and organ for church services, since, hey, I already knew the show. I had “quit” several times during that period, saying no to one church and another, and then finally, finally, got angry enough to leave one day.
People who didn’t grow up religious don’t know the immense pain of the religious experience. The Catholic relationship with God is an abusive one. Enough “love” to make you feel you belong, enough torture to keep you in line, enough disorientation to keep you from questioning anything. “Salvation is offered at the minor expense of all your critical faculties,” Christopher Hitchens said.
To navigate the world outside of the comforting constriction of the religious compass is daunting and confusing. It seems that every week I realize that a harmful habit or belief is derived from Christian morality: purity of diet, ways of dress, self-worth, safety. The Catholic conceit is that security only comes with the approval of God. Not only bad choices but also simple weak will (i.e. “temptation”) can cause your eternal damnation. The only thing keeping you safe is subjugation. The habit of self-repression is deep-seated. Your own thoughts are not just unnecessary, but dangerous.
Perhaps the most challenging and most necessary religious unlearning is around sex. I say with no flippancy whatsoever that the Christian church has no moral authority over any issues of virtue, especially sex. Nothing more need be said about the international sex crime ring that is the Catholic church (or on the contrary, we should never stop talking about it, since it continues thriving at this very moment), but even if none of that were true, the church would still have nothing of value to offer in the area of sexual philosophy.
At various times in Catholic school, we are taught:
Sex is a gift from God.
Sex is only for the purposes of procreation.
Sex should only take place within marriage.
Sex is only between a man and a woman. (Penetrative sex is the only kind.) (“Love the sinner; hate the sin.”)
Sex is fun and pleasurable, but dangerous.
The usefulness of any of these individual teachings is debatable, but they share a common theme: sex is a base instinct with serious consequences. In other words, having sex leads to bigger things. That’s true, but if this were the earnest warning, then perhaps they would have taught us about STIs and contraception. (Oh wait, unwanted pregnancies are also a gift from God.) The crux of the fear-based abstinence education is that people are definitely going to have sex, so let’s demonize it and scare them until they’re afraid enough to repress themselves for as long as possible (or hide it, or avoid more knowledge, or do it unsafely).
It sounds pretty malicious when stripped down to its essentials, but dominant popular culture is not so different. Sex is dirty/bad/wrong, and even though it’s pleasurable it leads to things like romantic entanglement, mismatched affections, deception, and all manner of scary things. See above: sex is a base instinct with serious consequences.
What this value prop gets wrong is that it puts sex at the beginning of the transaction: having sex creates contractual obligations (children, marriage, affection). And while that can be true, treating sex as a powerful, scary activity completely erases the other possibility: that is a resultant expression of intimacy — that it need not be the first nor most important part of a relationship, but rather a culminating expression of a friendship (or simple chemistry) already shared.
In the Conscious Leadership framework, we identify five core feelings that are the roots of all emotions: fear, joy, anger, sadness, and sexual feelings. Emotions are just physiological reactions to our circumstances, and even though we can generate the sensations through rumination and rehashing (e.g. retelling the story can make you angry about it again), the emotions arise principally to indicate something to us. Just like hunger pangs tell us to feed ourselves, sadness tells us to say goodbye to something; joy tells us to celebrate something; and so on.
When I share this core feeling framework with people, the inclusion of sexual feelings is often confusing. It seems much more complicated than the other four. (Honest analysis will show that social judgments of anger and sadness are just as fraught, but that’s another discussion.) But the primary message of sexual feelings is that something wants to be created. There is a creative possibility arising between people, which the body indicates to the brain as sexual sensations. The sexual sensation can be even stronger when creative work is already happening; in the days when I worked for orchestras, it always struck me how many people in the ensemble were partnered with other people in the ensemble. Sure, the group spends a lot of time together, but I realize now that the bond generated through collaborative work opens up its participants to the other possibilities for collaboration: sex, partnership, love. They are on the same spectrum of experience, and no one is better or worse than the others.
Positioning sex as a result of intimacy rather than the first step toward it might make it seem rather Catholic, that sex is only to be engaged in after the cultivation of deep emotional bonds, but “intimacy” and “affection” need not be so scary and powerful either. Intimacy can be the simple frisson of meeting someone new and sharing a laugh, or the possibility of stepping outside of your everyday life for a new experience. Comedian Simon Amstell memorably said, “Sex can just be fun. No one says, ‘Oh you’re playing all that tennis, but where’s it leading?’” It’s our unwillingness to get personal clarity on these different goals and interest levels and express them to potential partners which is the precise cause of all those misunderstood entanglements and consequences.
Sex as marriage contract is one such example. Given that historical marriage is only for the purposes of transferring property between families, we’re somewhat at a loss for what to base our marriages on these days. Want children? We should get married first. Been dating for over a year? Where’s that engagement ring?! The marriage contract itself has little usefulness these days because people are increasingly living their own independent lives, even within the legal contract. “Marriage equality” isn’t real, as disabled people are threatened with the loss of their social benefits if partnered, and most modern marriages have no expectation of lifelong partnership in the first place. It’s just what you do.
So when marriage has no real usefulness except for keeping up with the Joneses’ Pinterest wedding photos, we tether it to one of the remaining vestiges of wife-slavery: sexual exclusivity. Seeing a secret partner for years is a serious thing, but a single kiss or one-night stand in the heat of an exciting moment? The only way this could destroy a “committed” relationship is if the relationship had no legs to stand on in the first place.
Centering intercourse as the absolute pinnacle of relational experience (and the fulcrum upon which an entire relationship rests) gives it too much power. If “cheating” is having sex with another person outside of a monogamous commitment, then “winning” is having sex at all — or maybe being committed in the first place? Whatever that tortured language really means, I’m opting out of the game.
When we treat sex as an expression of intimacy and collaboration, as opposed to a leash or bargaining chip, we realize how much of relationships is just about ownership, power, and role-filling. A person who “needs” a traditional husband-breadwinner partner will be outraged by his extramarital affair, because the contract of sexual exclusivity is carrying the weight of so much more: “You provide for us, and only for us. You do not spread your resources thin by caring for anyone else.” A person who ends their relationship over their partner’s one-time dalliance on vacation has realized that the only thing tying them together is the sexual contract. An unhappy couple, not having sex, tries an “open” relationship: “Sex is the only thing that can save this. Since we’re not doing it with each other, we’ll try someone else.” In all these instances, sex is the first principle: the action that creates the contract, rather than the expression of an existing bond. If we’re honest enough to admit that we have affection and love for many people in our lives, then we can begin to deconstruct the programmed shame of sexual attraction — that the desire for sexual partnership is not a moral failing of will in our committed relationship, but an emotion as essential to the human experience as joy, anger, sadness, or fear. Outside of religion, you don’t get a prize for being the most sexually-repressed person in the room. (Tell that to Gandhi.)
It’s a red flag when spiritual teachers talk about being more liberal with sex, because usually it just means that some “guru” wants to nail his students. So to be clear: that’s not what I mean.
The heart of mindfulness is honesty, and that means dissecting all the layers of programming and conditioning that we carry around with us. What is the reality? What is the story? What is the feeling? Which of these are true?
Every religion (and I include in that category yoga, mysticism, and New Age-Transcendent sects and cults) creates their own tortured new narratives around sex. Send the sexual energy here; it’s for this and and not that; it’s good or bad, but only in certain contexts and ways... It’s the same old tune. The desire for liberation from the trappings of these human bodies is understandable, but useless, and in many cases, actually harmful. When we have the practice to let go of false narratives, we may be surprised by what we find. We may shed our old ways of pursuit or abstinence or judgment or manipulation. We may be free of the constant chatter of current social norms. We may actually feel some of the things we don’t allow ourselves to feel. But who cares? Seeing with fresh eyes is its own reward.
