Dawn Eden, author of The Thrill of the Chaste, has a review of sorts of one of her ancient enemy’s books, and it makes for very interesting reading. Jessica Valenti, in The Purity Myth, argues that “making a cult of virginity via media stereotyping and ‘abstinence-only’ sex education damages young women [. . .] and rolls back women’s rights by emphasizing sexuality and deprecating personal character.” She also purportedly maintains that chastity-promoting social conservatives are secretly perfectly happy that there’s lots of pornography out there – the worse the better – as it serves to conveniently bolster their apparently otherwise insupportable positions. I haven’t read her chapter on this subject – and, would you believe it, I probably never will – so I’m not going to deal with it here just at the moment. One thing I do wish to address, however, is a sentence of Valenti’s in which the “indelible ethical impact” of sexual activity is airly dismissed. Says she:
“I fail to see how anything that lasts less than five minutes can have such an indelible ethical impact.”
What dross.
Though she’s clearly just being “smart” or saucy or what have you, it might reasonably be asked: at what threshold, then, does the ethical impact begin to be apparent? Six minutes? Ten? An hour? If it only took me four minutes to steal Valenti’s wallet (for example) would it be alright? Three minutes to rape someone? Two minutes to kill? It only takes a moment to tell a lie – that can’t possibly count for anything.
Her answer would likely be that all of these things take much longer than however much time is consumed by the act itself. She’d be right; the “ethical impact” is found not simply in the act but also in the plans to engage in it and the modes of thought that could see those plans entertained and acted upon in the first place. This is as true of sexual intercourse as it is for anything, though, and her attempts to divorce act from both intention and intellection are pretty nakedly self-serving.
She wishes to remove the body from the equation of sexual ethics, if such ethics even exist for her, but this simply can’t be done. The body is necessary for sexual intercourse to take place, after all – it’s the venue wherein the abstractions she seems to concede may be the subject of ethical inquiry are played out in the physical world. They have consequences there (ideas do too, of course, as Richard Weaver famously insisted, but Valenti’s whole thesis is based on something very much like that contention and I don’t think she would disagree with it), and we can’t pretend they don’t exist. Dawn Eden rightly notes that all of this play and experimentation that Valenti and her colleagues promote demand that other parties be involved – whether they like it or not, and at their own possibly unwitting risk – and this necessity is all too often ignored or downplayed by the advocates of license, whether in relationships or aesthetics.
It’s also the case that we couldn’t remove the body from the equation even if no intercourse were to be had. The human being is naturally a combination of both body and spirit, after all, and we cannot engage one of these aspects (as in the mental consideration of ethics – a spirit-based exercise) without affecting the other. To think rightly is good for the body just as to kneel (for example) is good for the soul in prayer. Even if we take a less spiritual view of the thing, few would deny that you can benefit your mind by doing things to your body – meditative silence, sitting comfortably, the mere closing of the eyes. Indeed, for a materialist – as I assume Valenti is (if she’s something else, please let me know) – the link between mind and body becomes all the more inescapable.
Anyway, it is both difficult and inadvisable to develop a broad critique of an author’s ideas from a single contextless sentence, so I am not here claiming to pass any authoritative judgment upon her book and its various theses, with which I am frankly (and happily) unfamiliar. The sentence in question, however, was a veritable masterpiece of nonsense and could not easily be ignored.
