Ross Douthat, the most conservative columnist in the modern history of the New York Times, offered an exasperating op-ed over the weekend: Why Monogamy Matters.
Douthat is clever enough to know his relatively liberal audience may be suspicious of his agenda, so he’s careful to cloak his argument in seemingly reasonable and reassuring tones. He tells his readers he doesn’t really believe in teaching teens to wait until heterosexual marriage; rather, he’s in favor of teaching them to wait for someone. And, like so many contemporary conservatives, he dresses up his argument in favor of abstinence with feminist language, suggesting that the religious right may care more about the well-being of young women’s hearts than the secular left:
Female emotional well-being seems to be tightly bound to sexual stability — which may help explain why overall female happiness has actually drifted downward since the sexual revolution.
Among the young people Regnerus and Uecker studied, the happiest women were those with a current sexual partner and only one or two partners in their lifetime. Virgins were almost as happy, though not quite, and then a young woman’s likelihood of depression rose steadily as her number of partners climbed and the present stability of her sex life diminished.
One assumes that Douthat missed critical thinking courses. As many others have pointed out, Douthat makes the basic mistake of confusing causation with correlation. If we’re going to use Ockham’s razor, the simplest explanation for why young women with high numbers of sexual partners report depression is because we live in a society in which the sexual double standard is alive and well. As with the old studies that found gay teens at greater risk of unhappiness and suicidal ideation than their straight peers, the misery is not rooted in the sexual activity itself but in the way that behavior is mercilessly judged by our still-puritanical culture.
This failure in logic isn’t the only problem in Douthat’s piece. His assumption that the overwhelming majority of human beings will find their deepest joy in an enduring romantic and sexual connection with one other person erases and ignores the lived experience of an astonishing number of people. As someone who is inclined towards both monogamy and marriage, I have the good sense not to universalize from my personal predilections. I’ve met too many people whose lived experience makes clear that profound joy can be found outside of the traditional model for sexual relationships.
What troubles me most about Douthat’s piece, however, is not his faulty reasoning or his disingenuous appeal to our concern for the emotional and physical wellbeing of our children. What is most annoying is his continued defense of abstinence-only education, despite the established fraudulence of its ideological and psychological underpinnings. The jury is still out on whether abstinence-only education encourages teens to wait longer to have intercourse (the verdict is already in on whether it leads to a delay in other kinds of sex, and the answer is clear that it doesn’t have much impact.) But even if we concede that “waiting” is invariably a good idea (and I’m not at all sure that’s true), shaming young people into waiting is indefensible.
Make no mistake, abstinence-only education is shame-based. When we teach young people that kids with healthy self-esteem won’t have sex, we send the unmistakable message that teens who do choose to be sexual with themselves or others lack self-respect. When we teach, as many abstinence programs do, that a future spouse will be put off by too much pre-marital sexual experience, we’re telling kids that pleasure is dirty, leaving a stain that doesn’t wash off. That’s an absolute guarantor of shame.
I’ve been a sex educator more than half my life, since I joined the pioneering Peer Sexuality Outreach as a counselor my sophomore year at Cal. Since 1986, I’ve spoken to teens and adults in school, church, and community settings about virtually every imaginable aspect of sexuality. How I teach and what I teach and how I think about what I’m teaching has evolved a lot in the past quarter century. But there are certain principles I’m committed to, principles that I think must undergird any responsible sex education curriculum.
1. Pleasure is a purpose. While one kind of sex can be reproductive, most kinds of sex aren’t. Human beings don’t exist merely to procreate; we exist to delight in our bodies and to share that delight (if we choose) with others. The clitoris doesn’t exist to pass urine or feed a fetus; it exists solely for delight. We need to remember to teach that at its core, sex is about more than making babies and more even than about connecting with another human being. Sex, at its most basic, is about our right to pleasure. And pleasure is perhaps the most basic driving motivator in our existence.
2. Shame is the enemy. Shame and guilt are not the same; guilt is what we feel when do something wrong (like deliberately hurting another person.) Shame is what we feel when we believe we are bad because of what we’ve done, even if we haven’t caused anyone pain or harm. Shame is what we feel when we believe we want too much, feel too much, need too much. Guilt is healthy; it keeps us from hurting each other. Shame is toxic — it acts as a barrier to pleasure and intimacy with ourselves and others.
3. There is no one-size fits all approach. For example, some teens are emotionally and physically ready for sexual intercourse. Some aren’t. Some people will be happiest limiting sexual expression with other people to committed, monogamous relationships. Others will find their greatest joy outside of the confines of traditional fidelity. We must surrender the tempting but unsound idea that each and every human being has the same basic longings. My Christian friends should know this: the apostle Paul mused that it would probably be best if everyone were celibate, but he had the good sense to know that what worked for him would not work for everyone else. Would that those who follow whom he followed had his same reverence for diversity!
Responsible sex education informs, encourages, comforts and inspires. It honors the individual needs and wants of each person, and teaches the importance of honoring the boundaries of others. As Douthat’s social conservative allies in Congress seek to defund Planned Parenthood and other providers of women’s health care and sexual education, we need to redouble our commitment to standing for pleasure, for safety, and against the twin evils of shame and ignorance.
“And, like so many contemporary conservatives, he dresses up his argument in favor of abstinence with feminist language, suggesting that the religious right may care more about the well-being of young women’s hearts than the secular left”
Just as Dinesh D’Souza publicized a fellow Dartmouth student’s sex life without her permission and said it was “for her well-being,” as I’m sure he also felt about outing several Dartmouth gay students.
Maggie Gallagher also played the correlation=causation card recently to imply that anal sex is bad for women and makes them depressed. What does she want…to impose a ban on it via force of law and severe penalties, as many states did as recently as 2003, and often continue to arrest for but not bring to trial? (Virginia AG Ken Cuccinelli said that prosecuting any sort of sodomy even helps “integrate its perpetrators into society,” to go with a recurring theme we’ve been on here.)
“Ross Douthat, the most conservative columnist in the modern history of the New York Times…”
Ack! Disparity of opinion! Quick! Hand me something by Paul Krugman or Frank Rich!
“And, like so many contemporary conservatives, he dresses up his argument in favor of abstinence with feminist language, suggesting that the religious right may care more about the well-being of young women’s hearts than the secular left…”
As I’ve written here before, I’m in favor of the girls and boys receiving the exact same message. But I thought you used to think it didn’t matter what a couple does or does not do during high school, or before marriage, or during it, Hugo. Now with the Kate Middleton/Prince William post and this one, I see you’re now tipping the scales to the favor of one side.
“The jury is still out on whether abstinence-only education encourages teens to wait longer to have intercourse (the verdict is already in on whether it leads to a delay in other kinds of sex, and the answer is clear that it doesn’t have much impact.)”
Well, we don’t know if it’s because of abstinence-only or abstinence-focused education, but we do see a decrease in the percentages of young people becoming S/A:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/03/03/134235838/more-young-people-scorning-sex-study-finds
“The 2002 survey was the first to report that the majority of teenagers said they had had oral sex, which raised concerns that teens were putting themselves at risk for sexually-transmitted infections, including HIV…The numbers are pretty much the same in this new survey, but the researchers refined their questions, and it looks like oral sex isn’t that popular a substitute for intercourse among teenagers after all.”
I dunno – considering the number of unsafe and troubled people out there, is it such a stretch to argue that being intimate with a lot of strangers is more likely to leave a legacy of emotional damage than saving sex for someone whom you know and trust, and who feels a certain level of commitment to your well-being?
Where Douthat veers off the rails, IMHO, is that his examples are all about *women* suffering from the sexual revolution – reopening the door to patriarchal protectionism.
I’ve got to take issue with your comment that “sex is about more than making babies and more even than about connecting with another human being. Sex, at its most basic, is about our right to pleasure.” Masturbation may be about our right to pleasure, but sex is a specific type of pleasure that (by definition) always includes a connection with another human being, whether both parties want to recognize that or not. If a person doesn’t want the connection, she should get her pleasure by herself.
I’m not arguing that pleasure should be sought with complete disregard for another person. And of course, if you’re touching another person, there’s connection of a sort. What I’m arguing against is the notion that we can only be sexual with people with whom we are in committed and enduring relationships, in which pleasure is invariably subordinated to a host of other “higher” goods like conversational intimacy and so forth. There needs to be trust and there needs to be mutual enthusiastic consent, and that requires connection — but it doesn’t require a vow of fidelity. Pleasure is our right, but it doesn’t mean we can impose ourselves on others. I ought to have made that clearer.
Thanks for clarifying. I still think that expecting trust without commitment is risky business, and it isn’t anti-pleasure or anti-women to say “You have the right to try it for yourself, but experience suggests that the odds of a good outcome aren’t great here”. A partner who has a low investment in your long-term well-being *could* still be trustworthy, but it’s a bigger gamble because (1) you don’t know each other that well and (2) the temptation to be inconsiderate is greater when you can easily walk away from the other person.
I also assume, from your past writings, that when you say “it doesn’t require a vow of fidelity”, you’re referring to honest polyamory rather than cheating…
Sometimes I feel that progressives go too far in taking sex out of the ethical realm as overcompensation for the shame-based ethics of the past. Sex isn’t any more or less innocent than other interpersonal activities. We can’t help bringing our best and worst selves to it.
“Ack! Disparity of opinion! Quick! Hand me something by Paul Krugman or Frank Rich!”
Nowhere did Hugo, or any other commenters on here, suggest that the increased ideological diversity of the NYT as a result of Douthat’s presence was inherently a bad thing.
Meanwhile, people like Neal Boortz detest ideological diversity in the opposite direction, to the point that they call for conservative employers to fire Obama supporters if they are forced to downsize; what do you say to that? While it’s not advisable to have an Obama bumper sticker on your car if you work in the defense/oil/etc. industries, Boortz’s attitude will lead to employers trying to pry the views out of left-of-center voters no matter how much they keep their views to themselves. Eventually, you may get figured out if you’re the quiet one in all the political conversations at lunch, since the only thing the right dislikes more than liberals is liberals who aren’t open about it, or moderates, who they see as liberals hiding their views, whether they are or not. It’s similar to how social conservatives insist that everything will be hunky-dory for gays if they “stay inside the closet,” whereas they may also be “figured out” eventually.
If anyone is truly interested, I will try to find the studies that I got these statements from. I came across them doing a research paper several years ago.
According to those studies, in states where abstinence only education is taught, the rates of teenage pregnancy, STD’s, abortion, and divorce are higher than in states where they teach comprehensive sex-ed.
Another study looked at teens who signed a pledge to wait until marriege for sex and teens who did not. There was not a difference in the average age than one lost their virginity between the two groups. It makes complete sense to me, but I also understand being skeptical. I will try to find these studies if anyone cares enough
A more likely theory to me would be that sexually adventurous women are stigmatized, like Hugo said. And it may also mean that women with pre-existing mental health issues are more likely to sleep with numerous men. I do not believe there is any concrete connection between being unhappy and having many partners.
(PS: New reader here! I am catching up on all your old stuff now. I love it, great work.)