Body, Sex, and Pleasure: Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics. - book reviews

Christian Century, March 15, 1995 by Jean Porter

Reviewed by Jean Porter, associate professor of moral theology at the University of Notre Dame.

OUR SOCIETY is in a crisis over sexuality in part because the churches have been paralyzed by fear of stepping away from the confines of the Christian sexual tradition," Christine Gudorf claims. We have failed to develop an ethic which better accords both with "our scientific and experiential insights into sexuality," and "the central revelations of the gospel." As a result, "the broader society [is left] without effective moral guidance on sexuality at a time when more and more public policy issues involve sexuality." As the subtitle indicates, Gudorf hopes to offer a reconstruction of Christian sexual ethics. Drawing on social scientific data as well as theological reflection, she argues that traditional Christian ethics has been too act-centered and too bound up with procreationism, the view that sex is naturally oriented towards creation of human life." Thus, the traditional ethic does not help us to address the growing problem of global overpopulation; furthermore, it contributes to a climate of sexual repressiveness and misinformation.

Gudorf's constructive alternative falls, roughly, into two parts. In the first part, she proposes a new vision of "sexual pleasure as grace and gift," to quote the title of her fourth chapter. That is, she argues that "sexual pleasure is not morally neutral--it is too powerful to be neutral," even though in itself it is a "premoral good." Indeed, she goes on to say, sexual pleasure "should be the primary criterion for evaluating sexual activity." Or to be more precise, mutual sexual pleasure is the main such criterion, because "sexual pleasure can be evil when it is exclusive--when it is derived either through the inflicting/accepting of pain, or through excluding a partner from pleasure either deliberately or accidentally" (emphasis added).

This is a rather daunting standard. Yet it is more understandable, when we realize that for Gudorf, sexual pleasure "can function as an experience of divine reality." For many persons, both men and women, "the primary experience of divinity itself, as well as of God's intention for the reign of God, is sexual. There is in sex, as in the Eucharist, the potential for participating in divinity." This does not mean, however, that every form of sexual activity is good: "In both sex and Eucharist, inherent power and goodness are at the mercy of human intentions and decisions, which can either minimize or distort them."

The second part of her sexual ethic is a defense of what she calls "bodyright," that is, the right to control one's body, including the right to avoid unwanted touch and to wear and eat what one chooses, as well as the right to birth control and abortion. Although this right is recognized to some degree in our society, Gudorf argues that our still-dominant patriarchy keeps it from being widely acknowledged. Women, children and those who are drafted into the military are especially vulnerable to violations of bodily integrity.

Gudorf argues that bodyright should be almost inviolable for adults, although she does allow (somewhat surprisingly) for mandatory drug and alcohol testing in some circumstances. She acknowledges that children cannot be allowed the same degree of control over their bodies, but asserts that each child should be allowed as much bodily autonomy as she can safely handle, and should be progressively trained to assume more.

Sheila Rothman, Peter Gardella and other historians have argued that by the early decades of this century, sexual ethics had already begun to shift from a focus on procreation toward what Gardella calls the ethic of sexual pleasure. If this is so, then Gudorf's alternative sexual ethic is not the radical break with a dominant ethos that she suggests. Yet a proposal does not have to be countercultural to be valuable, and in the current political climate a humane defense of the goodness of simple pleasure is certainly welcome.

At the same time, Gudorf would have made a stronger case if she had attended more carefully to the details of her argument. For example, she offers a considerable amount of statistical data, but without some discussion of the way in which these figures were compiled it is difficult to know how to assess them. Nor is the evidence always consistent; at one point, we are told that between one-third and one-half of women in our society are victims of attempted or completed rape, but later that figure becomes one woman in four. Gudorf's theoretical arguments also seems contradictory at some points. For example, it is odd to find in chapter four advocacy of a version of utilitarianism and then, in chapter six, a forceful defense of a doctrine of human rights, which has generally not been considered compatible with utilitarianism.

More fundamentally, the claim that mutual sexual pleasure is the chief criterion for sexual ethics is not developed fully enough. If I have understood her correctly, Gudorf grounds this claim on her view that sexual experience contains within itself "the potential for participating in divinity." No doubt this is sometimes true. Yet sexual experience, like all human experiences, can mean a great many things, depending on the context within which we act, our intentions in acting, and our interpretations, to ourselves and to others, of what we are doing. I do not believe that Gudorf would deny any of this. Yet if this is so, then it seems neither plausible nor adequate to say that mutual sexual pleasure is the only or even the chief criterion for evaluating what we do with our sexual capacities.