Saving Our Sexuality: Is #MeToo Enough? by A. Arndt
(Link): Saving Our Sexuality: Is #MeToo Enough? by A. Arndt
Excerpts:
…Is #MeToo Enough?
“Carelessness” and “brutality” are two words that certainly typify the sexual “moment” we are in as a culture. How we expect to live in a 50 Shades sexual fantasy world while also managing to avoid it’s unintentional (but by no means unforeseen) ugly consequences totally escapes me.
…I rejoice that with the #MeToo movement we are seeing at least the beginnings of a reckoning—of society’s attempt to say, with a unified voice, “This we will not tolerate.”
But is #MeToo enough? It seems obvious to me that it is not.
As long as the roots of the problem are left unaddressed, the same ugly fruit will continue to spring up from polluted earth—now in one way, now in another. We will keep recycling brutality and abuse.
…The Gnosticizing of Our Sexuality
Lack of mutual consent is indeed a problem. But the problem, in fact, goes even deeper than quibbles about what qualifies as “consensual” and what does not.
There is a “gnosticizing” impulse at work in our culture’s understanding of sexuality. This impulse to theoretically divorce personhood from sex corrodes the unbreakable link between between soul and body, and thereby—even while it touts the supposed “liberation” of our bodies—in point of fact degrades them by implying that the sexual encounter “says” nothing that is abidingly true about us.
This gnosticizing impulse underwrites our society’s many brutalities and makes possible this lie: what we do with our bodies—or other people’s bodies—does not really matter (as long as, once again, what we do is “consensual”—whatever it is that means).
That is not to say, of course, that mutual consent does not matter.Surely it does.
But it is not nearly enough to save our sexuality from calamity.
Scripture is instructive for us through the words of St. Paul here. Against gnosticizing tendencies present in his own congregations, St. Paul declared that the human body is a “temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor 6:19).
That is to say: there is an irreducible sanctity—a holiness—to the human body, and that therefore what we do with those bodies, especially when it comes to our sexuality, matters and matters deeply.
Read the rest of that editorial (Link): here
Related Posts:
(Link): We’re Casual About Sex and Serious About Consent. But Is It Working? by J. Zimmerman
(Link): Why are young feminists so clueless about sex? by M. Wente
(Link): Some Researchers Argue that Shame Should Be Used to Treat Sexual Compulsions
Christian Pundit 