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MORALITY

Sex American Style, Part 1

By John Grabowski
An intriguing history of the origin of contemporary American sexual mores


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If we think of it at all, we tend to blame “the Sixties,” perhaps in combination with the Fall of Man, for the current messy state of American sexual mores. In fact, as Dr. Grabowski shows, sexuality in America has had a divergent history, ebbing and flowing between its Puritan roots and the sexual “freedom” that prevails today. Grabowski follows Peter Gardella’s book, Innocent Ecstasy: How Christianity Gave America an Ethic of Sexual Pleasure, to arrive at an analysis of, and insight into, the contemporary situation.

One of the most striking features of contemporary American culture is the seeming omnipresence of sex. In entertainment, advertising, the marketplace, and public life there is a constant stream of sexual imagery ranging from covert allusions to youthful beauty and sex appeal to in-your-face depictions of sexual acts. While it used to be the case that one would have to travel to a seedy area of town to access pornographic materials, they are now easily accessible within the comfort and privacy of millions of homes thanks to the multitude of sites devoted to the raw commercialization of sex and the human body dotting the World Wide Web. Ours, it seems, is a society so saturated by sex that it could make Freud think he had underestimated the pervasiveness of eros.

Of course, this is not a phenomenon confined to American shores. Other countries have felt the flames of the sexual revolution in the 1960s and ’70s and seen them fanned by the explosion of communication and information technology. But the success of the American economy and the export of its consumer culture to many parts of the globe have carried with it aspects of a distinctively American outlook on matters sexual.

The sources of this outlook are diverse and embedded within the folds of American history. In his 1985 book Innocent Ecstasy: How Christianity Gave America an Ethic of Sexual Pleasure, church historian, Peter Gardella examines some of these sources and their end result.

According to Gardella, America’s Puritan founders brought with them the Reformers’ view that marriage and the sexual relationship of husband and wife were natural rather than sacramental realities—and, therefore, outside the scope of what should be addressed by the church. The resulting vacuum of information was increasingly filled by the medical profession. Catholic immigrants and clergy, on the other hand, carried with them the practice of very explicit discussions of sexual matters in the confessional and in textbooks for seminary education. The immediate impact of this was to fuel anti-Catholic sentiment and activism and to establish a lasting association between Catholicism and sensuality in American consciousness. In the long term, however, these imported practices would serve to engender more frank, public discussion of sex in the American context.

The Victorian period produced a decided cooling of attitudes toward sex among both Protestants and Catholics. Closely associated with original sin, sex was seen as a disordered passion to be moderated and, where possible, eradicated by a regime of exercise, a properly bland diet (enshrined in the development of such food products as Graham Crackers and Kellogg’s Corn Flakes), abstinence, and even surgery. Such a resolutely austere program was thought to be able to eradicate not just sexual vice but the whole gamut of personal sin and public crime. The desired outcome was a kind of “medical salvation” endorsed by theologians and scientists alike.

By the turn of the twentieth century, many doctors began to reconsider sexual passion and pleasure and to see them as integral to physical and spiritual well-being. Rejecting the Victorian association of sex with sin, they urged couples to a “total yielding” to their sexual impulses within marriage. This notion resonated deeply in a culture influenced by the revivalist ideal of “total yielding” to Christ forged in the Great Awakenings and carried forward by various evangelical groups. In the warmer currents of the Romantic period, women came to be seen as uniquely capable of the ecstasy which accompanied this self-abandonment—whether female radio evangelists such as Aimée Semple McPherson or Catholic visionaries such as Bernadette at Lourdes.

In the first part of the twentieth century, two final forces coalesced to strip the ideas of salvific sexuality, “total yielding,” and female ecstasy of any religious associations: modern psychology and the birth control movement. The first of these built upon the growing dominion over sexual matters exercised by the medical profession to claim it as the subject of scientific rather than religious concern. And while not proposing resistance to it as did the Victorians, Freud and others asserted just as strongly the universality of the sex drive as the source of human behavior. The second of these, as embodied in the person of Margaret Sanger, harnessed anti-Catholic sentiment and popular religious ideas (e.g., salvation through sex, female ecstasy) in her campaign to change attitudes toward contraception. The success of this campaign can be measured by the rapid change in criminal laws, the teaching of many churches, and even common parlance. (Sanger successfully replaced the negative term “contraception” with the positive “birth control.”)

The end result of this history was an understanding of the sex drive as universal, and sexual activity as an ecstatic release necessary for personal happiness. Through this release, one achieved a kind of salvation or wholeness, but without any reference to either sin or God.

The next part of this column will explore the impact of this history on contemporary ideas and attitudes regarding sex.

Copyright © 2000 John S. Grabowski




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