Schizophrenic Sex (Harvard, Yale and Princeton Orient Students About Sex).

Our culture touts free sex, but in reality life just does not seem to work this way. Sex is not free. The cost of attachment or resentment or insecurity often arises the morning after.

In the past few years, particular attention has been given to sex at Harvard and Yale. In 2004, sophomores Camilla Hrdy and Katharina Cieplak-von Baldegg decided to start a magazine entitled H-Bomb, which the Harvard Crimson described as a “porn” magazine. The premiere issue included erotic fiction, nude photos and poetry about sex. In 2004, Eric Rubenstein, a Yale senior aiming for a Hollywood film career, organized the university’s first Sex Week. On one hand, these efforts are helping to address a topic of almost ubiquitous interest, but what view of sex is being communicated?

Sex is an alluring topic, yet the whole picture of what sex entails is seldom communicated in our popular culture. During orientation Princeton University presents a mandatory session for freshmen called “Sex on a Saturday Night” that tries to address the reality of sex in college, warning of such dangers like date rape. Yet one program can only hope to offer a cursory treatment of this topic and leaves some important questions and perspectives about sex unanswered. This past year, the newly formed Anscombe Society, the self-proclaimed pro-life, pro-sex, pro-woman group, tried to address this deficiency by requesting that the University include a chastity option during orientation. The Anscombe Society addressed the need to have dialogue encompassing all view points presented at the university regarding sex, a proposition that I could not agree with more.

Too often, discussions on sex—whether at Harvard, Yale or Princeton or in mainstream media—are driven by prevailing cultural attitudes that assert that sex is free—free from emotional, relational, and societal attachment or responsibility. Liberated by the sexual revolution, revolutionized by the psychology of Sigmund Freud, sex has become primarily about pleasure. This notion of guilt-free, “Sex in the City”-fashioned sex is alluring, uncomplicated, provocative, but in reality, unworkable and deeply damaging. The story that often goes unheard on campus is that sex is not as simple as the popular culture would have you believe. Rather, it can create deep emotional scars that are anything but liberating. We are in desperate need of a holistic sex education on campus, one that will speak the hard but tested truth that sex is much more than just an act of pleasure, but the fruit of committed, covenanted love.

Why is it that people who engage in sex for the first time do not see it as simply recreational pleasure, like soccer or swimming? Such people are often surprised by the feelings of dependency and attachment that they feel afterwards. If sex is indeed free, then why is it that many people struggle with feelings of deep resentment? Some consciously or subconsciously act as if it never happened and feel a psychological need to block it out of memory. Many of these responses are self-defense mechanisms as Jennifer Roback Morse, a contributor to Yale’s Sex Week Magazine, writes in The American Enterprise, “We might feel like a chump because the whole experience mattered more to us than to the other person. If we allow sex to mean a lot, we leave ourselves more open to being hurt. A person might resist letting sex mean very much—by holding back, protecting herself from the potential bad feelings that flow from vulnerability. But in the process, we’ve ‘protected’ ourselves from many potential good feelings as well.” 1

Let’s face it. We are schizophrenic when it comes to sex. Our culture touts free sex, but in reality life just does not seem to work this way. Sex is not free. There is a cost and a sanctity to sex. The almost inexplicable attachment or resentment or insecurity that arises from sex leaves the individual enslaved. Let me attempt to exemplify our culture’s schizophrenia. Imagine a college student, Bob, who goes out to the street and after a few drinks begins to “hook up” with Jill. Things begin to steam up, but Jill says, “I think we should cool it down.” Bob says, “Why? We’re having a good time, right? It’s not like sex is making love to someone. We’re just two people having a good time with each other.” The next day, Bob gets a call from his dad who says, “Your mother and I have decided that we want to be liberated from tradition and have decided to sleep with other people.” It is difficult to believe that Bob would respond affirmatively, even encouragingly, saying, “I’m really happy you feel that way because that’s how I feel too.” No. The response would be of outrage and of disgust, a sense of violation and betrayal. Why this moral outrage when they are merely living out what Bob was preaching the night before? You see, our culture wants sex to be free, but intuitively, we know that sex is a consecrated form of love, commitment, and responsibility between two people. Is our culture right? Is sex free? Sex is either free or it’s part of a larger reality of committed love. Which one is it?

Some appeal to evolutionary biochemistry to explain the feelings of attachment that arise in connection with sex. Jennifer Morse explains how during sex, women secrete a hormone oxytocin which is the same hormone secreted during the nursing of babies. Some call oxytocin the attachment hormone, because “this hormone causes us to both relax and connect with the person we are with. In the aftermath of sex, we relax and commit to our sex partners. While we are nursing, we relax and connect with our babies.”2 The argument could be made that the feelings of attachment are the product of millions of years of evolution and should be dismissed as survival-increasing chemicals with no deeper significance than the propagation of our selfish genes. Yet, this explanation is a bit unsatisfying because it diminishes sex in the larger scope of human experience and needs. It reduces things like intimacy and romance to nothing more than chemically-induced illusions in which ultimate meaning is not found in higher concepts of love and affection, but rather in our primal instincts of survival. Is this the worldview we must accept to explain the felt attachments that sex seems to bring? The Christian tradition communicates something profoundly to the contrary. There is an inseparable union between body and soul, in which our hormones are not just meaningless chemical processes but act in concert with the larger reality in which we live. Pope Benedict XVI’s in his first encyclical, “Deus Caritas Est” (God is Love) clarifies this orthodox Christian perspective:

Christian faith, on the other hand, has always considered man a unity in duality, a reality in which spirit and matter compenetrate, and in which each is brought to a new nobility. True, eros tends to rise ‘in ecstasy’ towards the Divine, to lead us beyond ourselves; yet for this very reason it calls for a path of ascent, renunciation, purification and healing.

Pope Benedict’s words speak against the cultural view that sex is merely physical pleasure. He paints the picture of a reality that extends beyond a reductionistic view of the body and unites the body to the soul and ultimately to God. In this view, sex points to the reality of God. The Christian view of sex is inextricably bound to God as our Creator and Redeemer, and this forms the basis of a more robust view of sex that accounts for both the experience of attachment and the innate sense that sex is more than simply pleasure free from moral responsibility.

God as Creator, defines the significance of sex and in Genesis 2 describes marriage as two becoming “one flesh”, the picture of sexual union. Sex is by definition the consummation of covenanted love and it is in this context that sex is fully realized and enjoyed. Sex unencumbered by attachments is unnatural and emotionally violating. If we look at sex, two people are bringing together the most vulnerable and sensitive parts of their bodies. This is not just happening at the physical level but corresponds to their emotional realities. This vulnerability can be profoundly good and nurturing if expressed in the security of commitment and love, as its exposure leads to a deep sense of intimacy and trust. This level of vulnerability outside the context of commitment is poisonous, feeding novel and latent paranoia, fear and insecurity. Sex makes us profoundly vulnerable physically and emotionally. In the context of marriage, this vulnerability nurtures two people to experience deep intimacy while sex outside of marriage leads only to a nebulous sense of dis-ease.

God is not only our Creator who defines sex but is also our Redeemer restoring the healing aspects of sex. We all know that most marriages are far from life-long romances or self-giving love. The reality is that we are fallen, selfish, self-centered people who love others more for what they do for us than from a sincere love arising out of a desire to serve the other. Yet, if we understand God as Redeemer we can see how sex can be an act of reconciliatory power and love. To understand this, we need to understand the Christian gospel. The God-Man Christ was crucified on a cross so that the sins that separated humanity from God have now been redeemed, paid for. This work of reconciliation becomes the source of a profound healing through the grace that is given to those who trust in Him. Our eyes are opened to see His redemptive love and forgiving power communicated tangibly through the union between husband and wife, and this for the apostle Paul is admittedly a “profound mystery” (Ephesians 5:31-33). Sex for the Christian becomes a deeply redeeming act renewing the heart, empowering a Christ-like, sacrificial, other-centered love—a love that finds its delight in the joy of the other. Sex then becomes a reminder of the reality of this redeeming power that is at work enabling husbands and wives to keep those words of matrimonial inauguration: “to have and to hold, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death.” Perhaps this is why the apostle Paul writes not to withhold sex from one’s spouse (1 Cor. 7:3) for to do so would hinder a powerful affirmation of God’s redeeming power and renewing love.

1 “Good Sex: Why we need more of it And a lot less of the bad stuff”, The American Enterprise (April 2006), 18-29.

The Rev. David H. Kim is the director of Manna Christian Fellowship. He received his M.Div. from Westminster Theological Seminary and is currently pursuing his Th.M. in Christian Ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary.

This article from a Princeton Graduate informs us about the latest mandatory orientation freshmen must attend at the start of the school year :

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Sexed-Up Sex-Ed

By CHRISTIAN C. SAHNER

September 5, 2007; WSJ Page A16

College freshman are now on campus or soon will be. If my experience arriving at Princeton University four years ago is any guide, the days ahead could be more than a little awkward for them. One event in particular sours many freshman orientations: sexed-up sex-ed.

At Princeton, the freshman class must attend "Sex on a Saturday Night" (SoSN) during its first week. It's a university-organized, student-performed play designed to warn about sexual assault and alcohol abuse. Many schools have similar programs. Its noble intentions are overshadowed, however, by a deleterious message: College is time to get busy (and not just in the library)!

SoSN revolves around Joe, a bookish upperclassmen, who is egged on by his peers to "score big" on his first date with Frances, a naïve freshman. Armed with condoms and the keys to an isolated lovepad on campus, he sets out. The play then turns to their sex-crazed friends, who spend their Saturday plotting about hooking up. Meanwhile, Joe and Frances get very drunk. She passes out and he, on the brink of a blackout, has sex with her on a coatroom floor. The next morning, in a poignant scene, Joe realizes he committed date rape.

If SoSN were only about preventing sexual assault, it would be a positive contribution to freshman year. But that's not its underlying lesson. The play spends much of its time glorifying the hook-up culture, and through crude jokes and jejune stereotypes, drowning out the message about rape. Every one of the play's 10 characters (including one gay couple) is sexually active, save for the token abstainer, who comes off as hokey (and owns a copy of Playboy).

Princeton does "not take a position on the sex lives of students," according to spokesman Eric Quinones, but the "anything goes" attitude of SoSN is a far cry from neutrality. For many Princetonians and their parents, the underlying message -- that it's perfectly healthy to be sexually active -- is hardly neutral. By presenting consent as the principle moral consideration before having sex, the play makes the important question of whether you should have sex in the first place seem irrelevant.

Princeton's administrators are intelligent people of good will, but what they sometimes miss is the big-picture perspective on how programs like SoSN can be harmful for students. Indeed, the play gives freshmen the false sense that virtually all of their peers are sexually active, with the resulting message that, "Maybe you should be too." But according to the 2002 National Survey for Family Growth, about 35% of 18-19 year olds have not had sex -- a figure that increases among those who come from intact families or have mothers with at least some higher education (true for most Princetonians). A 2007 senior thesis survey of 1,210 Princeton students looked at the issue more broadly, and found that around half of all freshmen have never hooked up (a hookup is here defined as any physical intimacy outside a committed relationship).

More worrying, the play doesn't seem to acknowledge that hooking up can be a risky contact sport, and rape isn't the only kind of collateral damage. SoSN is silent on the unplanned pregnancies and high rates of STDs on college campuses. And as University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox notes, "A growing body of research suggests that sex -- particularly sex with more than one partner -- puts young women but not necessarily men at risk of depression, suicide, and a loss of respect in the eyes of their partners." The Princeton survey bears this out: The vast majority of students report feelings of exploitation, discomfort, regret and guilt after a hookup, with rates higher among women.

SoSN also discards the golden rule of cultural sensitivity. Imagine how a student with traditional views of sex feels when he seems to be the only one not laughing at jokes about "screaming orgasms" or flavored condoms. You don't have to be religious or conservative to realize that these students probably feel forgotten and a little alienated at SoSN.

As an undergraduate, I and other concerned students discussed these objections several times with the administration. In a welcome effort to accommodate us, they offered to change one supporting character to seem realistically more abstinent. The big problems, though, were untouched. One university official worried that further changes would add too many messages to the play. Ironically, she either failed or refused to see that SoSN carries a lot of one-sided messages that already overpower the supposedly central lesson on rape.

If only SoSN were an isolated instance of poor judgment about sex-ed. Games of "Sex Jeopardy" for residential groups and scathing university-sponsored lectures like "The Religious Right's Obsession with Gay Sex" demonstrate a pattern of programs that either quietly encourage sex or unfairly denigrate traditional values.

I wouldn't trade my time at Princeton for anything, but it could have gotten off to a smoother start. Princeton can begin to improve things by changing SoSN, or at least make it not mandatory. It would be best to make freshmen attend an entirely new program that stayed focused on the evils of rape. But if the university wants to keep the play, it would do better to give a truly balanced portrait of sex, its ethics and risks.

Mr. Sahner, a 2007 graduate of Princeton University, was a Robert L. Bartley Fellow at the Journal this summer.

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