It's in the Code Ep 125: “The Purpose of Sex (Part 1)?”
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“The purpose of sex is procreation.” This assertion has been a dominant Christian position for centuries, and plays a central role in the ideologies of sex, sexuality, and gender within contemporary high-control American religion. But is it actually plausible? In this episode, Dan argues that if we think about how we actually talk about and experience sex and sexuality, and if we consider the natural sexual and gender diversity of the human population, it simply doesn’t make sense to define the procreation as the “purpose” of sex. Listen to this week’s episode to hear more!
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As always, I want to begin by saying welcome to It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Pleased to be with you.
Pleased to be coming back after a Thanksgiving holiday, after our events in Los Angeles and San Diego, excuse me.
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Such a great set of events, great listeners.
I can't say enough about all of you and how cool it is to get to do these events and to get to meet you and talk with you and go out afterward with some folks and things like that, so...
Thanks for that and for spending some time with us.
As always, this series relies on you.
Keep comments coming, questions, new topic ideas.
I'm continually sort of developing the upcoming episodes and things like that.
Daniel Miller Swaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Drop me a line.
Let me know what you think.
Diving in here, we're continuing a series of discussions about gender and sexuality within high-control, conservative American Christianity.
Again, these are topics that I've heard about from so many folks.
I've talked with so many people about topics that I'm familiar with from my time within American elicalism.
And so I sort of felt like these topics deserve some time, and that's what we're doing.
Today, what I want to do is really sort of the first of two episodes, reconsidering, again, a topic that I've hit before about the so-called purpose of sex.
It's the idea that the purpose of sex, the reason for the existence of sex, is procreation or reproduction, that that is the purpose of sex.
Now, I've talked about this before and I realize that.
And one of the reasons I'm revisiting this and one of the reasons it has stuck with me is that I probably got as much pushback For my take on why I think the idea that the purpose of sex is procreation is misguided.
It's off base.
There's no reason to accept that notion, that understanding of human sexuality.
I got as much pushback on that as I probably have on any episode I've done, even from sympathetic listeners.
A lot of sympathetic listeners have talked about evolution and things like that.
I'm going to get into that again in the next episode.
But a number of people just say, hey, we're just not convinced.
And so that sticks with me, gets me thinking about it more, and I still want to try to further clarify what I think and maybe convince some of you who weren't convinced the first time around, okay?
This also isn't just about my ego.
It's not just about trying to convince people of things like that.
It's because I think that the idea that the purpose of human sexuality is procreation is such a central component Of the ideologies of sex and sexuality and gender within high-control Christianity, that once we see that it simply is not a plausible articulation of human sexuality, I think it undermines a lot.
It undermines a lot, and it helps us to pull those threads and expose sort of what's going on to further decode the way that these ideologies operate within this kind of religious framework.
And just a reminder, a lot of the topics in this series, we've got some frank discussions about sexuality, and it may not be...
Elementary school car line appropriate.
So you might just want to be aware of that if you've got people in the car who maybe you're not ready to start your day with this kind of discussion with them.
So here's just a brief sort of thing here.
The idea that the purpose of sex is procreation, it goes way back in Christianity.
Way back.
And it has sort of two main roots.
And we could go a lot deeper into this.
We're not going to.
But these two roots kind of grow together early on.
The first is what's called natural law.
And that's the idea that it is natural that sex leads to procreation.
Sex undertaken without sort of hindrance or whatever will lead to procreation.
And in thinkers like, say, Aristotle, obviously a pre-Christian thinker, ostensibly observation is what leads to this conclusion.
You observe the world, you see that in nature, animals that have sex, primarily mammals, I suppose what people would be looking at, it leads to offspring.
Ergo, the natural end, the natural goal, the natural purpose of sex is procreation.
Well, then you take natural law theory and you marry it to Christian notions of creation.
In this sense, then, nature works the way that it does, and the laws of nature and things that are quote-unquote natural, they become not just natural but normative.
Why?
They become normative.
That is, they become the way things are supposed to be because nature was created by God.
Natural law becomes God's law.
Therefore, what is natural is divinely ordained, and what violates the laws of nature violates God's intended design.
So you put these pieces together, what you get is the idea that sex, as designed and instituted by God, has as its natural end procreation.
And a departure from that is a violation not just of nature, but of God's laws, because nature's laws are God's laws.
That's how the logic works.
So, the idea then is that non-procreative heterosexual sex becomes a violation of divine law.
Now, this is more of a Catholic doctrine than a Protestant doctrine, but increasingly in my lifetime, I've seen more and more Protestants sort of absorb this understanding, so-called artificial contraception that interrupts The natural end of sex becomes a violation of divine law.
Masturbation is a violation of God's law.
Homosexuality or same-sex sexual encounters are a violation of God's law and so forth.
And in more recent years, this was not something that we would hear a lot about, say, when I was a kid growing up in the church, but in more recent years, non-normative gender expressions also become a violation of God's law.
Why?
Because only the binary of cisgender male and female can produce biological offspring within this quote-unquote natural framework.
So you can see the work that this conception of human sexuality does.
If we accept that human sexuality has as its purpose or goal procreation, that becomes the Christian basis for eliminating or judging or ruling out or ruling as violations of divine law all of these other forms of sexuality and gender expression.
And the idea is simple enough.
It's intuitive enough for many people that the idea still holds for many non-Christians.
The pushback I got when I was challenging this notion that the purpose of sex is procreation came from a lot of folks who are not in high-control religion, who don't support it, people who are not Christians, who are not looking to express a sort of conservative Christian sexual ethic or whatever.
It's an idea that has an intuitive appeal for a lot of people.
I wanna challenge it.
And the first thing I wanna challenge in this episode is the naturalness of nature.
In other words, I want to challenge the idea that if you sort of observe human sexuality, your conclusion is that it is natural, that the natural end of human sexuality is procreation.
And what I wanna do is really offer what I think are just some kind of common sense reasons to question This quote-unquote natural view of sexuality and of sex.
I want to show that we really just don't have any good reasons to think about sex in this way.
Excuse me.
And in the next episode, I want to take up some of those, approach this in a different way.
I want to look at sort of what I think evolutionary theory, how it undermines this notion of the purpose of sex.
I also want to try to show in the next episode how, from a conservative creationist perspective, the perspective that God directly created the first set of humans with their full sexual expression, etc., why it is that the view that The goal of sex is procreation doesn't sort of make sense even within that.
We're going to come to that.
What I want to start with in this episode, then, is these kind of, to me, common sense things to think about.
The first and most basic thing that I want to highlight is that the argument that the purpose of sex is procreation, it's circular.
The reason things like homosexuality or trans identity and gender nonconformity and so forth are denounced as sinful or unnatural—those are synonyms within this framework—is that they are unnatural departures from God's intended plan.
And their unnaturalness stems from the fact that they preclude biological procreation.
Fine, but here's the circularity.
The very existence of queer sexuality and queer gender identity demonstrates that these are a natural part of human diversity.
Now, folks, I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole of trying to put forward arguments that queer identity is like a real thing and that it occurs naturally in humans or the same thing with trans identity or all the historical discussions about, you know, what we would now call trans identity in other cultures and so forth.
I'm just taking it as a basic fact.
If you want to argue about this, I guess you can email or whatever.
A basic fact that part of the diversity of who we are as a species is gender diversity and diversity of sexual orientation and sexual desire, okay?
Accepting that, the existence of that diversity places those within the realm of nature.
Queer sexuality is a natural part of human diversity.
Queer identity, trans identity, gender nonconformity is a natural part of human diversity.
What I should actually say is gender fluidity and a range of gender identities is a natural part of human diversity because there's nothing natural about breaking gender into two dimorphic features to begin with.
Those are all natural parts of human diversity.
Now they may not represent most of the human population, but they represent a sizable, significant portion of it.
And there's evidence, growing evidence, that humans aren't alone in this.
There are lots of biologists studying other parts of the natural world and finding parallels to this.
What does that mean?
It means that there has always been a significant subset of human beings for whom expressions of sex wouldn't naturally be procreative.
They would naturally not be procreative.
In other words, if you have queer folk out in the world and they're free to be queer folk and they're free to be, you know, to desire whom they desire and to couple sexually with people that they want to, the natural end of their sexuality will not be procreative.
So what that means is that the only way to make procreation the quote-unquote natural purpose of sex, the natural end, is to exclude a sizable subset of the human population from the beginning.
You have to factor all of those people out of the equation and the understanding of human sexuality before you'd come up with the natural end of it.
But that exclusion was supposed to be the result of the naturalness of procreative sex.
So what does that mean?
It means that the argument for the naturalness of procreative sex, that the natural end of sex is procreation, that argument only works by presupposing what it's supposed to prove.
It's a textbook example of the fallacy of begging the question, which is using the conclusion of an argument as a premise in the same argument.
It's circular reasoning.
And here's how it works.
You're talking with Uncle Ron, and he says, you know, why do you oppose, like, I don't know, same-sex marriage?
Well, the natural purpose for marriage is to create the space for sexuality.
The purpose of sex is procreation in biological families, and two men can't do that.
Okay, cool, but...
But, like, there have always been queer people, and they have sex, and it's not procreative.
Like, maybe the purpose of sex isn't procreation.
Nope, nope, it is.
Queerness is unnatural.
It's like, well, you just said it was unnatural because of the way sex works, and I'm saying sex works in other ways.
You can see how this works.
You can see how this unravels.
It just falls apart.
So, if we wanted to start with nature, if that's what we really wanted to start with, We would begin with the fact of human sexual and gender diversity.
That's where we would start.
You would look at the human population and say, wow, yeah, there are a lot of cisgender straight people, but there are an awful lot of people who aren't cisgender.
There are a lot of people who are queer identified.
Let's start with that.
And if you start with that as quote-unquote nature, the idea that the purpose of sex is procreative, it falls apart.
Recognition of queer folk of all kinds highlights that there are lots of kinds of sexual coupling that naturally aren't procreative.
Okay, so that's one.
And for me, again, for me, that's just a common sense assumption.
People say, well, let's just look at nature.
Okay, cool.
Let's look at nature.
Let's look at the natural diversity of human populations that falls apart.
But there's a second point that connects here that I think is also important.
The naturalness of procreative sex, if somebody's arguing for this, that the natural end or goal of sex is procreation, it doesn't just rely on the exclusion of non-cisgender and non-heterosexual people, even for cis-hetero people.
So I'm speaking now within the framework of a cisgender man and woman in a heterosexual relationship.
Even within that framework, The idea that the purpose of sex is procreation, it only works if we exclude all kinds of sexual practices.
To get at what I mean, I mean, just think about this for a minute, answer the question, what is sex?
And the answer has traditionally seemed obvious to many people.
It's penetrative vaginal sex and penetration with a penis.
Okay?
Usually understood, obviously, in a very heteronormative way.
I'm working within, again, a cis-hetero context here.
That's the way many people define sex.
Penetrated vaginal sex, penis and vagina.
But if we reflect at all...
We'll find that sex involves more than this.
And I want to throw this out.
I even talked with a couple doctors, right?
People that I know who are doctors, and I tossed around some ideas for these episodes with them, and I talked it over with them, and they got me thinking about this, okay?
So think about it this way.
If we're thinking of someone being sexually active, And I talked to one of the doctors and said, you know, and said the question I'll get is like, are you sexually active?
Well, what does sexually active mean?
Within a public health or a medical context, we're thinking about a lot more than vaginal sex.
Maybe we're thinking of sexual practices that can transmit STIs.
Anything that could transmit an STI could fall under the category of sexually active or sexual activity.
In which case, we're obviously talking about a much broader range of practices than just traditional vaginal sex.
If a doctor asked somebody, are you sexually active?
It would certainly include vaginal intercourse, but it wouldn't be limited to that.
And it would probably include practices that aren't high risk for either pregnancy or STI transmission.
There are other things that people can do that are sexual, clearly sexual, that don't fall within that purview.
If we think about the realm of, say, legality and ethics, law and ethics, we also realize that That these questions of what is sex are more complicated and much bigger than vaginal sex.
If we think about issues like sexual assault or sexual relations with minors or awful things like this, we are also thinking about an even broader set of practices.
Sexual contact or sexual behavior in contexts like this covers probably even more than it does in a medical context.
We're talking about a range of practices, again, that don't have anything necessarily to do with procreation.
What's my point?
Here it is.
When we talk about sex and sexual activity, we do so in ways that do not reduce to procreative sex all the time.
I would argue that we rarely limit discussions of sex to sex that can lead to procreation.
So to make the purpose of sex procreation, we have to set all of that aside.
We have to exclude all these other kinds of sexual practice and sexual expression.
What we end up doing is privileging one very specific sex act above all others without any non-circular reason for doing so.
In other words, you gotta work really, really, really hard to get to the position where you can try to say the purpose of human sex is procreation.
You gotta work really hard to get there.
You gotta make all kinds of exclusions to do that.
And on that note, there is one more consideration I want to bring up here.
And this consideration is, as we discussed this, you don't have to have a degree in gender studies.
You don't have to be a queer theorist, you don't have to be a feminist scholar to know that Western discourses about sex have not only privileged a cis-hetero perspective, that that whole notion that the natural form of sex is vaginal intercourse between a man and a woman, obviously that presupposes a cis-hetero perspective with, in my view, no good reason for doing so.
But Western discourses about sex have also privileged the male sexual experience.
Christian discourses on procreative sex, and this is right up to the present.
We're going to get into an episode later in this series I'm going to call the Christian Sex Positive Purity Movement.
And there's a lot of talk about, like, very frank discussions about sexuality.
Discourses on procreative sex tie procreation to what?
To male orgasm.
Within a cis-heterocoupling, when the man reaches climax, his procreative potential is released.
So on this logic, the consummation of the sex act occurs with the potential of procreation.
That's the logic.
The man reaches orgasm, releases his semen into the woman, and procreation can follow.
This is the consummation of the sexual act.
It's from a completely male perspective.
You're like, okay, that's cool, if you're a guy.
But if you don't start with the assumption that That male orgasm is the consummation or goal of the sex act, the story is different, and that's within a cis-hetero context.
If we focus on, say, the woman's climax, the story is radically different.
Again, I'm staying within a cis-hetero frame here.
I'm not suggesting that only female-identified people have vaginas and so forth, okay?
Many people with vaginas don't climax through vaginal stimulation.
I'm not going to go into, like, super detail here, but, you know, you can go look it up, okay?
And for many of the people who do, who are able to reach climax through vaginal stimulation, a penis simply isn't going to do the trick.
Sorry, penis people out there.
If you think that, like, that's the magic sex tool for people with vaginas, it's often not, okay?
So if we don't assume that the male climax is the consummation of the sex act, then once again the natural link between sex and procreation, it doesn't look so natural at all.
And this is actually a running joke among many women coming out of evangelical purity culture.
People I've talked with, I've read this in different accounts that people have written coming out of the purity culture and evangelicalism and so forth, is that the kind of sex religious leaders and parents are most worried about young people having Right?
Vaginal intercourse is, for many women, the least desirable form of sex to have, because it doesn't lead naturally to climax or orgasm.
Okay?
Gotta wrap this up.
As I said, a lot of frank discussion in this episode.
Hopefully, like, I don't know, other parents in the car line aren't staring at you now because your windows are down or something like that.
Here's the point of all of this.
Here's the point of this episode.
If we reflect just a little on the way we talk about sex, the way that we experience sex, everything I just talked about is a part of the common experience of a lot of folks listening, and I know it.
If we reflect on the way we talk about sex, the way we experience sex and sexuality, if we consider the basic and I would say natural gender and sexual diversity of ourselves as humans, the claim that the purpose of sex is procreation, it just loses plausibility.
The only way to make it plausible is to exclude from the start all the things that complicate that account.
You have to exclude a range of sex practices, you have to exclude different sexual orientations and gender identities, you have to privilege the experience of men over women in a cis-hetero framework, on and on and on.
You have to set all this up ahead of time so that the nature you're appealing to actually emerges as very artificial.
The nature of quote-unquote natural sex is a human construct.
What does that show us?
It shows us that when high-control religious appeal to nature to defend their views on gender and sexuality, they're not really appealing to nature.
They are projecting a very specific set of understandings of sex and sexuality and embodiment onto nature and then using that projection to justify the attitudes and views they already want to impose.
They are creating the nature from which they're supposed to be drawing their observations.
So again, for sex to be procreative, we have to be talking about very specific kinds of bodies engaged in very specific kinds of acts that do not represent the full and natural expression of human sexuality.
So those are what I'm calling my common sense reasons for suggesting that there's no plausible reason to say that the purpose of sex is procreation.
Next episode, I'm going to go and revisit the points that I tried to make about evolutionary theory.
This is more based, as I say, just the way we talk about sex, the way we understand it on an everyday basis, if we reflect on it.
Talk about evolutionary theory next.
Please, keep the comments coming.
DanielMillerSwaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
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