Guys and Dolls

When it comes to sex, there is no lack of fodder topics to address that leave me longing for our historical fodder topics, such as “is French kissing a sin?” followed closely by “is French kissing a sin if I have a copy of Theology of the Body on the nightstand?”

The topics welcoming us to the new age range from open relationships, hookup culture, polyamory, androgyny, third-sex, transsexuality, asexuality, dual-soul, sexual-fluidity, Tinder, porn, rape-culture, and pansexuality. These are the discussions about sex and sexuality that our culture engages in a post-liberated society. While these questions deserve to be addressed, two important questions deserve a hearing first: what is sex inasmuch as it makes us male or female?, and how does sex relate to our deep-seated longing for community? Here I hope to offer the beginnings of answers to these questions.

The complicated thing about sex is this: it doesn’t exist out in the aether somewhere. Sex—that is, being male or female—is something intrinsically in us. Now, does that mean all our cultural assumptions about sex are always accurate, such as “boys can’t wear pink if they are normal,” or “every little girl wants to be a princess,” or “real men can’t be sensitive,” or “all women are emotionally irrational”? No. The colors (or even textures) we prefer in our clothes, our hopes, aspirations, intellectual pursuits, range of emotional expression, favorite bands, hobbies, and other facets of life are simply that: facets of our lives. These facets have little, if not nothing, to do with our sex.

What about people with biological complexities (such as androgen insensitivity syndrome, hormonal disorders, chromosomal disorders)? Don’t these persons’ conditions clearly denote that sex is an unscientific, and thus psychologically relative, notion? No. Those are obviously extremely complex cases, but they are not normative. Moreover, they still work within the binary framework; although some people may argue for a third sex (some admixture), nevertheless such admixture of male and female depends on male and female as unique conceptions. While such cases can often help us tease out questions—Is the soul sexed? What is proper to sex and what is simply cultural? What norms are intrinsic versus learned?)—the complex cases that fall away from the norm cannot be the cases on which we base a normative discussion. Sex is not a set of behaviors, strictly speaking. Wanting to do ballet or wear a princess crown does not prove that a little boy is really a little girl, any more than wanting to engage in lightsaber battles makes him a Jedi, or throwing painted tennis balls around makes a girl a Pokemon Master. If it did, I can guarantee you I would have caught them all.

Sex is more than a sum of “normative” behaviors. In his Theology of the Body, St. John Paul II notes that sex is what affords us “two complementary dimensions, as it were, of self-consciousness and self-determination and, at the same time, two complementary ways of being conscious of the meaning of the body.” Seeing the body as reflective of and intrinsic to our ability to be for another, sex offers us a way of being conscious of our individual self, and of determining that self in the body. This awareness of the meaning of our bodies as male and female allows us to be more other-directed. The obvious example of this orientation toward another through our sexed bodies is when the man gives his body to the woman and the woman gives her body to the man in the marital act: They are determining themselves both as other and capable of uniting with that other in a manner that may lead to the creation of a new life.

But let’s begin first by looking at what is common and what is different, before looking to the union of masculinity and femininity.

A human being, independent of what sex he or she may be, is a composite of body and soul. Not a composite like a house, where we can still distinctly recognize the wood and the wires and the tile and the glass. Rather as St. Thomas Aquinas argued, “inasmuch as the soul is the form of the body, it has not an existence apart from the existence of the body, but by its own existence is united to the body immediately.” So the composition of the body and the soul is somewhat similar to a water molecule: When you separate the body and soul, you no longer have the man, as when you separate the hydrogen and oxygen you no longer have water.

Now, some effects of being human are due to our matter and some due to our soul, which is united to the body, not inhabiting it as if it were a method of transport. This is key: The human person is the body and the soul united, not simply the soul. For example, my curly hair is an aspect of my body, while my ability to choose between haircut options is based on reason, and falls under the activity of my soul.

Culturally, we might make the distinction between our body and who we are: my body has curly hair and I chose to get bangs because I like the style. But this false dichotomy can result in speech that assigns all we identify as psychological to our “self,” and everything that differs from our psychology as materially malleable. Such speech is confusing, not in the least on the matter of sex. If sex is merely dispositional or preferential, what we mean is that it is identified with the soul. This would lead us to falsely claim that an individual might have a male soul or a female soul: the sexed aspect of the body is accidental and should follow upon what is internal if it fails to correlate. However, when we consider the human person as composed of body and soul, what we claim is that all souls are without sex, and they can only be considered “male” or “female” insofar as they are united to a body that is male or female.

By considering sex as in the body we mean that this soul united to this body forming this person is disposed to the world as masculine or feminine because the body is such that the soul receives sensible impressions through a body which is either male or female (I use this term to include geno- and phenotypical expressions, not merely intact genitalia or sexual presentation). That is fundamentally what it means to be human as male or female.

Though difficult compositions of chromosomal and hormonal effects exist, being male or female is not a behavior: It is a necessary aspect of the physical matter. One consequence of the essentiality of sex to the body is perhaps that we should stop implying (or stating) that men are less masculine because they love poetry, or women are less feminine because they can fix a car. These preferences and ability fall far more on the side of individual preference than on normative sexuality. (Though the unique way in which the individual is male or female, and how that physical fact disposes them towards activities, might allow for different insights). For example, one scientific study has demonstrated that women, in aggregate, are better disposed to multitask than are men, in aggregate. So while men in a group project may be more disposed to think linearly and address the problem immediately in front of them, women are far more holistic, seeing the larger scope of the entire undertaking.

The self is not the soul “having” the body—it is the body and the soul, together, working as a unified person. A human person is either male or female. Though there are fringe cases, being sexed is a necessary feature of our nature as beings composed of body and soul. Sex, meaning maleness or femaleness, is intrinsic to being human. Can it, as any other physical attribute, come through in more and less clear ways? Yes, just as someone might have fighter pilot vision, be nearsighted, or even blind. Being blind is a deficit not on the part of the soul, but simply on the part of the body. But, as I mentioned above, such cases are exceptionally complex and not normative, and thus can only refine, not define, our understanding.

What is normative, or even attributable, to each sex is not expressed equally strong in every person. Many people may be atypical in both insignificant or else quite significant ways: A man may excel at multi-tasking in a way his female co-worker does not, despite the normative description of men and women in aggregate. On the extreme end, in the case of androgyny, the individual may deviate from the physiological norm by possessing, in some degree of development, both sets of genitalia (or neither). In the former case, we would hardly claim that the man’s capacity is a negative deviation, although it is a deviation insofar as that is not an expected result to find in the majority of brain scans of males, while the dual genitalia is obviously a far more significant deviation that presents a clearly exceptional case.

Being male or female does not mean you must like video games or ballet because of your sex. However, being male and female does dispose us towards others in various ways, similar to how having ears that hear music extremely well, or fast reflexes and a certain body mass, might dispose us to certain ways of interacting with others. The difference here is that sex is a way of being a bodily creature, while possessing a high degree of physical coordination is merely being a bodily creature with a certain capacity. You can have a body with varied levels of physical coordination, but a human person must be either male or female. It is in this sex that we are given a fundamental way of being other-directed. This other-direction does not automatically entail certain gender norms: a man can be an exceptional cook and a woman can be a CEO without disregarding their maleness and femaleness, though they would undertake such roles with the excellence proper to their sex. What sex does is dispose us to the other, as having ears disposes us to hear music.

We ought now to talk about sex as we colloquially use the term: sexual intercourse. Being sexed is a way to be other-directed through the body. Humans are the sort of beings that tend to strive for community with those who are not ourselves. Whether through friendship, political society, or some union of the two, our speech, our rationality, and our bodily composition dispose us to tend toward each other. The sexual act is a culmination and intersection of that disposition of humans to be for another as male and female. Our sexuality is expressed in the unity found in the precise duality of male and female. In that unity, the possibility of a new life arises out of the otherness found in these two ways of being human.

This disposition of the spouses to be for one another through the body in a unitive act that has the possibility of producing life is the foundation of all human community. Sexual intimacy occurring between the differentiated sexes provides a visible proclamation of how it is that our very otherness within the body that calls us to communion: through being for the other, we bring about the possibility of new life.

Life is the foundation of the human community. Like it or not, we eventually must give rise to other humans, if we hope to continue the existence of our species. But beyond the obviously useful procreative aspect of being sexed, being sexed is foundational to how we engage with others in the community. Being a man or a woman disposes us to experience the world in different ways, and I’m not just talking about being in the patriarchy or not. We have different ways that our senses and brains understand and experience the world. A man will never know what it is to bring life into the world via pregnancy, to use the most obvious aggregate example. And while it is true that everyone, in virtue of being an individual, experiences the world in a different way, the dispositions that our sex in some way impact in that experience is a way of both being other, yet one of a group (male or female), and one of a sort of synergy—human, which is male and female, so other and yet the same.

There is a certain shared experience of being human that both sexes bring to the table. Has history often disallowed some voices or experiences from being recognized? Yes. But only by affirming those differences—that men who are sensitive are still masculine, that women are rational, that women who are mentally tough are still feminine—will we truly be able to embrace the fullness of being human: male and female. This also will allow us to address all those other pesky problems that arise from this duality and unity.