The Only Sex That Counts

A Christian Beginning to Overcoming Broken Sex and Gay Gender

How We Get Broken Sex and Gay Gender

With these came they, who from the bordering flood
Of old Euphrates to the Brook that parts
Egypt from Syrian ground, had general Names
Of Baalim and Ashtaroth, those male,
These Feminine. For Spirits when they please
Can either Sex assume, or both; so soft
And uncompounded is their Essence pure,
Not tied or manacled with joint or limb,
Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones,
Like cumbrous flesh; but in what shape they choose
Dilated or condensed, bright or obscure,
Can execute their airy purposes,
And works of love or enmity fulfill.
For those the Race of Israel oft forsook
Their living strength, and unfrequented left
His righteous Altar, bowing lowly down
To bestial Gods; for which their heads as low
Bowed down in Battle, sunk before the Spear
Of despicable foes. 

-John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1, ll. 419-437

Marriage is a sexual relationship. In fact, that may be all that it is. Simply a sexual relationship, the sexual relationship, the only sex that counts.

The word sex used to be much more than merely coital.

It was a biological term, as in the male and female sex. Man and woman, consisting of the fairer sex and the sterner sex, or the weaker sex and the rougher sex. Human biological reality is sexual, always male and female, and cannot be other than sexual.

If you look in newer dictionaries, you will find that definitions of sex are bound up with gender. Gender is primarily a grammatical, syntactical word. It does have to do with biology, but only so far as any concept that we can talk of in terms of family trees and successors has. A gens, in Latin, was a people or tribe, bound primarily by its progenitors, who engendered them. There were other ways to relate to a gens, by marriage or adoption, but the common ancestor was what defined them. Of course, this involves biology. Engendering is done using genitalia. That’s where the big family tree comes from; the seed of Aeneas or the seed of Abraham are metaphorical seeds that comes from real seed, which is what the word semen means, after all. Families of things come from a common ancestor, which is why genus is used in the taxonomy of animals. Gender is to genus as kind is to kin, which is say, it’s a family word.

Gender is a good word to use in grammar. Most languages have genders, which is to say, families, groupings, types of words. Human reality is sexual, which makes it very natural to divide words into, if not male and female, then masculine and feminine. Linguists believe that the ancestor tongue of most European languages had two genders, animate and inanimate, which morphed into masculine and feminine. Most gendered languages have two or three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter. Most, but far from all. Remember, gender is not sex. Various languages includes genders such as celestial, terrestrial, large objects, small objects, people, countables, uncountables, long objects, and so on. Some languages have several genders that outsiders can see the sense of, plus one more for miscellaneous words. Chechen apparently has four miscellaneous genders, although I suppose it may be that Chechens understand the world in some ineffable way they’ve not been able to communicate to foreigners, and these genders will actually make sense to us in the life of the world to come.

Gender is kind, which does indeed make sexing a way to use gender. In some parts of the country, high school kids get summer jobs at chicken farms, where they spend the days of their youth turning chicks upside down and peeking at their genitals to determine their sex. The genital sorting is called sexing. Once the chicks are sexed and sorted, the males are killed, the females kept. The chicks have been divided into two kinds, two genders, two conceptual categories.

That’s what a gender is when the word is used metaphorically. A gender is a word cloud, a branching tree, a word family, a category. I think of a wonderfully titled book about the grammatical genders of a certain Australian aboriginal language, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind, by cognitive linguist George Lakoff. According to linguists, the Dyirbal tongue has four genders, animate objects and men, edible fruits and vegetables, a miscellaneous gender, and I’ve saved the best for last: women, water, fire, violence, and dangerous animals.

The word sex was used to speak of men and women, not of the “sexual act”. The very fact that I have to say sex act or sexual intercourse rather than use a direct verb shows that. You can’t sex someone (although these days you can gender someone). You have sex with them.

In the 19th century, as Rousseauism, Romanticism, Marxism, and Darwinism (yes, I would put these all in the same genus) conspired to reduce mankind to animal status, intellectuals began to speak of the sexual impulse. This still made sense. It is obvious to think of maleness and femaleness as seeking each other for procreation, or, as ugly moderns put it, reproduction.

The men who most studied the sexual impulse, the thing that led to sexual intercourse, became fascinated by the sociology of the sex act as an end to itself. Men like Havelock Ellis and George Bernard Shaw began to divorce the idea of the sex act from the idea of having children. They studied and promoted homosexuality, because it liberates us from nature and frees us to higher pursuits. They became eugenicists and socialists, justifying the slaughters of Communists and the Nazis. To be clear, it wasn’t that some of them chose to support Communist sexology and others Nazi sexology, but that they saw totalitarianism and communism as necessary.

George Bernard Shaw, winner of a Nobel prize in literature, provides a good example. The still-widely-praised playwright said in the preface to a 1933 stage comedy that “[I]n the long run the power to exterminate is too grave to be left in any hands but those of a thoroughly Communist Government responsible to the whole community”, and that the “unfortunate Commissar” was obliged to shoot bad workers “so that he might the more impressively ask the rest of the staff whether they yet grasped the fact that orders are meant to be executed.” In a 1948 essay published in The Atlantic, three years after the full horrific scope of the Nazi eugenics program had been exposed to the world, Shaw argued that certain men were to be eliminated “as a fox caught in a poultry yard is liquidated on the spot”.

There is a considerable class of persons who become criminals because they cannot fend for themselves, but who under tutelage, superintendence, and provided sustenance are self-supporting and even profitable citizens. They make good infantry soldiers and well-behaved prisoners. But throw them out into the street and they are presently in the dock. They also present no problem. Reorganize their lives for them; and do not prate foolishly about their liberty.

But it may be asked whether they are to be allowed not only to read the newspapers but also to marry and breed. Yes, decidedly; for human stock needs its fallows as much as wheat or oats; and these feckless creatures may be only fallows: their children may be competent as their ancestors. Humane treatment of them will not deprave their custodians, and may prove very instructive. But the ungovernables, the ferocious, the conscienceless, the idiots, the self-centered myops and morons, what of them? Do not punish them. Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill them.

In the late 19th century, sexologists became a thing. They supported eugenics as part of building up a new and godlike human race in a world with no god. They became fascinated with sexual kinks (like Albert Kinsey would later, with his Wonder Woman and his toothbrush), and were usually kinked themselves. They “had sex” with each other; most symbolic, perhaps, is the reported affair between Havelock Ellis and Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood.

Language began to change to reflect their materialistic and chemical outlook on humanity, and their belief that individual men were ultimately only animals. The sex impulse and sex instinct began to become sex as we understand it today, that is, no longer referent to male and female, but to coitus itself.

In 1925 H. G. Wells published the novel Christina Alberta’s Father, in which a character says “in the new world there would cease to be two sexes only; there would be recognized varieties and subdivisions. So Bobby speculated. For just as there were women who did not want to bear children, so there were men who did not want to lord it over wife and children.”

This use of the word sex shows two changes. First, it recalls the ancient pagan possibility of a third sex, a third nature; in our Western tradition, this is the myth of Androgyne in Plato’s Symposium. The third sex, like most thirds, proceeds from the binary; whether it is hypersexualized or desexed (e.g. the castrati), it stands upon the meaning of male and female for its own significance. The second change is more significant. Wells has conceived of a sex that is self-determinative. Women do not want to bear children, men do not want to be lords, so they will choose to become something other than male and female.

This use of sex does not include the sex act. However, Wells had been using sex for at least a quarter century to speak, if not of the act, at least of the impulse for the act. In his 1899 novel Love and Mr. Lewisham, a character thinks of the words of a speaker at Hammersmith, perhaps a speaker that Mr. Wells had heard in real life, saying “[W]e marry in fear and trembling, sex for a home is the woman’s traffic, and the man comes to his heart’s desire when his heart’s desire is dead.”

The word had taken on two meanings in popular culture, which made sense, because it was following the intellectuals. In 1882 Walt Whitman had written in A Memorandum for a Venture, an essay which served to defend the importance of open sexuality for democracy and as an apologetic for the homoerotic nature of his poetry, that “the movement for the eligibility and entrance of women amid new spheres of business, politics, and the suffrage, the current prurient, conventional treatment of sex is the main formidable obstacle.” In Leaves of Grass Whitman uses the word often but nebulously, in ways that could be interpreted as meaning male and female, or as meaning “sex act”. In Leaves, he is “bathing my song in Sex”.

It is this determination to better a godless world by the gratification of desire, whether it be by the desire for physical or intellectual pleasures, that brings us to gender.

Sex as male and female is limiting; even as mankind flees from it, it anchors us down and restricts our movement. It keeps us as two major kinds. No matter how we choose to live, we still end up being some kind of man, some kind of woman.

Godless humanity therefore required more kinds. It required gender rather than sex. On top of that, sex was already being reduced to a drive that seemed to be its own end. Real freedom would consist, not just in inventing yourself, but in inventing the kind of person you would be. Each man, if he wished, could be his own category, “all just as immortal and fathomless as myself”.

The use of the word gender for this invention and liberation of sexual category was natural. Latin was already studied as a gendered language, with sex-related genders, masculine and feminine, male and female. No confusing categories like heavenly things or liquids.

Back in the world of language, some linguists are trying to pretend that grammatical gender and noun classes are different things, because the word gender has now changed meaning. Gender now means what sex used to mean, referring to sexuality, if now with infinite possibilities. So now some linguists pretend that grammatical gender can only be used in reference to languages with masculine, feminine, and neuter. Languages with twenty genders and alien-to-us categories use “noun categories”, which according to them definitely doesn’t and never did refer to gender. As in so many aspects of Western life, our history and dictionaries are being actively rewritten.

The effects of this rewriting of our sexual thinking have been horrific. They have destroyed marriage and the family. They have debased childhood. They have placed our satisfaction in ourselves, and so left us empty. And they have given us, to be frank, nowhere to put our parts, nowhere to fit.

In the words of the poet, Walt Whitman, “I will show of male and female that either is but the equal of the other, And sexual organs and acts!”

In the words of the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, “sex is a hole”. What is more, the “ideal of the hole is then an excavation which can be carefully moulded about my flesh in such a manner that by squeezing myself into it and fitting myself tightly inside it, I shall contribute to making a fullness of being exist in the world.” In other words, no matter how much I use words like ontology and psychoanalysis, sex is life and life is sex, and that’s all there is. I must squeeze.

The sexual logic of materialism, free love, Rousseauism, Romanticism, Communism, gender ideology, et alii, is a logic of self-determination over nature, by either singular or communal humanity. It takes something which out to be a modest part of our lives and makes a monster of it. The lack of definition, the lack of parts and fit, has put sex acts everywhere, in our schools, in our news, in our supermarkets. Rather than this being a world full of sexual beings, we have made the world sexual.

This is not new, of course. It has always been a pagan temptation, but our ability to kill procreation and replace it with reproduction (usually by killing our babies) has made us more powerful in this regard than even the old gods.

Sexual Beings

And that thy love we weighing worthily,
May likewise love thee for the same again:
And for thy sake, that all like dear didst buy,
With love may one another entertain.
So let us love, dear love, like as we ought,
Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught.

Edmund Spenser, Most Glorious Lord of Life

Everything is sexual, but not everything is about sex. Everything is sexual in the sense that this is a natural world and we are created. Everything we do is sexual because we are sexual beings.

So perverted has our thinking become that it is difficult for us to read “sexual beings” as anything other than “beings who want to have sex”. That is not what I mean at all. What I mean is that men are at all times men, in all things they do; women are at all times women, and are motivated, not just as humans, but as women.

A few pages back I said that marriage is simply a sexual relationship, the sexual relationship, the only sex that counts. Perhaps your first reaction upon reading that was something like “How reductive! Doesn’t he know how glorious marriage can be? Does he not love his wife? Is he only married for sex?”

I am married, above all, for ontological reasons. Marriage is in my being. I was made to marry. After all, I am a man. What could be more true and more beautiful than a good man marrying a good woman and working through this life’s garden together? It’s not romantic; it’s what I was made for. If you find that thought unloving, you have fallen prey to the lies of Romanticism. Remember, you’re not telling your story, you’re telling God’s story. In other words, it’s not about you. It’s never been about you.

We are always who we are, and no matter how far we run from ourselves, there we are again. A man may flee to the opium dens of Borneo, or cut off his penis and surgically build a small hole in its place, and he will still be a man. A woman may do as H. G. Wells imagined and choose not to have children, or choose to kill them in the womb; she may make for herself a flesh tube with insertable plastic rod; she may grow a hyper-hormonal beard; she is left a woman with a beard and empty womb. A mutilated man is only a monster metaphorically. He is always a man, and that is the tragedy of his monstrosity.

I’m not married for sex. I’m married because of sex, because of how I was made. In other words, I’m married because I’m a man. My wife is married because she’s a woman. We are sexed humans, male and female, and by God’s grace we embrace that.

This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed. (Genesis 2:23-25)

When Christian self-help books talk about men and women as being sexual, they are usually caving to modern concupiscence. The husband relentlessly thinks of release; the wife craves intimacy; both are obsessed with the hole. Both are filled with and being encouraged in lust.

Marriage should be modest. Sex should be modest. I do not mean that they should be small, or meager, or shy, or introverted. I simply mean that they should fit into life just right, that they should be among the things that it is meet and right to do for God’s sake.

The man who thinks only of food will never be satisfied; whether he is always eating or never gets a bite, he is a glutton.

The woman who thinks only of sex will never be satisfied. It has become a god to her.

A modest sexuality may be content, by God’s grace. It seeks to be what it was made to be: an aspect of human life that pushes us to such unity with another that we can be said to be one, that this new nature of one flesh may be compared to the divine nature. True sexuality is a relationship of creation and communion, and it may be said, in a small but right way, that this is like God’s relationship with man.

The point is not the physical pleasure or the satisfaction of some unrelenting biological drive, as the world teaches. The point is the creation and communion. And what is more, that is where the real pleasure and satisfaction are found.

Our minds are often so impoverished in their thinking that “one flesh” seems like a prohibition. Paul tells us not to go to the temple prostitutes:

Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid. What? know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body? for two, saith he, shall be one flesh. But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit. (1 Corinthians 6:15-17)

There is, of course, a prohibition here. But the point is not the prohibition. The point is that we shall be raised up like Jesus (v. 14), that our body is a temple of the Holy Ghost (v. 19). The point is that you ought to “glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's.” (v. 20)

Being one flesh with one’s spouse is a little picture of what it is to be with Jesus. And when I say “little” picture, I don’t mean that it’s an intellectual analogy or sermon illustration. It is limited, but it is living. Being one flesh is a living and lived-out picture of divine community. When a husband lives well with his wife, he shows the truth, beauty, and goodness of Jesus to the world; when he lives badly with his wife, he makes God to be a liar. When a wife lives well with her husband, she shows the truth, beauty, and goodness of the Church to the world; when she lives badly, she slanders the Bride of Christ. But one flesh is not only about what is seen from outside, as if it were a Nativity play trying to tell a story. It is that, of course, but it is more. You are living within that picture. It’s not only lived out, it’s lived in, and it’s your life. You experience that communion, that divine community, for yourself. You experience that fruitfulness, that creation and procreation.

Remaking Our World

If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.

Anne Bradstreet, from To my Dear and Loving Husband

my glowing breast,
The welcome house of him my dearest guest.
Where ever, ever stay, and go not thence,
Till nature’s sad decree shall call thee hence;
Flesh of thy flesh, bone of thy bone,
I here, thou there, yet both but one.

Anne Bradstreet, from A Letter to her Husband, absent upon Publick Employment

Forget gender. Forget “having sex”. Leave behind egotism, selfishness, and porneia. Remember your first love, which was yours before the foundation of the world. Remember the wife of your youth, the wife of your covenant, the wife God made one with you, blessing that union with the Holy Spirit (Malachi 2:14-15). Remember that God brings his men and his women together for a holy seed (Malachi 2:15).

In a marriage blessed by God, a diligent and loving husband at table and garden with a faithful and honoring wife, there will be communion and procreation. There will be bountiful board and bonny beds. There will be what we’ve taken to calling sex. But that will never have been the point. It is simply what happens when a man and a woman want to be one flesh, want to be fruitful and multiply, want to plant a garden, want to fulfill a commission.

I’m not suggesting that marriage or sex is always (or ever) easy. But I am saying it is exactly what we were made for, that it’s fitting. And because it’s what we were made for, sin doesn’t destroy it.

Men were made to work; broken bodies don't change that.

Men were made to be fruitful; dry wombs don’t change that.

Men were made male and female; having no partner doesn’t change that, nor does having a bad partner. It is a betrayal of our Creator, it is making God out to be a liar, to decide to be some new kind of human, an asexual, an incel, an invert. It is a betrayal to withhold sex or bully for sex or otherwise manipulate your marriage with sex. Male and female are brought together as one flesh, even with an unbelieving spouse. “For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband: else were your children unclean; but now are they holy.” (1 Corinthians 7:14)