I finally finished listening back to Drunk Ex-Pastors #10 yesterday, and I found myself practically wanting a complete do-over (that kind of thing is pretty common for me: “I should have said this”; “I could have been clearer there,” etc.).
One issue that just wasn’t sitting right for me was the point I was making about sex being more than simply scratching a biological itch. The reason I was insisting on this is that humans are not just natural but supernatural beings, a point that any parent tacitly agrees with when he or she says something like, “I don’t think my 12 year-old daughter is emotionally ready to have sex.” We don’t say that of hamsters, because we all know that humans are a higher order of being than animals. Plus hamsters don’t reach age 12, so.
The rub for me comes in when I consider a couple facts: (1) Generally speaking, boys and girls reach puberty a good 5-10 years before the point when we tend to think they’re “emotionally ready” for sexual intercourse, and (2) in antiquity, the gap between reaching puberty and marriage (and thence sex) was pretty non-existent (a popular example of this could come from Game of Thrones, where Queen Cersei is waiting for young Sansa to “bleed” so that she can provide Prince Joffrey with a male heir. For 436 other examples, see The Holy Bible).
The questions that were bothering me as I listened were, “Is this idea of ‘emotional readiness’ just a societal construct with no basis in reality?”; “If not, why are humans designed to become sexually mature so much earlier than they become emotionally mature?”; “Is doing away with the emotional component a subtle capitulation to the idea that humans really are just animals after all?”
Thoughts? (And you can listen to the discussion here.)
You don’t know me but I know you. That’s the creepiness of the internet. I listened to your conversion story on C2C and stumbled on your podcast through the Bad Christian podcast. I’m thinking of becoming Catholic myself. Dragging my feet for two years now. Anyway, I have enjoyed your work and and listening my way through the podcast.
On to this article. you articulated part of something I have thought for a while. I think that the idea of emotional maturity is just a hold over from Christian thinking and morality. We have divorced sex from within marriage but have created emotional maturity as a new boundary but this will fail. if sex is simply an expression of our individuality and a pleasurable activity that is not connected to procreation then there is really no need to keep kids from having it. I think western culture will eventually realize this. It is probably best not to have kids having too much sex with each other because of the dangers of failed contraception and STIs it would be better for an adult to tutor them in sex first. Eventually western culture will warm up to the idea of adult child or at least adult adolescent sex like in pagan Rome and other cultures.
Hi Karl,
Just trying to figure out how tongue-in-cheek to take all this. . . .
Sorry Jason. I’m not promoting this. I am saying that this is, God forbid, the direction that sexuality could take in western culture.
I think that the idea of emotional maturity is a social construct to create a sexual barrier to protect the idea of childhood on the one hand and to step in for the loss of marriage as a sexual barrier on the other.
Doing away with the emotional component is not the problem. We already see ourselves as animals and I could see us further sexualizing adolescents.
Also, puberty has been getting earlier for girls in the last few decades. I don’t think we know why. Probably environmental hormones. However adolescence has been getting longer. The whole idea of a teenager is a modern western construct. It doesn’t exist historically.
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