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The True Use of Sex

By Kenneth Barnes

[1]Last week Brian Hill showed us how the possibility of achieving peace within ourselves and a deep enjoyment of the world depend upon discovering the true use of things. Thinking about what he said has made me feel that he laid an excellent foundation for something that I have for some time wanted to say.

Life is full of wonderful opportunities. The world is a fascinating place, endless in its variety and its interests. Human personality too is endlessly fascinating, and it is within human personality that the fundamental choices are made as to what use is to be made of all the opportunities given us. There is material in the world that we can do things with. There are impulses within us that we can make use of too. When I weigh up the various opportunities given us it seems to me that there are some of tremendous scope and others of limited scope, and that the things we can make the most valuable use of are also the things that we can make the most evil use of. As my mind ranged back through history I suddenly thought of the invention of printing. What a new and tremendous freedom it gave to mankind - the freedom to circulate the most valuable of men’s thoughts and discoveries throughout the civilised world, so that men could so to speak communicate with each other across great spaces gaps of space and time, passing on that was helpful and stimulating to millions who could never actually meet. But the same opportunity has also been used to circulate the most poisonous of thoughts, to stupefy millions with propaganda, to stop people thinking for themselves, to degrade their spiritual life and dirty their minds, and to put them in the power of a few unscrupulous men.

In the modern world we see the same two-way process happening with everything that science brings. Every discovery put to good use can also be put to bad. Even the understanding of how to cure disease can also be put to use in creating disease through bacterial warfare.

Coming nearer home I can show you how a human impulse may be used in either way - the impulse to eat, from which arises all our interest in food. I have a very strong interest in food and I can gratify that impulse by all sorts of ventures in cooking - or rather in tasting the results of other people’s cooking. This is a thing that makes continental travel such a joy. But I could also gratify that impulse to eat by a process that ends in making myself sick.

I hope I have made it quite clear that such things as printing or scientific discoveries or food are neither good nor bad in themselves. It is our use of them that is either good or bad. Those things that can bring us the greatest joy can also be used to bring the greatest misery, those that can be most constructive can also be used for fiendishly destructive purposes. This is because we have freedom. To be free is to be able to choose. If we automatically chose the good use we should not in fact be choosing at all; we should be doing it because we could not help it, as though we were machines. And the word “good” would have no meaning there were no opposite that we could choose. To be human is to have this sort of freedom - the freedom to choose good or evil.

Now I come to my chief concern tonight - the use we make of the sex impulse. In sex we have one of those opportunities that I spoke of as being of immensely wide scope. There is so much that we can do with it. It is a very great freedom. It gives us opportunities that can lead to experiences that are supremely satisfying and delightful; or it may lead to misery and degradation. We ought then to understand what is the purpose of sex and what use we can make of it. There is the obvious biological or organic use - for breeding. But there is a big general difference between human beings and most other animals where breeding is concerned. Most animals have definite breeding seasons, relatively short periods during the year in which they feel driven to mate. In between these times sex seems to have little interest for them. But human beings are interested in sex all the time; they have a continuous desire for mating, with the result that babies may be born at any time of the year. Now that might seem a nuisance. How much more convenient it would be if men and women were interested in mating only when they wanted a baby and stopped being interested for a year or two until they felt ready for another one. Then they would be free from the bother of sex for long periods of time, during which they could give their undivided attention to the other things of importance. No, we are not like this. The sex interests breaks in at all sorts of times, sometimes distracting us from our work and always making the life of a community of people a little difficult. If we think of this continuous interest in sex as being concerned only with the physical process of mating, with the sexual parts of the body and how they work and what can be done with them, then most certainly this interest is a nuisance and we should be better without it. But it is emphatically not only that. The “dirty jokes” and naughty drawings that young people sometimes indulge in do make it seem as though human beings were just with sex organs with bodies rather unimportantly attached to them and personality nowhere at all. What does it mean to be human? Surely it means to have an inner life as well as a body - to have thoughts and feelings, joys and sorrows, delights and fears. It means to have ideas and aspirations, it means to know what it is to be lonely and to have a great need for companionship. Any view of men or women, boys or girls, that leaves out this personal inner life, is a view that insults humanity. It thrusts God out of life far more definitely than does any argument of an atheist.

Sometimes when young people become obsessed with sex and are caught up in the sort of jokes or drawings I have mentioned I question them to see what they feel about it. They know there is something wrong about it but they cannot tell me what. They only know that they feel guilty. This is what I think is wrong, that these things leave out everything that gives sex its full meaning for us a s human beings. They leave out personality, they leave out friendship, they leave out all the tenderness that sex can convey between two people. Often they do worse. They often suggest or imply that sex is something violent and aggressive, a sort of attack made by a man on a woman. If those who use sexual swear-words will think of them for a moment, they will realise that they are all explosive words, they suggest at the very least something that has no consideration for another person. Sex can be like that and often is. When it is like that it denies personality, it destroys humanity and kills tenderness. Sex at its fully human level, however, has nothing in it that is aggressive or hurtful. First and foremost it is an expression of tenderness.

Where do the feelings of guilt come from in people’s thoughts of sex? I can’t go deeply into this, but I would say this, that any action or attitude that denies the essential humanity of another person leaves us with s sense of guilt. If I kill or injure another person I shall feel guilty, and even if I only harbour murderous or hateful feelings guilt will be there. I think our deepest impulse is to think of ourselves as a whole, not in parts, and to think of other people in the same way. To do otherwise leaves us uneasy, and thoughts or actions that deliberately deny the wholeness of people, as these sexual thoughts do, turn that uneasiness into guilt. We can get rid of the guilt by getting away from the aggressive attitude in sex, by remembering all the time that we are dealing with people, not just bodies. We have to discover slowly and painfully, that the true use of sex is to bring people into intimate and loving friendship. That is what sex is for.

I’m going to enlarge upon this personal aspect of sex until I can be certain that it is reasonably well understood.

Sex is not just something that is in our sex organs. It belongs to the whole of us. Men are men, and women are women, from the last hair of their heads to the soles of their feet. That’s what makes them so interesting to each other. Think how relatively dull the world would be if we were all of one sex. The fact that we are male and female adds a tremendous interest and liveliness to our experience of life. It puts, so to speak, a sparkling light on the surface of our experience and also stirs us to the depths of our being.

When boys and girls are in their late teens a searching process begins, sometimes conscious and definite, sometimes a bit vague and casual - a searching for someone of the opposite sex with whom an intimate friendship will be possible. Under wholesome conditions it is always something definitely personal, something big and extensive, that is sought for. In other words boy and girl are seeking for each other with the whole of themselves, not just with there bodies. In adulthood the time may come for complete union and fulfilment with someone; the physical side of sex is all there, but if the earlier friendships have brought understanding, there is much more too. The physical intimacy is the outward expression of the intimacy of friendship into which the man and woman have entered, and of their commitment to responsibility for each other. When sex is set in this pattern of friendship, the sex impulses themselves can remain strong and persistent, yet entirely wholesome and free from guilt.

Now we can perhaps better see what is wrong in the attitudes that many boys and girls take. I’ll be severely practical and speak of difficulties that we actually have at present that are never quite absent in a school or any community where there are boys and girls. A thirteen-year-old sees a boy and girl of about sixteen or seventeen going for walks together, or sitting talking in a classroom. He draws the attention of his friends to this. “Saw Nancy and Fred going into the wood this evening. Can guess what they’re up to, can’t you?” A guffaw and a leer passes round the group.

Now what are those boys doing? Suppose I had them as pupils in a classroom and treated them only as brains to be stuffed with information, or in the courtyard I treated them only as machines to shovel coke, what would be their complaint? That they were whole human beings and had right to be treated as persons not just as brains or machines. They would feel that I was guilty of an injustice to treat them as something less than human. But I say that crude jokes about boy-and-girl couples involve just the same injustice, because it is treating them as though they were just vehicles for sex and not fully human. To rob a couple, even in the way you think of them, of their essential humanity is to insult them. Those who think or act in this way do more harm to themselves than to the people they insult, but they certainly do real harm to the school, for they make difficult the process of getting to know each other by causing embarrassment all round. So one of the most important things in the school is hindered.

I think the difficulty arises in this way. Younger boys and girls become aware of the excitement that surrounds sexual matters long before they are aware of what is possible in friendship. So they can imagine a boy and a girl having a sexual interest between them but they can’t imagine what there is in the friendship side of it. Their lack of insight into what is happening makes it sometimes difficult for me to get their cooperation in making the school a place in which friendships between boys and girls can grow happily and normally. But I will ask them to keep this in their minds. Even if they can’t fully understand what goes on, can they realise that they owe a loyalty to the school, to make it a place where people can be free to enjoy a friendship without fearing the remarks that may be made about them? In three or four years time the very people who make the remarks now will themselves be angry because others poke fun at the friendship that they will have begun to enjoy. Perhaps they can also take it from me that when a boy and girl are walking round thye wood together or standing talking in a classroom they are probably not consciously thinking about sex at all, but getting to know each other in a general and wholesome way, sharing ideas and thoughts and feelings about all sorts of things. Again I say that the use of sex at its most human and personal level is to prompt people to share their thoughts and to get to know each other in an intimate way. Boys and girls in the late teens begin this experience in a tentative and halting way, but they learn a great deal; and a coeducational school that has a wholesome atmosphere can do a great deal to help them towards a deeper and more intimate sharing that comes in adult life and marriage.

I should say a word to the couples themselves. I wonder whether, while I have described this process of getting to know each other through sexual attraction, they have been making measuring themselves up to the description I have given? I think they should ask this - whether alongside the fun of having an affair they are making an opportunity to understand the other person, to feel consideration and responsibility in some degree, and to begin to realise what human tenderness is. It is so easily possible to hoodwink oneself in the matter of love. What we commonly call love, while having outwardly the appearance of being tender, can in fact be aggressive, grasping, dominating, completely selfish. True tenderness, on the other hand, asks nothing for itself, does not wish to coerce or alter the other, delights only in the other being himself or herself. In the first friendships there will be a good deal of confusion between the two sorts of love - the selfish and the tender - but with growing experience each boy or girl can begin to sort out the feelings involved and to grow in self-knowledge.

You will see that I have begun to emphasis responsibility. Sex, at the personal level I have described, must accept responsibility. It must never be something that we think we can enjoy and then pass on from it as though it had never been. The meaning of responsibility is clearest in marriage itself and the most conscious and definite undertaking of responsibility is in the act of marriage. When I think of this I can’t help recalling the Quaker form of marriage, which is of all religions forms the most simple, yet moving and impressive. There is no priest to conduct the ceremony or to make things easy for the bride and bridegroom. There are no questions that can be answered in monosyllables. Each of the partners has to state clearly what he or she is doing. They sit in silence at a Meeting for Worship with a number of other Friends, and when they feel ready they stand up and take each other by the hand. The man then says: “I, John Smith, take this my friend, Ann Robinson, to be my wife, promising, with the help of God, to be unto her a loving and a faithful husband until death shall us part”. The woman then makes a similar statement. There is no ritual to carry them through and in no form of marriage could the commitment be more definite and more conscious.

Marriage is obviously a great responsibility, but we should not think of it as the only relationship between a man and a woman that involves the acceptance of responsibility. All loving relationships of any kind involve it. A young man or woman may have several close friendships before marriage is reached and the right partner found, and in all of these there must be some measure of tenderness and responsibility, a readiness to share each other’s burdens and meet each other’s needs. Nothing will be learnt from any relationship if it is thought of as casual and involving no commitment. All friendship has obligations in proportion to its intimacy.

Now I shall appear to drop from the sublime to the trivial, for I am going to say something about sexual swear-words. But I hope to show that this is not in fact a trivial matter. In these days nearly every boy or girls (sic) gets to know these words. Only by keeping a boy or girl protected from the world in a way that would be very bad for them could we keep these words from their ears. So it is everybody’s problem. Why do people use sexual words for expressing violent feelings or annoyance? Perhaps this is part of the reason. People have always been afraid of the power of sex, and older people have been specially afraid of the power of sex in the young - in their own children. So they have tried to keep sex under, so to speak, by making it a subject that must not be mentioned. Now, if you know that a certain thing is terribly important and at the same time never to be spoken, then you get a tremendous feeling of letting off steam if you go away into a room by yourself and say that very word to the walls or the furniture. If an everyday thing like the potato had been regarded for hundreds of years as a very powerful and at the same time unmentionable, then no doubt a boy would find great satisfaction in expressing his anger with another boy by calling him a potato.

But this is very unfortunate. It is a sad misuse of sex to employ it for expressing anger, annoyance, vindictiveness, bitterness and repudiation when its proper use is for the expression of delight and tenderness and of complete satisfaction in friendship. Moreover, because what we fear most is sex-gone-wrong, the words that apply to sex-gone-wrong become the most violent swear-words. Even though many of the children who use these words do not understand fully their meaning, they have a feeling that there is something nasty about them as well as sexual; and I think that in many young people it tends to make them feel that sex itself is necessarily nasty. I know there are many young people who, when they experience a really good love affair, escape for ever from this feeling, but I am afraid that there are others who carry a feeling of uneasiness throughout life, so that even in marriage they cannot feel that sex is wholly good.

I think everyone is bound to have a struggle in discovering how sex can become wholly good. All understanding comes to some extent through struggle, whether it concerns sex or anything else. That is no reason, however, why the struggle should be made unnecessarily difficult, as it is for most young people, by the pollution and distortion of sex that they find all round them in the world. It is the responsibility of all of us to try to lessen this, and one of the ways is by ceasing to use sexual words for purposes quite contrary to the feelings that ought to be associated with sex. I make this as a direct appeal to the boys - and perhaps some girls - who use these words. I would appeal to them also to respect any new boy or girl who comes into the school free from the habit, and not to set about the unworthy job of teaching them.

Speaking generally I have found coeducational schools freer from the dirty story habit than boys’ schools, but that is not to say that they are entirely free from them. Occasionally the habit is imported by a newcomer and takes hold of a number of people for a time. About this I should say the same as I have said about all the rest of the things I have criticised; it is a wrong use of sex. When people choose to tell these stories they are choosing to make sex a miserable thing instead of a delightful thing. They are lowering sex to a lower than the animal stage, for animals express their sex impulses simply and naturally; they don’t snigger and distort. Further we all owe our very existence to sex, to the fact that something happened between our parents and we were born out of their love. Isn’t it a strange thing to do, to lose our respect for the very thing that gave us life? That is what the dirty story does; it makes us lose our respect for something that above all deserves our respect (sic), in fact not merely respect but reverence.

All this is not to say that we can achieve the right use only by being continuously solemn about it. There is plenty of room for laughter in friendship, and sex can be at the same time both wholesome and amusing. There is much that we can laugh at without feeling guilty and without in any way disparaging sex.

Now perhaps I should summarise what I have said:

To be human is to be able to think about our lives and to be able to choose what we shall make of our opportunities.

The greatest opportunities for good are also the greatest for evil.

Sex is neither good nor bad, it is just a fact. It is we who by our choices make it good or bad. We can use it wrongly or use it rightly.

The biological use of sex is to produce babies, but it has a tremendously wider use in bringing people together to share their thoughts and feelings, to feel tenderness and

responsibility for each other.

We should never put stumbling blocks in the way of other people’s friendships by disparaging them or by emphasising the sexual element at the expense of what is deeply human and personal.

We live in a world in which sex is, unfortunately, polluted and distorted. We all have a struggle to become free from th (sic) its Influence. We owe it to each other not to make the struggle harder than it need be by degrading sex in what we say to each other.

Finally, let me remind you again of something said in last week’s talk - that we shall achieve peace of mind only when we discover what life is for and what is the proper use of things. We cannot escape from sexual interests and achieve peace that way. Men and women everywhere will always be interested in sex, but one wishes that they could be less tormented by the interest. The central thought in what I have said is that when our sex impulses come within the circle of enduring tenderness and responsibility our guilt and anxiety fall from us, and we are free to enjoy all that sex brings to us, to enjoy it with peace of mind.

Archive Reference: PP KCB 3/7/1 document 08