The Meaning of Sex

A “social construct”? I’m an anthropologist and I speak this language. Virginity is a social construct to the extent that we invest the state of virginity with social significance. American culture seemingly has been divesting its stock in virginity since the sexual revolution more than half a century ago, but somehow the idea lingers. The young woman at Dartmouth would like to think it doesn’t matter, it is just a total social construct, but even the dismissive formula betrays her troubled feelings. It does matter. 

As well it should. To say that something is a social construct is not to say it is trivial or meaningless. It is only to say that we have developed standard ways to talk about it. Virginity, as it happens, is a biological fact as well as a social construct, and because it is both, it commands a special kind of attention. 

Fatherhood

Virginity is a bit like some other words that connect biological realities with social expectations. The word “father,” for example, refers inescapably to the male who played the seminal role in impregnating the egg that became a child. But we build on this nucleus of meaning to create quite elaborate cultural conventions. The man who raises a child he has not fathered is also called a father; George Washington is father of our country; and some holders of religious office are addressed as Father. A father in the familial sense is expected to love, care for, and provide for a child and to exercise tempered authority. We could, with the Dartmouth student, say this is just a total social construct. But we’d be wrong. It is a lot more than that. 

Anthropologists have spent some 150 years trying to get to the bottom of words like “father”—and mother, brother, cousin, etc.—kinship words. A 19th-century American lawyer who was gifted with both unusual curiosity and immense patience opened this door in the 1850s when he took note of how much Seneca Indian kinship terms differed from English ones. Lewis Henry Morgan tugged on this thread for the next 30 years, along the way producing one of the great monuments of 19th-century scholarship, an immense study titled Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity in the Human Family. 

Morgan made much of the observation that in many societies around the world words such as “father” apply to whole classes of people. I might, for example, use the local equivalent of “father” for my father’s brothers and for my father’s father’s brother’s sons. Thus the word “father” might be translated as “paternally related male a generation older than me.” At which point we might be tempted to conclude with our Dartmouth friend that the concept of “father” is just a total social construct. After all, different cultures fill the conceptual space of “fatherhood” in different ways, so how much biological or existential reality can there be to the concept?

Morgan himself thought something similar. He speculated that maybe the natives being none too scrupulous about sexual relations were never certain who their actual fathers might be and hit upon the happy expedient of identifying all the potential inseminators with a single term. Morgan’s theory was never substantiated by evidence of such promiscuity among people who used kinship words in such a broad fashion, but Morgan did succeed in putting some key questions on the table. How do we decide collectively who is a relative? And what difference does it make?

These turned out to be very good questions, and the discipline of anthropology grew up wrestling with them. One of the characteristics that makes us human and that both unites us with nature and sets us apart from it is our preoccupation with kinship. At its most basic, kinship is the way human societies organize the realities of sexual reproduction. It supplies the meaning of sex—at least a large portion of that meaning, if not all of it. Kinship turns the biological fact of mating into the social facts of living together in a more or less orderly world. 

We need that social ordering because the biological facts are and always have been dangerous, disruptive, and often deadly. Sex without the constraint of social constructs would have brought an early end to our species, which depended on pair-bonding and a sexual division of labor to make it through the hard passage of time to reach modern civilization. Sex and human reproduction liberated from fairly stable pair-bonding wasn’t a viable possibility for most of human prehistory, and in the ethnographic and historical record, there is the barest trace of societies that did without pair-bonded marriage between men and women and stable families of some sort. 

Fatherless

There are exceptional cases, most famously the Nayar and the Na. The Nayar were a warrior caste among the several kingdoms of the Malabar Coast in southwest India, who in traditional times treated marriage as a ceremonial matter after which a woman took acknowledged lovers rather than a husband. A Nayar woman, however, had to produce a named man of appropriate status for each of her children or face expulsion from her lineage. The Na (or Musuo) are a tribal group in southwest China who went still further in erasing fatherhood. The Na kinship terminology is the only one we know of that lacks a word for “father.” But the Na do allow a woman an option to marry and to take an actual husband. There are exceptional reasons for these exceptional cases: Mainly they are instances of small subgroups within larger complex societies that have fit themselves into a niche by adopting mating patterns that would be impossible in any other situation. 

When Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his report in 1965, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, he likewise observed that marriage was rapidly deteriorating in African-American communities because of state incentives for unmarried women to have children. Moynihan’s warning about an emergent pattern was derided at the time, but the pattern he foresaw proved real. When Moynihan wrote, about 25 percent of African-American children were born outside marriage. Today it is 72 percent. Clearly it is possible for people to form a social system that discourages stable pair-bonding between men and women. But the realization of that possibility has brought dramatically negative results in the form of multigenerational dependency on government benefits, a culture of poverty, educational disadvantage for children, poor health, and psychological damage. 

Leaning away from the social constructs that comprise humanity’s long-enduring kinship patterns seldom conduces to human flourishing. Of course, the kids in college who are hooking up aren’t thinking about mating at all, let alone creating enclave social systems. They enjoy a different kind of enclave made possible by individual prosperity and institutional wealth, which have always provided a limited exemption from the rules that govern society as a whole. The hook-up culture is the patrician version of inner-city promiscuity—without the immediate and dire consequences.

Hooking Up, Marquesan Style

Sex outside of marriage is as old as the hills, but what about sex outside of meaning? Sex that is “just sex”? Sex that is pleasure for pleasure’s sake? 

“Sex without meaning” is, paradoxically, an important and meaningful idea in contemporary life. The hook-up culture, pornography, prostitution, and the commercial sex trade in all its forms are illusory promises of sex unburdened by the “meaning” that comes from sex as part of long-term attachment between individuals. Of course, sex outside long-term attachment is nothing new. The world’s oldest profession comes by its reputation honestly. But the attempt to make sex into a recreational activity equally available to men and women and free for both from the burdens of shame and guilt is something pretty new. “Free thinkers” of earlier generations may have fantasized about it; Aldous Huxley may have pictured it in Brave New World. But it took the peculiar combination of feminist advocacy, the gay rights revolution, modern technology, the breakdown of the two-parent family, and the liberated college campus to create the conditions whereby this assault on human nature could have the opportunity to play itself out. 

Humans have broken free of biological imperatives to the degree where we can try out all sorts of social experiments. Every human society can be thought of as experimental in this sense. We are always trying things out. And, more often than not, failing. Where are the communes of the 1960s? 

In the 150 years that anthropologists combed the world looking in detail at the variety of ways people organized the facts of human reproduction, we indeed found some challenging cases—special cases where a brother might marry his sister (ancient Egypt) or a woman might be simultaneously married to two husbands (the Marquesan Islands). But even the exceptional cases prove on closer look to fall within the fairly tight prescriptions biology gives us, even as biology leaves us a margin for cultural elaboration and error.

Those Marquesan Islanders, made famous by Herman Melville’s captivity narrative, Typee, stand out as especially exceptional. When European ships began to arrive in these remote Pacific islands, they were often met with swarms of young girls attempting to climb aboard to have sex with the sailors. Though our knowledge of the Marquesans is limited, it appears that, for them, virginity—or chastity—was not a social construct. But Marquesan life was no sexual free-for-all. These islanders were part of strictly hierarchical tribal groups governed with their own elaborate kinship obligations. The sexual openness of Marquesans shocked and sometimes appalled Westerners, as did Marquesan full-body tattoos. The sexualization of young girls was notable. Older women stretched the labia of little girls to make them more attractive. Both boys and girls were initiated into sex at a very young age by older adults, and the children became avid participants. 

But behind this exotic surface, the Marquesans were governed by strong rules on rank and privilege, sexual segregation, and birth order. Only a woman of high rank could have a second husband, for example, and he was a commoner subordinate to her. Men and women ate separately. And, as in Europe, the oldest son inherited family property. Sex for the Marquesans was not outside of meaning. It was fraught with meanings, some of which are now obscured behind the shroud of a dead culture. But the general picture is clear, and it is the usual thing: Attraction. Pleasure. Attachment. Reproduction. Fulfillment. To which we can add power, prestige, danger, purity, control, and the other relational overlays that typically attach themselves to sex. But there are also culturally specific meanings that were never easy for outsiders to comprehend and that have now been lost to history.

Embarrassments 

In What Does Bowdoin Teach? How a Contemporary Liberal Arts College Shapes Students, my coauthor Michael Toscano and I examined not only the curriculum of this exemplary liberal arts college but also a wide swath of campus social life. In that vein, we came across a series of surveys carried out by Bowdoin students on the college’s hook-up culture. For several years running, the students had surveyed other students and found, consistently, that about 75 percent of the students were “hooking up.” The exact definition was left to the discretion of the students who answered the question, but there was little doubt from the surrounding comments that most of the respondents meant they were having sexual intercourse with other students outside the expectation of a close or ongoing romantic relationship. 

We also observed that a fairly large number of the female upperclassmen appeared to regret having been part of the hook-up culture. One of the regrets came from the discovery that the Bowdoin men are more interested in the new women on campus. Many of the female upperclassmen experienced a diminishment of their desirability, as they were replaced by fresh recruits to the hook-up scene. Those regrets seldom surprise mature adults. But I’ve noticed that the inclusion of this material in our very long and exhaustively detailed account of Bowdoin has drawn more attention than almost anything else—and more criticism. The criticism came from the parents of students, as well as faculty members and students. We apparently crossed some Marquesan-style cultural taboo in reporting to the general public what Bowdoin students were regularly reporting to one another. 

The Bowdoin community was, in a word, embarrassed. 

That makes sense. The pretense that Americans can engage in promiscuity without consequences is hollow. Sex does have meaning, and part of its meaning is that it belongs in the context of attachment. It can be removed from that context for a while, but the need reasserts itself, despite what gender theorists of various sorts would have us believe. If we are working hard to maintain the theory that sex is a combination of harmless fun and self-exploration, the reawakening of that need for attachment can be deeply disturbing.

The fictional rape crisis on American college campuses is an outward manifestation of that disturbance. Rape in the sense of forced sex is a serious crime and a terrible moral transgression. When rape occurs it should be treated as a serious crime and reported immediately to law enforcement. But we now know that forcible rape is a fairly rare event on college campuses. The National Crime Victimization Survey found that rape and sexual assault are 1.2 times higher for nonstudents (7.6 per 1,000) than for students (6.1 per 1,000). Yet we are subject these days to a highly audible campaign of assertions that college campuses are home to a vast epidemic of sexual assaults. We are also subject to efforts by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and various campus activists to make the punishing of supposed perpetrators a high priority. 

Much has been written about the bogus allegations and the instances of seeming self-delusion on the part of young women who say they have been raped, so I will leave aside the details. The Rolling Stone story about the University of Virginia and the endlessly reported story of the mattress girl at Columbia University have now gained bodies of literature that could be case studies for pathological lying. But there are dozens if not hundreds of other instances. 

Many but certainly not all women who participate in the hook-up culture eventually awaken to some sense that a history of casual sex jeopardizes the possibility of long-term attachment. This isn’t a matter of stigma at all. In our society, and especially in the microculture of the college campus, no immediate stigma follows from hooking up. To the contrary, the stigma is typically visited on those who decline to participate. Social acceptance, popularity, and a certain prestige can be obtained by playing the game. Many college women now seek sexual conquests in a pattern similar to that of many men. Feminist author Hanna Rosin made only a mild stir when she wrote in a 2012 article in the Atlantic that hooking up is “an engine of female progress,” and advised young women to avoid the “overly serious suitor” as a danger to career success and “a promising future.” Clearly large numbers of women who attend college start out believing this. 

But if the cost of that view is not immediately apparent, it is still real. The woman who treats her sexuality as something detachable from strong mutual attachment to a single partner sooner or later discovers that men regard her as expendable. Rosin and her like-minded apologists for the hook-up culture shrug. What does it matter what men think? 

But the pretense that sex is just sex is never true. Nor is it ever merely a social construct in the sense that society has arbitrarily decreed what it means and we can, with sufficient attitude, decide it means something different or nothing at all. The distress of women who feel used by the hook-up culture returns now as recrimination against their former sexual partners. This doesn’t excuse the propagandists of the rape culture, which might better be called the “false accusation culture.” But it does point to an underlying truth. Biology and culture are, at a fundamental level, opposed to the level of sexual license that colleges like Bowdoin not only condone but encourage. 

Disappointment

Bowdoin College welcomes its “first-year” students with a play titled Speak About It, in which upperclassmen act out numerous situations of sexual coupling. At the end of the play, the cast unites in explaining that, sexually speaking, anything goes at Bowdoin. Students should take advantage of the opportunities, but they need to observe one constraint: Always be sure that you have your partner’s “consent.” 

Consent has become the watchword of the current phase of the sexual revolution. The term is acquiring additional legalistic accretions, such as “affirmative consent,” which requires the participants to make many repeated inquiries about the willingness of the partner before they proceed. 

But “consent” is really no answer to the deeper questions that sexual intimacy inevitably raises for men and women. And ramping up consent with stronger affirmations of willingness doesn’t change the shiftiness of the idea. We “consent” to all sorts of things against our better judgment. The whole advertising industry is founded on the ease with which we are swayed by our impulses, and no domain of human life is more susceptible to impulse than sexual attraction. 

Consent between college students who are placed in a situation of social license by the colleges themselves is at best an ambiguous concept. Colleges long ago abandoned their in loco parentis stewardship of students’ behavior and have in many cases moved on to the role of enabler. Bowdoin follows up the invitation to debauchery in Speak About It by placing bowls of condoms in conspicuous places in all the residence halls, which, of course, are co-ed. Students are told they can opt out of the sexual culture of the college, but doing so requires a student to reject the prevailing campus norms. In these circumstances, consent is a weak guardrail. 

Consent exists in a gray zone between legalistic framing of sexual conduct and psychological rationalization. It is the all-purpose permission slip and excuse of the hook-up culture. In any and all subsequent recriminations, the dispute turns on whether consent was granted—or withdrawn, or exceeded, etc. This has a readily grasped logic based on the premise that people make well-deliberated choices about sex; they know what they mean and they mean what they say. Everyone admits that a woman’s consent can be impaired by intoxication, but this stops short of admitting that both women’s and men’s consent is often impaired by immaturity, lust, peer pressure, and the thousand other things that lead people in doubtful situations to make doubtful decisions.

College students who seemed to have “consented” to sexual encounters at the time, upon reflection decide that they were coerced. These late-blooming allegations typically have little credibility with law enforcement officials and courts, but they are worth taking seriously as evidence that sexual behavior has its biocultural logic that cannot be wished away. 

The young women in these cases can become obsessed with the idea that they were assaulted or raped even where there is compelling evidence that the sexual acts were consensual and even though the women remained on friendly terms with the accused males for a long period after the alleged rapes. The accusers in these cases may sometimes be fabricating their claims out of thin air. That seems to be the case with the Rolling Stone accuser. And many of the accusers may be influenced by the feminist narrative that elevates them into heroic “survivors” no matter how specious their claims to victimhood. But the vehemence of the allegations suggests something more: the crystallization of regret. 

Let me repeat: Actual rape is a serious crime which calls for the serious response of law enforcement. The gravity of that crime, however, is obscured by rhetoric that treats other kinds of sexual encounters as though they were rape. 

Many men at some point also feel the emptiness of promiscuity and uncommitted sex, but they typically take longer to reach that conclusion. What might be called the imbalance of regret between men and women has a partial biological explanation, favored by sociobiologists. The theory is that male sexual adventurism is rooted in the built-in urge of men to sire as many offspring as possible, in contrast to female reproductive strategies that are constrained both by gestation and by the woman’s need to secure a reliable protector and provider for her child. 

Do these legacies of our primitive past still bear on contemporary behavior? After all, very few college men are attempting to father even one child. Hooking-up is supposed to be without consequences, not a means of filling a nursery. And college-aged women are urged to secure careers, not husbands. Outrage attended the remarks of Susan Patton, the mother of a male Princeton student, when she suggested in 2013 that female students should make a point of finding “a life partner” among the available men on campus. Much of the outrage drew on the “right” of young women to enjoy consequence-free sexual liaisons. 

But a fair number of college women belatedly discover that there is no such thing as sex without consequences. Their experience is perhaps summed up in the line spoken by a female character in the 2001 movie Vanilla Sky, “Don’t you know that when you sleep with someone, your body makes a promise whether you do or not?” Broken promises like that add up. The liaisons are easy in the microculture of the college campus. But there is an internal cost that comes from acting against a woman’s better self—and a man’s. 

At Bowdoin, the rise of the hook-up culture coincided with a sharp drop in the number of alumni who marry each other. That’s a pattern that I expect we would find around the country if the data were available. But, be that as it may, the recriminations that make up the substance of the “rape crisis” speak loudly of the regrets these women have over their transient sexual relationships. 

Leaving the Wilderness

The sexes are complementary. The distortion of women’s sexuality plainly distorts men’s sexuality as well, though in a more deferred way. Men, instead of learning how to be responsible, committed partners and eventually husbands and fathers, learn that the pleasure-seeking dimension of their sexuality can be sustained with relative ease. As a result, the men shun social maturity. The women who are veterans of the hook-up culture find that, once they are in it, their options for getting out are reduced. The fictionalized portrayal of this situation is the hit TV show Girls. 

All of this distorts and diminishes the lives of those who are caught up in the pursuit of sex without attachment. They eventually become those for whom genuine attachment is far more difficult. There are also less obvious consequences. As the philosopher Peter Kreeft has pointed out, the disruption in college of traditional sexual mores is part of the devaluation of truth and the rise of subjectivism; the emphasis on instant gratification undermines the habits of character that depend on patience and longer-term planning; and it cuts away the authority of the past in favor of the instant wisdom of the present and utopian dreams about the future. As Kreeft puts it, “If you want to restore liberal education, restore sexual morality. And if you want to restore sexual morality, restore liberal education. The same virtues of honor, self-control, innocence, purity, respect, patience, courage, and honesty are cultivated in both places. They reinforce each other.”

But one doesn’t need to go all the way to the mind of the moralist to recognize that we are cultivating deep problems by ignoring the meaning of sex. 

The Dartmouth student who attempted to suffocate her realization that she had tossed away her virginity by diminishing virginity to “just a total social construct” testifies to how difficult it is for contemporary college students to face the realities. Part of that difficulty is that they find themselves immersed in a sea of rationalizations for destructive behavior and invitations to wade in even deeper. The Dartmouth student, for example, now regards her sexual orientation as “queer.” That is to say, she has embraced the movement that rejects efforts to model same-sex attraction on age-old patterns of opposite-sex attraction. The wilderness of self-invention beckons. 

We are, however, not creatures who thrive in the wilderness. Both biologically and culturally, we need to plant ourselves in an order that accommodates our sexual complementarity. The meaning of sex is that it leads somewhere—somewhere beyond orgasms and the excitements of strangers. An older generation called that “somewhere” marriage. 

Peter Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars.