So, I let vent the other day about the way that cinemas sanitise death for a family audience. This got me thinking -- though I just about managed to restrain myself from throwing it all in to one particularly extended and rambling discourse -- about the other aspects of human existence you do and don't expect to see in a 12A. One obvious no-no is, understandably, graphic sex -- cue lots of suggestive cut-aways just at the moment of hand-buttock contact, or of one foot leaving the floor, or of a directional transition towards the horizontal... (Basically, any of the various happenings they warn you about in those start-of-term Christian Union pep talks).
But, as with death, sex can be cheapened even while it is not being explicitly depicted -- and that's what I think happens when it's treated as 'no big deal'. Of course it alienates me terribly to say so, because 'no big deal' is, in most cases, the widely agreed-upon standard of healthy sexuality that we should all be aspiring to. I guess it's something of a pendulum swing away from a certain type of puritanical moralising considered responsible for a whole load of self-loathing, confusion, repression and guilt. I can well see why well-intentioned entertainment makers might want protect their young audiences from such voices, drown them out with a different message. But, well, I'm not convinced by the championed alternative either; 'just sex' -- first and foremost fun, fine in casual (consenting) contexts, fundamentally separate from its optional life-conceiving functionality -- just doesn't square with whatever else I think I know about human nature.
I recently read John Updike's Rabbit, Run -- a book with enough sexual content to have been considered a serious publication risk when it was finished in 1960, as Updike relates in reference to a conversation with his publisher:
So Rabbit, Run is not exactly 12A material ... but I can't help but think that it would make a pretty good sex-ed resource for teenagers starting to make decisions about these sorts of things. Ha, who'm I kidding? It'd be a disaster ... they'd most of them flip through to the sexy bits, snigger at "her warmth", "their mixed fur", "the sensitive core of his love", ignore the rest as boring and weird, then reminisce decades later about how school had put them off literature for life by making them write endless essays about why some pretend guy with a stupid name kept screwing up all the time. Which is a shame because, without descending into preaching or guilt-mongering, the novel provides a wealth of honest insights about that most imperative of adolescent mysteries, "what is sex actually like?" -- just the sort of data that is helpful when faced with choices about things as-yet unknown. I like to think it would encourage a more critical appraisal of the 'no big deal' ideal; Updike depicts a world in which people are too precious, too fragile, too cruel for 'just sex' to be realised in practice.
We like to draw lines, we Christians. These behaviours are acceptable; these are unacceptable. This film is appropriate; this book is inappropriate. It simplifies things. We don't have to think so much, and we always know how we're supposed to feel. Stray across the lines and we must suffer the discomfort of our own self-recrimination and the disapproval of anyone else who happens to find out. Stick within them, though, and we can relish the luxuries of complacent self-righteousness. And, after all, there's some leeway in deciding where the lines lie in the first place: a bit of ingenious gerrymandering and we (the mutually reinforcing majority) get to make sure it's normally 'someone else' who's on the outside...
But Jesus... it's almost like he doesn't respect our carefully mapped-out lines -- as though he's determined to colour all over them, like a child with a completely different picture in mind to the one in the colouring book...
By no means am I just talking about sex, or trying to turn it into a special case. Large swathes of the Sermon on the Mount are directed against that underlying human tendency to view and treat others primarily in terms of their utility or indebtedness to us: by unleashing contempt and anger against those who displease us (Matthew 5:22); by demanding 'our own back' wherever we feel owed or wronged (Matthew 5:38-42); by finding fault and taking self-satisfied reassurance from the failures of others (Matthew 7:1-5); by approval-seeking self-promotion which reduces the rest of the world to little more than an audience for the Me Show (Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18).
I was always terrified of the Sermon on the Mount. "You think you're doing pretty badly as it is but look at all these other, subtle, unstoppable, subconscious ways you're getting it more crucially and condemnably wrong than you ever imagined -- and that before opening your eyes or wiping the drool from your cheek of a morning." That's all I could hear from it at my most self-despairing, and for a long time I preferred to skip to the comforting soteriology of the epistles; the reassurances that, yes, I can never begin to hope to meet the perfect righteous requirements of God as set down in the words and example of Jesus but it is OK because "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith." (Romans 3:23-25a)
And this reassurance is needed; Jesus' description of righteousness is overwhelmingly unattainable! I can't simply pull myself up by the bootstraps and make myself right with God; I desperately need grace. But ... the Sermon on the Mount is not just the mirror to guilt that I reduced it to (and avoided it as) for all those years. It is also a mirror to our worth in God's eyes. The reason there's so many more ways of getting it wrong than we ever imagined is that that person next to you -- and, by extension, that person in the mirror -- are so much more precious than we ever allowed for. All of which is precisely why Romans 3:23-25 as above...
It is also why I don't buy the 12A rom-com corrective towards 'no big deal' sex. My lingering awe feels too healthy to send me seeking after a cure. Why not be awed? ... by the mysterious preciousness and unknowableness of the person beside me ... by an act that produces life, that testifies to death, that cements and destroys relationships [2] ... more generally, by the responsibility I take upon myself as soon as I start making judgments about who is good, bad, worthy of life, deserving of death, meriting attention or a matter of indifference. To remedy such an awe would seem a morbid sort of relief.
[1] The fact that his disciples do not seem to have mutilated themselves in the manner recommended confirms, I think, that the instruction is intended as a wake-up call rather than as the most fitting solution to the problem of temptation. It occurs to me that, actually, it isn't 'my hand' or 'my eye' that causes me to sin, it's 'my will' -- which no self-surgery can excise; it requires an entire death of self (cf. Luke 9:23-25, Romans 12:1-2, Galatians 2:20).
[2] An act that is even, in an horrific and unthinkably grotesque inversion of its potency, frequently weaponised.
[Thumbnail image cc from smudie on Flickr].
But, as with death, sex can be cheapened even while it is not being explicitly depicted -- and that's what I think happens when it's treated as 'no big deal'. Of course it alienates me terribly to say so, because 'no big deal' is, in most cases, the widely agreed-upon standard of healthy sexuality that we should all be aspiring to. I guess it's something of a pendulum swing away from a certain type of puritanical moralising considered responsible for a whole load of self-loathing, confusion, repression and guilt. I can well see why well-intentioned entertainment makers might want protect their young audiences from such voices, drown them out with a different message. But, well, I'm not convinced by the championed alternative either; 'just sex' -- first and foremost fun, fine in casual (consenting) contexts, fundamentally separate from its optional life-conceiving functionality -- just doesn't square with whatever else I think I know about human nature.
I recently read John Updike's Rabbit, Run -- a book with enough sexual content to have been considered a serious publication risk when it was finished in 1960, as Updike relates in reference to a conversation with his publisher:
"The reservations turned out to be (he could tell me this only face to face, so legally touchy was the matter) sexually explicit passages that might land us -- this was suggested with only a glint of irony -- in jail. [...] Not wishing, upon reflection, to lose the publisher who made the handsomest books in America, and doubting that I could get a more liberal deal elsewhere, I did, while sitting at the elbow of a young lawyer evidently expert in this delicate area, consent to a number of excisions -- not always the ones I would have expected." (John Updike, Rabbit Run, 'Afterword by the Author', 1960)To me it seems immensely ironic that such a book should have stood suspect alongside 'dirty novels' and outright porn. Updike's descriptions of sex are as emotionally as they are physically graphic, exploring the preciousness, the brokenness, the vulnerability of human individuals in their aloneness, in their hunger to connect, and in their potential to damage one another. The sex scenes and the characters' remembrances of past experiences are woven into the deeply theologically thoughtful whole of the book. They seem written, not to 'titillate' (the physical clumsiness and intermittent bleakness of the encounters ensure against that), but to affirm the unfashionable and often undesirable link between bodily and spiritual intermingling -- a mysterious union longed for and dreaded and so nearly within reach but never quite grasped and yet never quite relinquished once touched...
...he clings there, his teeth bared in a silent exclamation, crying out against her smothering throat that it is not her body he wants, not the flesh and bones, but her, her.Updike is grimly real about the ugliness of sex whenever there is an asymmetry in respect, honour, duty, desire, or care. Mutated by selfishness, the ultimate physical expression of romantic love becomes a powerful vehicle for cruelty and heartlessness; when it's not forging the closest, most trusting of connections it is rending the widest of chasms...
[...]
As they deepen together he feels impatience that through all their twists they remain separate flesh; he cannot dare enough, now that she is so much his friend in this search; everywhere they meet a wall.
[...]
He looks in her face and seems to read in its shadows an expression of forgiveness, as if she knows that at the moment of release, the root of love, he betrayed her by feeling despair.
[...]
"What's it like?"
"Oh. It's like falling through."
"Where do you fall to?"
"Nowhere. I can't talk about it."
...he realizes she hasn't had it for three months and in all that time has got an unreal idea of what sex is. She has imagined it into something rare and precious she's entitled to half of when all he wants is to get rid of it so he can move on...
...that was the funny thing it was his bad deed yet she was supposed not to have any pride afterwards to just be a pot for his dirt.The events of the novel also firmly and fearfully contextualise the act of sex within the cycle of new life and of death -- a reality which, well, should be pretty obvious, but is strangely obscured by our multifarious contrivances to isolate the recreational aspects of sex from its biologically functional ones. However proficient we get at preventing sex from making people (actual people! conscious, sentient, reasoning bundles of anxieties, longings, responsibilities, needs) that is, after all, what it's for, from a dispassionately scientific perspective...the full weight of this potential is inseparable from the act. And, on the other side of that coin, the unambiguously bodily nature of it, not to mention the phenomenon of post-coital tristesse, guarantee it to be something of a memento mori -- as acknowledged idiomatically by the expression la petite mort.
So Rabbit, Run is not exactly 12A material ... but I can't help but think that it would make a pretty good sex-ed resource for teenagers starting to make decisions about these sorts of things. Ha, who'm I kidding? It'd be a disaster ... they'd most of them flip through to the sexy bits, snigger at "her warmth", "their mixed fur", "the sensitive core of his love", ignore the rest as boring and weird, then reminisce decades later about how school had put them off literature for life by making them write endless essays about why some pretend guy with a stupid name kept screwing up all the time. Which is a shame because, without descending into preaching or guilt-mongering, the novel provides a wealth of honest insights about that most imperative of adolescent mysteries, "what is sex actually like?" -- just the sort of data that is helpful when faced with choices about things as-yet unknown. I like to think it would encourage a more critical appraisal of the 'no big deal' ideal; Updike depicts a world in which people are too precious, too fragile, too cruel for 'just sex' to be realised in practice.
We like to draw lines, we Christians. These behaviours are acceptable; these are unacceptable. This film is appropriate; this book is inappropriate. It simplifies things. We don't have to think so much, and we always know how we're supposed to feel. Stray across the lines and we must suffer the discomfort of our own self-recrimination and the disapproval of anyone else who happens to find out. Stick within them, though, and we can relish the luxuries of complacent self-righteousness. And, after all, there's some leeway in deciding where the lines lie in the first place: a bit of ingenious gerrymandering and we (the mutually reinforcing majority) get to make sure it's normally 'someone else' who's on the outside...
But Jesus... it's almost like he doesn't respect our carefully mapped-out lines -- as though he's determined to colour all over them, like a child with a completely different picture in mind to the one in the colouring book...
You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell. It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.(Matthew 5:27-32)(NB: Jewish law itself did not forbid divorce; cf. Matthew 19:1-12). Sexual morality is not a matter of what we can or can't get away with. It is not our observable adherence to a checklist of behaviours which marks us out as OK or not OK. We fall short of righteousness every time we mentally objectivise a person; every time we dismiss someone, devalue someone, look at someone through the besmirched filter of what we can or can't 'get' from them. Whatever we understand Jesus to mean by 'hell', it is absolutely clear that the consequences of giving sway to our selfish desires -- and, in doing so, of reducing other people to nothing more than ends to those desires, to be discarded when they cease to meet those ends -- are utterly appalling. The ferocity of his language challenges us that we evidently haven't grasped quite how appalling or we would be doing everything in our capacity to release ourselves from that sway. [1]
By no means am I just talking about sex, or trying to turn it into a special case. Large swathes of the Sermon on the Mount are directed against that underlying human tendency to view and treat others primarily in terms of their utility or indebtedness to us: by unleashing contempt and anger against those who displease us (Matthew 5:22); by demanding 'our own back' wherever we feel owed or wronged (Matthew 5:38-42); by finding fault and taking self-satisfied reassurance from the failures of others (Matthew 7:1-5); by approval-seeking self-promotion which reduces the rest of the world to little more than an audience for the Me Show (Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18).
I was always terrified of the Sermon on the Mount. "You think you're doing pretty badly as it is but look at all these other, subtle, unstoppable, subconscious ways you're getting it more crucially and condemnably wrong than you ever imagined -- and that before opening your eyes or wiping the drool from your cheek of a morning." That's all I could hear from it at my most self-despairing, and for a long time I preferred to skip to the comforting soteriology of the epistles; the reassurances that, yes, I can never begin to hope to meet the perfect righteous requirements of God as set down in the words and example of Jesus but it is OK because "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith." (Romans 3:23-25a)
And this reassurance is needed; Jesus' description of righteousness is overwhelmingly unattainable! I can't simply pull myself up by the bootstraps and make myself right with God; I desperately need grace. But ... the Sermon on the Mount is not just the mirror to guilt that I reduced it to (and avoided it as) for all those years. It is also a mirror to our worth in God's eyes. The reason there's so many more ways of getting it wrong than we ever imagined is that that person next to you -- and, by extension, that person in the mirror -- are so much more precious than we ever allowed for. All of which is precisely why Romans 3:23-25 as above...
It is also why I don't buy the 12A rom-com corrective towards 'no big deal' sex. My lingering awe feels too healthy to send me seeking after a cure. Why not be awed? ... by the mysterious preciousness and unknowableness of the person beside me ... by an act that produces life, that testifies to death, that cements and destroys relationships [2] ... more generally, by the responsibility I take upon myself as soon as I start making judgments about who is good, bad, worthy of life, deserving of death, meriting attention or a matter of indifference. To remedy such an awe would seem a morbid sort of relief.
[1] The fact that his disciples do not seem to have mutilated themselves in the manner recommended confirms, I think, that the instruction is intended as a wake-up call rather than as the most fitting solution to the problem of temptation. It occurs to me that, actually, it isn't 'my hand' or 'my eye' that causes me to sin, it's 'my will' -- which no self-surgery can excise; it requires an entire death of self (cf. Luke 9:23-25, Romans 12:1-2, Galatians 2:20).
[2] An act that is even, in an horrific and unthinkably grotesque inversion of its potency, frequently weaponised.
[Thumbnail image cc from smudie on Flickr].
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