Men, Women, Sex, and Reality
Sophia blushed and half smiled; but, forcing again her brow into a frown—“If I am to judge,” said she, “of the future by the past, my image will no more remain in your heart when I am out of your sight, than it will in this glass when I am out of the room.”
“By heaven, by all that is sacred!” said Jones, “it never was out of my heart. The delicacy of your sex cannot conceive the grossness of ours, nor how little one sort of amour has to do with the heart.”
“I will never marry a man,” replied Sophia, very gravely, ”who shall not learn refinement enough to be as incapable as I am myself of making such a distinction.”
—Fielding, Tom Jones
Tom, in this scene, is trying to persuade his true love, Sophia, that his several sexual encounters with other women had nothing to do with his heart and with his love for her. Not all women are “incapable” of making the distinction to which Sophia refers, but much grief in the realm of love and marriage, and therefore in human life altogether, arises from the fact that the separation of sex from both love and procreation does come far more easily to men than to women. Try as we may to deny it in the name of equality, I am convinced that this is a fact, and one so obvious that I won’t bother to defend it.
Of course there are exceptions. Some women are physically stronger than some men, but that doesn’t change the fact that most men are physically stronger than most women. Some women treat sex like most men do; some men treat it like most women do. But the generalization holds true. As my wife put it recently, in her straightforward and succinct way: “Men don’t get how important the love part is to women.”
It makes sense that women would grasp the sex-love-children connection more readily than men; it’s built into their bodies. I think it generally takes a real (although perhaps unconscious) effort on a woman’s part (or the effects of drugs or alcohol) for her to shut out the knowledge that the man in her arms may be the father of her child, and therefore the person to whom she should be devoted, and who should be devoted to her. In any case I think it’s pretty obvious that it is generally more difficult for a woman to separate love from sex, and that it requires something like an act of self-injury for her to do it on a continuing basis. The usual result of this self-inflicted violence is anger and depression, on display among women everywhere in the modern world, especially, these days, among younger women.
I’ll go a bit further and say that the body-soul separation is not as pronounced—not as clear and severe—in women as it is in men. I’ve said before that it seems to me that women are their bodies in a way that men are not—that is, in the way they perceive themselves, the way they view their relationship to the world. And when a woman gives her body it is difficult for her not to give her heart. And when she freely gives both her heart and her body she has given her whole self, often irrevocably. I quote my wife again, describing the life of a friend whose whole life was affected by what could be described as the gravitational pull of an early love affair in which she gave all: “It didn’t mean much to him, but to her it meant everything.”
And although it opens the woman to heartbreak, this is the way it ought to be; in this respect woman’s instincts are more healthy and whole, less fallen, closer to what God intends, than man’s. A man is more likely to feel his body as something separate from him, something he inhabits. It is generally easier for him to treat sex as a pure physical pleasure, not only without commitment but quite possibly without any affection at all. And if a child is conceived there is no physical reason why he can’t walk away from the situation, or indeed why he should even know that it has occurred. (I don’t mean to imply, by the way, that women are not as capable as men of using sex in a dishonest, exploitative, and generally sinful way; they certainly are, but it’s usually in a different and more complex way than men.)
So from a very worldly point of view it might seem that men have an easier time, and that the simple biology of being human is unfair to women.
But that’s a superficial way of looking at it. The spiritual reality is the same for both men and women, and one day men will see it. They—I guess I had better say “we”—we will see that every sexual act involved our souls, whether we knew it or not. Our biological good fortune creates an illusion: we are like people who can’t feel pain, and so can suffer terrible injuries without realizing it. The damage is done whether we feel it or not, and greater than it might have been had our senses told us of the danger. The burned fingers no longer grasp; the broken leg no longer supports.
This is another example of the truth Jesus keeps trying to get us to understand, with only limited success: that the way we see things is not the way God sees them, and that in fact the two may be directly opposed—the first shall be last, and the last shall be first; the one who suffers most is given most. Men may scorn as weak the vulnerable heart of the woman, and think ourselves strong because we don’t feel the same pain; we may be pleased that sex is a thing we do, not a gift of our essential being. But we bring a curse upon ourselves:
you will say That
is a dead thingand you will be talking about the entry
to a chamber of your heartyou will say of that door
It is a thingand you will be speaking of your heart
—W. S. Merwin, “A Door”
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