These are just a few off-the-cuff (what does that mean, anyway?) thoughts which I’m not going to make any great attempt to organize. They’re provoked by two things: one, this remark by Louise in a comment on the previous post:
What women seem to want (from my POV, though I am reluctant to extrapolate to others, even from my actual experience of being a woman!) is love and it seems, these days, that they are willing to settle for sex.
The other thing is the fact that my wife has been exchanging text messages since late yesterday afternoon with a friend who is out in Texas with her daughter, who is, as I write, in the process of giving birth to her first child. It’s now about noon on Sunday, and the young woman has been in labor since Saturday evening, and as far as my wife has heard the baby has still not been born.
I suspect Louise is right, although I admit the question of what and how women think about sex remains a mystery to me. All I can say with any confidence is that it isn’t the same as what and how men think.
It appears that a very large factor for women is the sense of being desired, of being affirmed as attractive. I was struck, many years ago, even as many women were asserting that there really wasn’t any big difference between men and women, by the fact that the covers of men’s magazines featured sexy women, and the covers of women’s magazines also featured sexy women. And I suspect there is often a misunderstanding of the connection between being desired and being loved. There is not necessarily, in the male mind, a connection between physical desire and emotional affection—there may be one, but there may well not be.
The ideal of the attractive woman is the beauty of youth, and, implicitly, of fertility. So we see women, long after the point where they can hope to compete in the beauty contest with young women, desperately trying to make themselves look younger, to emulate the look that goes with the ability to make babies.
And yet our culture has done everything it possibly can, and is always trying to do more, to separate the sexual act from procreation. Women try desperately to keep themselves forever looking as if they are of childbearing age and eligibility, and yet the child is the last thing they want. You don’t have to accept, or fully accept, the Catholic teaching about this to see that there is something fundamentally misguided about it. Our bodies are designed for reproduction, and this is more strikingly true for women than men—that is, more of their physical system is oriented to reproduction than is the case for men.
So it stands to reason that on some level, even if it’s unconscious, women would always have some awareness of the seriousness of sex. After our first baby was born—and it was a difficult birth—my wife said she was just amazed to think that every person walking around in the world was here because some woman had gone through what she had just gone through. And I remember thinking that I should always remember that every sex act had the potential to bring about the scene I had just witnessed (and, in an obviously limited way, participated in).
I think the separation of sex from marriage and procreation may be the single greatest cultural disaster of our time. If I had the power to make one idea fully accepted by young people, it would be the consciousness that sex naturally leads to babies, and that one should not engage in sex unless one is fully prepared to accept the baby. This applies just as well where contraception is being used, because as we all know it can always fail.
For the man, of course, this means accepting the woman as she really is, with all her potential fertility, not as an attractive toy forever frozen at the moment of greatest sexual attractiveness—always a flower, never a fruit. It’s hard to do, because the flower is so alluring, and because she is going to change in ways that are going to make her less physically alluring and also less concerned with him and more with their children. But the man should know that his love for a woman means being there with her, nine months after the fun, when she is struggling in pain and fear to bring forth the new life. A woman should be able to know that he will be there.
“Respected and beloved companion.” I think most of us, men and women alike, want to be one, and to have one. How old was Pope Paul VI when he wrote those words? 75 or so? Funny that a celibate old man could see that, while most of the world couldn’t. Or wouldn’t.
If a woman feels herself to be that respected and beloved companion, she won’t have to be so anxious about her looks as she grows older. And if a man feels himself to be such, he won’t feel so anxious about what the world thinks of his accomplishments, or lack thereof.
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