The council of Toledo (400 AD) declined to excommunicate a man who lived faithfully with a concubine. But half a century later, Pope Leo ruled that a previous relationship with a concubine did not exclude marriage: this was not bigamy, but moral improvement. [...] Bishop Callistus of Rome, in the mid-second century, caused outrage by ruling that such cohabitations, though they were not marriages in law, need not be denounced as fornication. Gillian Clark, Women in Late AntiquityThe infamous and biennial Sex Week at Yale begins tomorrow, which means that matters of love have been on everyone's mind. While Housemate Will has been trying to get his burqa admitted into the lingerie show ("Gentlemen members of the Committee for Freedom are expected to donate $5 to the burqa fund"), I've been wondering what an appropriate-yet-appealing alternative to "Sex: Why Not?" might be, and how to fit it onto a sandwich board.
Hard-line prudery has the advantage of making a good protest chant, but until it becomes practical for college students to marry it isn't likely to make a dent in the paperback sales of I Am Charlotte Simmons, which leaves conservatives searching for a middle ground between the ideal (no dating without the prospect of marriage; chastity outside marriage) and the nightmare scenario (what exists now).
I am basically on board with the Church sticking to her guns on chastity* (although we'll see what happens when I finish Boswell). ("It sounds like a parlor game. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: pick two." —Eve) A bigger problem is the notion that all dating should be oriented (however distantly) towards marriage. If we take it as a rule of thumb that one should never date a girl for more than a year without marrying her, then it becomes impossible to date in one's first three years at college. There is a Very Highly Placed Officer of the Yale Political Union who refuses to date before he's "settled" (read: rich) enough to marry, which he expects to be sometime around thirty.
Preliminary Conclusion: "No sex before marriage" is difficult in a world where people don't marry until their mid- to late-twenties but essentially fine. "No dating that isn't directed towards marriage" is a bigger problem.
Another data point that fits into the constellation "Christian hook-up culture" is something that happened a few nights ago: Housemate Dara was unhappy and I was fulfilling my obligation to comfort her when I realized that, while our script was fine, the blocking was off: I was saying the right things, but the fact that I hadn't given her a hug was some kind of failure. There is some bundle of physical activities that go along with marriage, and to neglect them makes a marriage bad or incomplete. So too with friendship. So too with dating.
This is important for the following reason: in the same way that Christian theology understands "girlfriend/boyfriend" as somewhere on the spectrum between "stranger" and "spouse," it also puts all physical intimacy somewhere between "handshake" and "the sacrament of marriage." Putting my arm around Dara when she's unhappy is an instance of physical intimacy that technically fits somewhere on this spectrum, but it wouldn't make sense to put it there.
Campus hook-ups as they exist now are either "not quite sex" or "sex," and, unfortunately, very few college students can give themselves any compelling reason to stop at the former. The prevalence of out-of-wedlock sex on college campuses could conceivably be side-stepped by inventing some genre of hook-up that isn't part of a declension that ends in sex.
Preliminary Conclusion: In the same way that campus culture suggests that there should be a genre of dating alienated from the march towards wedlock, it also suggests that there should be a genre of intimacy that isn't part of the spectrum between a handshake and sex but makes sense independently.
This shouldn't be taken to mean that the problems of hook-up culture would be solved by replacing it with another kind of sexual free-for-all that respects certain deontological bright lines. For one thing, that fails to address the emotional consequences of a romantic scene centered around hooking up. (The Women's Political Forum discussion focused on these — who'd'a thunk?) However, if I were to draw up a list of every kind of college student romance I could think of (the Two Drunks at a Frat Party, the Summer Romance, the Doomed Love, etc.), I could probably get a committee of morally sensitive people to differentiate between ones where a hook-up would be emotionally disastrous and the ones where it would be genre-appropriate.
Preliminary Conclusion: While it's true that some kinds of non-marriage-oriented dating are bad (drunken one-night stands, boo!), this doesn't mean that every kind of non-marriage-oriented dating is (summer romance, yay!). Further research into which genres of dating are acceptable despite being alienated from marriage should consult Hollywood and the Western Canon.
One alternative to hook-up culture that was popular with the ladies of the WPF was this: "Chastity until marriage is impractical, but hooking up is bad for women, so college students should pursue committed long-term relationships and exercise their own judgment about what level of physical contact they think is appropriate within that." This sounds appealingly humanistic, and makes sense in a world where marriage is obsolete, but inventing some kind of mini-marriage is bad for actual marriage. The attitude towards late antique concubinage was "It's like marriage, only different"; the WPF's attitude towards committed relationships between college students is "It's like marriage, only smaller." The difference is crucial. The latter suggests that commitment is the thing that makes sex appropriate in marriage, when the real reason is much more complicated. (If it's commitment that's important, then why reject gay marriage? Where does the fact that sex makes children fit it?) The alternative to the current Sex Week culture that I've sketched raises its own questions, but I am more confident that it leaves marriage untouched than I am about the WPF's solution. Not totally confident, but more.
*The two things complicating this are the Gillian Clark quote above and some edition of Bernard of Clairvaux's sermons that I read ages ago — as I remember it, the introduction said that his sermons on the Song of Songs obviously assumed that his audience (monks, not laity) had some familiarity with sex. I wouldn't swear to it, though, and I'm not sure it would make a difference if I did.
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