Lots of folks in the right-wing blogosphere are excited about this lengthy piece by Mary Eberstadt: Is Food the New Sex? It appears on the Hoover Institution’s website as part of their “Policy Review” series, and it seems an unlikely fit for a center more associated with promoting a staunchly conservative perspective on foreign affairs than on issues like, well, food and sex. The piece got a boost in attention after George Will made it the subject of his column last week.
Eberstadt’s piece is long, and perhaps convincing to those who don’t know their history a bit better. Her basic thesis: as recently as the 1950s, Americans were resolutely non-judgmental about what they ate, and deeply conservative about with whom they had sex. In the last half-century, Eberstadt opines, that moral calculus has been reversed. We now, to be vulgar, care more about what we put in our mouths than whom. Eberstadt offers us a hypothetical “Betty”, a thirty year-old housewife from the Eisenhower era, and “Jennifer”, a thirty year-old single woman from our own time. She summarizes their views thus: Betty thinks food is a matter of taste, whereas sex is governed by universal moral law; and Jennifer thinks exactly the reverse.
Eberstadt thinks that this isn’t a good thing, and is perhaps evidence of a deep inconsistency on the part of modern men and women, at least those modern folks with the sufficient resources to be discriminating about what it is that they eat. (If you are fond of snarky remarks about vegans, the slow food movement, and others who practice ethical consumption, you’ll love this piece. Otherwise, be warned, our Mary is rather tediously middle-brow in her evident contempt for those who are deeply concerned with what we eat.)
There’s a lot wrong with Eberstadt’s piece. First of all, her history is off. She imagines the 1950s as an age blissfully unconcerned with calories and weight, and writes as if dieting emerged sometime during the Sexual Revolution of the subsequent decade. As any student of the discipline known as “body history” knows, she’s off by decades. The first diet books hit the American market at the end of the First World War, in response both to the dramatic fashion changes emerging from France (the new, slim, sleek designs of Paul Poiret, the grandfather in a convoluted way of the flapper dress) and the sudden uptick in the availability of excess food for the majority of Americans (thanks to various technological changes, refrigeration not the least important.) Eberstadt would do well to read Joan Brumberg, our pre-eminent historian of the flesh; see her Fasting Girls and The Body Project.
One of the things about the 1920s is the emergence of what we might call the “moral language of food.” For the first time, as Brumberg’s exhaustive study of girls’ diaries has shown, young women begin to use words like “good” and “bad” to describe their eating habits. It’s in the 1920s, and no later, that we see the emergence of phrases like “I was so bad today” (to refer to an experience of eating something fattening) or “I’ve been good all week” (to refer to having adhered to a strict diet for several days.) Of course, to be entirely fair, it’s in the 1920s that we first see a secular moral language for eating. Any medievalist knows that centuries ago, rich and flavorful foods were given up as acts of penance, and a willingness to subsist on as little as possible (Catherine of Siena is a fine example) was seen as a mark of virtue, particularly for women. For medieval Christians, a disdain for the pleasures of the table was a sign of holiness. This wasn’t just a rejection of gluttony, but of carnal joy itself. (And surely Eberstadt recognizes the double meaning of carnal, which is an ancient one.)
Eberstadt thus makes the mistake that conservatives have been making since at least the Reagan Administration: looking back fondly at the 1950s with the stunningly false assumption that that genuinely anomalous decade represented America as it had always been previously. There may indeed have been women like Eberstadt’s “Betty” running around in 1959. But there weren’t many Bettys in 1929, or 1729, or 1329.
So her history is off. What else is wrong with Eberstadt’s thesis? For one thing, she misreads the emerging sexual ethic of the very people she villifies as inconsistent. She paints a typical false dichotomy: either one accepts the historic teaching of the Judeo-Christian world, that sex ought to be confined to heterosexual marriage, or one wanders inevitably off the path and into a thicket of exploitation, heartache, and orgiastic misery. But of course, the ethic practiced by the “Jennifers” of the world is surprisingly coherent. It is an ethic that de-centers marriage as the only locus of right sexual activity, and instead centers things like mutuality, emotional connection, and pleasure. While an earlier era grounded its morality in an obsession with right form , our modern era grounds its equally powerful morality in an equally worthy concern: content. For more on this, see this post of mine from last year. I wrote then:
“Content” based sexual ethics are concerned with the way in which people, in the process of being sexual, value themselves and their partners. Content-based ethics are deeply concerned with mutuality, with pleasure, and with the willingness of each partner to take responsibility for the physical, spiritual, and emotional consequences of what is done. Form-based ethics teach the Christian to ask the question “Am I allowed to do this?” Content-based ethics teach the Christian to ask “Am I truly loving — in every sense of the word — the person or persons with whom I am doing this, including myself?”
Eberstadt, like many traditionalists, doesn’t see “content-based sexual ethics” as having moral weight. But while she might not like the implications of this modern moral system, she and her right-wing allies go too far when they deny that it is in fact a coherent moral system at all — and one that has an excellent chance to lead to personal fulfillment and happiness. Yes, it’s an ethic made possible by greater economic opportunities for women and the availability of contraception. Of course, one could easily argue that a more restrictive ethic was necesary in the past only because of the absence of these opportunities and innovations. (If one wants a good Monday morning shudder — and perhaps a chuckle –, read this tiresomely familiar screed from good Father Longenecker: Contraceptives and the Economic Collapse. Inadvertently makes the point progressives inside and outside of the church have been making for decades: a desire to control women’s bodies is at the very heart of the traditionalist loathing of feminism.)
When it comes to food, most religious traditions proscribe certain foods eaten by outsiders. Jews won’t eat pork; Hindus won’t eat beef, and so forth. Though Christianity, thanks to Peter and Paul, tends to take a broader view about what can be eaten, Christian teaching has historically been suspicious not only of gluttony (because of its potential to deprive others of sustenance) but of excessive pleasure in eating. Veronika Grimm’s wonderful From Feasting to Fasting: the Evolution of a Sin makes this point. Writing about St. Augustine, Grimm notes:
When he urged upon his Christian flock in Hippo self-restraint in eating, Augustine certainly did not mean days without food or water, or giving up meat and wine. What he meant by fasting was the avoidance of enjoyment, the shunning of pleasure. This is how he defines fasting: “I do not ask from what food you abstain, but what food you choose. Tell what food you desire so I may approve your abstaining from that food.”
The objection is not to gluttony because it robs others of what is their share, nor is it an objection to environmental depradation or animal cruelty. It’s an explicit rejection of pleasure itself. Just as physical delight offers pleasure for its own sake, self-denial can offer evidence of righteousness for its own sake. But no other person or animal benefits from self-deprivation guided by such a moral calculus. The tragedy of asceticism and its influence on later Christian morality is that it elevates self-denial to the status of a moral good that needs no justification, that has no purpose other than to prove one’s own righteousness. This is a twisting indeed of the Gospel and the promise of abundant life!
My sexual ethic and my food ethic are rooted in my faith, but also in my reason and in my experience. They are rooted in the Gospel, and also the utilitarian ideal of Bentham and the the liberal ideal of Mill. Both boil down to this simple and exceedingly coherent point: we are called to do justice with our bodies. What does “just” eating look like? Just eating asks us to eat in ways that are sustainable for our planet, and that involve the least amount of cruelty and exploitation to other created beings as is possible. On both a sustainability level and a cruelty level, it’s hard not to see veganism as a morally coherent choice (though, to be fair, perhaps not the only morally coherent choice.) “Justice-based” eating asks what the impact on the world will be of buying tofu rather than steak, of supporting a local CSA rather than a supermaket. It’s a moral calculus rooted in the ancient commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves; we vegans have simply expanded the definition of neighbor to include non-human sentient beings — animals.
As for sex, the same is true. “Justice-based sex” doesn’t ask “Am I allowed to have sex with this person?” It asks “Does this person want to have sex with me?” Just as the vegan considers the desire of the cow to live and gambol in the fields to have moral bearing on our food choices, so too a modern person has an obligation to consider the desire of the other person to be paramount. But it’s not just mutuality that undergirds justice-based sex; desire is too fleeting and too fragile a foundation by itself. Two other pillars of justice-based sex are responsibility and honesty. Responsibility means a willingness to share the physical and emotional consequences of what happens sexually with another person. Honesty (an easy virtue for the traditionalists to ridcule) means more than a willingness to describe one’s own feelings accurately. It means acting sexually in a way that is consistent with one’s other commitments. Infidelity, because it does harm and it involves betrayal, is unethical sex because dishonesty brings clear and profound harm to both personal relationships and the broader fabric of society. It’s possible to have sex outside of a committed relationship while practicing mutuality, reponsibility, and honesty. While Eberstadt and her ilk judge sexual morality by things like the number of partners or the presence/absence of wedding rings, a modern morality is concerned with these more essential qualities of relationship and concern.
Eberstadt’s article is getting plenty of attention from traditionalists and conservatives. But as compelling a read as it is, she’s off the mark on both historical and moral grounds. The sexually active single person who cares about what she eats is not guilty of sloppy thinking, as Eberstadt would have us believe. More likely, she’s got a coherent moral philosophy that centers responsible, loving pleasure at the heart of her way of life.
I’m washed in the blood of the Lamb, and I’m quietly confident that my name is written in that Lamb’s Book of Life. And on the grounds of my faith in the Lamb, and on the grounds of my God-given capacity to reason, and as an incarnate sentient creature with the divinely-ordained capacity for joy, l’ll stand with the much-maligned “Jennifers”, thank you, and not with St. Augustine.
This is tangential, but I spent most of college thinking that Veronika Grimm’s junior seminar on “Food and Drink in Ancient Rome” sounded like an unbearably obscure topic for a class. (I was a history major at Yale, where Grimm teaches, or at least where she taught ten years ago.) Your post makes me glimpse the appeal for the first time.
I do landscape history now, but during my undergrad I took history courses on alcohol and food - one was a social history survey of alcohol since the dawn of alcohol, and another was a teensy bit more specific, focusing on food and drink in the Early Modern European World (so, hard to pin down as “social” because it was often military or environmental in scope, just to name two examples). Anyway, that background has made me especially sensitive to essentially ahistorical and/or revisionist treatments of food and its meaning, so I really appreciate your decision to put Eberstadt’s words in historical context.
Hugo,
I also don’t think that premarital sex is always necessarily immoral. Intercourse within the context of a loving, committed, long-term relationship is certainly not against _natural_ law, and I think that the scriptural grounds are fairly ambiguous and, in any event, written for a very different society in which we didn’t have things like contraception. Since there are many unmarried couples who love each other and are devoted to each other as much as married ones, I don’t think it’s wrong for them to be sexually active.
However, you take it much farther than I could accept when you say this: “It’s possible to have sex outside of a committed relationship while practicing mutuality, reponsibility, and honesty.” And when you generally defend consent and mutuality as the only things that make a sexual relationship consistent, or not. I think that the best grounds for arguing about sexual morality are natural-law ones. Within that framework, I think legitimate arguments can be made that neither premarital sex (within a loving relationship) or some forms of contraception are necessarily wrong. However, when you abandon the ideas of purpose, natural order, and final ends entirely, then I think you enter some very dangerous terrain.
Lastly, Hugo, you seem to be arguing (re: food) that asceticism and abstention from good things have no value in and of themselves. The liturgical season we are in right now, was devised for the very purpose of contradicting people who shared your opinion. I don’t have time right now to argue in favor of the inherent virtue of fasting from food, sex, and other pleasures, but suffice it to say that there’s a very strong Christian case for it.
I think it is not only natural, but even healthy to have thoughts about breaking fasts. However, what ultimately distinguishes the individual is whether they act on those impulses to cheat.
Abstention has no good in and of itself. It is good to abstain for the purpose of being reminded that we don’t really need what we think we need. We fast in order to be reminded that we aren’t as dependent on constant infusions of food as we had imagined. But that is worlds away from saying that self-denial is a primary good. It’s a temporary tool for an enhanced experience of God or the Light. If all we’re getting out of it is the priggish self-satisfaction of not indulging, we’ve missed the point.
Augustine makes the mistake of identifying sin as intimately tied in with pleasure, while it would be more accurate to say that sin is tied in to the forgetting of relationship. If our pursuit of pleasure causes us to forget our relationship with God or Her creatures, we’ve missed the boat. In those circumstances, a brief withdrawal from pleasure might help restore us to sanity.
Hugo,
We fast for the reasons you suggest, but also in order to restore the supremacy of spirit over flesh that was lost at the fall, and in order to share in Christ’s suffering on the cross. We can’t truly love God, or our fellow men, unless we first turn away from loving ourselves and the things of this world. Self-love is, as Augustine puts it, the first and most basic sin.
Self-love is a sin insofar as it blinds us to our obligations to others and to God — insofar as it limits our capacity to love. But self-denial is not an automatic guarantor that we will become more loving; if that were so, those who were most abstinent from food and sex and other carnal pleasures would be the kindest and most charitable of all, and that is certainly not always the case.
We live in tension, as Christians, between the Already and the Not Yet. We are called to love God more than the things of this world, but the things of this world are part and parcel of Creation, and Creation is good. Deny yourself pleasure if that makes you a better person, but don’t make the mistake of assuming that indulging in pleasure makes you less compassionate and less able to serve God’s creatures. We are incarnate for the sake of delighting in our incarnation, not merely for the sake of transcending it. (Unless you’re some sort of nutty Gnostic!)
“Augustine makes the mistake of identifying sin as intimately tied in with pleasure, while it would be more accurate to say that sin is tied in to the forgetting of relationship. If our pursuit of pleasure causes us to forget our relationship with God or Her creatures, we’ve missed the boat. In those circumstances, a brief withdrawal from pleasure might help restore us to sanity.”
This is absolutely right. I’m glad someone puts Augustine in his place finally.
Captcrisis,
St. Augustine was a smarter man than you, me or Hugo. He was certainly wrong about some things, but really, let’s give him his due here.
The Gnostic contempt for matter was many things, including wrong, first and foremost. But it wasn’t “nutty”. It was a compelling view on its own terms, and makes at least as much sense to me than, for example, modern atheistic materialism. (Parenthetically, I dislike the term ‘Gnostic’, as it lumps together some fairly well-intentioned people like Marcion and the Cathars, with some truly nasty individuals like Simon Magus or Carpocrates. I personally try not to use ‘gnostic’ in religious argument in the same way that I try not to use the term ‘fascist’ in political argument.)
As for your name being written in the book of Life, Hugo, isn’t that a theologically dubious proposition? I certainly don’t know if I’m ’saved’ or not, and I’m aware that as a being with free will, I could make any number of decisions in the future that will damn me. To claim that I ‘know’ I’m saved would be to commit the sin of presumption.
Oh, those crazy Cathars and that good old anti-Semite, Marcion. Love ‘em. ;-)
You forget I sometimes dabble in Calvinism, Hector; on my Calvinist days, I fall prey to doctrines like “unconditional election” and the “perseverance of the saints” and “irresistible grace” (though never the other parts of TULIP). Calvinists are very sure of their salvation.
I didn’t say I was a Cathar, I said there was a lot that I found compelling and admirable in them. Marcion was opposed to the Jewish religion, not the Jewish race, that’s a far cry from anti-Semitism, and what he said about the Jews is no worse than what we as Christians say about, say, the Carthaginians (i.e. that they were worshiping an evil power). Does that make me guilty of anti-Punicism? Actually, Marcion didn’t even said that- he said the Jews were worshiping a _lesser_ god, a _just_ god, not an evil one. Which makes the accusation of anti-semitism even less meaningful. I’m not a Marcionite either, but I’m at times sympathetic to some of the neo-Marcionite arguments of Simone Weil. The purpose of the Old Testament, to me, is to prophecy and set up the Incarnation: whatever doesn’t in some way prophecy Christ, I find of little value personally.
I confess to not knowing much about Calvinism, but do you then not believe in free will? How is the perseverance of the saints compatible with free will?
Two things about Augustine and the contempt for matter.
1. As someone put it, “The Via Negativa cuts dead across the Emmaus road.”
2. When you require contempt for matter you are placing happiness and godliness out of the reach of the ordinary person, who has to earn a living, raise kids, and enjoys a beer, and doesn’t have the time to engage in these lengthy ascetic meditations.
The idea that anti-Semitism only applies to “Jews as a race” is nonsense. For centuries various factions in the Catholic Church sought to expel the Jews from their lands, steal their children and force them to convert to Christianity because they believed they were deniers of Christ. That’s not anti-Semitism?
As for Eberstadt, you know, Hugo, you could have stopped reading at “Hoover Institution”. There are many intelligent, intellectually honest conservatives out there; those affiliated with the Really We’re Part Of Stanford Honest We Are! think tank aren’t among them.
Mythago,
Er, Marcion didn’t want to force Jews to convert, or to otherwise be suppressed by the civil law. He held that the Jews were worshiping a stupid and malicious lesser angel, and that beyond the grave they would have nothing but death. That isn’t, inherently, an anti-Semitic position, any more than saying that the Regensburg criticism of Islam from a couple years ago is a bigoted position. It’s a theological position, and it needs to be refuted or accepted on the grounds of theology, not on some politically correct arguments about tolerance. Really, it would be nice if we could get through all the politically correct business about ‘bigotry’ and ‘tolerance’ and assess arguments on their theological merits or lack thereof. I think that Marcion was wrong in his blanket rejection of the Old Testament and the creation of the world; he did, however, point out some weaknesses in the orthodox Christian view of the Old Testament, the tension between justice and love, and the problem of evil, and I’m very grateful to him for that.
Apropos the stealing of Jewish children, while this was of course a monstrous atrocity it’s also worth remembering that it was condemned by many church leaders including by Aquinas himself. see below:
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3010.htm#article12
Captcrisis, dualist heresies were actually very popular among the common people at many points in time, most notably in 13th century France.
Glad to see you acknowledge dualism as a heresy, Hector!
Of course I believe in free will; I’m not really a Calvinist. I was being glib — but I do think we can trust in God’s promise of love, and that we will never be separated from Him. I think that a taste of that love is strong enough to know, with as much certainty as any of us can have on this earth, that we will never be cast away from him. One thinks of the final glorious lines of Romans 8, the high point of all of Scripture as far as I’m concerned.
Re: Glad to see you acknowledge dualism as a heresy, Hector!
Well, I mean, a ‘heresy’ from the point of view of the Catholic church. I try not to use the word ‘heresy’ myself too much since I’m aware that some of my own views are heretical. I do think that, yes, the Cathars and Marcionites were wrong to say that this world was the creation of an evil power, and that the Creed is right in saying that it was the creation of God. I do think, though, that dualism provided, in some regards, a more compelling answer to the problem of evil than orthodox Christianity, and that we may have something to learn from them in that regard.
So in short, although I’m aware that dualism is a heresy it’s one I’ve always had a good deal of sympathy for. Regarding being cast away from God, well of course we will never be ‘cast away from God.’ That’s not the issue, the issue is can I _choose_, by my own free will, to tear myself away from God and choose hell. and I certainly think that’s possible, even for one who has been baptized. (Perhaps even more for one who has been baptized, since we no longer have as much of an excuse of ignorance.)
Ah. Human rights are not a part of your ‘natural law’, and it’s proper for Christians to decide whether Christianity says Jews should be treated fairly or not.
Mythago,
Did you not read my post? The proposition ‘Christianity is a better religion than Judaism’, or say, ‘The Carthaginians worship a demon’ are theological questions, not matters of so-called ‘human rights’. The question of whether Jews should not have their children stolen is quite a different matter, and one which Aquinas (and I) answer in the negative.
And if you start telling me that ‘human rights’ require that we acknowledge that all religions are equally valid and worship the true God, truly understood, then I’m just going to laugh.
Eberstadt’s refusal to honestly engage with what she sees as her ideological opponents drives me crazy. Instead of getting a forthright defense of her perspective on sexual morality, we get this half-baked, historically ignorant exercise in question begging.
I’d pay in blood, almost literally, to see Eberstadt respond honestly to Hugo and to the idea that ‘Jennifer’ is not sexually chaotic, but, rather, subscribes to a different, internally consistent, and perfect legitimate alternative sexual morality. But we won’t get that, because to do so would be to undermine the real action here; Eberstadt isn’t interested at all in her purported thesis, but, rather, is trying to slip the assumption that the conservative-50s-fantasy-myth-era sexual morality is the gold standard by which other ways of thinking about sex and intimate relationships should be judged under the door before the first word of the essay has even been read.
It’s intellectually dishonest. In a properly run universe, Eberstadt would be ashamed to be so openly deceitful.
“Self-love is a sin insofar as it blinds us to our obligations to others and to God — insofar as it limits our capacity to love.”
This kind of contradicts that old advice chestnut, “How dare you even think that you could love someone else when you don’t even love yourself.” (Which is complete rubbish anyway.)