Progressive sexual pessimism vs exclusive lifelong fidelity

The University Press has splendidly celebrated its acquiring a new head, in the person of Prof. Henry Frendo, by publishing two volumes, each of nearly 700 pages, called The European Mind. In the light of your long-term and at times close connection with the European Union, how valuable a contribution do you think these almost one million printed words make in our current context?

I remember more than four years ago attending the 10th world congress of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas at Tal-Qroqq. There were some 400 scholars from some 40 countries, many of them chasing the poker-faced Prof. Frendo with logistic problems.

In this jamboree-type of academic atmosphere, the participants are inevitably divided into separate workshops, and I remember myself shuttling between one on the Mediterranean and another on the Constitution.

Now, from the edited selection of papers, I discovered that there were a cluster of three workshops that were even more juicy. They turn out to be strangely pertinent to questions which I have been rather reluctantly striving to answer in the media, such as whether sexual intercourse carries any implication of lifelong fidelity or what are the deep sources of paedophile fascination.

One might not at first have expected such topics to feature so prominently in a conference on European ideas, but on reflection it was already then occurring to readers of the signs of the times that biology was becoming even more politically relevant than electronics in Europe. This was not only because of demographic trends but also because of the deep cross influences between sexual/gender relations and enterprising/depressive attitudes in all fields of personal and social life.

What is the key theme discussed in this cluster of papers?

The trend of thought that was taken to be culturally prevalent in Europe was labelled ‘progressive sexual pessimism’. It was called progressive because its exponents (of whom possibly the best known is French novelist Michel Houellebecq) take for granted the occurrence of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s.

The great symbol of this revolution, which took place in Europe as well as in America, is the Kinsey Report. The only criterion for distinguishing between good sex and bad sex, in Kinsey’s perspective, was whether it was consented to or not.

Forty years later, both American and European novelists (such as Adam Thirlwell in his best-selling novel Politics) have been describing life lived according to the Kinsey model as actually leading generally to frustration and unhappiness rather than to liberation and joy. Sociologists and philosophers have joined them in presenting arguments why it naturally turns out to be so. This is why, although progressives, they are also called pessimists.

Nevertheless, they do not, like conservative writers on the subject such as Roger Scruton, look back with nostalgia to the days when it was believed that sex could only be properly enjoyed if it took place in the context of love. They are basically against the puritanical tradition, which also sometimes reared its head within Catholic culture, as among the Jansenists in France.

These had a notable following in Malta, as is evident from the frequency here of the so-called Jansenist crucifix, in which Christ’s arms are not open world-wide, since the Jansenists believe that the saved would be relatively few. But the progressive sexual pessimists do not think consent is the only condition for fulfilling sexual experience. In one way or another, they re-establish some aspect of necessary connection between Eros and sex.

As the conservatives point out, logical consistency should lead them to the point of asserting the traditional doctrine that the physical expressions of love (from shaking hands through kissing and embracing to full sexual intercourse) should correspond to the degree of interpersonal commitment, so that full intercourse is only a true sign if there is commitment to exclusive and lifelong fidelity.

Clearly, the situation in Europe is rather that described by Linda Grants in Sexing the Millennium (for the UK), by Volkmar Sigush in Neosexualitaten… (for Germany) and by Jos Van Ussel in Afscheid van de seksualiteit (for Belgium), and so on.

How does the situation in Malta compare?

I have long been lamenting the lack of adequate systematic studies of these matters in Malta, which is among other things a very severe handicap towards reaching a rational decision on the divorce issue.

Nevertheless, there is more than enough evidence to show that the Kinsey model has been adopted in Malta even more widely than in many places in Europe. It began happening later than in the US, because of the well-known cultural lagging behind of our island.

Now this means that the literature, both analytical and fictional, accounted for in The European Mind, with its moving picture of the unhappiness generated by Kinsey-style sexual mores, has still not percolated down much in our society.

The consent-only moral criterion for sexual intercourse is clearly a logically sound premise for divorce at will.

It seems to me much more important to ensure that our young people become aware of the clear results of the experience of others in this regard, that they receive a sexual education that convinces them inwardly that the entire life context in which it occurs significantly affects the long-term enjoyment of sex, than to conduct campaigning, however well conceived, about legal provisions.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.