Every-so-often I listen to experts lecturing on sex.
When I was young, they preached that school children should be freely having sex with each other, llamas and any convenient adult. Now the llamas are safe.
More recently I’ve been reading on how porn and its related sequela are resulting in both less sex, but less intimacy. [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex-recession/573949/]
Lots of related changes as well. To quote:
In other words, in the space of a generation, sex has gone from something most high-school students have experienced to something most haven’t.
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About 60 percent of adults under age 35 now live without a spouse or a partner.
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The truth appears more complicated
That article, of course, was right after I was reading experts who were predicting that porn and such would improve life for all. Now they are saying maybe not. Not to mention the articles that confuse LDS deacons with bishops (and report deacons going about interviewing people on sex topics — if an expert can’t get that right about the LDS Church, how much should one expect them to get other things right?).
However, I expect that the truth is more complicated.
And that experts and their predictions and advice about sex will change again.
- What do you think?
- Have you dealt with experts whose advice turned out to not be so expert after all?
- How to you decide which experts are right?
- How do you decide that the experts aren’t right, at least now?
- Which experts should be lecturing church leaders about sex?
Wheat & Tares 
This is a tough one. I think we want for someone to tell us the facts and we can then follow that and be happy. It just isn’t that easy – in the church and in science.
There is blame all over the place where experts/church leaders didn’t get it right even while they stated “this is the truth.” I see both smearing the others – church leaders using “so-called experts” language often and some scientists that claim religion is just all made up.
On this topics experts have messed up, the church has also. I read an article a few years ago titled something like, “why should I trust the church on the topic of sex?” It went through quite a few issues that the church put forward, but have now either dropped or reversed. I wish I could find that article. Just in my lifetime I have seen some dramatic shifts in this area.
I do like that in the fight within what I consider real science, things improve over time. The end result of the fights IN THE LONG RUN produce better knowledge IN MOST AREAS. I am frustrated that science is often mucky and experiments are generally never definitive. Human motives often drive much of what is even tested and often has a predetermined answer that they want to prove. That isn’t an issue, but when contradictory information is discarded to make the results reach the desired conclusions, that is a problem.
I do feel that the church has generally resisted many changes past when they should. It seems the more conservative individuals are in leadership and progressives often leave. In my post last year on “Does Religion Have Built in Conservative Pressures?” https://wheatandtares.org/2017/11/17/does-religion-have-built-in-conservative-pressures/ it focused on how a balance of conservatism and progressivism are needed for more guided progress. Too much conservatism and no progress is made. Too much progressivism without some conservative “bumpers” to keep the ball in the lane and it is chaos. Too much of either can create issues. I think this is true of experts and religion. I do worry that with what seems to me “buckling down” of the church, it is just going to drive more progressives out of the church – which is a bit what made me post about my thoughts on how few can do “middle way Mormonism”. In the long run that will not be a good thing.
I think we need to recognize that the Church’s views on sex have changed dramatically in the last 100 years. It was not too many generations ago that we were preaching in conference that people who used birth control were going to have to answer to the spirits who should have come to their families and were under great condemnation. We openly condemned “recreational sex” within marriage and had all kinds of dos and don’ts in the bedroom. In my experience, my grandparents generation didn’t talk about it, didn’t even acknowledge it existed. My parents generation talked about it awkwardly and heaped lots of shame about it onto my generation. I feel like most of my Mormon peers are pretty comfortable talking and joking about sex (which was a huge no no not too many years ago). Now the Church seems to be getting more comfortable with the idea that married people should have a good sex life, but still throws out a lot of things that subtly undermine that (the emphasis on pure thoughts, lust is bad, garments : ( and other things that seem to get in the way of a good sex life. There’s also the WWN “godly intimacy” talk that creates all kinds of confusion and could lead some people to think the only way to have marital sex is to begin with a prayer and have hymns on in the background.
I feel like the experts can be all over the place. Our current American society seems to have a really skewed idea of sex that does not make people happy and leaves them starved for real intimacy and relationships. I think we have great ways that we can weave more of a healthy approach to sex into our theology. I think the overall idea that sex is special and should be saved for marriage and will continue in the eternities is beautiful. The shame and penalties we have for people who can’t meet the high abstinence standards can really mess people up (listen to the This American Life episode on bishop interviews). I think we really need a new approach to porn, we keep trying to fix the problem and are making it worse. Porn is essentially sexual junk food, can be fun once in a while and you may be better off without it entirely. However, if that’s all people consume it can have really bad effects on their emotional and spiritual health. But, of course people want to view porn, the same way people want to eat chocolate cake. It’s learning to be temperate and having self-discipline that is tricky. Expecting total abstinence and imposing harsh penalties and shame on people who view porn does not work and seems to make them view it more.
The Atlantic article you link to lists a lot of data and a lot of suggestions, and doesn’t come down hard on the side of any particular one. It also suggests among other things that social media may be impacting teen sex–that kids are spending both sexual and non-sexual energies on online relationships that leave less time and energy for, well, actual sexual activities.
Many cultural things have changed. My 8 yo daughter recently asked if she could knock on a friend’s door and ask to play. My first instinct was that this would be rude: the polite thing to do would be to text the friend’s parents first and ensure that we weren’t imposing. (On a personal level, there are many specific insanities that define our family’s daily lives, and we do not take kindly to unannounced visits from anyone.) But then I thought that when I was her age, that kind of thing was no big deal at all. In fairness, this is a pretty new friend; if this was someone my kid had been playing with for years, I wouldn’t have hesitated. As it turned out, I did text the friend’s dad and he replied that they were busy that night, but we set up a play date for later in the week.
To tie this back to your post: experts have been saying all kinds of things about social media, texting, the decline of live interactions between people–and yes, a lot of things have changed. But the new landscape is just something else to navigate, not a precursor to the end of the world. There’s no one cause and no one effect. We will someday have to measure our collective adaptability to the changed landscape–whether it relates to sex, romance, social media, historical issues, time spent in Sunday church activities, or whatever–and I worry that instead of adapting we’ll just rely on past wisdom that doesn’t always apply anymore, especially when we fall back on the “unchanging doctrine” sort of arguments that we tend to find as a church.
Stephen, You styled your questions about “experts” and whether they are “right” or not, and that may well make for a meaningful discussion. But as I was reading, I wondered about the label of “expert” and the focus on “right” or not as we follow their lead. I first thought that people should make up their own minds, rather than following “experts,” and I wondered about characterizations of “right” or not. Then, I thought of listening to “authorized” and “alternative” voices — it isn’t that authorized voices are right and alternative voices are wrong; rather, it is that some people, by virtue of role, have an authority to speak. In the long run, an authorized voice might be right or wrong, but that isn’t the crucial point — the crucial point is that authorized voices are authorized to give counsel, and we are obliged to respect that authority.
Imagine a son thinking of running off to join the circus. His father and mother are authorized voices to give him counsel and admonition, reminding him of duty and other long-term values. The circus staff are alternative voices who may be undermining the authorized voices, enticing him with the thrill of the moment. The ultimate “right” or “wrong” of the disparate advice might not be apparent in the instant, and the young man must make his own decision (and accept the good and/or bad consequences of that decision). Whether or not the father and mother prove to be right, still, they are authorized voices — whether or not the circus staff prove to be right, still, they are alternate voices.
It isn’t always a matter of right or wrong, even though the involved parties and spectators may use those terms. Let’s imagine that God Himself is quietly calling the young man to the circus and the big city for a yet unseen reason. The father and mother might be wrong in an ultimate sense by trying to keep the young man on the farm, and they might be unknowingly resisting God, but they are certainly right to care about the young man and to give him the best counsel and admonition they can (and God will likely sustain them in this). The circus staff might be right in an ultimate sense, even though they are enticing him for all the wrong reasons and even though they are wrong in undermining the parents (and God will likely condemn them for this). Then, the young man makes his own decision. Even if he decides to leave the farm for the circus, and follows the alternative voices instead of the authorized voices, he is still under covenant to honor his father and mother. If there is a breach, perhaps it can be healed later with learning, patience, forgiveness.
A message of those who speak with authority will sometimes change over time, whether on an individual or generational basis. If so, we err in constantly reminding them of earlier messages. Perhaps we should be more gracious in allowing them to change the message if it is time to do so.
If a message of those who speak with authority does not change over time, well, maybe there is some wisdom in the message. It is right to give careful consideration to the counsel of authorized voices. But in the moment, each person has to make his or her own decision. It’s called agency.
Fascinating is when listening to one generation’s experts gets you derided by the next.
HH and Felix —I really should have found a way to add “culture “ to “experts”. Too often I fear what we have is the culture of forty years ago clashing with random experts rather than a church.
Bro Jones “The truth appears more complicated” — isn’t that the truth.
Ji—those are interesting thoughts. Worth a post of their own.
I hope to be able to come back and read more and add more later, but for now I’ll just say it is always tempting to believe the experts who already agree with us.
“Every-so-often I listen to experts lecturing on sex.”
I will if there’s pictures (Ann Hooper comes to mind).
HappyHubby writes: “It seems the more conservative individuals are in leadership and progressives often leave.”
That is nearly the definition of conservative and progressive. The moment a “progressive” is in leadership he or she simply becomes the new conservative. Remember “hope and change”? It was not necessary or even useful to define what is to be hoped for or what is to change.
Just change. For its own sake. If you are going north, go south. If south, go north. Tomorrow change again. If you are not changing, you are not progressing. When was the last time you changed your passwords?
Eventually you might notice that a LOT of change is no change. After all those changes you may well end up where you started, but of course, wiser for having discovered the reasons for being in a play and behaving a certain way.
Ji: Exceptionally well stated.
Very odd. I wrote “being in a place” but something changed it to “being in a play”. That’s not a typo, the computer changed my choice of word.
Seeing things like this reminds me of the old proverb – “There are as many opinions as there are experts.”
Like the OP, I’ve read that article in the Atlantic. To me, it’s a pretty good example of the confusion and frustration of the world trying – and failing – to do without the old morality that it rejected long ago.
Call me a Pharisee if you like, but I believe in the traditional interpretation of Alma 39 – fornication (with its permutations like divorce and adultery) is the sin next to murder. What else could qualify? After all, burglary and white collar crime aren’t the reason half of American children grow up without a father. ( And I’m sure there are mild variants that wouldn’t compare to, say, stealing someone’s life savings, but I think Alma is looking at the big picture.)
What can an expert tell us?
First, there are reproducible observations. These are things that only the insane or deluded would argue against.. It might be something like the percent of people in a defined population that tested positive for herpes using some DNA/PCR test. The test might not be perfect but is probably over 90% accurate and maybe 99% accurate. (lumping sensitivity and specificity together in the word accurate) . The boundaries of the population might be a little fuzzy but not enough to significantly alter the result.
Second, is when experts interpret information. This involves complex evaluations of multiple factors and is essentially an opinion. Skill is acquired over years of experience. Many experts might agree with an opinion but a few may not. One does not have to be insane to disagree and over time these opinions are highly likely to change.
interpretations in fields with lots of hard, reproducible data tend to not change as quickly or easily such as physics but they do change. Interpretations in fields with little hard data and lots of judgment are likely to be very fluid.
Sex is supposed to be secret or at least private. It is very emotional. It is an experience with only a few metrics. And it is something people will and do lie about. I think it is hard to get reproducible information about most questions concerning it at the observational level. Therefore it is no surprise that what the experts say usually tells us more about them than about us and it will have quite a bit of variability and inconsistency.
Wesley:
The sin next to murder might include raping someone and doing enough physical damage that they never have children and enough psychological damage that they never have normal relationships. That is a bit different than when a couple of frisky teenagers go too far in the back seat of a car and the girl has to go to the doctor for “Plan B.”
Burglary if performed by a father will land him in jail for a long time with other consequences far worse than adultery and divorce. I think chronic severe child abuse is more damaging than illicit sex, even if it does not involve sexual abuse or death. I knew a beautiful Japanese girl who had her face mutilated with a sharp knife by the yakusa. I think I might have preferred my wife had consensual sex with her boyfriend than suffer the fate the Japanese girl faced.
When I was about 5 years old, a neighbor boy tried to cut off my ears with a pocket knife. That might have been a bigger problem for me than rolling in the clover with his skanky sister a decade later. (Neither happened). In some primitive cultures, they do cut off a person’s tongue or ears or nose, sometimes as punishment for breaking rules and sometimes just out of meanness. Castraton and female “circumcision” practiced today in some places is far worse than consensual sex. Slavery is a growing problem and the details of the enslavement of women in Southeast Asia to satisfy the lusts of patrons of the sex industry is unspeakably evil- not even in the same category as anything a bishop might hear about from a typical sinful Mormon boy or girl.
A drunk driver hit my neighbor riding a bicycle putting him in the ICU for a month. He lost his left arm. No sex involved there. A man had a heroin habit. He went to rehab and was clean for many years. He relapsed and died of an overdose. His daughter had 750 to 780s on her SAT and was accepted to a top private college. But after his death they could not afford it. She never did complete college. Do you think his wife would prefer he die like that instead of doing something like cheating on her once and repenting? A bunch of frat boys decided to put some mushrooms they collected in the woods in the keg.. Several people ended up in the hospital.Fortunately all recovered after a few weeks. Was that not worse than what they did to their girlfriends later that night?
I think some of the things people in power do that harms millions of other people is worse than sex even if it is not directly violent. Look at our president, is not the damage to decency and dignity he is doing to our entire country and political culture and future worse than his groping hands and borderline date rapings? (Not saying anything about the economy or whether Clinton was worse ) Read the papers (oops, everyone gets their news on the internet now), numerous examples will appear.
I think Alma or whoever wrote Alma 39 lacked much of an imagination or exposure to the more hellish side of this life.
But I do agree with Wesley that sex is powerful, either for good or evil, and our current culture takes it far too lightly.
Boyd K Packer was apparently a sex expert. The day I turned 12 my dad entered my bedroom and gave me the booklet “For Young Men Only” and told me to read it and ask him any questions afterwards. That was my birds and the bees talk. I had a mission companion whose dad gave him a copy of “Debbie Does Dallas” and told him to watch it and ask if he had questions. Why couldn’t I have that had talk instead???
I look around in my ward and I look at the Conference Edition centerfold (?) with pics of GAs and there aren’t many locally or in SLC I’d outsource sex education to.
Mike: Your diatribe there reminds me of King Benjamin’s sermon, “I cannot tell you all the things whereby ye may commit sin, f9rbthere are divers ways and means, even so many that I cannot number them.”
I realize now that “sin next to murder” is a little simplistic, Alma’s actual words were “shedding innocent blood” which can be read to include a lot of the mutilation you talked about.
It seems that Alma is talking about broad categories of sin, and his purpose is to get us to recognize the severity of sex sin in general – though like I said before it comes in different gradations, some milder than others, and there are definitely ways to combine and aggravate non-sexual sins into something just as bad as what Corianton did.
In Australia there is an anti bullying programme in scools called safe schools. Some of those most likely to be bullied, are gay. The programme has kids put themselves in the position of the victim.
The extreme right, which includes most mormons, present this as straight kids being forced to act out being gay. There are sites that these people refer to, as experts, and no matter what experience you present they will refer back to their right wing sites, which not only attack the programme, but the history of the person who wrote it.
I was married in 1970, 6 weeks after my mission, and at a time when the church saw birth control as an attack by the devil on the family. And there was no sex education in schools, and none in homes either. We then had advice on anything but missionary position offending God etc.
Here sex education is standard in schools now, so much better informed, unless parents send their kids to private religious schools, home school, or pull them out of sex ed.
Many mormons home school or private school to protect them from safe schools.
The experts in this are extreme right wing groups.
Wesley Stine, Mike (FWIW, I liked the diatribe): Try reading Alma 39 without the expectation that the sin next to murder will turn out to be adultery. Pay careful attention to what Alma says is part of his direct experience (“I say unto you”) and what the Lord actually commands Alma to do something about.
I discovered this for myself when I read the Book of Mormon while ignoring the chapter headings, as part of trying to see it with new eyes.
Sorry to folks who are talking about sex being the sin next to murder: That’s just not borne out in the text. The phrase “these things” is much more likely from a grammatical standpoint to mean that the sin that is next to murder is leaving the ministry to pursue something else, whether it’s a harlot or whatever (“lusting of the eyes” in general, in other words). The last thing that is mentioned in verse 4 is “the ministry wherewith thou wast entrusted,” which directly precedes “these things are an abomination.” Just sayin’.
When talking about that “sin next to murder” passage in Alma 39, it’s also helpful to point out that just a couple chapters earlier Alma describes his own leading people away from the Church as a form of murder. “Yea, and I had murdered many of his children, or rather led them away unto destruction;…” (Alma 36:14). Corianton leaving the ministry and causing people to doubt Alma’s teachings is definitely along those same lines. Alma 39:12 follows up, “Command thy children to do good, lest they lead away the hearts of many people to destruction…”
Overpolicing, overcriminalization and overincarceration and the war on drugs, all of which grossly misproprtionately target communities of color, also might play a role in this.
My expert opinion is that only adultery itself is next to murder simply because the side effects of adultery can (but not assuredly) destroy two entire families, not just one. Pre-marital sex, in the bible anyway, was considered relatively inconsequential, its penalty was to require marriage. They’ve already consummated it. Make it official.
In reading Alma I consider it important to consider the scope as that of eternal life. Mortal consequences may be minimal to non-existent. Still, the fear that sex of any kind is a serious sin is itself wrong and probably sinful whoever planted that idea. I have already described my roommate in the Navy that believed he had committed the unpardonable sin by having sex with his wife. I helped him get it sorted out but I was very angry at whoever had planted that seriously wrong idea in his mind.
Essentially ALL rights and wrongs depend at least in part on the situation. In one evening, Nephi broke three of the ten commandments — killed Laban, pretended to be Laban (lied), and took Laban’s property. It is argued that it wasn’t really Laban’s property but that would be interesting to try in court.
Abraham seems to have lied about his wife really being his sister. But I write “seems” since it could actually have been true; I don’t know that she was not his sister.
Jesus seemed willing to re-write the laws of his day; ignoring some, modifying others.
Kullervo – I’m not trying to defend overpolicing; I think its a huge problem that America has the world’s highest incarceration rate, and I’ve even written to Congress to that effect. What I’m trying to say is that divorce and fornication – which are equivalent in Jesus’ eyes – are the main cause of broken-up families, and that the badness of this exceeds the badness of taking someone’s property.
Michael 2 – Thank you for pointing out the OT perspective on premarital sex. One point where I look at this differently than a lot of people is that I don’t see “no extramarital sex” as the basic rule; the basic rule is “mate for life.” So if two young people have sex prior to getting married, but then remain faithful to each other, their sin is a lot less serious than a man divorcing his wife and marrying someone else, even if he never technically committed fornication.
There is a long history of murder, adultery, and idol worship forming a sort of trifecta of worst sins. They are lumped together in Jacob 9 (“Wo unto the murderer… wo unto the those who commit whoredoms… who unto those who worship idols”). In rabbinical tradition, these are the only sins that you ought to die rather than commit, whereas lesser things like stealing and eating pork can be done to save your life. I’m not saying that this is scripture, only that the idea seems quite sound to me, even if its made of generalizations and can’t cover ever permutation of wrongdoing that one could think up.
Look at the first chapter of Matt. 5 women are mentioned there. More women in a shorter space than appear anywhere in the scriptures.They have have 3 things in common.They are all pivotal to the Bible narrative . It was through them that the Savior came into the world. All were accused of formication and at least 4 of them were guilty of it or worse.Tamar committed incest with her father in law. Rehab was a prostitue. Bathsheba committed adultery. Ruth lie with Boaz and while the record is slightly ambiguous most commentators consider the language a euphemism for sex. Mary by the cultural standard of the day and to all appearenses was guilty of fornication.Yet does Matthew condemn them.? Out of all of the good Jewish girls he might have mention during the 2000 years he covets in his genealogy he picks these 5. By the standards of the day none were *good girls”. Yet the Lord chose them to bring his Son into mortality. Maybe our ancient morality isn’t so important to the Lord after all. Maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to judge others and condemn them for what are really insignificant breaches of our cultural mores. Maybe Gods ways are not our ways. Maybe his ways are higher than ours after all.
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS:
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6. Thou shalt not kill.
7. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
8. Thou shalt not steal.
9…..
You know maybe we are reading way too much into this. Exercising too much expertise.
Moses brought a simple list of commandments down from the mountain for a bunch of stiff-necked, recently escaped slaves fleeing Egypt- who would wander in the wilderness until all but a couple of them died. The sin next to murder is simply the next one on the list and not even the top of the list. The rest is hyperbole.
Sort of like discussing which football team is better. Oklahoma or Washington State, rated #6 and #7 respectively. Like it really matters to Alabama and Clemson fans. Or God cares how we rank and categorize our wickedness.
Bellamy Brown writes “Maybe Gods ways are not our ways.”
For sure. But there is no “our” ways. Some persons might have an interest in discovering God’s ways and emulating them.
Mike writes “Or God cares how we rank and categorize our wickedness.”
Probably. The clue is found in the comment on gnats and camels. https://www.theproblemsite.com/ask/2016/01/straining-at-a-gnat-swallowing-a-camel
We also have beams and motes.
Ordering exists and knowing the order helps avoid paralysis should it happen you face two rights or two wrongs.
I thought I would add that experts and science eventually get us improvements and real knowledge.
Sometimes we get phlogiston and sometimes nuclear fusion.
But that doesn’t mean we should go full Luddite.