Civilizing Sexuality:
Reexamining America’s Values
to Prevent Sexual Abuse
©1994-2005 by John Hules
Excerpts
From the Appendix, Clinical and Scientific Findings Regarding Sexual Abuse Perpetrators, Victims, and Traditional Moral and Social Values:
More than 100 reports in the scientific and professional literature, involving more than 35,000 subjects, indicate that rapists, child molesters, incestuous parents, and sexually motivated murderers are typically very conservative in their sexual and social values and sometimes more religious than average—suggesting that in many cases traditional sexual morality is a contributing factor in sexual abuse rather than a deterrent. At the First International Conference on the Treatment of Sex Offenders in 1989, there was broad agreement that Western societies with repressive sexual attitudes and traditional male/female roles are more likely to have high rates of all forms of sex crimes.
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From the Introduction:
I view sexual abuse as a social and cultural problem because sexual aggression comes from a failure to socialize sexuality—and American society does everything in its power to prevent the healthy socialization of children’s sexuality.
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Sexual abuse of children is an exaggeration of prevailing social norms but not a departure from them—American children routinely suffer from adult domination and humiliation of their sexuality. The assaults are usually psychological rather than physical, but the results are similar. Adults’ prevention and punishment of children’s normal sexual developmental activities, and adults’ failure to provide adequate and realistic moral guidance for emerging sexual behaviors, are serious forms of abuse, which I call non-contact sexual abuse. I regard non-contact sexual abuse as the source of the pervasive sexual shame in our society.
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I will present the results of scientific studies of childhood sexual development which show that the early years, from birth to age eight or nine, are the most important years for the psychological and social development of sexuality. Puberty should be considered the end, not the beginning, of childhood sexual development.
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From Chapter 1, The Missing Commandments:
The Bible does not condemn the sexual abuse of children, nor does it condemn rape as a crime against a woman. Despite its lengthy prohibitions of incest, the Bible does not directly forbid father-daughter or father-son incest (although it does forbid sex with both a mother and her daughter). The Bible often fails to distinguish between sexual activity and sexual violence, and in some passages the Bible seems to condone sexual violence…. [The Bible] was written in a culture that had a moral blind spot toward sexual abuse, and Western society has inherited that blind spot. Unfortunately, ignoring sexual abuse allows it to flourish.
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Our traditional sexual morality expresses a warped value system. Traditional moralists expend great energy trying to prevent various types of voluntary sexual activities which often do no harm to the participants, but they usually ignore sexual aggression, which can result in serious psychological damage…. Moralists’ silence on sexual abuse has three principal effects: (1) it gives tacit permission to perpetrators of sexual abuse; (2) it gives their victims no grounds for objecting to the mistreatment they suffer; and (3) it gives everyone the false impression that sexual abuse is an unusual occurrence.
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The causes of sexual aggression (which will be discussed in Chapter 2) are complex and varied. But there does seem to be one valid generalization we can make: Sexual aggression can be understood as a failure to socialize sexuality. The one thing that almost all sex offenders have in common is that they have grown into adulthood without the social skills and positive attitudes necessary to satisfy their sexual and emotional needs in consensual, mutually satisfying relationships.
Most sex offenders are involved in consensual sexual relationships, but these relationships are typically superficial and emotionally unsatisfying, and the offenders do not understand why. According to W. L. Marshall, one of the leading researchers and therapists treating sex offenders, what is missing from their relationships is intimacy. “Sexual offenders,” Marshall says, “have failed to develop the appropriate skills and self-confidence necessary to form effective intimate relations with adults.”
Intimacy skills, which I will discuss later in this book, are not instinctive—they have to be learned. From this perspective, sexual abuse is not just an individual’s offense against society; it is also society’s failure to equip that individual with the skills he or she needs to live in society. Sexual abuse is, ultimately, a failure of child rearing and education.
Unfortunately, in America, guided by a morality that has a blind spot for sexual abuse, we do everything we can to prevent the socialization of our children’s sexuality, which in turn limits their capacity for intimacy. Abstinence-based sex education does not help children learn how to behave sexually, it just tells them not to behave sexually. By forbidding the erotic play which, as I will show later, is a necessary part of children’s psychological and social development, traditional morality prevents many children from developing the intimacy skills they will need as teenagers and adults to satisfy their sexual and emotional needs constructively. The result in some cases is anti-social sexual behavior. If we teach children that sex is obscene, we should not be surprised if they grow up and behave obscenely.
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From Chapter 2, The Traditional Values of Sex Offenders and Their Victims:
Many sex offenders had a morally conservative upbringing and, as adults, have puritanical standards of sexual behavior, often rejecting masturbation, premarital sex, extramarital sex, and any sexual activity except “missionary position” intercourse. They tend to regard sex as dirty, and many are self-righteously moralistic. Child molesters and incest offenders are frequently more religious than average.
Many child molesters and incest offenders, and some rapists, are sexually inhibited, even prudish, and relatively inexperienced sexually. They have more guilt, shame, fear, and anxiety about sex than non-offenders.
Sex offenders, especially rapists, tend to have conservative social and political beliefs. They believe that men and women are not equals and should not deviate from traditional social and economic roles. They believe in the double standard—men are expected to be sexually active, but women are either virgins or whores. Sex-role stereotyping is associated with belief in rape myths—that rape is a woman’s fault, that rape is motivated by sex rather than by a need to dominate, and that a raped woman is less desirable. Men who believe in stereotypes and rape myths are more likely to rape, and women who believe them are more likely to be victimized.
Sex offenders and their victims usually had inadequate sex education. One study found that girls whose mothers punished them for asking questions about sex or for exploring their own bodies were 75 percent more vulnerable to sexual abuse than other girls in the study.
These findings are the opposite of what many Americans would expect. The religious conservatives who dominate moral discourse in the mass media tend to associate sexual abuse with sexual permissiveness. But in fact, abuse is more often connected with sexual puritanism.
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A traditional, restrictive sexual upbringing subverts children’s ability to trust their own perceptions and judgments regarding sexuality. When children are taught that sexual activities that feel good are just as wrong as sexual activities that feel bad, they are left with no basis on which to make judgments. Right and wrong become divorced from personal experience. Traditional morality teaches children that masturbation, which feels good, is morally bad; but spanking, which feels bad, is morally good. This morality leaves children helpless to judge for themselves what is sexually right or wrong. They become totally dependent on what adults—including child molesters—tell them. Sex with an adult authority figure may feel bad, but it must be good if the adult says so.
Traditional morality teaches children to be sexually obedient, not to stand up for their rights. It’s no wonder that children face more danger of sexual abuse in sexually strict families than in sexually permissive families. Children who are taught that they must always obey, that they do not have rights over their own bodies, and that their own sexual feelings do not matter, are rarely able to resist or report abuse. For these children, all sexual experiences are shameful, and all of them must be hidden from adults. One possible explanation of why so many child molesters are religious is that sexually abused children from religious families are the least likely to report the abuse, are the least likely to receive treatment, and therefore are the most likely to become abusers as adults.
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From Chapter 3, An Epidemic of Shame:
Parents who punish children for their sexual interests and activities are actually modeling sexual abuse. By their actions, these parents are teaching their children disregard for another person’s bodily autonomy and emotional and sexual feelings; they are teaching that aggression, humiliation, and violation of personal boundaries are the rights of people with power.
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In America, sexual abuse is a traditional family value. The suppression and shaming of children’s sexuality—a defining characteristic of our traditional culture—makes a direct contribution to sexual aggression.
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From Chapter 4, To Thine Own Self Be False:
Because shame suppresses activity in the brain’s neocortex, where rational thinking occurs, I suspect that people who suffer chronic sexual shame may be physically incapable of thinking clearly about sex…. Unable to be honest with themselves about their own sexuality, shame-bound people are unable to be honest about sexuality in general, and act in ways that avoid, obscure, and deny the truth.
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Abstinence is not 100% effective in preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, because many people who attempt abstinence do not achieve it. A study presented at the 2003 annual meeting of the American Psychological Society found that over 60% of college students who had pledged virginity during their middle or high school years had broken their vow to remain abstinent until marriage. When you consider also that teens who are not planning to have sex are less likely to use contraceptives, it’s clear that abstinence is much less effective than contraception.
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The normal child’s reaction is not to escape abuse but to survive it by accepting and adjusting to it. Abused children go into a kind of hypnotic trance, dissociating from the painful experience while complying automatically to the aggressor’s every demand. [Psychologist Roland] Summit argues that sexual abuse continues unabated because we are a society of victims pretending not to be victims. We live in a shared hypnotic trance, hallucinating that everything is fine.
Many psychologists and social commentators have noted the hypnotic qualities of charismatic leaders and the trance-like behavior of people who automatically obey authorities. Child abuse of any kind makes people easier to hypnotize, more likely to support authoritarian political and religious movements, and more likely to support violence—ranging from capital punishment to war—as a solution to social problems.
From this viewpoint, we can see that the physical and sexual abuse of children actually protects the social and political status quo. Not only do abused children lose confidence in their own perceptions of reality, they are also conditioned to surrender their autonomy to authority figures. Thus child abuse provides a steady supply of suggestible and compliant followers to authoritarian politicians and churches. By ignoring child abuse, governments and churches protect their own power. Secular society pays lip service to religious sexual morality (and to religious morality in general) precisely because it is ineffective and will not threaten the social balance of power.
No conspiracy is required to make this happen; in fact, it’s the unconsciousness of society’s leaders that protects the status quo.
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Traditional morality paints a totally unrealistic picture of human sexuality. Because this picture is presented as normative, but does not conform to anybody’s actual experience, it casts a cloud of shame over all of our sexual experiences and makes it difficult for us to judge the validity of our perceptions. Universal sexual shame creates an ethos of denial, dishonesty, secrecy, and ignorance about sex. This ethos ensures that most sexual crimes will remain hidden, many will be unnamed and unrecognized, few will ever be reported, and hardly any will be punished.
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It’s bad enough that our religions have traditionally ignored sexual abuse in their moral teachings, as we saw in Chapter 1, but much of what they say about sexuality and sexual morality in general is untrue. There is a wide chasm between what religious scholars and historians know to be true and what is typically preached from the pulpit, taught in Sunday school, and asserted in the mass media. Many clergy members preach dogmas that they don’t personally believe—they think it’s their job to do that.
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After decades of observation, research, and reflection, I have come to the conclusion that the denial of sexual abuse in their own lives has made the defenders of traditional sexual morality systematically dishonest about human sexuality, the Bible, and the history of Christian teachings.
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Shame can be morally, as well as emotionally, crippling. It can leave us unable to assert the validity of our own experiences and insights, and unable to stand up for what we know is right. Breaking the cycle of sexual denial and dishonesty will require that people acknowledge the extent to which they have been sexually abused, begin the healing process, and speak the truth of their own experience, rather than conforming to political and religious correctness.
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In contrast to Jesus’ concept of God as a loving father, the most common Christian theology of atonement depicts God, in effect, as an abusive father, although it justifies his actions. First God punishes all of us for something we didn’t do—original sin. The human race then owes a debt to God that we can’t repay. But instead of forgiving the debt, as you might expect a loving father would do, God sends his innocent son to be tortured and killed to repay the debt. Many non-Christians, as well as a growing number of Christians, see nothing plausible in this scenario. Why do so many people believe it? Because it replays the dynamics of the childhood abuse they have internalized and failed to heal. Acceptance of abuse, not healing and prevention of abuse, is at the core of much of traditional Christian theology and practice.
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From the Chapter 5 synopsis, Spirit against Body:
For Jesus, physical purity was insignificant; purity of heart was what he demanded of his followers. Jesus also overturned the family as the center of society, treating the voluntary association of his followers as a stronger bond than kinship. He overturned the social hierarchy by giving children and the poor the highest place in his kingdom. In his treatment of women and children and his teachings on divorce and adultery, Jesus repudiated the traditional patriarchal property ethic. He taught that everyone is equal and all belong to God; this teaching is the seed of the modern concept of personal autonomy, which is the basis for condemning sexual abuse. However, the teachings of Jesus were so far ahead of his time that his followers were unable to grasp them fully. In the pastoral epistles we can see the early church already backsliding toward the patriarchal property ethic to maintain social respectability.
Christianity eventually developed its own radical purity ethic, which is fundamentally hostile to sexuality. This ethic is irreligious for several reasons:
1. It is based on a materialistic, reductionistic conception of sexuality.
2. The religious response to nature, exemplified in the Psalms, is wonder and gratitude; but traditional morality’s response to sexual pleasure is not wonder and gratitude, but fear, guilt, and shame. Sexual pleasure is the only gift of God that Christians do not give thanks for in their official prayers.
3. Authentic religion expands and deepens the meaning of life. In contrast, traditional morality artificially restricts the meaning of sexuality to marriage and reproduction, treating most sexual experiences as meaningless.
4. Religion and sexuality are both about connection; but excessive sexual shame isolates people from others, alienates them from their own bodies and feelings, and limits their ability to experience God’s love. Unconditional love begins with unconditional love of the body.
5. Authentic religion is about the truths that set us free. But the shame imposed by traditional sexual morality promotes dishonesty about sex in both our personal and social lives.
6. Looked at in its historical and social context, traditional sexual morality is often more concerned with social status than with religious values.
7. Traditional morality ignores the possibility of eros as a path to self-knowledge, spiritual awareness, and healing.
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From the Chapter 8 synopsis, Meaningful Pleasures:
Traditional sexual morality is based on a dubious assumption combined with a non-existent principle. The dubious assumption is that reproduction is the only purpose of sexuality. The non-existent principle, unspoken but implicit in the logic of many moralists, is that enjoying an activity for its own sake, without its practical purpose, is immoral (curiously, sex is the only activity this principle is ever applied to).
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The primary functions of human sexuality are personality development; physical, psychological, social, and spiritual well-being; and reproduction, in that order. This theory has the advantage of corresponding to actual human sexual behavior, most of which does not have reproduction as its goal. Non-reproductive sexual activity, considered unnatural by traditional morality, is in fact commonplace in nature, among both animals and humans
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It is strange that sex is the only pleasure that we are traditionally forbidden to enjoy for its own sake, as if the separation of pleasure from practicality were sinful. In fact, the separation of pleasure from practicality is one of the foundations of human culture. What we do because we enjoy it, rather than for some practical purpose, is considered recreation, sport, or art, and these cultural activities are considered essential for a well-rounded personality. By condemning recreational sex and the erotic arts, traditional morality tries to banish sex from culture, but the result is that some people—the perpetrators of sexual abuse—are left sexually uncivilized. Telling people that sex is obscene teaches them to behave obscenely. If we want to civilize sexuality, we need to integrate it into our culture, and that means actively cultivating healthy sexuality, not just leaving it to chance.
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From the synopsis of Chapter 9, Awe and Ecstasy:
Eros is bigger than we are. If we allow it to be what it is, rather than confining it within our narrow goals and concepts, it has the potential to connect us deeply on many dimensions, not just to other people but also to nature, to our own souls, and to God. Letting eros be eros teaches us acceptance and compassion toward ourselves and others. If we define sexuality too narrowly, we end up demonizing aspects of eros that can enrich and transform our lives.
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From the Chapter 10 synopsis, Desires and Boundaries:
Traditional sexual morality enforces certain social boundaries, but it violates people’s personal boundaries in two ways. First, by imposing rigid external controls on the most intimate and personal aspects of people’s lives, the traditional ethic violates people’s privacy and autonomy. Second, by failing to respect people’s individuality, feelings, and desires, the traditional ethic humiliates people and violates their dignity, often making them feel defective, worthless, and ashamed. We don’t need to relax the standards of traditional morality—we need higher standards.
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An ethic based on healthy shame and boundaries can be expressed very simply: Respect your own and other people’s desires and boundaries.
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From the Chapter 11 synopsis, Intimacy Education:
Intimacy education is the key to breaking the cycle of sexual abuse. Adults with good intimacy skills do not need to resort to coercion to satisfy their sexual and emotional needs. Children with good intimacy skills can resist and report attempted offenses. Conventional sex education presents facts and promotes values, but provides no way to integrate this information into the emotional and bodily reality of life as it is experienced. Sex education does not offer opportunities to develop intimacy skills.
Intimacy education is experiential. It involves learning how to be physically and emotionally present to another person; how to share one’s own feelings and listen with empathy to another person’s feelings; how to share physical and emotional vulnerability without violating boundaries; and how to give and receive respectful, nurturing, and pleasurable touch. Children need intimacy education appropriate to their age level; but before this can happen, their parents, caregivers, and educators need to develop their own intimacy skills so that they can share them with the children.
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Children will inevitably be intimate with each other, in both non-sexual and sexual ways. Adults need to decide whether we want those experiences to be pleasurable and confidence-building, or painful and shame-inducing. By forcing children to keep their sexual interests and activities secret, our society favors the shame option….
With a little skillful coaching, intimacy comes naturally—and learning the etiquette and art of intimacy is much easier than unlearning shame.
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