Bodies, Bodies, Bodies

It's no use counting something of infinite value.

Are we having too much sex, or too little? I can never quite keep track. On the one hand, younger generations don’t seem all that interested in physical congress—maybe because they have spent their lives drenched in a steady torrent of ever-more outlandish smut. The result of constant visual stimulation isn’t so much obsession with real-life flesh as exhaustion at the thought of it: when everything is pornographic, nothing is all that sexy anymore.

This would be alarming enough, except that apparently there are also scads of otherwise eligible singles out there (women mostly, we are told) who have been rendered “unmarriageable” by a lifetime of wanton dalliance. That is the implication of “body count discourse,” an online flamewar over whether men have a right to make virginity a condition for marriage. If not, how many priors is too many? And are men allowed to sleep around before settling down? I’m no expert, but by my calculations, a world full of promiscuous men and chaste women is one in which the math is not mathing.

The numbers don’t add up, for my money, because this is not a numbers game. As so often in our data-sick society, we are trying to quantify something that’s not about quantities. The only question we know how to ask about anything anymore is “how many?” And we seem to think that this question is a smarter one to ask than any other—smarter even than “in what way?” or “to what end?”

But those might actually be much better questions to ask. Because the touching thing, in a sad sort of way, is that we do seem to be backing into an old and profound truth, one long discarded to our detriment and sorrow. It was always a profoundly stupid move, born of the profoundly stupid ’60s and ’70s, to equate empowerment with promiscuity. The reality is that saying no to sex when you could say yes has always been, and always will be, orders of magnitude more powerful.

In the face of temptation, “no” is like a nuclear-grade warhead compared to the pellet gun of “yes.” Even “yes” becomes more shatteringly beautiful when it is preceded by a litany of “no”s. This goes as much for men as for women, which is why self-control is as indispensable a manly virtue as strength in battle. Bis vincit qui se vincit in victoria, wrote Publius Syrus in his Sententiae: “he conquers twice who conquers himself in victory.”

In the chivalric code, this fact was expressed by the ideal of “clennesse,” meaning “purity” or “chastity.” The Arthurian hero Gawain, riding forth to his greatest trial, carried a shield decorated with a five-pointed star representing his five most cherished virtues. Among these were “His clannes and his cortaysye” which “croked were never”: “his purity and politeness,” which had never yet lagged (line 653). No battle armor would be complete without it.

And yet the most important thing about Gawain is that eventually his purity did lag. That’s the point of the story. Gawain’s resolve is weakened in the sweaty warmth of a night with Lady Bertilak, the wife of his host who sets out to test his resolve. In the end he must admit to “couardise” and “covetyse,” cowardice and covetousness, the remembrance of which he will wear for his whole life (line 2508). But so will everyone else: all of Arthur’s court puts on a green sash, symbol both of mortal weakness and divine aspiration.

What “body count” is small or large enough to live up to that heroic ideal? The question has no answer. It is an approach toward perfection at an infinite distance, a strain under which human strength both constantly fails and grows ever greater. We have tried for decades now to opt out of this quest, to act as if the ideal was a fiction. This has gotten us nowhere, which is why we find ourselves both oversexed and sexless, having too much and too little sex at once.

The young people who are now waking up to this hard reality have to suffer the hangover of the sexual revolution without ever really even having been there for the party. Wandering lonely through a ravaged world, they seem to be getting all the listlessness of a morning after with none of the pleasure of the night before. But maybe that’s their cue to realize that there is a better way.

Underneath the squabbling and the accusations about “body count” is something well worth paying attention to: self-control is having a comeback after years of mockery and disregard. I’ve said before that we stand to recover the Middle Ages, much as the architects of the Renaissance recovered the classical world. So maybe we should hope for an age of knights and ladies to succeed ours. If they fail in their highest aspirations, they will be in good company—and at least they will have aspirations to begin with.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer