O Brave New World

Notre Dame’s John Cavadini has a piece on Humanae Vitae. It’s not a new thing for people to point out the document’s prophetic nature, but Cavadini takes the discussion into the ever-developing world of gender.

To be a man is to be an embodied person who reproduces outside of himself and in another; to be a woman is to be an embodied person who reproduces inside of herself—among other distinctions. But you can see that these two ways of being embodied cannot be reduced one to the other. It is impossible for a man to know what it is like to reproduce within oneself, to harbor and nurture new life with one’s own substance; just as it is impossible for a woman to know from the inside the experience of a man, whose relationship to his progeny is external. However, the two identities are complementary in that they have an irreducible mutual and procreative reference. You cannot know what a man is without knowing what a woman is, and vice versa. What is masculine and what is feminine? These are not determined by stereotypes, but rather, each sex is free to enact masculinity and femininity by living out their respective ways of being in the body. Whether or not they choose to marry and have children, though, the complementarity of these two ways of being embodied always has reference to procreation. It is when that reference is broken, that cultural stereotypes take over to fill the void.

It is interesting, for example, if you do any reading around in the literature of sex robots, that the “female” sex robots are designed according to exaggerated cultural stereotypes of what the ideal “feminine” woman would be. They are alarmingly young, perhaps if the robot were a person, illegally young, and otherwise verge on the pornographic. So, although it may seem initially surprising to someone whose idea of “complementarity of the sexes” is the fractional complementarity that trades in stereotypes, the Catholic view of complementarity is designed to separate masculine and feminine identities from cultural stereotypes and thereby leave intact and unerasable the concept of woman, as well as the concept of man…

….So we have come full circle. We have seen that thinking about the connection between sex and procreation is the same as thinking about the shape of society of the future. The texts we have looked at propose that separating sex from procreation is to welcome, or at least have no way of blocking, a brave new world in which reproduction tends to become a kind of production, reducing children to the status of something “made,” a commodity, a society which has a more and more attenuated sense of human dignity. We have also seen that to understand “man” or “woman” without seeing in these identities an essential, though complementary, relationship to procreation, is just another way of separating sex and procreation. Without the reference to procreation, these identities are left to vary at the mercy of cultural stereotypes, with no inherent dignity attaching to them, not even the dignity of being a “father” or a “mother,” and perhaps in the not too distant future, of being a parent. If there is no “there” there in sexual identity, then there is nothing wrong with replacing the personal character of procreation with technological, artificial reproduction and there is actually something desirable about it. “O brave new world!” to quote Miranda from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, ironically banned in Huxley’s utopia. “O brave new world”—it is brave—but is it human? 

From me, here, three years ago – can’t believe I’ve been banging this drum for that long.

It’s also – although no one will probably see this, because we’ll be deep into Brave New World/1984 territory by then anyway – absolutely the consequences of a contraceptive, sterilizing,affluent culture.

When human beings are sterilized and approach sexuality as sterile beings in a sterile landscape, when procreation has no necessary connection to sexual activity and everyone has – relative to what human beings have had through most of history – loads of free time and money –  what does “sex” and “gender” become?

A costume to wear during the pleasure-seeking performative exercise called Life.