I used to think that the demand for easy access to abortion was silly because, for the most part, it was driven by men and women having “meaningless sexual encounters.” I understand that sex is fun, but, really, is sexual pleasure so important that people need to be able to abort babies? But I now think differently about the importance of sex.
It wasn’t until I read Elizabeth Wurtzel’s best seller, Prosac Nation: Young and Depressed in America,[1] and realized that what I considered meaningless sexual encounters were, perhaps, for millions of people—if not hundreds of millions of people—the only meaning they could find in life.
Wurtzel explains how sex became the only meaningful thing in her life. She writes that when she was twelve, she would occasionally spend the night at a girlfriend’s house where she got a crush on her friend’s 17-year-old brother. WARNING: although heavily redacted, what follows is sexually explicit. Wurtzel writes, “I get such a crush on him—his name is Abel—and after a while I’m going to my friend’s house to see him more than to visit her. I feel this strange affinity, like maybe he might like me too, and one night…” She writes about the first time Abel seduces her:
I don’t try to stop him, I do nothing at all but sit there and take in the sensation because it feels good, it is the only thing that has felt nice to me at all in so many months, maybe even years. I have never had a feeling quite like this before, haven’t even come close to the strange electricity…. And I can’t imagine what I’ve done to deserve anything so nice. And I feel blessed. I feel that if God has given me this capacity for pleasure, then there must be hope.
So I start sneaking into Abel’s bedroom in the middle of the night whenever I sleep over at their house… because I never knew my body had such a capacity for joy…. I am surprised to discover that I have the facility, in all my sadness, not only to receive but to give a bit of this life force.
This physical contact brings me such happiness that I want to tell everybody I know about it, I want to walk up to women in the streets and tell them about this thing I’ve discovered, as if only I am privy to it…. I can’t say a word to a soul. Everyone will think it’s sick, will think I am being molested because he’s seventeen and I’m only twelve. No one will ever believe that this is the only good thing in my life.[2]
There it is: what I considered to be meaningless sexual encounters was what she considered a “life force” that gave her hope and was “the only good thing in my life.” When I first read this, I had a “now I get it” moment. What we call “meaningless sexual encounters”—without a robust belief in the eternal life available in Jesus—may be the most meaningful thing a godless person ever does. I’m sure many pro-abortion people wouldn’t say that sexual encounters were the “only good thing” in their lives, but I suspect that for many people, what I thought were meaningless sexual encounters are one of the very few things in their lives that give them any meaning—it gives them a reason to brush their teeth in the morning. After all, if there is no God then “my pleasure” easily becomes the most important thing in the world—so important, in fact, that I may need to kill my unborn children.
But, of course, as most reading this already know, as the years go by, promiscuous sexual encounters begin to reveal themselves for what they are: meaningless sexual encounters. Wurtzel writes,
I had tried so hard for so many years to turn all my despair into sexual abandon, I wanted so much to stop being me and start being someone else’s toy, but I didn’t have it in me. Those early encounters with Abel when I was twelve were the best experiences I’d ever had. He’d been so sweet to me… he showed me so much, and he made me so happy…. It hadn’t ever been that way again.[3]
No surprise that sex “hadn’t ever been that way again.”
Nonetheless, the shirt on the woman in the photo above sums up what is the sentiment for many: “DEAD INSIDE BUT STILL HORNY.”
Here’s an except from my book Immortal: How the Fear of Death Drives Us and What We Can Do About It? about how people try to fill their lives up with sex rather than God:
Once people no longer have the immortality promised through belief in God, what are they to do? Well, one attempted salvation is seeking love from another by putting hope in a romantic and sexual partner—on a love object—“a cosmology of two.”[4] Ernest Becker writes that “The self-glorification that he needed in his innermost nature he now looked for in the love partner. The love partner becomes the divine ideal within which to fulfill one’s life. All spiritual and moral needs now become focused in one individual.”[5] “Man,” wrote Becker, “reached for a ‘thou’ when the world-view of the great religious community overseen by God died.”[6] If you can’t conquer death, well, maybe you can conquer (i.e., seduce) another person.[7]
Mark Manson wrote a self-help book entitled The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F— that spent an astounding 279 weeks on the New York Times best seller list.[8] In it Manson admitted, “I became a player—an immature, selfish, albeit sometimes charming player. And I strung up a long series of superficial and unhealthy relationships for the better part of a decade. It wasn’t so much the sex I craved, although the sex was fun. It was the validation. I was wanted; I was loved; for the first time since I could remember, I was worthy.” Manson continued, “My craving for validation quickly fed into a mental habit of self-aggrandizing and overindulgence. I felt entitled to say or do whatever I wanted, to break people’s trust, to ignore people’s feelings, and then justify it later with sh–ty, half-assed apologies.”[9] So here it is again. However shallow—and it is very shallow indeed—sex gives people “validation” and a sense of “I was worthy.” This is because, as I write in Immortal,
Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a meaningless sexual encounter. Professor Jason K. Swedene in his book The Varieties of Immortality, is right, “Love, I argue, is a desire to extend a relationship on into the indefinite future. Love is always projecting itself into the future. The rational, decision-making, love vows its continuation into the future and the passionate, erotic love of the flesh seeks to secure a future in the passing on of life.”[10] Sex with another person always, for good or bad, marks another person emotionally, and sometimes sex makes literal marks on another person in pregnancy or disease. In sex you change the world but unless sex is done within the parameters which God ordains, then sex always changes the world for the worse.
But even if the romantic relationship transcends the one-night stand or the shared apartment, even if it ends in marriage, it’s not enough. Becker asks, “what is it that we want when we elevate the love partner to the position of God? We want redemption—nothing less. We want to be rid of our faults, of our feeling of nothingness.”[11] But Becker is right, “Needless to say, human partners can’t do this. The lover does not dispense cosmic heroism; he cannot give absolution in his own name.”[12] Becker, in discussing the perspective of psychologist Otto Rank (1884–1939), writes that “Sex is a ‘disappointing answer to life’s riddle,’ and if we pretend that it is an adequate one, we are lying both to ourselves and to our children.”
Becker says that sex education can become a “kind of wishful thinking, a rationalization, and a pretense: we try to believe that if we give instruction in the mechanics of sex we are explaining the mystery of life. We might say that modern man tries to replace vital awe and wonder with a ‘How to do it’ manual.”[13] Thus many people have made it their life work—their immortality project—to indoctrinate teens on sexual practice. Here’s just one example in Teen Vogue: “Anal Sex: What You Need to Know: How to do it the RIGHT way.”[14] Teen Vogue!
But, what if you can’t have the person of your dreams for real? Well, having people want you is what sexual fantasy is all about. Sexual fantasy can temporarily make you feel good—until you open your eyes and are again confronted by the mortality of life. Of course, sexual fantasy, if indulged long enough, can make you want to do it “for real” and that’s trouble. Adultery is rampant in our Desperate Housewives culture. If you can’t get the object of your fantasy then there’s prostitution. Or worse, there’s rape.[15]
I’m reminded of the woman at the well who had five husbands and the man she was presently living with wasn’t her husband. She was searching for something, and we read in John 4:13-14 that Jesus told her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
Absolutely let’s keep explaining to people the evil of abortion, but without Jesus the lost are going to try to feel “alive” and “worthy,” through otherwise meaningless sexual encounters, and that means they are going to have abortions whether abortion is legal or not.
So, again, we must proclaim the evils of abortion but most of the Christian’s emphasis needs to be on leading everyone to Jesus and the water He gives that will cause the lost to never thirst again.
I wrote about how Wurtzel’s fear of death depressed her (and the depression of Katy Perry and Sarah Silverman) in my post “An Unrelenting Cause of Teenage Depression.”
[1] Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 39-40. Emphasis mine.
[2] Ibid., 39-40.
[3] Ibid., 139.
[4] Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York, Free Press, 1973), 161.
[5] Ibid., 160
[6] Ibid., 161.
[7] Clay Jones, Immortal: How the Fear of Death Drives Us and What We Can Do About It? (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2020), 80.
[8] Angelique Jackson, “How ‘The Subtle Art of Not Giving a #@%!’ Author Mark Manson Prepared for His Close-Up in New Documentary,” Variety, January 9, 2023, https://variety.com/2023/film/features/subtle-art-of-not-giving-a-fuck-mark-manson-movie-1235481039/, accessed July 6, 2023.
[9] Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), 54. Emphasis mine.
[10] Jason K. Swedene, Staying Alive: The Varieties of Immortality (Lanham, MD: UPA, 2009), ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/biola-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1037724, (accessed April 2, 2018).
[11] Becker, Denial, 167.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid., 164.
[14] Gigi Engle, “Anal Sex: What You Need to Know: How to do it the RIGHT way,” Teen Vogue, May 16, 2018, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/anal-sex-what-you-need-to-know?verso=true, (accessed January 29, 2019). By the way, a surgeon pointed out to me that there is no “right way” to have anal sex. The rectum is physically incapable of sustaining that kind of treatment—at least for long.
[15] Jones, Immortal, 81-82.
