Promiscuity:
(by Thomas Howard)Promiscuity, either homosexual or heterosexual, is another form of failure to discern the other authentically, for it focuses on the body not as image but as object alone. The sailor who desperately needs something during his overnight in port, the junior executive with his list of telephone numbers in the convention city, the college boy cruising the beach, the old queen in the bar--none of these people feels malicious or even evil. Each has an appetite, there is a perfectly simple way to assuage that appetite, so en avant. But the ritual which they seek is a parody. It is like a Black Mass. For both involve all the equipment, movement, and pantomime of the real thing, and both promise a reward indistinguishable at the moment from the reward of the real thing (orgasm; supernatural food). But they are not addressed to the object which the ritual was designed to address. In the Mass, man addresses God and he addresses man, and there is a communion under the species of bread and wine; in sexual intercourse we address the other and the other addresses us, and there is a communion under the species of human anatomy. In the case of bread and wine, of course, it is possible and permissible to throw it away from a picnic table; but the minute you have set have set it about with a particular intention and ritual it is transformed, and you may no longer throw it away. By the same token, the human body is available for any number of activities (sports, medical inspection, work), but when it is taken into the service of the sexual rite, a universe of significance comes upon it, like God into the Mass, and immediately the participants are less than the thing in which they are participating, and it is theirs to observe the rubric with awe. The equipment is no longer merely object; it is image. Taken into the rite, it is transformed. As in poetry, courtesy, ceremony, or any of the ritual ways in which we shape our experience, so here the imposing of a form upon the mere function paradoxically elicits the true significance of that function from the raw material. So, for the sailor, the businessman, the boy, and the old queen, another human body is by far the best means of getting a certain kind of pleasure. But it also happens that the human body is the epiphany of personhood. It cloaks and reveals a human individual. A doctor may probe it strictly as a complex of organs and tissue; a gymnastics coach may manipulate it as a pattern of muscles. But the sexual exploration of this mass of tissue and muscle puts the bread and wine on the altar: the real presence of the person must now be reckoned with. The sailor sweating over the strumpet's body is like a priest rushing into the tabernacle and gobbling the bread for a snack. The executive with his call girl, the boy with his trick, the queen with his hustler all participate in the Black Mass which divides form and substance, for it takes the form (the body) and discards the substance (the person); it takes the form (the rite of two bodies) and discards the substance (the union of two persons).
Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance? A Critique of Modern Secularism
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1969), pp. 121-122 (from Ch. 7, "Sex"), pp. 124-126
(from Ch. 7, "Sex").