Wendell Berry and the End of Sex

In a quest for freedom, we have lost ourselves.

Wendell Berry and I were the same age when we abandoned the lives we were supposed to live. When Berry was twenty-nine, he left his life as an academic in New York City and moved to rural Kentucky to become a farmer.¹ When I was twenty-nine, I ended my career as a corporate lawyer and became a stay-at-home Mom.

I did this in spite of what I was supposed to want. I had learned first at prep school, and then college, and then law school, and finally as a corporate lawyer that I should want a certain life - let’s say a certain standard of living. The problem is that I didn’t. And this lack of want, this refusal to want, wouldn’t stop bothering me.

Besides working as a farmer, Wendell Berry writes in his free time about the ways Americans destroy themselves. For Berry, Americans’ original sin is our conviction that we deserve pleasure without consequences. Berry thinks this explains why Americans can’t stop buying cheap goods we don’t need, which has destroyed our land, and also shows why most people in the industrialized West have such a damaged view of sex and relationships.

When I was still working full time, I heard other professional parents reflect - often - on how rarely they saw their children. We all said this was in service of a “better” life for our children. This “better” life meant access to material resources. We were all separated from our children to give them a chance at elite schools and ski vacations, which would give them the chance to work in even more prestigious jobs then we had, and to buy larger houses than we owned. This is what better meant for us. This is what it is supposed to mean.

But this acquisitive culture, focused on wealth and status, inevitably separates parents and children and siblings and leaves us confused about our obligations. As Berry writes, once children become adults, “family members often have no practical need or use for one another.”²

Spenser Sembrat via Unsplash

In his essay “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” Berry says, “I do not believe that there is anything better to do than to make one’s marriage and household, whether one is a man or a woman.”³

The problem is that in the modern industrialized West, a happy marriage is conceived as “two successful careerists in the same bed”.⁴ Marriage, like our careers, has become another source of pleasure to discard at will, much like the refuse we buy at Target or Walmart.

Berry believes that the consumerist mindset has rendered marriage “a sort of private political system in which rights must be constantly asserted and defended.” He believes that “Marriage, in other words, has taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided.”⁵

Berry connects this devaluation of marriage with the modern West’s depraved attitude towards sex. For Berry, ideas of women’s sexual “liberation” and sexual “rights” are merely links in a chain of consumerist attitudes, all fruit of the same poisonous tree of greed. It’s worth quoting him at length:⁶

In fact, our “sexual revolution” is mostly an industrial phenomenon, in which the body is used as a idea of pleasure or a pleasure machine with the aim of “freeing” natural pleasure from natural consequence.

Like any other industrial enterprise, industrial sexuality seeks to conquer nature by exploiting it and ignoring the consequences, by denying any connection between nature and spirit or body and soul, and by evading social responsibility. The spiritual, physical, and economic costs of this “freedom” are immense, and are characteristically belittled or ignored. The diseases of sexual irresponsibility are regarded as a technological problem and an affront to liberty.

Women (like me) who attended rigorous schools and became careerists have learned since prepubescence that controlling our fertility was the key to our freedom. We would accomplish this control through - of course - birth control, or abortion if necessary. We were not encouraged to practice abstinence, which we learned was a sign of repression. Instead we learned that it was crucial to narrow fertility to the optimal time when we were financially “ready” but not menopausal. Later, in my law school years, I learned that even these biological limits were something to flout if possible. My law firm, like many other elite firms, partially covered egg freezing procedures.

At least when I was a teenager, I heard - and partly believed - that traditional religious organizations were the enemies of women’s freedom. Churches, we learned, wanted to constrain women from sexual pleasure, from having as much sex as we wanted, and from limiting our number of children. Repressing our natural fertility meant freedom. Part of this fertility repression meant eliminating signs of female sexual development, such as menstruation and ovulation. We were supposed to be more like men, or at least like we imagined men to be - practical about sex, driven by career, obsessed with extracting pleasure at all costs. The Church told us to give of ourselves, to sacrifice, because it hated us.

That’s not to say that certain churches have not persecuted women for their reproductive capacity or forced them into marriage and motherhood against their will. As Helen Roy has observed⁷, sexual entitlement and a view of women as more or less objects to impregnate as often as possible has infiltrated certain religious communities.

But I think this perspective is just another example of the industrialized sexuality that Berry critiques. Viewing children as mere outputs, with the goal of generating as many of them as possible, is an industrial idea. Believing that women are valuable because of their outputs is an industrial idea, too, one divorced from love or God or true freedom. Respecting the natural rhythms of a woman’s fertility - which, if she is breastfeeding, often means wide child spacing and fertility over a significant period of time - is the opposite. And this is what the Catholic Church encourages.

This is part of why it is so difficult to change social attitudes about natural fertility. This isn’t just about childbearing, it’s about our entire culture and what we learn to see as “better”. If our version of a good life involves material accumulation, we will decide that natural fertility - with its unpredictability and surprises - is inimical to a “good” life.

It is very understandable that a woman would want to avoid having a dozen children, especially very close together. But it is also true that viewing sex as merely for pleasure - and the body as a vessel for pleasure - leads to what Berry calls “the denial” that “the community, the family, one’s spouse, or even one’s own soul might exercise a legitimate proprietary interest in the use one makes of one’s body.” Berry argues that “this too is tragic, for it sets us ‘free’ from responsibility and thus from the possibility of meaning.”⁸

It is hard for us to admit this nowadays - that sex might have meaning beyond what the participants believe about it. It is also hard for us to admit how much modern notions of sexual freedom are actually driven by a desire for control. We want to tame our sexuality, and we want to tame women’s bodies, suppressing fertile cycles so that women, like men, remain relatively productive over a stable period of time instead of experiencing monthly periods of energy and withdrawal. We want to erase difference as much as possible. This bid for control, as Berry notes, is doomed. All that this control will ever do is pull us further away from ourselves.

None of this is why I quit my job at twenty-nine. I did that because I missed my baby and felt that I had to do everything I could to be with him. I did not feel that my choice to stop working was a concession to patriarchy, though I suppose some would interpret it that way. But I was tired of the vision of freedom I had absorbed through so many years of elite education.

Many see money as the ultimate freedom, especially for women, and I do want to emphasize that money matters - we do need it, and women should be able to earn it. But the relationship of money to freedom is strange. As you gain money, you become more free - but also less free. This can be especially true of women. As we climb the rungs of lucrative careers, our reproductive windows can close. Our ability to spend time with our children can evaporate. Our creativity can disappear. We can grow chained to mortgages and expectations and vanity.

In “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” Berry reflects on an image of “the diversely skilled country housewife who now bores the same six holes day after day on the assembly line.”⁹ Often, when we discuss feminism, we think of historical women held back from greatness by the demands of family life and childbirth. But rarely do we consider that the “career woman” may also reflect the loss of a local midwife, or a joyful grandmother, or even a Miss Marple-style spinster who lives a rich life without having what we call much “excitement” in her youth.

Berry argues that most modern men “are more compliant than most housewives have been” and that “[t]heir characters combine feudal submissiveness with modern helplessness.” He says, “These men, moreover, are helpless to do anything for themselves or anyone else without money, and so for money they do whatever they are told.”¹⁰

Our desire to control women has cost us much. But it is time to consider whether the idyll of the corporate woman represents a different type of control, and what we have sacrificed to obtain it.

1. Amanda Petrusich, Going Home with Wendell Berry, The New Yorker (q4 July 2019) https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/going-home-with-wendell-berry.

2. Wendell Berry, “The Work of Local Culture,” The World-Ending Fire (edited by Paul Kingsnorth, Penguin Books, 2017).

3. Id., “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine.”

4. Id.

5. Id.

6. Id.

7. Conservative Women's Aunt Lydia Problem

8. Berry, supra, “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine.”

9. Id.

10. Id.