If award nominations serve as any indication, Fox’s Glee is currently the number one show on television. A musical comedy about twelve kids who sing their hearts out every week for their high school show choir, Glee is this season’s top-ranking entertainment series for teens around the country. The show’s Christmas album was the number one soundtrack of 2010, and the cast’s songs have received over 16 million downloads to date. In short, Glee has become something of a pop-culture sensation.

In addition its music, Glee addresses a number of important life issues facing high school-aged kids today. Past episodes have focused on such topics as religion and alcohol. This week, the show’s theme hit especially close to home for those involved with the Love and Fidelity Network. Gwyneth Paltrow guest-starred as Holly Holiday, the sexy Sex Ed teacher who came to McKinley High School to teach the students all about sex and romantic relationships.

It would be easy to condemn the episode, entitled “Sexy”, for its inappropriate portrayal of sex and its antagonistic attitude towards more conservative views on sexual behavior. And yet, even though this episode did reveal a striking ignorance about the principles upheld by the Love and Fidelity Network, Glee is still on the right track in one significant regard: In affirming a group of students who are bullied and unappreciated in their school, Glee reminds its viewers that every person is special. It is in light of this very specialness—what those of a more philosophical bent might call their dignity—that an accurate understanding of the nature and value of human sexuality becomes so important. In this article, I will analyze what Glee got right with regards to sexuality, where they went wrong, and why reserving sex for marriage is the only option worthy of these awesomely special kids.

The episode opens at a meeting of the “Celibacy Club”, a name which is not only pejorative in this context, but also inaccurate for referring to the view that sex should be reserved for marriage. Celibacy is an essentially religious virtue that entails lifelong renunciation of sexual activity.  ‘Sexual integrity’, ‘chastity’, or ‘abstinence until marriage’ would be better terms to describe what the Love and Fidelity Network actually advocates. Sadly, the club’s overall characterization is no better than its ill-chosen name. Its faculty proctor Emma Pillsbury, the school guidance counselor, is a psychologically disturbed woman who is in fact terrified of sexual activity. Though married for four months, she has been too genophobic to consummate her marriage. Addressing the Celibacy Club, Emma describes abstinence as “a viable option for teens who simply aren’t ready for intimacy, and for those who are older and are terrified of [sex]”. Thus genophobia is the explanation Glee provides for why some advocate saving sex for marriage. The decision to uphold sexual integrity—abstinence prior to marriage and fidelity within it—is thus so counter-cultural today that it is often misunderstood and disregarded as some kind of psychological hang-up. Those who take such a stance, it is assumed, must just be “down on sex”. On the contrary, the position of the students of the Love and Fidelity Network is precisely the opposite.

Glee’s Celibacy Club exemplifies one of the two main attitudes towards sex that come into opposition during the course of the episode, the other being Holly’s (Paltrow’s) position that saving sex for marriage is unrealistic and that sexual activity amongst teens should be both expected and encouraged. As she puts it, saying that premarital abstinence is a choice for teens is “like saying that vegetarianism is a choice for lions”. When asked by a Celibacy Club student what Holly thinks of her choice to remain abstinent, she responds, “Well I admire you, although I think you’re naïve and possibly frigid.” Thus Holly advocates what she believes to be a more realistic and appropriate approach to teen sexuality: Educate the kids and then just let them have sex, because they are ultimately going to do it anyway. In recent years, this and similar views have often been labeled “sex-positive”, a term which is as misleading as the view to which it refers; more on that later.

Despite these discouraging remarks about the abstinence movement and chastity in general, the show actually goes on to make a number of great observations about sex and romantic relationships. One sub-plot in the episode addresses the role that the emotions should play in one’s sexual life. Santana, one of the glee students, preliminarily holds that sex is better when it is purely physical, involving as little emotional attachment to the other person as possible. But over the course of the episode, she realizes that that position is somehow deficient. She is, of course, quite correct. Though sex does indeed involve pleasure, it is a sadly wanting view to think that pleasure could be its only virtue. There must be more to sex than that, because there is more to man than that.

One additional dimension of sexuality—to which one of the glee students’ fathers draws particular attention—is its unitive aspect, the way in which sex truly brings two people together in an inter-personal union. Cautioning his son Kurt against the casual way men often approach sex, he says, “It’s about something more than just the physical. You know, when you’re intimate with someone in that way, you’re exposing yourself. You’re never going to be more vulnerable.” That is strong language, but he is exactly right. In sex, a person makes himself more vulnerable than in any other physical act, because he literally gifts his entire being, his entire self, to his partner. Kurt’s father continues, “You’ve got to know it means something. You know, it’s doing something—to you, to your heart.” Correct again, Mr. Hummel: Sex is not just some inconsequential, casual affair. Rather, it is the most intimate mode of human inter-personal unification. Thus sex affects man at the deepest level of his person, the center of his very being, what was classically referred to as the heart.

Yet many people challenge this view that sex is an essentially personal action, insisting that sex is just a bodily act and drawing a sharp distinction between the body and the person. Sex is only physical, they say, and thus while it may greatly affect one’s body, it need not have any significant effect on a person qua person. If this view were correct, then Holly’s more lax position on teenage sexual activity would make a lot of sense. If sex does not really affect you, but just your body, then there is no great significance to it. However, this dualistic understanding of the relationship between man’s body and his self is demonstrably false. As philosopher RJ Snell writes,

Humans are animals. We are bodies, not as an “extrinsic instrument” but as an “essential and intrinsic aspect of a human person”.¹… If the body is considered sub-personal, as an instrument of the person rather than an aspect of the person, it would seem to follow that sexual acts have significance only insofar as they impinge on consciousness, involve intention, or are granted meaning by the person.… If, however, the body is itself personal, so too are bodily sexual acts personal, with meaning revealed in the physical act and not merely in the intention.²

Man’s animality thus entails that sex, as a bodily human action, necessarily involves him as a person. And because man is bodily, his bodily actions have intrinsic meanings over and above what he intends for them. With regards to sex, the action itself signifies a total gift of self, even if a particular person engaged in it intends it to communicate something altogether different.

Kurt’s father offers his son one final pearl of wisdom with regards to sex: “When you’re ready, use it as a way to connect to another person. Don’t throw yourself around, like you don’t matter. Because you matter, Kurt.” Kurt does matter, and so do the rest of Glee’s kids. In fact, they matter so much that Holly’s approach to sex is not good enough for them. Nothing short of sexual integrity, as expounded here, can even come close to being worthy of these incredible kids, for all other views are strikingly incomplete.

Sex is a perfect sharing of oneself with one’s partner, a total gift of self to the other. It forms a comprehensive union of persons, making the partners so radically one that the traditional rhetoric describes this reality by saying that “the two become one flesh”. Thus when two people have sex, they take their very selves in their hands and present themselves whole and entire to their partner. This is the most perfect realization of unity men and women have on this earth. And a union this strong requires a commitment strong enough to support it.

No possibility of impermanence will do here. Because man is a temporal being (a being in time), to give himself totally to his partner in sex means to give all of himself from today onwards. In other words, to give himself in sex is to give himself from now until the day he dies; total gift demands permanence. Anything less is both a disservice to his partner and a betrayal of his own sexual nature. If sex means that the two are united as one, completely and totally, then to engage in sex in any context where this complete and total union is unrealizable is to tell a lie with one’s body, to frustrate the purpose and meaning of one’s sexuality.

Ultimately, it is only in marriage, a comprehensive union of a man and a woman until death do they part,³ that this kind of radical unity is possible. Because of man’s essentially temporal nature, this marital permanence is key. Wherever it is lacking, sex cannot be engaged in without harming both oneself and one’s partner. RJ Snell again comments,

Whatever the conscious intention, all non-marital sexual acts involve self-alienation (the treating of one’s own body as a mere instrument rather than as personal) or the use of another as an instrument, and thereby degrade one’s own personhood and/or the personhood of another. Since the body is an aspect of personhood, non-marital sexual acts of the body are intrinsically depersonalizing, and since it is wrong to treat another person as mere means and not also as end, non-marital sexual acts are wrong.⁴

The decision to have sex outside of marriage is therefore a decision to take oneself, one’s partner, and sex itself far too lightly.

As was said before, many dismiss extramarital abstinence and label the alternative “sex-positive”. Hopefully now it is clear why that terminology is so misleading and inaccurate. Those who defend the virtue of chastity do so not because we care less about sex than does Glee’s Holly Holiday, for example. Nor are we discouraging premarital sex because we think that sex is bad. On the contrary, we recognize that sex is so good, so valuable, so special, that it can only be shown appropriate respect within the context of a totally and permanently committed relationship; i.e., marriage. To think otherwise is necessarily to think less of sex, to cheapen it, to limit its specialness. Therefore, by advocating chastity, we at the Love and Fidelity Network are offering the truly sex-positive position. It is unfair to the young people of the world to offer them anything less.

Special Thanks to Michael Hannon.  Michael is a junior at Columbia University and a Student Fellow with the Love and Fidelity Network.  He is the founding leader of a student group, Agape, Actually, which seeks to educate students and young adults about the nature of authentic love.

1 Dr. Patrick Lee and Dr. Robert P. George in Body-Self Dualism in Contemporary Ethics and Politics.

2 RJ Snell’s “Sex Gone Wrong: On the dualism of degrading desire”, from Public Discourse, 31 Jan 2011

3 For a Natural Law Argument on the reality of marriage as defined here, please see Dr. Robert George, Ryan Anderson, and Sherif Girgis’ essay, “What is Marriage?”

4 RJ Snell’s “Sex Gone Wrong: On the dualism of degrading desire”, from Public Discourse, 31 Jan 2011