In Defense of Anscombe
or, Let's Maybe Give the Neo-Puritans a Chance
Where would we Princeton sexual progressives be without our Anscombe Society? Our shared derision for those anachronistic weirdos is one of the few things we all have in common. To mention Anscombe over dinner immediately animates the conversation with a satisfying round of hearty rebuttals. "It's fine if they want to be abstinent," we say, practically in unison, "but they have no right to judge us—and those intolerant, reactionary bastards are against gay marriage and in favor of 'traditional gender roles'—and they've never had sex, so they don't know what they're talking about—etc." Ridiculing a common enemy makes for zesty but easily digestible mealtime conversation. For a few minutes we all heartily agree with one another—feminist and hipster and jock, briefly reconciled. We may speak freely as we chew our chicken and asparagus, momentarily safe from the ever-present threat of accidently offending someone. This pleasant conversational sanctuary requires only the absence of any actual Anscombe members, or sympathizers, at the table—at Terrace, where I eat my dinners, usually a reasonable assumption. The ritual repeats itself throughout the dining halls and eating clubs every time an Anscombe member publishes a new opinion piece in the Prince. Someone invariably wonders aloud why the Prince keeps publishing those wrongheaded articles, unaware that they are for his benefit. They give us all the opportunity to reaffirm our collective rightness in contradistinction to the indefensible beliefs Anscombe is trying to force on us. We experience a moment of blissful unity—that is, until the novelty fades and our happy little society of detractors vanishes like a mirage.
Anscombe's most recent intrusion into the Princeton mainstream was "An Anscombe Valentine's Day," by David Pederson, published on the op-ed page of the Prince on 13 February. This time, the Durkheimian display of social solidarity was not limited to dining hall tables—six days after the article, the Prince published an opinion piece responding to it, tellingly headlined "Just the facts, please." This response took the form of a logical refutation, on the grounds that Pederson's "argument rests on false premises" and "empirical claims without evidence." Its method, as with all such logical critique, was borrowed from Sun-Tzu: discover your enemy's weak points and ruthlessly exploit them. Like a firing squad executing a line of prisoners, coauthors Sam Fox Krauss and Ian Brasg casually dismiss the whole article paragraph by paragraph, briefly examining each before tossing it away. The whole enterprise is carried out with the cold, contemptuous flippancy of a war rape. "Princeton students," they conclude, "are too smart to be swayed by moralizing arguments that only criticize others instead of examining the facts."
Their refutation is weak. It focuses largely on the tangential issue of Pederson's failure to acknowledge the possibility of healthy sex "within a loving, non-marital relationship," and its other arguments are cursory and make frequent recourse to assumed self-evidence. That aside, though, the real question is: was this called for? A look back at the original Anscombe article reveals that the answer is quite clearly no. "Anscombe has made it its goal," Pederson writes, "to inform Princeton students that 'free sex' is never free." The Anscombe society wants to help us. They are not moralists in the traditional Christian sense; they don't tell us we're "bad people" who are "going to Hell". Instead, they say that having casual sex will make us unhappy in this life. And yet we react to their well-meaning words with such visceral violence, as if they were mauling us. The argumentative impotence and defensive stance of "Just the facts, please" suggests that the article was, more than anything, a reflexive lashing-out—just as a surly animal lashes out when touched. The authors of the article don't explain the need for a refutation any more than a scorpion explains why it stung you. So, why do we hate Anscombe so much? Why do we feel the uncontrollable, biological need to claw viciously at every immaculately worded opinion piece they offer us? The social functionalist interpretation I offered at the beginning of this article doesn't cover it. Sure, Anscombe brings us together as a community just as despised minority groups always have. But our shared disgust is more than a mere social activity, and Anscombe is far from an arbitrary target of persecution. On the contrary, the roots grow deep, and it is in the moment of our defensive reflex that they become visible.
I think the reason we hate Anscombe so much is that we know, on some level, that they have a point. Because they've never had it, sex is for them still purely a theoretical matter; so it makes sense that they turn it into ideology. And, because their views on sex are ideological, they assume ours are as well. Pederson describes Princeton's "hookup culture" as "the culture of free sex, unhindered by outdated morals and inhibitions," identifies it as "the dominant sexual ethos on campus," and writes that he and his fellow Anscombe members "disagree with the false ideals of such a culture." But to refer to "hookup culture" as a "sexual ethos" is far too kind. It's not an ethos, but merely the behavior pattern that emerges when a group of well-trained people analyze a system and figure out how to extract from it the maximum amount of pleasure with the least possible effort, without breaking any of the rules. "Tigers on the Prowl," a third recent sex-related Prince article, shows its title to be uncannily apt: whereas Anscombe raise abstinence to the level of political identity, hookup culture equates sex with food. This equation is evident from some of the online comments about "An Anscombe Valentine's Day": "'11" writes "free sex is like free food. ever soo satisfying," and an anonymous comment expands upon this analogy with a long parody of the Anscombe article, substituting food for sex and decrying "the decline of the meal and the rise of the snack."
This intended spoof actually has a valid point: in our environment, food is so abundant that we've forgotten its purpose is nourishment and not pleasure. Our question is generally not "What should I eat in order to be properly nourished?" but rather "What do I feel like eating right now?" or "How much can I get away with eating without getting fat?" "Good food" has come solely to mean "food that feels good to eat," and "healthy" is almost a pejorative term in some circles. Our utilitarian rationalism treats the body not as the foundation of the self but as a vestigial appendage whose sole purpose is to deluge the experiencing subject with as much pleasure as possible. And, paradoxically, this pursuit of pleasure becomes the sole occupation of the subject—it only stops in order to do the labor necessary to ensure a continued source of gratification indefinitely into the future. ORFE majors studying optimization are only committing to numbers a process they've already been unconsciously performing for years. We approach our classes in the same way: we all know how to say our one brilliant comment in precept, get an A on a paper by "giving them what they want," and so on. With those 99th percentile problem-solving skills of ours, we enter a system and immediately calculate the easiest way to get the goodies—in this case, the sublime validation of a good grade. Free food, and anything free for that matter, are just goodies that we may obtain without having to jump through a hoop. And, as our entire psychical apparatus is devoted solely to the accumulation of goodies, to pass up anything free would be completely insane. That's why this past Dean's Date so many students lined up to receive a free Princeton scarf, intent, as always, on walking away with value added.
This mode of thinking applies to sex as much as anything. "Henry," a Princeton Don Juan quoted in "Tigers on the Prowl," has a tried-and-true formula, which he puts into action whenever he is "in the mood for a hookup." He begins by selecting a girl that strikes his fancy, and then moves in for the kill with casual conversation. Eventually sparks start flying and, as Henry puts it, "it just kind of escalates." He mentions "the dance-floor makeout," describing it as a "useful technique." An evolutionary psychologist might explain this behavior as a way of gratifying an archaic predatory impulse that our society's abundant food surplus denies us. And Henry's chilling similarity to a real-life tiger on the prowl is undeniable, although he is civilized enough to hide his true intentions with easy charm instead of just pouncing, like an animal, on his quarry. In another online comment under Pederson's article, "Sexually Liberated and Quite Satisfied Woman," trying to fashion out of hookup culture a sexual ideology to challenge Anscombe's, describes hooking up as "fun, exhilarating, liberating, satisfying, and meaningful"—the thrill of the hunt. It has a sexy danger to it, a sense of a forbidden regression to a predatory prehistory. Indeed, members of Anscombe often regale us with statistics demonstrating the "risks" of casual sex, most recently on Valentine's Day with a poster featuring a magnified pubic louse. Pederson's article also detailed the risks of STI's. These warnings are misdirected, though: STI's and crabs aside, "hookup culture" is characterized best as not risky but utterly safe. All the kissing-and-up encounters that fall under the accepted rubric of "hooking up" have one common feature: they are all, as "Tigers on the Prowl" puts it, "without long-term significance." In other words, and contrary to Anscombe's warnings, hooking up is by definition completely without consequences.
"Elizabeth" is quoted as saying that "the intense nature of long-term relationships might intimidate students," implying that the fundamental impulse behind hookup culture is fear—not even the fear of being alone, but the fear of being together, the fear of the "intense nature" of intimacy, the fear of actually letting yourself care about someone. This allegedly "emancipated" culture is in fact a terrified retreat from the possibility of an actual relationship. We are probably the most well-protected generation ever; ours was the era of mandatory bike helmets, DARE, and "safety schools." It's no surprise then that we carry into our sex lives the certainty that we've planned everything out, that any possible consequence is already predetermined. Our smug satisfaction at cheating the system and knowing the outcome in advance is the sort of pleasure that Krauss and Brasg must have felt as they gazed coldly at Pederson's article before savagely setting upon it. In this case, the foregone conclusion is: there is nothing wrong about the way we choose to live our lives, and Anscombe deserves to be punished for suggesting that there might be. But if there really is nothing wrong with the way we live our lives, why do we always get so defensive? Read not as a moral judgment but as a suggestion for how to make our lives better, "An Anscombe Valentine's Day" is actually extremely touching. Pederson shows palpable concern for the suffering endured by the victims of Princeton's "hookup culture." As someone in one of the committed non-marital relationships that he so fatally neglected to recognize, I agree with Pederson. His line of argument may be focused excessively on abstinence, but I think his underlying point is this: we human beings are not so scary. We are so terrified of one another that we can only encounter each other with the help of either highly structured activities or alcohol. Pederson wants to give us the courage to overcome our fear of "significance" and allow ourselves the experience of real love—maybe we should consider giving him a listen.
Glossary for non-Princeton readers
Anscombe Society: Crypto-Catholic student organization dedicated to spreading the gospel of abstinence and traditional sexual morality
The Prince: Nickname for the Daily Princetonian, Princeton's main student newspaper.
Eating Clubs: Undergraduate social clubs where most Princeton upperclassmen take their meals; roughly analogous to co-ed fraternities.
Terrace: The "alternative" eating club.