Yesterday, on the way to daily Mass, I had to cross paths with several of University of Maryland's finest.
The one seemed to be instructing the other on the importance of proper usage of barrier contraceptives since, and I paraphrase, "Some of the crazy girls actually want to get pregnant."
Ah, romance is alive and well here in College Park, and sexual freedom has indeed bestowed a special grace on women!
This got me thinking about contraceptives and what they do to women, and it occurred to me that there is strong comparison between the safe sex mindset and many eating disorders. I don't say this to lessen the impact or horror of a bona fide eating disorder, but to increase the disgust we should feel towards a safe sex mindset.
They both essentially aim at the same goal: to take a natural process of the body and separate the pleasurable good from its biological consequences. When a person looks at a fatty food and says, "I want the pleasure of eating that food, but not the consequences of consuming its fat and then having to exercise to burn off that fat" it is essentially the same mentality as the person who says "I want the pleasure of sex, but not the consequences of having a baby and then having to care for it."
Both come from an attitude that believes: "If I engage in this activity, than the consequences might cost me some other thing I want." A person with an eating disorder believes that their appearance is important to their success; a loss of that appearance could cause them to fail somehow, if only in thinking it will cost them respect among their peers. I'm sure there are other more complex reasons behind eating disorders as well, but I think it's safe to assume that this motivates at least some people. Likewise, the fear of pregnancy often stems from a belief that a baby will obliterate all of one's plans for the future.
An eating disorder comes with more immediate (but not necessarily visibly apparent) health risks. You can die of a heart attack as a direct result of undernourishment. But it seems to me that contraceptives bring just as many if not more lethal health risks in the form of venereal disease. These young men were talking about condoms merely as contraceptives, not as safeguards against disease. And we all know that there are a myriad of diseases that a condom will not protect against...and just as many ways for unmarried couples to engage in sexual activities for which they will not think or bother to use protection.
I remember at that great Catholic institution, La Salle University, the Honors Program had a safe sex presentation in which we were told to remember to always use plastic wrap to create an "oral dam" if we wanted to engage in some of these other activities. How many college students do you really think are going to say, "Wait, honey, not without the plastic wrap!"
And, tragically, both eating disorders and premarital sex can, in the long run, end up obliterating the very future they were meant to preserve and protect in ways other than bodily disease. The emotional stress, shame, feelings of humiliation, and even the possible loss of reputation that can follow are also real results that can shatter one's success.
Overcoming these obstacles won't be through a process of simply denying the shame or trying to reverse cultural assumptions about human sexuality. They will only be overcome through reconciliation, which is hard to find in a barren, secular world devoid of faith.
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