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Salient. Official Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 41 No. 14. June 12 1978

All you Need is Love — "Sexuality and Marriage" Forum

page 4

All you Need is Love

"Sexuality and Marriage" Forum

Last Monday the Christian Union held a forum in the Union Hall. If you saw the advertising leaflet you might not have known what to expect: an uncouth lout with bulging eyes and drooling tongue perving over a home movie. The title? Sex and Marriage Salient had advertised the forum as "Sexuality and Marriage" and this apparently was what it was meant to be.

The speaker was Dr Anna Holmes, a student health doctor from Lincoln College billed as a "Christian Feminist". Christian she was, if "as a Christian I see the pursuit of maturity as culminating in God" is anything to go by. Feminist? "I deal with whole persons" would be the most characteristic quote which came closest to bearing this out.

The problem was, Holmes wasn't too keen on talking sexuality and marriage in any normally accepted sense of the terms. Sexuality to her was not just' genital relations" (as she put it) but the whole range of emotional communication possible between two people. She didn't quite say that there could be no real sexuality outside this ideal state of communication.

Marriage was a "covenant", a "lifelong mature commitment.... Its actions encourage maturing growth, it is nurturative, healing." The concept of a contract, which seemed to creep in during the Middle Ages when it was ratified by sexual intercourse, has coloured our view of sexuality so that it has come to mean nothing more than sexual intercourse.

Before arriving at these definitions she spent a long time expounding on her ideas about male and female traits, liberally sprinkling the discourse with pseudo-medical information. In males the right side of the brain matures first, she told us, which led to the statement that males are "better at spatial and mathematical tasks".

Women tend to be diffuse in their view of the world, an evolutionary trait gamed in the caves when mothers had to be aware of many children at once. Males are objective, females subjective. These are not universal laws but they have definite general applicability.

Photo of Dr Anna Holmes

Many people would agree with such observations (although their biological basis might be in doubt) but their relevance to the subject at hand is hard to fathom. The link seemed to be that we should all realise stereotypes limit sexuality. Fine, but Holmes was not arguing the widely assumed logical consequence, that we should be more open minded in the substance and style of our sexual relations.

Her claim was that a breakdown of stereotypes should lead to the elimination of "sexual" concerns in favour of total love, total communication involving whole persons? In effect, she was arguing that sex should not exist outside the "covenant" of love. Asked later about this she avoided the issue by saying it would be silly of her to deny that this is not the case at present.

This was however the pattern of her thinking: approach things from a moral standpoint of what should be and rule out everything which doesn't measure up. The more positive attitude, to consider the reality of what is and try to develop it into what should be did not seem to enter her head.

This became very clear during question time. First up was Woman Vice President Caroline Massof, who attempted to get things back to a realistic level. "Do you hand out contraceptions to students at Lincoln College?" she asked. Once it was sorted out that she meant contraceptives, Holmes answered that she. "certainly talked to students about contraception". She stated that she was not a dispensing machine and always considered requests for contraceptives in the context of a whole person sexuality.

Lindy Cassidy put this in perspective by recounting one case she knew of. A woman student had realised that her relationship was nearing the stage of sexual intercourse, so after discussion with the male concerned she went to Holmes for the pill. Holmes told her to go away and think again. She came back some days later to demand her rights, and Holmes made out the prescription. What ethical justification, Lindy wanted to know, was there for a doctor to refuse a patient the medication needed for her continued well-being when the decision to take it had already been responsibly made?

Holmes answered that she did not have any ethical responsibility to prescribe if she did not "feel" the thing had been thought through properly. "Sexuality is not like hunger," she added, there is always the contraception called No. Later she indicated that if an unwanted pregnancy occured after she had denied a woman contraception she would not feel any responsibility.

Holmes argued again and again that she would not treat people as "slabs of meat". David Murray pointed out first, that a relationship between two people should not involve the moral judgement of a third, the doctor; and secondly that there was a viable alternative to the extremes of "dispensing machine" and moral watchdog stand which she defined the whole question in terms of. "I actually never judge my patients", replied Holmes, "I try to increase their self-awareness".

By this time the whole debate was going round in circles. Holmes argued from the basic standpoint that sex was to be discouraged outside a pure covenant of marriage. A covenant was something which could be violated but never broken, which represented a "joyful ongoing commitment", was not oppressive or imposed and which meant "the mutual fulfilment of all our needs". How it is supposed to be achieved was not made clear, but pity the poor Lincoln students who don't make the grade.

Simon Wilson