Valentine's Day - Caitlin Seery argues that to persuade people that sexual morality exists, we need to ask them thought-provoking questions and treat them with dignity, love, and respect.

Our National Sex Day

by Caitlin Seery

To persuade people effectively that a sexual morality does indeed exist, we need to help them arrive at that conclusion on their own by asking thought-provoking questions and treating them with dignity, love, and respect, not by force-feeding them arguments and statistics.
Valentine's Day is here again, as stores have been telling us for the past month, with piles of red-cellophane-wrapped chocolate and heart-shaped doilies in every window. This holiday--once an opportunity for husbands and wives to show their love and affection for each other, to bring back some of the romance that so easily disappears between diapers, bills, and driving lessons--has been transformed into a national day of sex.
Or at least that's what the Victoria's Secret ads and the local card shop's red-tinted stock seem to indicate. I'm told to "indulge" myself in erotic lingerie, experience the world's sexiest chocolate, make Valentine's Day all about me by buying myself (of course) more unmentionables. It's hard to find a Valentine's Day card whose purchase could be recounted to your mother without embarrassment. But it's all too easy to stock up on the day's essentials--like fuzzy handcuffs--at the local CVS.
There's something morally bankrupt about a culture that allows sex to be divorced from love and commitment, that embraces the mutual use of persons' bodies as an ideal form of self-expression, and encourages its youth to turn their bodies into tools for their own pleasure--and objects for others' gratification. The moral wrongs of our culture's embrace of casual sex have already been expounded philosophically and empirically.
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