A few weeks ago, Brigham Young University benched one of its star basketball players, Brandon Davies, for breaking the school’s honor code and engaging in premarital sex with his girlfriend. That decision sparked a few days of reaction among sports fans and culture watchers. Reactions that I read and heard – ranging from denunciation to support – were far less surprising, to me, than Davies’ ejection. Among the reactions that crossed my path and stuck in my craw was one from a good friend of mine, Amanda Marcotte, a vocal feminist, liberal blogger.
She laid out her opinion on the suspension in a few tweets. In the last one, she wrote that using the term “premarital” sex is antiquated. There are people, she argued, like her, who have sex but intend to never marry. And that got the word nerd in me excited.
“Premarital sex”, as most of us define it, means sex in a non-marital (not necessarily non-committed) relationship. But Amanda is right, it does assume that marriage is an eventuality in someone’s life. This is not only not the case for people like her who have no desire to marry, to but for those who may, but for whatever reason, never do. In the cases of those who would like to marry, but haven’t yet, or maybe never will, their sex activity can only be called “premarital” in retrospect.
It’s sort of like VBAC vs. TOLAC. VBAC is the acronym for Vaginal Birth After Cesearan-section. TOLAC stands for Trial of Labor After Cesearan-section. Mothers who have delivered via C-section in the past are increasingly aiming for a VBAC for subsequent children. It is quite common for women to say that they will be having a VBAC delivery. A few months ago, the American College of Gynecologists (ACOG, for those playing the monogram game, at home) issued a statement that current health statistics suggest that women could safely deliver a baby via VBAC after up to two C-sections. The statement discusses VBAC success rates and the uterine rupture and risk rates of TOLAC. I was a bit confused by the introduction of TOLAC into my alphabet soup vocabulary of women’s health. I asked a cousin of mine, who is an OB/GYN, what the difference was between VBAC and TOLAC. The difference: definition in retrospect. A woman in normal labor after a C-section is in TOLAC until the baby is safely, vaginally delivered. Then it’s called a VBAC. If a woman is attempting to deliver vaginally and some other terrible thing happens that necessitates an emergency C-section, then she didn’t have a VBAC, she had a TOLAC that ended in a C … section.
Premarital sex cannot be called that, really, unless and until the participants marry, later. (And not necessarily each other.) A woman may say she’s going to have a VBAC, but she’s not going to have one. She will have had one, once she has successfully delivered. We use these terms as givens for conditions that may or may not occur.
Both of these terms work on assumption. But let’s drop the assumption for “premarital” sex, for a moment. How do we term that sex performed outside the confines of marriage? Extra-marital sex is what one engages in, in breach of the marital contract. And what of those who are having sex, but are no longer married due to divorce or death of a spouse? Is that post-marital sex? So, maybe: non-marital sex?
However we term it, what interests me most here is one of things that interests me about language in general. It reveals our societal values. That we even frame the status of sex in terms of marriage says more about where we value marriage as a society, really, than where we value sex. We value marriage above sex. We value sex as a function of marriage, formerly regarded as a function exclusive to the marriage contract. Though we typically no longer expect people to reserve their sexual pursuits to the confines of marriage – or, at least, no longer universally castigate people for not keeping sex a purely marital activity – our language has yet to reflect that. “Premarital sex” is a vestigial phrase, then.
But it still works, frankly. We can take offense at it, or nitpick it for its inaccuracy, but no fluent English speaker is genuinely confused by its meaning. Similarly, I have yet to find someone who has no idea what President Bush meant when he talked about “nuk-yu-lar” weapons. We all know he means “nuclear.” Some linguists are beginning to accept both pronunciations. Since language tends to follow culture, I suspect that how we frame definitions of sex a hundred years from now, will be shaped by how we approximate sex and marriage a hundred years from now.
I’d love to create a cultural definition for sex we can use a hundred years from now, based on an assumed outcome. Any suggestions?
