The Fragility of the Body

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I want to philosophize today. I had a couple of
thoughts that are sort of jumping out of my head
based on a lot of things rattling around in the
old Dome today that got inspired by, of all things,
an incredibly stupid influencer. So there's this gal on Twitter

(00:22):
who tries to style herself as a relationships and dating expert,
and I think she tries to kind of be sort
of right wing aligned or right wing adjacent, AND's she
tweets out the following, all right, we're Basically her big
thesis is that now that this is going to be

(00:46):
a little bit adult topics, so little kids in the
car maybe you know, earmuffs, all your parents driving around. Okay,
there we go. All right, so we're going to talk
about relationships and sex during marriage. And this gal starts writing.
The more she's writing about her contention that Christian couples

(01:11):
should be having more sex, that they don't have enough sex.
That's her contention, and she says, the more hate I
get from Christian wives for saying have sex with your husband,
the clearer it is that she then says, whole industries
thrive because marriages don't. I E. I guess she's saying

(01:31):
that because couples in marriages don't have enough sex, family law,
porn therapy, dating apps, self help all built on unmet desires.
So she is here blaming divorce, pornography, use, the need

(01:54):
to go to therapy, the use of dating apps. So
presumably that means people cheating on their spouses, going on
dating apps to cheat on their spouses, self help all
built on unmet desires. If men and women were honest
and met each other's needs, half the economy would collapse. Well, okay,

(02:15):
this is not half the economy, but all right, now,
I've been thinking about this because I've been thinking about
this in terms of human fragility, the fragility of our bodies,

(02:37):
the weaknesses and limitations of the body, And it's a
topic I've been thinking about as my wife has been
going through pregnancy. This is her sixth pregnancy, and the
last two years I've been witnessed to sort of the
fragility of life at its beginning and at its end.

(03:02):
I have been present now for the birth of five
soon to be six human beings into the world, my children,
and I was present a year and a half ago
for my dad's death and so I've had a lot

(03:23):
of thoughts about human fragility and this comment by this
bozo influencer, who I think is a dufus. Frankly, no,
I don't think pornography is rooted in married couples not
having enough sex. Pornography is rooted in someone having an
unregulated and inordinate degree of sexual desires that are not

(03:45):
regulated by virtue, regardless of whether guys are getting quote
enough sex and marriage, which what that is seems like
a very vague standard. Obviously, I guess it's more than
zero sex whatsoever, but sometimes it is zero sex whatsoever.

(04:05):
That because of the frailty of human bodies. If your
wife just had a baby, yeah, for six weeks or so,
there needs to be zero sex. If your spouse is ill,
it might be zero sex. If your spouse is injured
or incapacitator or going through extremely difficult things like maybe
there might need to be a time of backing off

(04:31):
and not having tons of sex because human bodies are
weak and frail. So I want to talk about this
because I feel like culturally we have this deep impatience

(04:53):
with the body, and this with bodies that are not
in some way in our individual conceptions of it with
bodies that are in some way imperfect. Now this applies

(05:14):
to a lot of different spheres. In the nineties and
two thousands, it was, you know, there was some I
remember there was some show on I think it was
some MTV thing where they had made Oh it was
a Howard Stern show where they were doing this whole

(05:35):
segment about butterface women and they were recently resurfaced on
the Internet where they would bring on some woman who
had a very attractive body, and then she would take
a paper bag off of her face to reveal that like,
she wasn't even unattractive, she just wasn't like wearing makeup,

(05:55):
and everyone howling with laughter at how ugly she was.
And I think at the twenty twenties, like body positivity,
everyone looks beautiful, no matter everyone can be beautiful, no
matter what size you are. I think that was like
a direct reaction to the ludicrous, pornified standards of the

(06:16):
body that were being expressed like in nineties twenty twenty
tens advertising, both of which were unhealthy you know mindsets.
But we have this deep impatience with the body and
it gets expressed in all kinds of different ways. I
think it gets expressed, For one, in this area where

(06:39):
you have this influencer talking about just have way more
sex with your husband, just to have more sex with
your husband. Now, again, I don't know what an appropriate
amount amount of sex in the context of marriage is.
It is highly situation base, and it highly varies, I

(07:03):
would guess from couple to couple, situation to situation. There's
some surveys indicating that the average American couple, which that's
a ridiculous standard because it's not taking into account age
and all kinds of different things, has sex approximately once
a week a little bit more. But so this tweeter,

(07:31):
this you know, influencer who's coming out here saying, well,
the problem is that women aren't willing to have more
sex with their husbands. They should just have more sex
with their husbands. That's as if that's just a magic
wand solution, and I just don't think it is. And
I think part of it is because of our culture

(07:53):
wide embrace of contraception and the impatience we have with
the body. We have this distorted sense of what sex
is and what sex is for contraception has produced for
our culture a twisted sense of what is the purpose,
what is the end goal? What is the goal towards

(08:16):
which sex points where because so many people utilize contraception,
we have this idea that the point of sex is pleasure,
or to put a more positive spin on it, helping
a couple grow closer together, or expressing love and affection,

(08:37):
and certainly those things happen during sex. But the genuine
tilos of sex, the end goal towards which sexual activity
is pointed. The thing that cannot exist otherwise in nature
without sex is the production of children. And maybe to

(09:03):
put it more broadly, sex is about family, about a
couple being bound together with an act that could produce
a child, which the child itself is the thing that
is more binding someone together. That is actually the end

(09:26):
purpose of sexual activity, as in, it's the thing that
it does. It is the thing that it results in. Now,
not in every single circumstance, and we also have to
have patience with the fragility of bodies going through infertility
or or experiencing age, et cetera. But that is the

(09:48):
actual function of sex. So because we have this sense
that we have this incorrect culture wide sense of what
sex is, we think it is about just pleasure and affection,
and that it isn't really laden with serious consequence. We

(10:12):
have these sort of influencer types out here saying, well,
why not just have sex all the time, why not
just you know, go after your husband every day, or
why not have blah blah blah blah blah blah. Why not? Well,
the reason why is because our bodies are not always designed,

(10:37):
especially as we get older, with that level of libido,
women's bodies, men's bodies, et cetera. We can try to
strip sex of its family orientedness, of its ability to
produce children, but that's still what it is, and our

(10:59):
bodies still recognize that, and our bodies still have sort
of a different kind of libido for many people over
the course of time, where someone in their thirties and
forties maybe doesn't just have just doesn't have the same

(11:19):
libido that they had in their early twenties, you know,
their early twenties, a time when it's your twenties, a
time when it's healthier to have babies, physically healthier to
have babies than your forties, a time when it's less
physically healthy to have babies. This is stuff that's built
into our bodies, and so to have these influencers out

(11:41):
here just trying to tell men, the problem is your wife.
The problem is you're stuck up cold, loser wife who
doesn't want to put out. I think that's such a
disservice to couples, rather than trying to encourage both partners

(12:06):
to recognize the fragility of what bodies are, the fragility
of these bodies, how much of these bodies are going through.
And I think maybe I'm a little more sensitive to
this while my wife is pregnant. To see what my
wife has gone through during pregnancy, during her several pregnancies,

(12:29):
I'm left in awe and a kind of reverential awe
at the incredible beauty of what is happening, the tremendous
strain of what the body endures. It's incredible resilience, but

(12:53):
also a kind of like reverence, like a reverential fear
of disturbing something that has gone through so much. It's
almost like looking at a marathon runner. A marathon runner
who's completed twenty six point two miles, You're not gonna

(13:13):
go grab him and slap him on the back and
grab him by the shoulders and shake him, say hey,
way to go, buddy, Hey tackle him to celebrate. No,
you're like in awe of what this body has accomplished,
and you see how much it's gone through. But also

(13:33):
now how fragile it is to see what my wife
has gone through in you know, after deliveries. I remember,
I mean, I think this happens to a lot of people.
To see the woman after she gives birth. Sometimes she's

(13:53):
like shaking, and I've thought, I thought, like I offered
my way, Are you cold? Do you want me to
get you a blanket? What I realize is that no,
she's not actually cold. She has so much adrenaline coursing
through her veins that her adrenaline, her actual adrenaline levels
have gone up so high in order to give birth

(14:18):
that it leaves her physically shaking afterwards. And it gives
me this like, I'm so in awe of it. And
there's a certain degree to which I think we should
have this awe. I think men should I think have

(14:42):
this certain level of awe at the bodies of women
for the amount of changes that are happening, that the
hormonal changes that are happened. And I'm not talking about
like a jokey sick. Oh, she's having a hormone swing.
That's why she's acting like a like a you know what,

(15:03):
this is an incredible delicate machine. It's both incredibly delicate
and incredibly resilient. And to have a certain degree of
respect for that, I think is so important in a
marriage sort of to realize, like, yes, I want to

(15:28):
be intimated, or yes I want to be with this person,
but I also need to have an appreciation for weakness
and for frailty. When we return out, I want to
talk about that. I'm sort of working out over the
air sort of or you know, talking this out. I'm
working out an essay. I'm hoping to write about it

(15:49):
for National Reviews. So stick with me as I do
my rough draft of this essay on the radio. That's next.
That's an next Here on the John Girardi Show, I'm
talking about the frailty of the body. This got kicked
off by reading some tweet by some relationship influencer who
said the problem is the reason that why so many

(16:11):
marriages divorce is because women don't have enough sex with
their husbands and basically putting a lot of the blame
for marriages failing on women not having more sex with
their husbands. And I guess I can't judge whether marriages
are having too much or too little sex, but I
think it's it's indicative of a flawed mindset, this mindset

(16:34):
that has not appreciated what sex is. For sex is
oriented towards childbirth, it isn't purely just oriented towards expressing
affection or pleasure or closeness between a couple. And as
a result, I think this is showing a kind of

(16:56):
lack of reverence, aack of respect for the frailty of
the human body. Because again, what is the right amount
of sex for a couple to be having. Well, sometimes
the correct amount of sex for a couple to be
having is none. Sometimes the correct amount of sex for

(17:19):
a couple to be having is zero sex. Maybe because
one of the partners is ill, Maybe because one of
the partners is going through a serious illness, Maybe because
one of the partners just had a baby and needs
six weeks off, Maybe because you want to delay childbirth,

(17:39):
and maybe you're maybe use NFP and take some periods
of time away from sexual activity. That there are a
lot of reasons why you should not have sex. Sometimes
sometimes the correct amount of sex is zero sex. And
I think there's this like refusal to connect sex to

(18:05):
the marriage vowls. What are the traditional vows that a
Christian couple would exchange with one another, and which is
at the bedrock? I would say, of I guess I'm
not familiar with Jewish marriage rituals or anything, but I
would assume it's at the bedrock of a lot of

(18:25):
different religious conventions regarding marriage. What is at the bedrock though,
of the Christian marriage vowls? For better or for worse,
for richer or for poorer, for sick, in sickness and
in health till death do us part. You are making
a commitment, a lifelong commitment until the death of one

(18:45):
of the partners, of unity, of sexual exclusivity, and of
a shared life. And you're committing to that in sickness
and in health, specifically in sickness and in health. By
the way, this is why any of you, like sort

(19:05):
of any Christians out there who are not in mainline churches,
I feel like this is a temptation with marriages to well,
we'll make our own vows. Well, there's a lot of
tried and true wisdom in the old fashioned Catholic slash Episcopal,
you know, Anglican marriage vows a lot of wisdom built

(19:29):
into that because it actually kind of helps embody what
a marriage actually is. So don't get clever, don't get
cute with your marriage vows. I promise still love you
even if you leave the toilet seed up. No, don't
do that crap. Do the old fashioned ones in sickness
and in health, for better or for worse. And I

(19:51):
feel like there's a because of how we've warped our
conception of sex in our culture, largely because of conscious option,
where we have this divorce where we think of sort
of reproduction as over here, this is one tiny subset
of sex, and ninety five whatever percent of sex is

(20:14):
not about reproduction. We have this sense that for better
or for worse does not involve a partner's libido going down.
It does not involve someone not feeling able to have

(20:34):
sex with the same regularity in their forties as they
had in their twenties. But we can't exclude that from
the marriage vows. The whole idea of the marriage vows is, Hey,

(20:57):
one of you two is going to end this relationship
literally by dying. Okay, unless you're one of those couples who,
like you know, die simultaneously. You know, ninety nine nine
percent of marriage bonds are broken by a partner dying. Okay,
the marriage bond is for life, and so built into

(21:22):
that is an assumption that at some point one of
these two people will get horribly weak, horribly sick, and die,
and the bond lasts through that time period. The mutual
support and love and care and affection of marriage extends
specifically through whatever up or down happens, financial up or downs,

(21:50):
health up or downs. Why we have some sense that
the up or down of the body and sex is
part of the bodies ups and downs, is somehow excluded
from that or different from that. I think it's just illegitimate.

(22:12):
And I feel like more young people entering into marriages
need to really and realistically consider that. You know, my
wife and I served as kind of a mentor couple
for two young twenty somethings from our church who were
getting married to you know, the daughter of you know,
lifelong family friends of mine and my parents and her

(22:37):
fiance now husband. And this was a point I tried
to sort of emphasize, is that there needs to be
a kind of respect and reverence for the body, and
we have this this deep impatience for the body when
we return. I want to talk about that, the impatience,

(22:57):
the cultural impatience for the body, which is expressed not
just in our sexual moras, but beyond that in all
kinds of ways. It's at the root of the trans issue,
it's at the root of practices like IVF, it's at
the root of so much in our culture. That's next
on the John Gerardy Show. I want to talk about

(23:21):
I'm doing this big rambling essay today. If you listen
to the podcast, you'll get the whole thing. If you're
listening on the radio, you might be coming in the
middle of it. But I'm doing this long, rambling audio
essay today about the weakness and frailty of the body
and our culture wide impatience with it. I think this
is expressed in sexual relations between couples, where you have

(23:46):
these influencers online or just if women would just have
more sex with their husbands then no one would get divorced.
And it's like, well, no, that's not it's not necessarily.
There is a certain degree to which human beings drop
in libido over time. And if a husband can't understand that,

(24:09):
if he can't have enough of a reverence or an
appreciation for his wife's body to understand that maybe that's happening,
then maybe he needs to get his you know, priorities
straightened out. Maybe he needs to check himself and get
a better understanding of what's going on, or vice versa.
I mean, often it seems like in these surveys whatever,

(24:30):
it's more often than not it's husband's complaining about a
wife's lack of lilbido, et cetera. But we have this
culture wide impatience for the body where, you know, you
get influencers like this jumping out to say, well, the
problem is that wives don't have enough sex as opposed to, Hey,
the body changes. Women's bodies are these incredible things. I

(24:57):
sort of likened it, you know, I guess I'm more
sensitive to this right now, give my wife's pregnant and
seeing what she's going through. I'm sort of likening it
to a marathon runner. Where a marathon runner after mile
twenty six, you know, you don't walk up to him
and slap him on the back of Hey, way to go, man,
and grab his shoulders and shake him around. He's a

(25:20):
His body is a wonder, an utter engineering, endurance, marvel
and has accomplished something extraordinary. Its resilience is on full display,
and at the same time it is more fragile and

(25:40):
more frail than anything. And you don't smack it around.
You don't grab him by the shoulders, you don't grab
his head and the headlock and give him a noogie.
You you respect him, You respect what it has done.
I feel the same way about how the bodies of

(26:01):
women and what women's bodies go through. That this is
something that I think any husband has to approach in
marriage with an extraordinary degree of reverence, genuine reverence, and
to have a patience and a sympathy that, Okay, you

(26:25):
don't grab the marathon runner and give them a big
nuggie right after a mile twenty six, you know, wait
a day or two before you give them you tackle
or whatever. There's a certain reverence that has to take
place for women's bodies. We're going through these tremendously difficult
processes on like a monthly basis, and that sex is

(26:47):
part of this. Well, I want to just sort of
extend this outward. Why our culture is so impatient with
the body. So there's this culture wide idea that who
we are fundamentally is something that's rattling around between our ears.

(27:15):
It's the concept called expressive individualism, that my identity fundamentally
is rooted in how I perceive myself, my conception of myself.
That's who I am. It's not rooted in anything objective.

(27:40):
It's purely rooted in the subjective. And this is coming
out of I think, a lot of different strains of
modern philosophy Descartes, Kante, et cetera. But this is fun
and so this is an idea that has sort of

(28:02):
seeped through a lot, and it gets into a lot
of motivational speaker y ideas. You're not who other people
say you are. You're the only one who matters. Be
all that you can be, live out your dreams. And
it's not to say that your your own subjective perceptions
of yourself can't have a big impact. If you tell

(28:25):
yourself all the time that you are a certain kind
of way, that reality sometimes winds up expressing itself. And
I try to impress that on my kids, like, don't
say that you are bad at math, say that you
are having a difficult time with math now, but you
will work on it. You're not a static reality. You

(28:45):
are not a static reality of Sophia Girardi, a person
who is bad at math, like Sophia Girardi, a girl
with blonde hair. No, this is not a static reality
for you. Nevertheless, there are there are some things about
Sophia Girardi, my nine year old daughter, that are objective
and static. Sofia Girardi is a girl. Sofia Girardi has

(29:11):
pale skin and freckles. Sofia Girardi has blonde hair. Sofia
Girardi is currently I don't know how tall she is,
four foot nine. I'll say there are certain aspects of
who Sophia Girardi is that are in fact static and
do not change. It's not purely what's rattling around inside

(29:34):
of her head and those. Much of that static reality
of Sofia Girardi is embedded within her body. And for
so long there has been this kind of impatience with
the body in American culture. I keep going back to

(29:55):
contraception as being sort of one of the sing moments
where we had this this first sort of expression, this
deep unsatisfaction, this deep impatience expressed with the body. Bodies

(30:16):
that are having sexual relations will produce babies, and we
have this dissatisfaction that, well, we don't want our bodies
to do that, So how can we brute force it
so that that doesn't happen? And contraception comes along? So
this is our first sort of act of impatience towards

(30:39):
the body and what it is and what it does.
Then we get to well, I am impatient that my
body looks this way. I want it to look another way. Okay,
well let's do plastic surgery where it's a question of not.
And before you start saying, well, what do you think

(31:03):
about medical care, then you know we shouldn't have tile
and all. We shouldn't have, you know, surgeries to correct things.
I think there's a big difference between impatience with how
the body is naturally supposed to be. It's authentic teleology.
The authentic end goals towards which the body is ordered.

(31:23):
The body is ordered towards health, and the whole point
of medicine, of health care is to restore the body
that way. So, yes, we are impatient with cancer, we
should be impatient with cancer. Cancer is this horrible thing.
It's not how the body, in its proper functioning is
supposed to be doing a medical intervention to whack out

(31:44):
someone's cancer, to treat someone's cancer. That is a good thing,
but you see that there's a difference where with contraceptive practices,
or let's get into gender transition surgeries. I'm impatient with
my body being a male body. I wanted to be

(32:04):
a female body. I'm impatient with my female body. I
wanted to look like be a male body. That's not
doing something to make the body fulfilled towards its natural
end goals. That is something different. I am simply, and

(32:24):
we see this all the time, that this there were
differences in how we categorize different kinds of physical bodily interventions.
A nose job because you're a hockey player and you
got slammed into the boards and broke your nose and
you need a nose job to sort of reconstruct your
nose to make it look like a nose again and

(32:46):
allow you to breathe. Yeah, we considered that healthcare. That
rhinoplasty is healthcare. Michael Jackson being a crazy person and
insisting that his nose didn't look beautiful and trying to
get some weird, angular roman looking nose rather than his
normal nose, which frankly everyone thought was fine except him.

(33:07):
That wasn't healthcare, and we have elighted that difference. Liberals
chiefly have alighted that difference with what with abortion, with contraception,
and now with transgender interventions. Where the point of contraception

(33:28):
is not to fix something that's wrong, fix anything that's
wrong with the natural function of the body. The point
of contraceptive interventions is to stop the natural function of
a body. The point of abortion is not to fix
something that's physically wrong with the body. It's to end
the natural bodily process of pregnancy and to kill a

(33:48):
developing baby. The point of transgender surgery is not to
fix something that's wrong with somebody's body. Someone's female body
is working just fine. Their female breasts are are there,
and they're working just fine. The point is to just
change it cosmetically for some other kind of social goal.

(34:11):
To give someone a double mastectomy for no actual reason
other than for no actual medical reason, but rather a
social reason, to try to express oneself as the opposite sex.
And it's out of this impatience for the body we
don't respect it, we don't reverence it, we don't accept

(34:38):
its fragility. When we return, I want to talk about
the fragility angle in light of my dad's passing. And
they'll put a cap on this whole rambling audio essay
that's next on the John Gerrardy Show. So I'm doing
this whole thing today talking about the frailty and fragility
of the body and our cultural impati and how that's

(35:01):
expressed in our sexual moras, how that's expressed in the
transgender movement, how that's expressed through abortion, how that's expressed
through so many things, and I just want to talk
about it in light of In the last two years,
I've seen one soon to be two children be born,
and I've also seen my dad die, and so I'll

(35:24):
have been present for both of those things. To see
my five children soon to be my sixth child is
about to be born, it's this extraordinary thing to see
this very small human being who has been gestating inside
my wife, and how perfect this human being is. It's

(35:45):
like my buddy Jonathan Keller was talking with me about
this the other day, and it's like a miracle that
everything goes right it's a miracle that any baby is
ever born healthy. And we've been very fortunate that our
kids have all been pretty healthy and no serious health difficulties.
But just to look at this unbelievably intricate organism and
the tiny little fingers, every little joint is just so

(36:08):
just right in their every little joint in their tiny
fingers is just so just right. Their little toes are
just perfect, their and their heart is beating, their organs
are working, their brain is functioning. There they breathe. They
it's it's like this astonishing thing to behold, especially when
they're first born. It's it's like, how is how did
nothing other than an egg cell and a sperm cell,

(36:31):
you know, nine months ago produce this. It's like this unbelievable,
near miraculous process. And then at the end of my
dad's life to see sort of to see that also
to see, yes, this was is an incredibly fragile thing,

(36:53):
this incredibly delicate thing where you know, my dad had cancer,
and one of the things that was so just stressing
about it was anytime we did one thing to help
address the cancer, there were like twenty other things that
could go wrong as a result, and there was just
such an infinite number of variables that we just physically

(37:13):
that we simply could not control. They did radiation for
the bladder, for the tumor that was growing in his bladder,
but that radiation harmed his digestive system, and so that
led to all kinds of complications and difficulties. And to
see the fragility of that, how delicate it is, how

(37:37):
intricate it is, and how ultimately this is the end
point towards which we're all going that we are going
to die someday, and that we will be weak, and
we will be frail, and we will be dependent. I
think it has sort of impressed upon me the reverence
that we ought to have for the body. And I

(38:00):
guess that's my sermonizing for today on the subject be
reverent towards the body that'll do it. Johns already showed
see you next time on Power Talk