Complete Sex

Ruddick criticizes these dualistic understandings for two reasons. First, they result in an account of sexuality that radically separates a given individual’s sense of unique identity and distinctive selfhood from “sex” as something that takes place solely between (more or less interchangeable) bodies. Second, in doing so, such understandings seem inevitably to lead to an ethically problematic account of sexuality – namely, one in which individuals can use one another’s bodies only as the means to satisfy their own desires. Ruddick does not think that such understandings of sexuality are necessarily mistaken. But she first argues that, from a phenomenological perspective, they are incomplete. As we know from some of our most intense experiences – such as playing sports – we do not feel or experience some sort of mind–body dualism: rather, we enjoy these experiences so profoundly and completely in part just because they involve an immediate sense of unity between our selves (as unique and distinctive selves or agents) and our bodies. (The German phenomenologist Barbara Becker later coined the term “body-subject” [LeibSubjekt] to denote this experience of being in the world as an individual in both mind and body.) Ruddick does not argue that all our sexual experiences must involve such direct unity or embodiment. Rather, she maintains that those that do are morally preferable, first of all because our own personhood and autonomy cannot be separated from our bodies in such experiences. Specifically, to approach sexuality as embodied beings – as individuals and moral agents who are our bodies, especially as they are diffused with sexual desire – issues in what Ruddick calls “complete sex,” a sexual engagement infused with mutuality and reciprocal care and concern for each other. Such “complete sex,” as inextricably interwoven and suffused with the distinctive identities of the persons involved, thereby literally embodies the felt uniqueness of the relationship with each other, along with other feelings such as pride and gratitude – all of which reinforce the status of the Other as an equal person, not a thing.