Do you remember “Better than Sex” cake? I was reminded of it recently while watching “Next Level Chef.” Mentor Nyesha Arrington encouraged one of her chefs to “make sexy food.” That cake appeared on the social scene in the ’70s–about the same time as sex was elevated to the apex of life. To my knowledge, that’s when the term “sexy” infiltrated everything, even our food. Yet it’s value as life’s high point remains one of the greatest cultural lies of all time. Focusing solely on physical gratification robs people of true vibrant all-encompassing intimacy, the exquisite experience of becoming one flesh with one person for a lifetime. 

Without relationship, the physicality is about as satisfying as a piece of cake. If you’re lucky you may achieve a few moments of pleasure without the satisfying substance that remains and an unnecessary weight gain of mental/emotional proportions.

How do I know, you may ask? Read my book The Windblown Girl: A Memoir about Self, Sexuality and Social Issues and you’ll understand why I consider myself somewhat of an expert. During my love affair with the Norwegian navigator, I discovered something that far exceeds a mere physical experience. Over time, I also learned the downside of sex. Besides that I’ve read a number of books and articles by authors who have done statistical research, which included numerous interviews. Plus, I’ve talked with young adults who validated those findings.

As a result I’m convinced it takes a union of mind and body to satisfy the soul.

We’re More Than Just a Body

The mind-body problem has fascinated me for a long time–maybe because I struggled so much with it. Yet, I never dreamed my first editing assignment for a science/faith think tank would involved a piece written on that issue by philosopher/theologian J. P. Moreland. Even the scientists I worked with had a hard time grasping Moreland’s explanation of the concepts involved. Regardless, I believe we’d all agree with his description of “substance dualism,” basically the concept that a human being has both a body and a soul.

However, materialists attempt to deny the soul because it can’t be seen. But neither can numbers, the laws of logic, and Truth–irrefutable universal truths. Can you think of some? I can–we all age, we all die. Fish live in water. However, many materialists today try to deny concepts such as the number 2 and the laws of logic. If the body doesn’t have a soul, what you do with it is up to you. 

A Tool for Pleasure

Regarding the mind/body problem, Wendell Berry’s paper “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” an essay from his book What are People For?, reveals how the body and the mind/soul were intended to work together. He laments how in this age of

sexual freedom . . .  our ‘sexual revolution’ is mostly an industrial phenomenon, in which the body is used as an idea of pleasure or a pleasure machine with the aim of ‘freeing’ natural pleasure from natural consequence. Like any other industrial enterprise, industrial sexuality seeks to conquer nature by exploiting it and ignoring the consequences, by denying any connection between nature and spirit or body and soul, and by evading social responsibility. The spiritual, physical, and economic costs of this ‘freedom’ are immense, and are characteristically belittled or ignored. The diseases of sexual irresponsibility are regarded as a technological problem and an affront to liberty. Industrial sex, characteristically establishes its freeness and goodness by an industrial accounting dutifully toting up numbers of ‘sexual partners,’ orgasms, and so on, with the inevitable industrial implication that the body is somehow a limit on the idea of sex, which will be a great deal more abundant as soon as it can be done by robots (p. 9).

At the time that was written, Berry may have intended to use “robotic sex” as hyperbole. But over the intervening years, several authors have written about the plausibility of that very thing, impersonal automated sexual experiences that do not require relationship. Virtual experiences driven by the huge lucrative porn industry. In the process, humanity becomes increasingly broken and perhaps incapable of caring about one another. Rather than finding wholeness, individuals become more fractured and dysunctional. And, so does society.

Devastating Consequences

Consider this. In the quest for more and better sex–porn has become rampant. Human trafficking numbers rage to new heights with increasingly younger victims used for increasing violence. Even the books nice sweet Christians read reflect the dismissal of porn problems. A few years ago, The Christian Post reported these results.

A new study [by Barna] has revealed there is no difference between the percentage of Christians who have read Fifty Shades of Grey and the percentage of all Americans who have read the book, which has at times been described as “mommy porn.”

When I expressed disdain for women reading this book because it characterizes an abuser as the utlimate sex partner, friends including Christians claimed the “good girl changed him.” Right. Like that’s about to happen in the real world. Most likely she’d be killed as abuse escalates against its victims. Favorite authors like John Grisham and Kristan Hannah add to the problems when they surprise readers with graphic sex scenes painting mental visuals that may entice the more vulnerable to want more. With the proliferation of cell phones, many innocent children are even exposed to porn after or perhaps during school.

And, that leads to my take on the mind/body problem, which I believe can be settled with a very simple argument. If a woman was sexually assaulted as a little girl, it impacts her entire being. If she’s raped at any age, she’s traumatized in a multitude of ways. Even more so if she’s trafficked. So are boys and men. If we were just a body–none of that would matter. It would be OK to use the body as a commodity. But it’s so much more.

Creating Wholeness

Our souls crave something better than sex. For our spirits to soar like a yellow sunshine kite (that’s in my book!), takes relationship. Getting to know one another, caring. More than self-gratification, it requires the mutual desire to please. When two souls genuinely unite–they become one flesh and that sustains committed relationships for decades, whether the sex continues or not.

There is something better than sex and it’s not cake. Comparing it to art, Berry describes sex with the sense of wonder and value it warrents:

Like sexual love, art is of the mind and spirit also, but it is made with the body and it appeals to the senses. To reduce or shortcut the intimacy of the body’s involvement in the making of a work of art (that is, of any artifice, anything made by art) inevitably risks reducing the work of art and the art itself.

Berry rightly puts together mind and spirit and body in the forming of an artwork of any kind. And to be better than sex as a mere physical experience, love-making deserves to be treated and treasured as a work of art.