Today’s Stoic: How a Stoic Thinks About Sex

If you’re born into certain religious faiths, you tend to be raised with strong views on sex that come from on high. You’re not supposed to have sex before marriage or do this or that because God wouldn’t like it. (How that entitles you to regulate what other people do is less clear, but we’ll leave that to another discussion). And if God doesn’t like it, well that’s trouble. It is a rigid and restrictive worldview, to be sure, but it also offers a great degree of simplicity and clarity. Do this, don’t do that. For those who are not religious, however, it is a little less clear what to think about all things sexual. Should you do whatever you want—following every urge and impulse your body has? Should you chase pleasure? Or should you avoid it? What do you teach your children, whose innocence you want to protect, without being controlling or repressive? These are the type of questions the Stoics were always wrestling with, as they tried to find a rational path through the world. A path that was both in accordance with our nature—as they liked to say—and also not ruled by our passions. As it happens, one of the most direct comments we have on sex from Epictetus is both modern and commonsensical: “As for sex, abstain as far as possible before marriage, and if you do go in for it, do nothing that is socially unacceptable. But don’t interfere with other people on account of their sex lives or criticize them, and don’t broadcast your own abstinence.” Basically, try to be responsible and mind your own business. Not a bad way to live. There’s no reason to be a pleasure-hating moralist (that is its own passion, anyway). There’s not much to admire in the stories we hear from Greece and Rome about slaves and prostitution and pederasty either. Worse still are the hypocrites who say one thing and do another. Epictetus’s formula is almost a perfect Aristotelian Mean: Don’t abstain and don’t overdo. Leave other people to their own choices. Keep your own choices private. And don’t think you’re better than anyone else—because you’re not.