If you’re an adult woman, chances are you’ve sat through a bachelorette party or two (possibly even your own) by now. Celebrating an impending marriage with female friends can be a delightful experience, but I’ve found that the gift-giving portion, often involving lingerie, can provoke questions or discomfort in either the bride or some of her guests.
In my line of work, women also often ask about the morality of lingerie within marriage. Can love and lingerie mix? On the surface, it may seem to many like an emphasis of the female body would inherently cause lust–but as with many moral questions, the answer is not so cut and dry.
For many questions of sexual morality, it’s helpful to set the foundation for thought in what’s called “the personalistic norm,” an integral part of St. John Paul II’s philosophy of love, sexuality, and personhood.
The personalistic norm essentially states that each person, by nature of being created by God, is a gift–and therefore should not be treated as an object of use, but rather a good to be loved. This foundation helps guide our questions about sexuality inside and outside of marriage, including when we wonder about the use of things like lingerie.
Essentially, we can ask ourselves: does lingerie always reduce a woman to an object of her husband’s lust?
The answer is no, not always. In a healthy marriage, a woman can wear lingerie in the right circumstances and with good intentions, but it’s also appropriate to caution couples to not be too apathetic in their approach to it. Being married is not an opportunity to try whatever we want without any thought, but rather an invitation to always give our sexuality reverence and pursue things that enhance, not hurt, our spousal unity.
What is lust?
In order to prudently use lingerie, it’s helpful to define lust and how it might appear within a marriage. St. Thomas Aquinas says regarding lust:
A sin, in human acts, is that which is against the order of reason. Now the order of reason consists in its ordering everything to its end in a fitting manner. Wherefore it is no sin if one, by the dictate of reason, makes use of certain things in a fitting manner and order for the end to which they are adapted, provided this end be something truly good” (Summa Theologiae, II-II Q. 153. A. 2).
If we’re looking at the use of lingerie in marriage through the lens of Aquinas, we need to know when it is (and isn’t) reasonable to use lingerie. Maybe this seems like we’re getting too technical about something meant to be fun, but bear with me! It’s important to see the realm of sexuality as a place to love and serve each other, as well as to open to new life with each sexual act. This is the good end of married sexual life–in other words, the “reasonable” end. Lust is the opposite–it’s the desire for pleasure outside of its good context.
Know your end
Questions about sexual morality, including the use of lingerie, need to correlate with this reasonable, good end. For instance, it wouldn’t be reasonable to use lingerie to incite sexual desire when one has no intention of actually having sex. It also wouldn’t be charitable if one or both spouses are trying to recover from pornography use and are currently easily triggered. Finally, it would not be prudent or loving to use lingerie if it makes either spouse, especially the wife, feel uncomfortable or that it overemphasizes parts of her body as opposed to the whole. Spouses who love each other will also take into account the personal stories, wounds, needs, or desires of the other when discerning whether or not lingerie would be something enjoyable or not for them.
However, it’s also in accord with reason to use lingerie to portray excitement, desire, and beauty in a marriage where both spouses are striving to love and honor one another when having sex. While for some, lingerie may lead to objectification, or the disordered desire for pleasure outside of the good of married sexual life (unitive love and openness to procreation), for others it may be a reminder of the gift that their sex life is and increase their enjoyment of it.
It’s not at all wrong for a wife to feel beautiful, desirable, and alluring–nor is it wrong for her husband to think she is. If both spouses are comfortable and acting in good conscience according to their own needs and stories, lingerie can in fact be a reminder that “the person, being a person, should be an object of love” (Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility).
