Some Moral Dangers to Avoid When Using Marital Aids

Overview

While marital aids can sometimes help couples deepen intimacy and overcome physical challenges, they also carry subtle moral risks if not used rightly. As with any good in marriage, intention and moderation matter.

Introduction

Our Apostolate has written several articles about the moral use of marital aids. For any of our readers who haven’t read those articles, you can find some here and here. In this article, however, I would like to provide a nuancing word of moral caution when it comes to using martial aids in practice. With almost all things that are good in themselves or serve a virtuous purpose, they can be used for evil, either in themselves or in the motivations behind their usage. 

The Morality of Marital Aids 

Before we point out potential moral dangers that can come with the use of marital aids, we should recap the morality of martial aids in general. While artificial devices aimed at causing sexual stimulation are often used for unnatural sexual acts which terminate in orgasm outside the context of the marital act, they needn’t necessarily be used for this purpose. Therefore, since as Fr. John Hardon SJ reminds us, when it comes to grave sins against nature for married couples, the only sins that fit this category would be when spouses knowingly and deliberately “impede generation” or “intend to have a pollution” [1]. Since marital aids do not necessarily bring about these sins, they cannot be prohibited under the penalty of grave sin, so long as they facilitate licit sexual relations between spouses. Unless someone can point to where the malice of sin would be found in the mere use of marital aids, more needn’t be said about their moral legitimacy. Moreover, some spouses are simply not able to regularly achieve mutually satisfying sexual relations withour recourse to these aids, especially wives. For this reason, marital aids can serve a medicinal function to enhance not merely pleasure for its own sake but the means whereby spouses can grow closer together in intimacy and thereby attain deeper marital communion. 

Words of Moral Caution 

Now, a word of caution. Marital aids are just that. Aids. In the moral order, they can only be used to facilitate licit and rightly ordered conjugal interrelations between spouses. Insofar as spouses shift the focus of their sexual enjoyment away from the other spouse and toward the device itself, this brings about a disordered inversion in the proper ordering of marital sexuality. This is a tendency that must be avoided and while ordinarily speaking the concrete risk of sin would be venial, it could lead to a gravely sinful mentality if over a period of time the spouse becomes reduced to a mere instrument alongside the marital aid for realizing a maximum degree of sexual pleasure. This can become apparent if one spouse notices him or herself intentionally sidelining the other spouse in order to make room for a unique kind of pleasure only the device could offer. 

Some marital aids, moreover, are designed in such a way as to elicit a level of sexual pleasure so intense that it far outweighs the natural capability for a human person to bring about in his or her partner. This can be morally dangerous for multiple reasons. For one, it can easily run the risk of substituting the person for the marital aid as the center of gravity for sexual expression. Such a mentality would quickly erode the proper ordering of conjugal sexuality which must always remain oriented toward a deeper realization of marital communion between the spouses as persons. For two, it can easily give rise to a hedonistic preoccupation with sexual pleasure, for in this case, it is not even the other spouses’ body which is sought to maximize pleasure, but an artificial instrument, which makes it more difficult, though not by any means impossible, to subordinate the pursuit of pleasure to marital communion. Finally, particularly for the husband, there can be an unjustified risk of orgasm outside the act of intercourse, which must always be avoided. 

For these reasons, in my judgment, spouses, should they choose to use marital aids, should limit their selection to simpler devices that are designed more for facilitating natural sexual acts. When marital aids are purchased that are overly complex and multifaceted in their purpose, this could be an indication that you are using intimacy for the sake of receiving pleasure from the marital aid as opposed to using the marital aid to enhance the exchange of pleasure between you and your spouse. As I said above, for the most part, the risk of sin in these matters ordinarily doesn’t exceed venial guilt, but in the interest of pursuing virtue and greater sanctity, it is very important for us to recognize in the use of a good thing where the dangers are so that we can honor the use of that good thing and in so doing honor God Himself.

References

  1. Fr. John A. Hardon, SJ,  Moral Theology, Chapter VII: "Birth Control"