Okay, Fine, Let's Talk About Sex

I'm normal, you're normal, readers of bear shifter cowboy romance are normal

Photo by Deon Black on Unsplash

When I started telling people about this whole “Summer of Pleasure” project, I got a lot of bug-eyed reactions and several romance novel recommendations (not that I’m complaining.) It took me longer than it probably should have to realize that most people equate “pleasure” with “sex.” I actually meant pleasure in a broader sense—the physical embodiment of joy; everything from a cold drink on a hot day to the sound of my children’s breathing as they slept. FWIW, I meant “pleasure” as the opposite of “work”—not the Summer of Boning.

But, of course, there’s a reason most people associate sex with pleasure—that’s the main point of sex, right? It’s an activity generally practiced more for recreation than procreation. Is it telling that I’ve been reading, thinking, and writing about pleasure all summer and sex was one of the last things that came to mind? Probably! As much as I’ve worked on developing a new sexual ethic, purity culture baggage has a long tail.

But confining pleasure to the PG-rated things of life felt very antithetical to this project. And while the public narrative of monogamy is that it means the death of desire, I wanted to know if, after sixteen years of marriage, new pleasures still awaited me in the bedroom.

Esther Perel discusses the conundrum of monogamy in her excellent book, Mating in Captivity. Her chill, European vibe is the opposite of the uptight Evangelical sexual ethic I was raised with. Her book details many of the lessons she’s learned over her career as a couples’ counselor. The most powerful one, for me, was the lesson that eroticism is fueled by overcoming a distance. Monogamy can be boring because sex is a sure thing. You grow to have so much affection and nurturance for this person that there’s no mystery or excitement left. The challenge is to strike a balance between emotional security and independence. We must challenge ourselves not to take our partner for granted, to be present and really see them. Mindfulness comes back again, sorry not sorry.

But when I tried to practice mindfulness around sex, purity culture reared its ugly head. My mental chatter was filled with feelings of guilt, shame, and a strong sense of “should”—there was good, proper sex for a Christian wife to be having, and then there was all of the other stuff that was actually enjoyable.

But I learned from Dr. Marlene Winnell that processing religious trauma comes under two big questions: “What happened?” and “So what?” I needed to look at how purity culture was

What happened: purity culture teaches that sex is evil and dangerous outside of marriage, so dangerous that it could cause someone to “stumble” and be sentenced to Hell. After marriage, sex goes from forbidden to mandated—women’s bodies are not viewed as their own but belonging to their husbands as objects for their sexual gratification. It teaches that masturbation is evil, so are “lustful” thoughts. Matthew 5:27-30 is used to say that thinking about sex is just as bad as doing it.

So what: I grew up (like many Christian Millennials) fearing sex and feeling ashamed about sexual desire. A totally normal part of my development was pathologized by these teachings, along with a healthy dose of old-fashioned American slut-shaming. The 90s and 00s were positively fraught with True Love Waits rings (even Britney Spears had one!) CCM artist Rebecca St. James basically built a whole career on being a virgin.

When I finally got married at the ripe old age of 22, I was dying to have sex. But contrary to the sex videos we watched in Sunday School, THINGS DID NOT GO AS PLANNED. The first few months of married sex totally sucked—I experienced both physical pain and a huge emotional letdown. My husband and I had done everything “right,” so why weren’t we experiencing the amazing sex life that we’d been promised? I wondered if something was wrong with me and felt ashamed.

What I know now is that you can’t spend a decade imbibing messages that “sex is evil and dangerous” and then flip a switch and expect it to feel safe and fun. It takes time to undo that harmful messaging, and to learn to feel at home in your body.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the writers who helped me discover pleasure were largely those outside the church. Dan Savage, the man behind the NSFW “Savage Love” column, taught me that being a good partner meant being GGG—good, giving, and game. His sexual ethic is about as far away from Evangelicalism as you can get, and yet his Campsite Rule (that you should leave your sexual partners at least as good as you found them) is deeply moral.

Emily Nagoski, author of Come As You Are and Burnout taught me about how stress can block your sex drive (a huge problem for folks coming out of purity culture, where sex was inherently stressful) and spontaneous vs. responsive desire. Basically, our culture equates a hot sex life with spontaneous arousal—you look across the room and feel overwhelming attraction and then want to have sex. But many people (especially women) experience “responsive desire” that is, they become more aroused once they start engaging in things like kissing, cuddling, etc. One type of desire isn’t better than the other.

Similar to Nagoski’s discussion of “responsive desire,” Esther Perel insists it’s okay to say to your partner, “I don’t know what I want. Convince me.” There are gray areas in sex—that’s not to discount the importance of consent, the less well you know a person, the more important consent is—but, in trusting, reciprocal relationships, it’s okay to be ambivalent, to dip a toe into the sexual waters, so to speak. Mating in Captivity goes on to discuss the transgressive nature of fantasy and the importance of play in erotic life.

What these writers do is normalize rather than pathologize sexual desire. It’s normal to feel attraction and to crave transgressive things. It’s normal to find monogamy boring at times, it’s normal to go through stressful periods and not desire sex. Internalizing these messages is a big step towards recovering from purity culture. In fact, self-compassion researcher expert Kristin Neff outlines normalizing as one of the key steps in developing self-compassion. I am normal. You are normal. Even people who read bear shifter cowboy romances are normal. (Yes, those are cowboys who sometimes turn into bears. The women don’t have sex with them while they’re bears, as far as I understand.)

While purity culture shamed us for our desires, we can finally embrace the truth: there’s nothing wrong with us. Our bodies and desires are normal. What’s wrong is what we were taught about sex. We can work towards our own healing and aim to teach the next generation better.

How are you examining the effects of purity culture messaging in your life? Are there any books or resources that are bringing more pleasure to your life? Share in the comments so we can learn from each other. And if you know someone who could use a little more pleasure in their life, why not share this post with them?