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| A chef making a chocolate sculpture. Image source. |
Links to all posts in this series can be found here: Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue"
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Let's look at chapter 12 of The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You've Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended [affiliate link]. This chapter is called "From Having Intercourse to Making Love" and it's about how to have sex which is passionate- not just doing the steps that fit the definition of having sex, but having it be amazing and intimate and all that.
This chapter talks about how things like shame and lack of trust can hold people back from experiencing that kind of passion during sex. There are anecdotes about women who felt weird about being naked with their husbands. Or felt guilty about things they did and then confessed them to God the next day. Feeling shame about your body, or about your desires and enjoyment of sex. Feeling pressure to do everything the "right" way, instead of just being yourself.
The book says that in order to have "passionate" sex, you have to be able to fully trust your spouse, and you have to be vulnerable and honest with them.
So... What do I want to say about this? First of all, full disclosure, yes, this is exactly what I want sex to be too. It's a concept I definitely got from purity culture, but I still 100% buy into this. This is what I see as the ideal for sex, in my own life- to do it with a partner that you are totally committed to (which means married, or pretty sure you will get married), whom you can totally trust and be totally honest with, and you don't feel any need to put on an act for them, or hide how you feel or who you are.
I'm finding it tricky to write about this, because purity culture says this is what sex IS, this is what it HAS TO BE, and if anyone takes a more casual approach to sex, well that's BAD and WRONG. I don't agree with that. I think people can have casual sex, with someone they're not committed to long-term, and they don't have to be super emotionally intimate, they don't have to tell each other what it means to them and what they're getting out of it, etc. People can have casual sex and that can be a healthy thing for them. Not for *me*; I am very sure I do not want that. But sure, for some people, that can be good and healthy.
(And there are other levels of commitment and trust besides casual sex and "committed for life" sex. I'm not sure about what the right terminology is, but basically yeah you can figure out what you want or don't want.)
And a second aspect of this, where I disagree with purity culture: Purity culture says sex *is* emotionally intimate, it's giving your *self* to another person, the deepest form of connection, etc. That when you get together with another person and do stuff with your genitals, you will necessarily be emotionally intimate with them in a way that will stay with you for the rest of your life. No, I don't agree with this. Sex is not intrinsically, automatically emotionally intimate. To put it a different way, if you feel like "I love my spouse and I want to be more connected with them" and so you have sex, that's not guaranteed to work. Sex isn't a shortcut to intimacy. I've found it *can* be emotionally intimate, but only if you do the work.
What do I mean by "do the work"? I mean things like this:
- Unlearning the purity-culture nonsense I internalized about how much men "need" sex and how it would be just so horrible if a man "feels rejected" by his wife, and therefore I can't say no to sex, and I can't speak up during sex if there's something I don't like. In purity ideology, the wife has to make sex a perfect experience for the husband. She must make sure he believes that he's really good at it. She must not bother him by interrupting his amazing experience to request that he care about something she wants. The whole "wifely duty" is about being fake, putting on an act to make sure sex is amazing for the husband. This is the opposite of intimacy.
- Giving honest feedback to each other. "I liked when you did [whatever] because it made me feel [whatever]." Yeah super awkward and vulnerable to say that so explicitly. But I want my marriage to be a relationship where we trust and love each other enough to be that honest. (And also, if your partner knows very specifically what you like, they will do it.)
It was really hard for me to "do the work" that I'm talking about here. It really took a long time, because of how much I had internalized the idea that the woman's role is to make sure the man has an amazing experience during sex- if she tries to spend time caring about what feels good for her, or she tells him not to do something because it hurts her, what if that ruins his mood? The sex-ed resources I read emphasized how important communication is, how your partner doesn't really know what feels good for you unless you tell them, and I knew from a scientific perspective that there's no way to improve without making use of detailed, accurate feedback- but wow I always had this feeling telling me it was wrong to say something. It was so hard to get past that. Even though purity culture told me that sex is about being totally intimate and honest with each other, about knowing each other completely, they also very much taught that I need to hide how I feel if it's something negative that might cause the man to enjoy sex less.
So to sum up, I do have a view of sex where I think it should be about trust, vulnerability, accepting each other, not feeling like you need to hide anything- and I got that from purity culture. But I disagree with purity culture when it says casual sex is always bad and will destroy your life, and I disagree with purity culture when it says that having sex with your spouse [or anyone] is by its very nature emotionally intimate, the highest level of emotionally intimacy you can have.
(Actually, it has been very helpful to me to read sexy fanfiction, where some characters have experience with casual sex, and it can serve as an example of the different ways that people can view sex, and the different feelings people can have about it. It's really good for me to see that it's totally possible to conceptualize sex in ways different from the purity-culture "it's so emotionally intimate, it has to be only in marriage or else the fallout from that level of intimacy will RUIN YOUR LIFE.")
So where does "The Great Sex Rescue" fit into this? Well basically this chapter seems to have the same view I do- that sex in marriage should be about trust and vulnerability (and that's what makes it "passionate"), and that this doesn't happen automatically, but you first have to get rid of shame and the idea that there's something wrong with enjoying sex, and you have to have a partner who totally accepts you. This chapter doesn't say anything about whether or not less-intimate sex can be okay for unmarried people- so, it's not teaching purity culture. It's only talking about sex in marriage. And I do think it's logical to say that a marriage, if it's healthy, should be the sort of relationship where you can trust each other and be totally honest with each other.
All this is to say, I basically agree with what "The Great Sex Rescue" says in this chapter, but also I believe it's fine if people view sex differently than how it's presented here.
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Okay so those are my thoughts overall on this chapter. But I also want to talk about this quote from page 219:
Three years ago, at a women's small group, Julie's perspective shifted. "One woman led a Bible study where, for the first time, I was told that God wants me to have amazing, mind-blowing sex-- and there was nothing shameful about that!" Over the next few months, Julie combed through Scripture and had an epiphany: "I finally understood that sex was a God-sanctioned way to experience a complete, ecstatic loss of control mixed with intense, overwhelming pleasure. And it completely blew my mind." She took time to process everything she learned, but when it all clicked, Julie announced to [her husband] Greg, "Look, I've never fully given you my whole body. But let's do this-- let's be naked, and let's have some fun."
My first thought reading this was, "uh I've read the bible, and I'm not sure where she's getting that from." Like, you study the bible very carefully, and you discover that it says God wants you to have mind-blowing sex? That just seems very odd to me.
But then I realized, *I* believe that God wants people to life full amazing lives and experience pleasure. This is a really important belief for me, which I wrote about in my post I Deserve God's Love. I had to fight my way out of evangelicalism to get there- this belief is very much opposite everything I was taught about "the gospel"- I was taught that everyone deserves to die and go to hell and suffer forever. (Which is why I'm skeptical that Julie could get there just by very carefully studying the bible- this is an extremely evangelical thing to do.) But now I just marvel at how amazing humans are, how God has created us with the capacity for love and happiness, the ability to create, the ability to experience pleasure- and it's such a beautiful thing when that happens.
So, I realized, maybe Julie also came to the conclusion I did- like Jesus says in John 10:10, "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full." It's just, I'm asexual, so when I think about living a life full of pleasure and happiness, sex is not one of the things that comes to mind. Maybe for most people, sex is one of the main things they associate with pleasure? Just feels like someone said "I studied the bible, and I realized God wants me to experience the mind-blowing pleasure of making incredibly detailed sculptures out of chocolate." Like, uh, okay if you want to do that, I guess that's cool, but I have no idea where you think it says that in the bible. But maybe it makes sense if it's saying God wants you to have a fulfilling, abundant life, and for most people, sex would need to be a part of that.
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Links to all posts in this series can be found here: Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue"
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