Christianity, Sex, and Critical Thought
Our friend talks about his experience with Christianity and how it left him unprepared to handle the realities of modern day, particularly sex.
Straight / Male / 30–35 / Europe / Married
Let’s start at the beginning, or as close to it as is reasonable. Sexually, I was a slow starter and until I was about 21, I didn’t really understand juvenile sex jokes. Even curse words like ‘slut’ and ‘wanker’ only gained true meaning later on. The reason for this and a lot of my sexual naiveté was that I truly and literally believed the Bible, verbatim, and took the interpretations of my religious leaders without any thought, critique or filter. Which according to the word of God, you’re supposed to do! As a guy in his early 30s now, I’m moving out of that mental bondage, following years of uncritical worship. I’m now going through a spiritual/religious renaissance and enlightenment that might resonate with someone else out there. Which is why I’m sharing my story. The Church, I felt, failed to make the Bible relevant to modern life and how we navigate the landscapes of sex and love.
You see, when the pastors in my church said no sex before marriage, I assumed everyone in the congregation religiously (and easily) followed along. It didn’t seem like it was going to be particularly difficult to pull off. All the films I watched chronicled ‘normal’, happy functioning families and relationships. Every adult I knew was in traditional normative and holy marriages. Seemingly, they all had bought into this and had kids in wedlock with that one partner at the right time. No funny business or unplanned pregnancies. My world view was that those unplanned pregnancies were rare because they were wholly wrong and everyone fully bought into this God thing. As I was easily absorbed by my comics and computer games, I didn’t really realize that obeying the Bible is tough and the realities of life aren’t as black and white as I thought they were. I also didn’t realize that the lives of my wider family and the older people around me were full of challenging relationships.
Instead of recognizing this, I was blinded by horror stories about how awful it was to have sex with people who weren’t your wife/husband. How spirits intertwined when people had sex. How the spiritual footprints left behind robbed you of your spiritual power and value. I had an overactive imagination and I remember really believing in the version of the Bible my church preached. I heard horror stories of women with too many sexual partners suffering spiritual attacks and mental breakdowns because they were so messed up with the leftovers of other people’s spiritual footprints following all the ‘bad’ sex they had. Powerful images for an impressionable teen who was now far too into comics and games to think there was any pleasure in women.
I remember thinking it would be easy and super special to stay a virgin and eventually have one connection with one lady, as the Church kept arguing I was supposed to do. When the film Avatar came out, it perfectly encapsulated what I had always felt. There was that scene with the magic flying dragons, banshees, and the hero was told you could only bind with one and that was it. Purity was in all the narratives. I was convinced everyone must surely be keeping to it. The Matrix played a part too with its messianic themes of Neo being The One. Pretty much every other film I was allowed to see also carried these narratives, further confirming my perception and how I saw relationships in the world. I also played video games all day and was not chasing girls, so others must also have been able to control themselves and not get into too much trouble, right?!
Whilst most guys in their early 20s were trying to lose their virginity, I liked that I was being different and obeying God’s word. I had formed ‘virginity’ in my identity enough to not want to lose it. The resilience to withstand the peer pressure felt rebellious in an odd way because I was rebelling against pop culture and setting my own path. Next to the sports teams I supported and my smarts, my virginity was something that defined me. Even though the reality of people’s promiscuous nature became apparent, I liked my uniqueness. I was standing firm on the words of my pastors, even though I failed to realize some of them were privately facing their own challenges.
I think girls liked that I preferred to have stimulating conversation rather than trying to get in their pants. Who needed all that stress and commotion, and risk of STDs and pregnancy anyway? My eventual sexual discovery was a fraught one as I began guilt wrenched masturbation sessions to my brother’s porn collection that I discovered when I was 19. I remember he tried hiding it in folders many levels down in random program file folders. Think C:\Program Files\Microsoft Silverlight\5.1.50906.0\cs\misc\Shared\Exec files\1232 Temp\Reference 43\PORN. The guilt of this fornication soon faded as I reasoned it was better to masturbate than to get too close to women and potentially end up having sex.
During college, I became close with a couple of the women I saw during my studies. I became very comfortable with ejaculation outside of penetration and knew it was better to fool around instead of experiencing intercourse. Plus, I was able to grow my skills in other areas like cunnilingus and general foreplay.
A couple of times it got hairy. I remember I was at a girl’s flat once with a friend of hers, who it turns out also knew about my virginity. It was approaching my birthday and they bought me some condoms as a ‘gift’, teasing me and trying to pressure/bully me to have sex with the girl that I was friendly with at the time. I didn’t know how to respond appropriately, but I had been around situations like this before and decided to excuse myself quickly. In another situation, I was really frisky with this one girl she got quite aggressive and tried to get me to penetrate her. The pastor’s words were always ringing in my ear and I was so scared of my spirit being ‘defiled’, I wrestled away from her, ran away and continued waiting for the one. I never spoke to either of these girls again.
Christian girls that I dated were comfortable with my sexual behaviors. They had often been with guys who tried to force sex on them really hard. It was refreshing for them to be with a guy who didn’t put that pressure on them. I loved it. We always had a mutual understanding that it was the lesser of two evils to settle with hand jobs and blow jobs to satisfy sexual desires. They too had sexual desires and we struck a nice and unholy balance jointly flirting with intercourse, trying to curb our frustrations.
Then I met the girl who eventually became my wife, planting the seeds for paradoxical despair. Her church said that we had to have pre-marital counseling classes before they would marry us. Most churches I knew stipulated this so I agreed and in hindsight, recognize that this was the icing on the cake to bringing my undercooked sexual attitudes to the foreground.
I believed the Bible is perfect and still do, perhaps I’m now just a bit more aware of the Church’s interpretations. To me, the messages in the Bible and the points it makes are sound and a perfect ideal to aspire to. The wisdom it contains, the poetry and the lessons it teaches are a strong foundation and foolproof moral compass for a peaceful society. I believe the Bible by itself is an excellent account of how to live your life and have a loving relationship with the higher power, unfortunately, the messengers that relay the message are variable.
The Church could have done a better job in telling us about sex and love. It holds up the Bible’s ideals of sex, love, and marriage but its delivery is so off-kilter from the realities of modern life, it renders the lessons blunt. One of the lessons for these premarital classes was on finance. The lesson was that as I, the guy and head of the house, would have the final say about all financially related endeavors. We saw the words “wives submit to your husbands” in the Bible, and with the guiding hand of the pastor, agreed that would be what we would do. My 21st Century Western post-modern feminist thoughts had a little bit of a resistance to this but were drowned out by the expectation our family and culture had placed on us. The Church told us to behave this way and we had grown up in families where this was the norm. This setup does not quite work if you marry a woman who earns more than you and has learned to be a strong and respected achiever in her own right. The Bible doesn’t encourage patriarchal financial slavery, but the Church did. I see the discrepancy now and this is wrong.
Another one of the lessons was on oral and anal sex, which the Church tried to argue was unbiblical. Thankfully, I managed to argue that one away!
One of the other lessons was on sex in general. We were shown a line in the Bible that said our bodies do not belong to ourselves. The pastor told me that whenever I wanted sex, my good wife would recognize her duty and satisfy me as her husband.
In these lessons, there was almost no recourse for the contrary feelings we might feel and what to do with them. That as a leading woman who had managed her family’s finances for 20-odd years, being told what to do from her new husband, wouldn’t come easy and would require love and patience from me. No. We were told the rules of the Bible and how we had to stick to it. This amplified the problem I had with sex, now that I was ‘allowed’ to start having it in my marriage.
Sexually, our honeymoon was a mess. We fumbled around trying to achieve penetration but my wife’s anxiety was so great, we weren’t able to achieve it. It took us a six to seven months before getting the diagnosis of vaginismus, which is basically an involuntary tightening of muscles around the vagina whenever penetration is attempted. It took that long because the guilt of sex my wife felt from the Church for decades didn’t just dissipate during one romantic night in Thailand. The guilt of watching porn also prevented me from being a bit more forthright with my experiences and understanding of what to do. All in all, not a great mix.
My wife and I are still trying to climb out of the Church’s misguided teachings about sex and love. We have had some great sexual experiences together, but are still a long way off from routinely finding our authentic sexual selves. Ironically, it’s hard to find people to talk about this with too. I believe the Bible would love us to have these conversations with our spiritual brothers and sisters. The residual guilt and tendency of maintaining outward appearances of holiness, however, prevent any real discussion.
At the time of writing this, I’m not too optimistic, nor too pessimistic. I’m slap bang in the middle; ambivalent. My wife may resolve to work through the guilt of being sexual and recognize the unhelpful role the Church has played in influencing her attitudes. Or she may not. I too may resolve to figure out my role in all of this and understand how my frustrations may foster a poor environment for her to feel sexual. Or I may not. For those of you that might be a one, five or ten years behind me on this journey, my advice is this; think for yourself. I imagine this story might resonate with people who are subject to similar cultural or spiritual pressures. My understanding of other religions isn’t strong enough to know whether you could take my story and replace the Bible with the Quran, or the Church with the Synagogue, all I know is humans have sexual desires and these should be treated with love and respect.
Repressing sexual desires out of fear of punishment (i.e. hell) or from a negative reproach from your spiritual leaders risks leading to imbalanced and unhealthy sex lives. Holding out and controlling sexual desires to eventually share privately with a really special person is one of many possible approaches towards sex and love, and also happens to be compatible with the Church. This may be the right path for some people, it might not. That’s for you to decide. I’m pretty confident my ambivalence will not give way to splitting from my wife. We are imperfect lovers, but hopefully, one day will find perfect love and sex in each other.
If you enjoyed this story please recommend it by clicking the heart and remember to subscribe to cambyo to read more stories on exploring sexuality.
