Posted on 06/14/2014 10:06:08 AM PDT by Gamecock
I've heard people say that growing up as an evangelical meant they never talked about sex. This wasn’t my experience. I grew up in the thick of evangelical purity culture and we talked about sex A LOT. We just spent all of that time talking about how and why NOT to have it.
As someone who waited until I was married to have sex, I was assured that I would be guaranteed an easy and rewarding sex life. When reality turned out to be different, I was disappointed and disillusioned. Only through gradual conversations with other married friends did I realize I wasn’t alone.
I started to wonder if maybe the expectations themselves were wrong. Maybe what I’d been told or inferred about post-marital sex simply wasn’t true.
Here are four of the biggest lies about sex I believed before marriage
1. Any and all physical contact is like a gateway drug to sex.
Once in high school I attended a big Christian youth conference. One night, one of the chaperones addressed the girls: “Girls, we have noticed some very inappropriate touching going on...”
The inappropriate touching she meant turned out to be two high school couples in the youth group holding hands. This woman was deadly serious. “I know it may not seem like a big deal to you,” she said. “But hand-holding leads to OTHER THINGS!”
I heard similar things from parents, teachers, church leaders and books. In my church it was not unusual for people to pledge not only to save sex until marriage, but even to save their first kiss for their wedding day. “Don’t start the engine if you aren’t ready to drive the car,” and other similar metaphors warned me that any physical contact was a slippery slope straight into the jaws of fornication.
On this side of things, I can honestly say that there are SO many conscious decisions you have to make between kissing and having sex. Despite what Hollywood says, clothes do not take themselves off and bodies do not magically and effortlessly fit together.
If you are committed to waiting until you’re married to have sex, there are many valid reasons to set boundaries on your physical relationship, but the fear of accidentally having sex shouldn’t be one of them.
2. If you wait until you are married to have sex, God will reward you with mind-blowing sex and a magical wedding night.
Before my wedding night, I had been told that honeymoon sex isn’t usually the best sex. I had heard that good sex takes work. I knew that it would probably be uncomfortable at first. But what nobody ever, EVER told me was that it was possible that it just might not work at all at first. On my wedding night, my mind and heart were there, but my body was locked up tighter than Maid Marian’s chastity belt.
I entered marriage with the firm conviction that God rewards those who wait, only to find myself confounded by the mechanics. I felt like an utter failure, both as a wife and a woman. And while we did (eventually) get things working, this was hard, frustrating, embarrassing and a huge blow to our confidences.
Saving sex for marriage is not a guarantee that you will have great sex or that sex will be easy. All it guarantees is that the person you fumble through it with will be someone who has already committed to love you forever.
3. Girls don’t care about sex.
As a teenager and young adult I cannot count the times I heard something to this effect: “Boys are very visual and sexual, so even though you aren’t thinking about sex, you need to be careful because you are responsible for not making them stumble.”
Let’s disregard for now how degrading this is toward men and focus on the underlying assumption that boys are sexual and girls aren’t. For years I was told that “girls don’t care about sex.” Well, as it turns out, I do. This has been a deep source of shame for me. For a long time I felt like a freak, until I started to realize that I wasn’t the only one, not by a longshot. But I never knew it because no one would admit it.
Many girls (yes, even Christian girls) think about sex. Many girls (yes, even Christian girls) like sex. This doesn’t make you a freak. It doesn’t make you unfeminine or unnatural. God created us, both men AND women, as sexual beings. Enjoying sex makes you a human being created by God, in the image of God, with the capacity and desire to love—physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually and sexually.
4. When you get married, you will immediately be able to fully express yourself sexually without guilt or shame.
Many Christians have spent years—from the day they hit puberty until their wedding day—focusing their energy on keeping their sex drives in check. Then, in the space of a few hours, they are expected to stop feeling like their sexuality is something they must carefully control and instead be able to express it freely. And not only that—but express it freely with another person.
Many of us have programmed guilt into ourselves—this is how we keep ourselves in check throughout our dating relationships. And that “red light” feeling we train ourselves to obey doesn’t always go away just because we’ve spoken some vows and signed some papers.
It took me several months to stop having that sick-to-my-stomach guilty feeling every time I was together with my husband. Not everyone experiences this, but for the many people who do, it’s terribly isolating. Once again we’re experiencing something our churches and communities never acknowledged as a possibility. We feel alone and broken and filled with a profound sense that this isn’t the way it’s meant to be.
I don’t regret waiting until I was married to have sex, and I’m not advocating that churches stop teaching that sex is designed for marriage. But I do think there is something seriously wrong with the way we’ve handled the conversation.
If our reason for saving sex until marriage is because we believe it will make sex better or easier for us, we’re not only setting ourselves up for disappointment, but we’re missing the point entirely. Those of us who choose to wait do so because we hold certain beliefs about the sacredness of marriage and about God's intentions and wishes for humanity, and we honor these regardless of whether they feel easier or harder. In the meantime, we in the evangelical church has a lot of work to do correcting the distorted ways we talk about sex and sexuality, especially to our youth.
There is a contingent of FRoman Catholics are are convinced beyond any hope of reasoning with, that anyone who leaves the Catholic church does so for moral reasons.
IOW, that those former Catholics don’t like the sexual moral strictness of Catholicism and think that they can have an easier time indulging in sexual impropriety in non-Catholic churches because those churches are so lax about sexual issues.
This article puts to rest the misrepresentation that non-Catholic churches are more morally lax than Catholicism.
The same line of thinking is at Pensacola Christian College. Mere incidental physical contact can result in expulsion on the grounds of “sexual immorality”.
I’ve seen it reiterated on this thread too many times not to comment on it.
The statement that ‘men are more interested in sex than women’ just isn’t true.
Yes. Women have more variety in their sex drives than men do. I’ve had friends who have never once had a climax well into middle age and yet still enjoy the act and others who have no sex drive at all.
But that’s weird. That’s not the norm. Most healthy women tend to have sex drives at least as strong (and many times) stronger than men. The reason men think we’re less interested is that our drive waxes and wains with our hormonal cycles and there’s probably a week out of the month where it’s more work to get into the mood. (Want proof? Go into any book store and check out the romance section. This is nothing more than fodder for frustrated women. And there are thousands upon thousands of books in that section.) The other reason for the myth is that the actual act is a little more complicated for us, but the daily *drive* is quite potent. (And our learning curve is significantly longer than boys. It’s just not as easy.)
Why is this important enough to bring up?
Because we’re told all our lives than men are insatiable lust hounds and it’s emphasized over and over again that men, ages 16-25, are obsessed with sex and can’t get enough.
So what happens when a young woman gets into a relationship with a young man and he doesn’t want her 24/7? What happens when *he’s* tired or stressed or just not in the mood?
She thinks that something is very, very wrong with her and her self esteem goes into the toilet. That’s the only reasonable answer in her mind because he’s supposed to be a lust-filled animal. She must be terribly wrong for him not to be crawling all over her.
And, as time goes by, women’s sex drive continues to grow into her 40’s and as her husband’s natural drive drops, she’s now in real trouble. This causes a LOT of issues in healthy, long-term marriages (if she’s not wise enough to understand the mechanics).
So people need to stop spreading this myth. I’ve counseled too many young women who hate themselves and are *really* upset with their young men because he’s *not* a functional sex addict.
It's not a myth. (Most) men are hardwired for horniness, and (most) women are hardwired to nest. This has been known since the dawn of time. Citing exceptions won't change basic human nature.
In a marriage, it is the responsibility of the "cooler" spouse to warm up, and of the warmer spouse to cool down. The essence of a good marriage is devotion to one's spouse and children, not personal fulfillment.
Now, if you're talking about a relationship outside of marriage, who gives a crap?
Men are more easily *triggered*, is all, which is not the same as being *more interested*.
I've heard exactly that.
Exactly. You nailed it.
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