Best Sex Writing 2009

by Rachel Kramer Bussel

  Dillow and Pintus are enormously reassuring in their sensible advice that every woman—like every couple—is unique, and that “there is no ‘right way’ to make love.” So they also stress that while clitoral pleasuring may be the key to orgasm for the majority of women, some women experience their orgasms as centered in the vagina.And they point out that simultaneous orgasm is not a necessary aim; it is perfectly fine for women to come first. Indeed, “some couples find that intercourse is more pleasurable for the women [sic] if she has already reached a climax as her genitals are lubricated and engorged.”

  And they go out of their way as well to answer the query “Is intercourse the only ‘proper’ way to have sex?” by asserting that, no, “intercourse is not the only ‘proper’ way to have sex,’ because “God grants us enormous liberty” and “we are free to enjoy sexual variety.” They recommend to their female readers the following prayer: “Lord, keep me growing as a godly and sensuous woman. Keep me from worrying about what is normal and let me dwell on what is a successful sexual encounter for me and my husband.” If all goes well, and all lessons are practiced and learned, Dillow and Pintus assure their female readers that this story of “Bethany” might someday be their own story:It had never occurred to me that I could come more than once.Then I read that this sometimes happened to women as they grew in giving in to their sexuality and in their trust of their husbands. I think reading about it opened the door—and the next time we were making love I experienced wave after wave of pleasure. As he entered me, I built up to another orgasm. It wasn’t something I tried to make happen, but it was glorious, and my husband felt like “Superman lover.”

  Testimonials like these are another crucial component of the evangelical sex industry: true tales from real people who find orgasmic bliss through prayer and devotion—and by flexing their love muscles.

  When evangelicals talk about sex, they inhabit a world of religious references that make sense to them. A typical recommendation is: “Try this simple act of foreplay: Pray with her.” Nor would eyebrows be raised by the answer to the question “How Do I Shift into Sexual Gear?”: “1. Memorize the first portion of Romans 12:2: Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

  Yet, as the experts suggest over and over again, evangelicals struggle with anxiety about what they are permitted to do with one another. As marriage therapists and clergy counselors Louis and Melissa McBurney put it in their essay, “Christian Sex Rules: A Guide to What’s Allowed in the Bedroom,” they receive “many, many questions from Christian couples who want to know what is and what is not okay to do sexually.” Or as Dillow and Pintus note, “Many women we talk with want to be reassured that their sex life is normal.” Yet “normal” is not always an easy thing to define, even for the true believer. (And certainly doing so has not gotten any easier in the midst of new pressures and challenges wrought by sexual psychopharmacology and Internet pornography.)

  There is no consensus among the faithful as to what constitutes good clean sexual fun. To be told that 1 Corinthians 7:1-5 reveals that “the Bible clearly promotes the value of regular sexual release” is considered pertinent, if perhaps ambivalently received, information. Being told that the Song of Solomon celebrates oral pleasuring for men and women can be a huge relief for some. A few Christian advice-writers reject the idea that the Song of Solomon offers guidelines for sexual practice, yet many argue otherwise. The LaHayes in their 1976 classic were among the first to suggest that the Song of Solomon, especially verses 2:6 and 8:3, might be translated into tips for genital pleasuring.And Joseph Dillow (Linda’s husband) dedicated an entire book to the naughtiness of Solomon on Sex in 1982.

  In his book, Dillow offers a close reading of Song of Solomon 4:5: “They two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies,” and then riffs on Solomon’s interest in “his wife’s breasts”: “They are very curvaceous like the lily. Their beauty creates within his heart a desire to reach out and fondle them as one would a gazelle feeding by a brook. The notion of frolicksomeness suggests sexual playfulness.” And “the female genitals are referred to in 5:1 as a ‘garden’ and in 4:13 as ‘shoots.’ In both passages, myrrh and frankincense are described as characteristic scents of her ‘garden.’”

  Other evangelicals have made similar enthusiastic claims that the Song of Solomon is a detailed account of the sexual foreplay and “total body involvement” enjoyed between King Solomon and his beloved, and that the Song of Solomon describes “passionate lovemaking” and “sexual climax—higher and higher,” “ecstasy,” “orgasm,” and “sexual oneness.” It all gets pretty steamy in the retelling. As one writer summarized the accumulated wisdom in 2000, “The Song of Solomon…is one of the best textbooks for sexual instruction ever printed.”

  Another writer assures his male readers: “If you’re a husband who wants to be a consummate lover to your wife, learn from Solomon. Once you start understanding the idioms of Solomon’s day, you’ll see that he knew exactly how to bring his wife to peaks of sexual ecstasy. Do what he did, and your wife will respond as passionately as his.” Never mind that a few pages earlier, the same author concedes that “rich and powerful men like King David and King Solomon had not only a multitude of wives but concubines, as well, to sate their need for status and sexual gratification.”

  Not that Song of Solomon is the final word on sexual dos and don’ts.There are a host of thorny issues that continue to challenge evangelical sex writers as they confront what should be deemed proper or improper behavior in bed. For instance, there is the not-inconsequential matter of oral sex. In this regard, Tim Alan Gardner’s Sacred Sex: A Spiritual Celebration of Oneness in Marriage stands firmly with the naysayers. Gardner informs the faithful thatIf you receive your sexual information primarily from the magazine rack at the grocery checkout lane, you’ll believe things like “every man loves getting oral sex and every woman loves giving it.” In reality, however, studies show that this is not true. A majority of women do not like giving or receiving oral sex, and most men don’t find it the most enjoyable way to engage sexually. The reason everybody is talking about it is simply because everyone is talking about it.

  Evangelicals cannot agree about the righteousness of oral sex. Marriage and sex advice author Karin Brown acknowledges that there is considerable unease among Christians over the activity of oral sex, and she admits that often either the man or the woman does not particularly enjoy it or feels forced into it by their partner. She notes that “so many marriages seem to be plagued with disagreement regarding it.” Yet Brown says she favors the activity, although she is careful to advise that it be used solely for foreplay and not as a substitute for intercourse.

  There are also sex toys to puzzle over. Take vibrators. This time Karin Brown heads up the opposition: “I personally see no need for them when we have hands, lips, and other great body parts to successfully heighten our intimate sexual encounters.” But Dillow and Pintus demur.They ask that the faithful apply the following test: “To find out if the use of a vibrator is right or wrong, let’s apply the three questions. Is the use of a vibrator prohibited by Scripture? Is a vibrator beneficial to lovemaking? Does the use of a vibrator involve anyone else?” Since scripture does not offer commentary on vibrators—rendering it acceptable from a scriptural perspective—Dillow and Pintus move rapidly to questions two and three. On this basis they conclude: “So if a vibrator enhances a couple’s lovemaking and is used exclusively for the couple’s private enjoyment, then it is permitted.”

  This is the commonsensical view adopted by a number of evangelical writers. Examine scripture and if there is nothing to prohibit a specific activity there, then it ought to be permitted. On this score, evangelicals Melissa McBurney and Louis McBurney emerge as virtual sex libertarians.The McBurneys have concluded, with regard to “oral sex, rear-entry vaginal penetration…and mutual masturbation,” that since “we find no scriptural injunction against any of these,”
they are all just fine.

  Evangelical authors have given thumbs-up to all sorts of activities one might not immediately assume to be appropriate evangelical behavior. Sexy lingerie? This has been interpreted as a definite plus, again with reference to the Song of Solomon. Anal sex? Hard to imagine? On the contrary, while some evangelicals deem anal sex unhealthy, there is the loving couple Reverend Charles Shedd and his wife Martha, who have testified that their own sexual experiments have included anal sex, and they have publicly pronounced it enjoyable indeed. So too do the Reverends Paula and Lori Byerly of the online site The Marriage Bed, which is officially antiporn, feel comfortable recommending both oral and anal sex, as well as a wife masturbating while her husband gets to watch. For the Byerlys, in marriage you can do just about anything. Typical upbeat advice includes enthusiastic endorsement of the “come-hither” move, in which the husband uses his fingers to stimulate his wife’s G-spot—“We think the G-spot should be seen as one more way God gave us to share in the pleasure of sex”—as well as the seemingly neutral observation that just because the Bible says homosexual sex (as well as, they note, homosexual kissing) is wrong does not in any way prove that anal sex is wrong. They also note that spanking can be “arousing” and that bondage can be “very arousing.”

  Recently, evangelicals have also begun increasingly to recommend that couples engage in occasional quickies. As Tim Alan Gardner states in Sacred Sex: I like to think of healthy marital sexual encounters in three categories….The first grouping is Fast-Food Sex. This primarily includes “quickies” and those spur-of-the-moment rendezvouses that take place without a lot of planning. Frequently, only the husband will have an orgasm (though not always). Fast food is fine, on occasion, but too much of it will leave one or both of you lacking passion and feeling taken for granted just as too many triple cheeseburgers will leave you—well, let’s just say, not healthy.

  Gardner’s two other recipes for a healthy marriage are Informal Dining and Five-Star Dining.

  Gardner is far from alone. Dillow and Pintus also endorse the quickie, by which “we are talking about the act of sex taking around three to five minutes.” The quickie, these women assure their presumably female readers, is absolutely “okay with God.”

  How do we explain the evangelical advocacy of the quickie? First, there is the worry that with women’s growing equality in the world and growing concern with enhancing women’s orgasm equity, men don’t seem to feel terribly special anymore. Second, there is the much-discussed phenomenon that the supersaturation of the visual landscape with sexualized images—from Internet porn in the home to racy fashions on the street—has been accompanied by a perceived plummet in heterosexual desire.Viewed in this double context, the evangelicals’ obsession with male ego-boosting and the novel attacks against masturbation and fantasy make more sense. And this is also the context in which the quickie—fine for the man, less so (usually) for the woman—should be understood.

  The extent to which evangelicals embrace their version of the sexual revolution and the feminist movement is striking.As Shannon Ethridge writes:“I’m thrilled that the women’s liberation movement brought us freedom to vote, get an education, and find satisfaction in careers.”And Stephen Arterburn clearly understands the necessity for husbands serving their wives, especially the many who work outside the home, by cooking, cleaning, doing the dishes, sharing child care responsibilities, and so forth. These are the legacies of women’s liberation that the evangelical movement supports 100 percent.

  Yet evangelical writers on sex unapologetically contradict themselves. On the one hand, they admonish men that they never have a “biblical right” to demand sexual submission from their wives.They assure wives that they need never engage in any sexual practice they find degrading or unpleasant. In fact, they urgently remind wives that to accept the biblical injunction to wifely “submission” does not mean mindlessly doing whatever their husbands tell them to do.

  On the other hand, the authors of the “Every Man” series, for instance, also recommend that wives be sexually available to their husbands at all times. Women should meet their men’s needs with tenderness and compassion—and, if need be, with those quickies. Even Shannon Ethridge encourages wives to keep their legs shaved and their vaginas douched at all times. Just in case.

  Despite their seeming support for women’s equality at home and in the workplace, moreover, evangelical authors spend a great deal of time repeating what they call “a foundational truth: God created men and women to be different.”

  That women don’t want sex as often as men is a regular feature in the archives of Christian sex literature. Dr. Neil T.Anderson, founder and president of Freedom in Christ Ministries, tells us that when he conducted a “For Women Only” seminar in the early 1990s,“to my surprise most of the written questions dealt with sex in marriage. If I could synthesize their questions into one, it would be ‘Do I have to do whatever my husband wants me to in bed?’ ”Tim LaHaye is even more blunt: “The sex drive in a man is almost volcanic in its latent ability to erupt at the slightest provocation.” James Dobson, president of Focus on the Family, has said:“Many women stand in amazement at how regularly their husbands desire sexual intercourse.” More recently, Paul Coughlin, in No More Christian Nice Guy, finds it rather irritating that evangelical wives were found—statistically—to be the most sexually satisfied wives in the nation. (He’s invoking those early 1990s National Health and Social Life Survey research findings conducted by the University of Chicago team. Never mind that it was only 32 percent of conservative evangelical wives who always had orgasms during sex with their husbands versus a mere 27 percent among mainline Protestant and Catholic American women; no matter which number is considered, the findings were not exactly a ringing endorsement of the state of American heterosexuality. Yet the difference is still cause for right-wing pride.) But Coughlin is focused on something else. He thinks the untold story is that it’s evangelical husbands who are not so satisfied. Coughlin complains vociferously about wives who give their husbands—who struggled so hard to preserve their own sexual purity in the midst of a sex-obsessed culture—nothing but the sexual equivalent of “frozen dinners” rather than the “fabulous banquets” they need and deserve. Coughlin says that “sex isn’t the only reason some guys get married (at least it shouldn’t be), but it’s a biggie.”And he regales readers with sad laments of husbands who suffer from being with wives who offer up “I’m-tired-so-hurry-up sex” or “did-I-detect-life? sex”—or even “new-car sex” or “bigger home sex”—when “what we really want and need is There’s-No-One-Like-You sex.” Coughlin may sound whiny, but he has an audience.

  Again emphasizing the idea that women don’t want sex as much as men, after reviewing the results of their survey of 1,300 individuals about the “top five love needs,” evangelical syndicated radio talk-show hosts Dr. Gary and Barbara Rosberg—authors, individually and together, of at least a dozen books, including Healing the Hurt in Your Marriage and Forty Unforgettable Dates with Your Mate—make related observations. In their advice book on how best to Divorce-Proof Your Marriage, the Rosbergs relate that while for both spouses “unconditional love and acceptance” rank as number one, among husbands “sexual intimacy” is number two but does not even make it onto the wives’ top-five list.The Rosbergs elaborate: “Much of a man’s masculinity is rooted in his sexuality, a part of his maleness he cannot erase. As most couples discover, men spell intimacy S-E-X.” The same cannot be said for his wife:“Wives spell intimacy T-A-L-K. For many women, conversation is the primary way they process thoughts, feelings, ideas, and problems.”

  The books in the “Every Man” series argue repeatedly that guys use emotions to get sex, while women use sex to get emotions. But the series takes this generic sentiment—so frequently asserted in mainstream culture as well—and amplifies it in wholly new ways. Arterburn’s contention is that, put in the most rudimentary terms, if a husband can’t do it to his wife every couple of days
at least, he will stray—at least in his mind, if not with his body.

  So what is the self-respecting evangelical wife supposed to do? This is where the quickie comes into play. It is also where some of the more disturbing aspects of evangelical advice come into the picture. For a woman has to be taught to cooperate. She must never ever compare her husband unfavorably to another man.The sin of comparison is as bad as the sin of sexual impurity. She should wear sexy lingerie, if he wants her to do so. But she must also give her husband sex whenever and however he wants it. For only in this way will her man be reassured.And a reassured husband is a satisfied husband and a satisfied husband is the key to marital bliss.

  A central premise of Every Man’s Battle is that men must learn to “bounce” their eyes.That is, they should practice and learn to look away immediately when confronted with a sexy image in the same way one would immediately yank a hand back from a hot stove. In this way, a guy can learn to “starve” his brain of all improper fantasies, memories, and images—anything and everything that is sexually stimulating that does not involve his wife. Stoeker and Arterburn recognize that Satan tempts men who will try this—and that the closer a man is to victory, the more Satan will develop ruses and rationalizations. But they express confidence that their step-by-step plan will work.They recommend going “cold turkey.” Targeting masturbation alone won’t work. The key is to target the eyes and mind. And then, in fact, there will be a huge—as they unabashedly say—“sexual payoff”: “With your whole sexual being now focused upon your wife, sex with her will be so transformed that your satisfaction will explode off any known scale.”