Good Christian, bad sex

In which I disagree with a godless sex maniac concerning the subject of bad sex. Athol writes:

When you are born and growing up, your sexuality is a blank slate in terms of your beliefs and socialization, but your physical body is designed to enjoy having sex. So your basic default orientation is going to be that sex is a positive and desirable experience. Unless you have some sort of physical fault that makes sex painful or unpleasant, you're going to like having sex. If you're inexperienced at sex, it won't be crazy wonderful good sex, but you will like it and feel good about it.

So if you don't like sex, if you think it's nasty, dirty, disgusting, wrong, bestial, sinful, degrading or frightening, it's because you have be taught to think that way about sex. And to overcome your own body's design to find sex the most enjoyable experience possible for a human, that training either needs to be systematic purposeful education to crush sexuality, or as physical sexual abuse as a child. And with deep regret, I have to say that parts of the church specialize in both.

Speaking as someone who would appear to have a bit more experience in this area than Athol, I can testify that while this makes sense in theory, it simply is not empirically true. There are 30 year-old virgins raised in the Church who turn out to be near nymphomaniacs once they get married and are able to finally unleash a decade of pent-up desire, and there are also atheist women raised entirely without religion in a culture of sex positivity who are more sexually repressed than the average Catholic nun.

In fact, the younger a woman starts having sex, which is negatively correlated with church attendance and the sort of active parental involvement required to have been taught that sex is dirty and degrading, the more likely she is to have some sort of strong sexual inhibitions. Show me a woman who began having sex at twelve or thirteen, and most of the time, I'll show you a woman who has a far more problematic attitude towards sex than most women in cultures that practice female circumcision. The self-loathing slut who derives her sense of self-affirmation through casual sex is fairly likely to turn off on sex altogether once she hops off the carousel into the soft, undemanding security of a marital relationship with a delta or gamma.

No disrespect to Athol here, but if I recall his biography correctly, he genuinely wouldn't have any reason to know what he's talking about here. This is not to say that one can't be taught by others that sex is "nasty, dirty, disgusting, wrong, bestial, sinful, degrading or frightening", only that it is more often the unforgiving school of actual sexual experience that provides such lessons. Also, one's personality plays a significant role in such matters. Those who are self-conscious almost never enjoy sex as much as those who are not, or as those who have the ability to set their self-consciousness aside in intimate situations. Also, as should be readily apparent, instinctively negative people are always worse in bed; "no" is the unsexiest word in the English language, unless one counts "idontlikethat" as a single word.

One reliable indicator of a woman's attitude towards sex is the way she reacts towards having her picture taken. If she hates cameras being aimed at her and can't avoid being uncomfortably self-conscious for thirty seconds with her clothes on, there is a high probability that she will be even more uptight in the bedroom as well. Such women are too self-centered and too self-conscious to understand that sex doesn't entirely revolve around what they happen to like, or as is much more often the case, don't like.

As for the Christian aspect, there is a reason the apostle Paul instructed men and women not to sexually reject their husbands and wives. Such rejection not only poisons the marital relationship, but it also tends to have a negative effect on the person's relationship with God.

"The wife's body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband's body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife. Do not deprive each other except by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control."

In other words, if you take the Biblical instruction seriously, your attitude towards every aspect of marital sex that your partner desires should be to simply smile, relax, and do it, so long as it does not scare the children and horses or violate the local ordinances. The Devil is a deceiver and if Paul is correct, then you can safely conclude that he wants you to be as uptight, vanilla, and sexually repressed as you can be, as this will have negative marital and spiritual ramifications. And who knows, you might even come to like it in time.