Episode 74 - The Ethics of F***ing (Part 2)

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=== my name is bromley mclennan [Music] i am uh currently the associate pastor at union church of hinsdale which is outside chicago it's a ucc congregation but i'm ordained as a united methodist grew up in that church and my most recent book is good christian sex i mean your book excited me so much um which is strange for like a monogamous guy to say like a committed 16-year married person so like i'm not personally evaluating uh what sexual sexual ethics or or an edifying sexuality would look like because i'm pretty comfortable in a very old model right but i'm not immune or unaware of what's happening in our larger society and certainly the listeners of this program are not because we get asked all the time what do we do with sex and sexuality in the 21st century as people who in some way wish to follow or honor christianity as a tradition as our faith however that person may hold that and it is a topic that tends to only get approached in two directions one is a very particular western protestant interpretation of a judeo-christian sexual ethic and the other is a post-religious post-theistic secularized framework which is of those two i probably fall much closer to the latter um but really fascinated to hear uh about how you're approaching sex and sexuality today and and what led you uh to start thinking about that so if you read the book or pretty much anything that uh i have ever written you know that i'm a preacher's kid so i grew up in the church but a real you know a pretty liberal you know socially progressive congregation too and so uh we did do some sex ed as part of our youth group experience if you boiled it down it was the denominationally selected and and they sort of started with the creation story as most christian sex ed things do and talked about how sex is best in marriage but then we're sort of like but make good choices i noticed though as i got older and found myself in romantic relationships that while my faith continued to be important to me i didn't actually know how it applied at all uh to my relationships and what i wanted what i wanted uh period so we didn't have a particularly robust understanding of individual sin uh in the communities i grew up in social sin we were good at like gambling is bad but how much you can do on the couch with your boyfriend was sort of less discussed so anyway as i got into college and didn't really ask those questions as much started focusing more on other kinds of religious issues and then i went to grad school and started serving in campus ministry and as a youth pastor or teaching confirmation in a local church and and started realizing that the curriculum that was available wasn't really where it needed to be or where the kids in my care were or or where i was so anyway so sort of noticing the gap um starting to have those conversations was something that intrigued me so i i grew up in illinois and we have or at least at the time we had pretty comprehensive sex ed required in our public schools and yet i i graduated from college the year that the second president bush came into office and so we also saw a lot of conversation around faith-based initiatives and giving federal money to abstinence-only programs so as someone who's interested in faith and politics that was something that was really interesting to me too particularly as the research kind of started to come in that said that you know abstinence-only education didn't actually help teenagers to make better choices um or to protect themselves uh and so that was something that seemed a pastoral concern for me it's interesting how the motivation behind a lot of these policies and a lot of these knowledge structures that happen within the church end up creating the opposite outcome as what is desired where you see this inverse relationship sometimes between religiosity and especially a relationship between conservative religiosity and teen pregnancy or abortion rates or the issues that on paper at least it seems like conservative religious folks care about more i do think there is though with conservative religious folks the personal individualistic lens that is usually kind of the center point of all that and and so you always have to talk about the sin issue when you're talking about a sexual ethic with the religious mindset in in view so how broadly would you talk about that how would you talk about sin in relationship to sexuality is there such a thing as sexual sin and how would you respond to somebody um who is concerned about a sexual ethic that just leads to some sort of unbridled pursuit of pleasure that could be destructive um could you talk about that the pursuit of pleasure is not in and of itself immoral or sinful i think the question is how does that pursuit and how does the things that are giving one's pleasure how do those stack up against an ethic of care for neighbor and care for the world um and love of god and and so yeah there are certainly things as sexual sin but i'm not convinced that a particular act with a partner who you care about you know that's not in the same way as saying you know i want to have sex and i don't care if this partner wants to or not because i'm just going to go ahead and do it i mean like assault is clearly a sexual sin right why well because it doesn't care for the other as a full human person it subjugates their humanity so as a minister like how do you what is your metric by which you both as a leader and then also someone who encourages other people to make their own ethic how do you help people to draw those lines because i mean certainly 99.99 of people are going to agree that violence where one person is not into it or does not want it is on the wrong side of sexual ethic um but there's a whole lot of room between that and only sex inside of a heterosexual monogamous marriage so when you get into polyamorous relationships and into vastly different aged relationships and all sorts of ways that people might still say from their perspective are consensual and loving and other people would say that's not valuing the image of god and the other person because you're not respecting them as an individual you know what sort of metric what sort of measuring device can you use to build such an ethic if you don't have you know sort of the black and white scriptural concept of you know that the bible says something about just one man one woman which is funny because it it's not very good at saying that if that's what it says but right like the bible says all kinds of things i mean many of which are good and some of which are not as great but but if you don't have that i mean it's at least simple is it and it's at least like consistent sort of i mean mostly well sex outside of consistent in sex outside of marriage is wrong and that's pretty much their go-to position and it's easy i mean i don't you know how sort of um how sort of i mean like there's a vast swath of stories throughout the hebrew bible and the primary concern in many of them is not whether or not uh two folks are are married in in a particular way um and but i think it's interesting because i think that one we often go to extreme cases to sort of push a question right to like raise the stakes like let's immediately talk about you know infidelity or polyamory or age discrepancies in relationships and it's not that those aren't necessarily issues but i i guess part of my question is what's at stake in in hinging everything on whether or not a couple is married i mean i i think that there are actually broader and higher ethical and theological standards than that i mean like asking whether or not your partner is all in in any given encounter is a is a far higher standard than being married in the book i think the language that i use is that marriage is not a sufficient norm like to say be married isn't enough you know the question is about communication and mutual vulnerability and what's the power dynamic um in this relationship and i think that that's actually like those kinds of questions are actually a lot harder for most people to navigate on any given day you know um so i think that those are sort of important questions to ask and and it's interesting because i don't think that the bible is always the first or best resource in asking questions about what interpersonal relationships between largely men and women but you know in same-gendered couples too you know what power dynamics look like i mean the problem of two vastly different partners in vastly different ages is usually one of power and experience right did you all read i kissed dating goodbye when it came out back in the day i can say i have never read it really oh see i thought everybody had to read it did you read it i was already well versed in the i could have i feel like i could have written it i could have written it but i could have written it yeah i didn't need it so so and not to like you know throw shade on josh harris but like i read it when i was in grad school and like researching my thesis on christian sex ed curricula and it and boy meets girl you know starts out basically like he's a pastor of a church and he like marries his secretary okay so like boundary training 101 is like don't touch the staff so i don't so anyway it's always funny to me that like you know progressive christians are like yeah but what about you know you don't want to have sex with a million people or with people of the same sex or animals or children or anything and it's like no but also not with your secretary like you know i mean just because you marry her doesn't necessarily like shift the power dynamic here we we tend to draw our lines as christian communities about what we think is acceptable and not but but part of my hope is to encourage christians to like ask some good hard questions about what are the lines that we've taken for granted and and why are they that way and and what's really at stake in them [Music] what is the metric by which you can make those decisions if it's not the bible this is what keeps a lot of people from being able to cross the line into being affirming of different sorts of lifestyles and different sorts of intersections of people is because there is this road they see as sort of the correct boundaries that make sex healthy rather than destructive what i'm hearing you say is you still have some sort of road but oh yeah they they have very clear fencing um i'm trying to figure out what your fencing is that makes you say well this is obviously outside of the road and this is not i talk a lot about um margaret farley she wrote a book called just love uh which is about sexuality and sexual ethics for christians and she sort of lays out certain characteristics that a loving relationship and just sex you know sex with justice ought to demonstrate so one is respect for the autonomy and relationality that characterize persons as ends in themselves and hence respect for their well-being so basically sex that uses another person in whatever capacity is not kosher uh respect for autonomy that's consent right people have to be able to give it and give it freely and enthusiastically respect for relationality are we in this together as equal partners are we committed to this relationship in equal and mutual ways and then uh respect for persons as sexual beings in society does this interaction reflect the freedoms and affirmations we want all people to have you know how does this fit into the larger picture of what we want and hope for in society and so i think that like in any given relationship ask if your interaction meets those criteria or manifests those things then you might actually have a lot less interaction than you would otherwise so i mean i think that you know there's the sense that that a progressive sexual ethic is like oh yeah whatever goes but i think looking at all those that raises the stakes tremendously and i think it asks a better set of questions because it asks about a potent you know a potential partner as a full person um and and asks about this interaction in a context uh with some complexity i mean it's harder work to do this sort of thing than just to say oh no definitely not you know but it's interesting you know as i interviewed some folks and as i i've been you know i've been speaking on this topic now for a number of years and as i've talked to folks with different backgrounds i talked to a number of folks who came up or who grew up in considerably more conservative christian backgrounds than i did and many of them spoke of you know being with dating in high school or college and like looking for loopholes or like trying to justify you know what things were okay and what things were not you know like constantly redrawing the line i went to christian school so i've heard lots of those loophole situations going on yeah there's a there's one of my favorites was the uh the fist where you just i'm afraid to even know where this is going you basically i shouldn't the man the man uh i don't know if it made it to google this is real christian school subculture but uh the man basically holds his fist around the base of his penis so that it's not the whole thing [Laughter] oh see so that actually so you're still we're still a virgin no i'm still a virgin i mean it's amazing and it and and why i mean like folks one woman that i uh interviewed or i don't know she responded to my survey but she told about you know having sex with her boyfriend in high school like on multiple occasions and like oftentimes after you know as as they had finished laying together you know panting and and you know settling you know he'd be like we should pray for forgiveness and then at near the end of their relationship you know had this whole conversation with her about how he was going to marry a virgin [Laughter] like that is not a good christian boy you know and and it's not the sex that is making him not good right like that like it it is far less concerning to me as a woman as a pastor as a ma you know that like the particularities of of an act or what a couple is pursuing you know than how it makes everybody feel you know does this make them feel respected and loved and valued and you know i mean that like that's more important to me than you know who's doing what is there anything distinctly christian or christ centered about viewing sex in that way like how can the church confront that fear and move toward a healthier relationship with sex and relationships i think we can try to embrace complexity so i also studied public policy and i had a policy professor uh once who said that if any of these ongoing social issues were easy to solve the many many smart people who were working on them would have figured them out by now right like that would have we would have done it so i mean if if human sexuality for christians was an easy question well you know just be married you know i mean if that was easy be married preferably to someone of the opposite sex right i mean like if that was it then we'd all just do it right i mean lots of us are baptized we just never do you know we'd never marry our secretary we'd never you know yell at our spouse we'd just be okay but it's complicated so i think that like trying to be honest and self-reflective and aware of the complexity while also trying to embrace the place of flourishing and abundance in a well-lived christian life i mean i think that's i think those are ways forward i'm hopeful as the parent of a pre-teen i am desperately anxious about uh the internet right like and and the availability of things i have already had to have a conversation with uh one of my kids to say because of course you know they're all tech natives they have like chromebooks starting in the third grade in our school district right i have already she's not even 10. had to have a conversation that's like if you ever have a question come to me do not google it right like always come to me never google anything um but please but but the upside of the the internet in a lot of ways and and the availability of information is that people are telling their stories and we're starting to see just how complicated and complex and wonderful and fraught and joyful and hard and resilient and recovering like people are you know i have hope i'm ordained right i serve in the church because i believe in it you know i have hope that we're gonna get better with our understanding and relationships to sexuality as part of a well-lived human life but i still think we have a ways to go here on the liturgist podcast we always try to keep our minds and hearts open to various perspectives and in that spirit we thought it might be good to hear from somebody who comes from a more traditional christian approach to sexuality while a lot of christian sexual ethic may be simple especially like in the purity movement where they just kind of string a few proof texts together there are christians who are really smart and who hold to a much more traditional view of marriage and sexuality than mike or i do so in discussing this topic we didn't just want to give you an echo chamber of our own brains uh nor do we just want to give you a caricature of an argument or set up some straw man to knock down so as far as i've ever seen through my life the most thorough deep and robust theology on the conservative side of the sexuality discussion came from pope john paul ii it's called the theology of the body it's substantial and we talked to christopher west who is one of the most well-known teachers of this theology i know there's so much to the theology of the body but i was wondering if you could give our listeners a summary of the basic thoughts it's it's possible to give a summary but just keep in mind the theology of the body is actually a collection of 129 lectures delivered over a five-year period a real thorough bible study by john paul ii on what it means that we're created male and female in the image of god here's here's the nutshell so the very phrase is it's a fascinating phrase isn't it theology of the body uh the point is that our bodies are not only biological they're theological that means they tell a divine story but we need to learn how to read that language of the body you know jesus says they look but do not see and this certainly applies today to the way we treat the human body we look at the body and and we don't see someone made in the image of god rather we're looking at something for our own pleasure that's kind of the mindset of a pornographic culture but when we when we are given those eyes and and i love what jesus says right in the first chapter of the gospel of john he says come and become one who sees we really we really need to cry out like the blind guy and say yo jesus son of david have mercy on me i want to see what is this message that's in the body here's what it is the bible from beginning to end tells a story about marriage it begins with a wedding in an earthly paradise in the book of genesis throughout the old testament god speaks of his love for his people as the love of a husband for his bride in the new testament that love of the eternal bridegroom is literally embodied when the word is made flesh skip to the end of the story and the book of revelation ends the bible with a heavenly marriage in a heavenly paradise the marriage of christ in the church and when we look to these two bookends the bible begins with the marriage ends with the marriage we discover the key that unlocks the whole story here's the whole divine message in five words god wants to marry us and he wanted that eternal marital plan to be so plain to us so obvious to us that he chiseled it right in our bodies by making us male and female and calling the two to become one flesh as the apostle paul says this joining of husband and wife in one flesh is a great mystery and it refers to christ in the church it refers to the divine love song and this love song pervades all of creation you can't look at creation which is god's first book and conclude otherwise god's favorite subject in all of creation is mating and fertility every living thing is called to do it but what's different between us and the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees is that we as human beings we have freedom we have the freedom uh to love we have the freedom as a capacity to enter this love song of our own volition or conversely we can use our freedom to refuse the divine love song and come up with our own plan for love and we all know that that doesn't go so well so on what basis um of course seeing the pattern of connection and joining and even what what is the what are the foundations of marriage and sexuality and how do those relate to the universe at large that's one thing and seeing it in the in in the scriptural narrative but how can you make ethical decisions and and implications how from from those things in a confident way what is the basis of saying forming any sort of sexual ethic based on these stories the biblical vision is essentially this that the union of man and woman is meant to express and reveal and proclaim divine love christ's love for the church if what paul says in ephesians 5 is not merely some poetry but it actually has theological gravitas if you will and this is the way the earliest christians certainly understood it but this means there's a divine iconography written into our bodies and so ethically the conclusion is this you have any question about sexual attitudes or behaviors from the biblical point of view it's this does this truly image christ's love for the church or does it not john paul ii puts it this way he says the body has a language and that language is prophetic why prophetic because our bodies are meant to proclaim divine love that's what a prophet does but then he adds he says we have to be careful to distinguish between true and false prophets because if we can speak the truth with our bodies we can also speak lies with our bodies what does sexual activity look like when it speaks the truth of divine love when those lovers are true prophets well to be a true prophet we have to speak the truth of divine love what's the truth of divine love we see this in christ giving up his body for his bride uh there's a mystical marriage taking place at the cross uh the the the early christians understood this that what's happening at the cross is the consummation of a mystical marriage and and the early christians understood that whenever jesus calls mary woman we're at a wedding right so where does jesus call mary woman he calls her woman at the wedding feast of cana and he calls her woman from the cross why because she's the representative of the church in these instances she becomes the symbol of the bride and she becomes a new eve if you will she becomes the mother of the living so when christ is on the cross we have a new adam giving up his body for his bride and we have this mystical new eve and what does the new adam say to the new eve he says woman behold your your son the beloved disciple is the mystical offspring of this mystical marriage so ethically what we're saying is do we want to be true prophets or do we not do we want to proclaim authentic divine love or do we want to proclaim something else and we can recognize that what christ is doing on the cross he's saying this is my body given up for you freely he says they do not take my life from me i lay it down freely it's a total or unreserved gift of himself scripture says he loved us to the last it's a faithful gift he says i'll never leave you i'll never forsake you and it's a fruitful gift christ came so that his bride might have life and have it to the full so we could say a free total faithful fruitful love if we're expressing that kind of love we're true prophets and guess what another name for that kind of love is marriage this is what a man and a woman commit to at the altar they commit to love one another freely totally faithfully and fruitfully this is what paul's getting at again in ephesians 5 when he says husbands love your wives as christ loved the church that as we learn that that journey of loving in this way we become more and more true icons of divine love and that's the biblical [Music] vision um how do you make the leap from you know saying something like being true with your love and being true profits rather than false prophets to that's called marriage to to move into practical a person's life and say this way of behaving this act of sexuality is being a false prophet versus being true and loving of christ who can delineate those lines and how how are those lines delaying delineating that's a great question i think christ delineates those lines when he gives us the new commandment he says love one another as i have loved you that's the new commandment that's the fulfillment of the whole gospel and i think one of the greatest contributions of this beautiful bible study that we call theology of the body is that it demonstrates that that fundamental gospel call to love as jesus loves is chiseled by god right in our genitals it's chiseled by god right in our sexuality a man's body does not make sense by itself a woman's body does not make sense by itself but seen in light of each other unless we're blind we see this fundamental call to holy communion a communion that is life-giving and and this is christ's gift to his bride on the cross this is my body given up for you this is the biblical vision of our humanity we are called to love as jesus loves and it's a bodily gift of self now let me let me back up here and say very clearly that marriage is not the only way to love as jesus loves right every time i make an authentic sacrifice of myself for someone else every time i i make a genuine gift of myself to someone else i i'm loving in the image of god but sexual love is a very particular expression of what it means that we're made in the image of god and to say theology of the body is really synonymous with we're made in the image of god and we see that the fundamental call of humanities right there in the book of genesis male and female he created them in the image and likeness of god he made them and he blessed them and he said be fertile multiply i think we can recognize that at the root of so much of the gender confusion in the world today is a rendering of our genitals unable to generate and when we do that we are attacking the image of god in us look at the very word gender it shares the same root as words like generous generate progeny genealogy and that greek little that little greek word gen it means to produce to give birth to so the word gender in its fundamental meaning is this the manner in which you generate when we understand that that gender means the manner in which you generate we recognize there are only two genders because there's only two ways to generate one as a father and one as a mother and if you notice the only way a man can become a father is if at the same time a woman's becoming a mother so we need one another in order to generate when we live in a world where sex has been sterilized sex has been neutered uh the name of the game is no longer forming and shaping and bringing into existence the next generation the name of the game is pleasure and and there's nothing wrong with sexual pleasure in itself it's a great gift of god but it's meant to be the joy of loving as god loves you know jesus says love one another as i have loved you i tell you this so that my joy might be in you and your joy might be complete when when a husband and wife receive that joy as a gift from god loving in the image of god this is awesome this is a great gift in fact it's a foreshadowing of the eternal joys that await us in heaven but when we focus in as on sexual pleasure as the goal well other human beings then become objects for our pleasure so i'm really into biology and i'm also a person who is you know a member of of christian fellowship and the church believes in the importance of christ as the reconciler for all creation uh but looking at it biologically um i wrestle with the the the very concept of of two genders um one um if we're if we're looking at the the in a theology of the body context that there are two genders and this is demonstrated by their ability to to generate new life to to produce new generations to be fruitful and multiply we have people who throughout their entire lifespan are born unambiguously male or female but aren't able to produce offspring for one reason or another that isn't related to lifestyle but related to genetic and then we also have about 1 in 1 000 babies who are born with ambiguous genitals that medical experts can't clearly identify them as male or female and of course we look at the larger animal kingdom we see frequent gender ambiguity non-gender-based reproduction so i wonder looking at this through the theology of the body understanding things through this um this male and female dichotomy what do we do when those divisions aren't so clear-cut or easy to understand mike that is an excellent question and and if i may i'll turn directly to the words of christ that start out the whole reflection of the theology of the body uh john paul the second teaching here is based on three key words or three key statements of jesus about the body and the first is in the dialogue with the pharisees they say hey is it okay for a man to divorce his wife moses allowed us to do this what do you say jesus and jesus says haven't you read that in the beginning god made them male and female and and that phrase in the beginning is decisive here and it points to the fact that there was an original plan for our humanity that has gone awry with what we call biblically original spin that something original got thwarted something some original plan which was pristine and and full of splendor and revealed the glory of god something somehow got spoiled uh and and now the good news is christ came into the world to restore creation to the purity of its origins right we the fact that there are anomalies in in in the births of certain people like we know many people are born blind we know many people are born without legs but that does not change the fact that we know there is a human nature and eyes are meant for seeing and people are meant to be born with legs and something has gone wrong when someone is born without legs or someone is born without sight we know eyes are meant to see we know ears are meant to hear we know genitals are meant to generate so if we're merely looking at this is a technical term forgive me uh my theologian is coming out here but if we're merely looking at post-labs aryan humanity and by that i mean the human being after the fall then we are going to have a skewed picture of of what is natural or what human nature is because nature itself has been affected by a cataclysmic event we call the fall so when we look merely at fall in humanity we will draw some faulty conclusions christ himself says the standard for understanding human sexuality is to go back to the beginning now if we don't have the perspective that christ came into the world to restore creation to the purity of its origins well then looking at the man born blind or the person born without legs this is hopeless but in christ we have the hope that the blind will see the death will hear and the lame will walk right we also have the hope that those with ambiguous genitalia will in the resurrection of their bodies at the end of time when all is restored there will be no ambiguity the restoration of that person's true and deepest humanity will be complete this is our hope and if we don't go back to the beginning as our standard we end up calling our fallenness the way god made us one of the things that has confused me maybe you can help elucidate this a little bit for me is how the catholic church seems to value the theory of evolution or say that that's a a legitimate scientific theory or at least a lot of room for that but i don't quite understand how one could see the fall as being a literal historical change in the biology or the how natural selection suddenly change how was there ever a world without death and decay in keeping in mind the theory of natural selection all these by a lot saying that there was a plan that at some point in human history drastically changed biologically and what the was that does that mean that the laws of physics suddenly change and what does that mean for the natural record i i guess i don't understand how you can reconcile the fall being a theological concept trying to say that that was actually a literal physical thing that happened in the universe and say that you can value the theory of evolution via natural selection this is these are great questions guys i am thoroughly enjoying this conversation i do lots of interviews and i don't always get these deep dives from my interlocutors great this is great stuff we have an audience that appreciates the any depth of an answer you wish to give oh good good i mean it would take a doctoral dissertation to give a thorough answer to that very very insightful and important question let me just give a certain direction of thoughts and food for thought uh catholic theologians do not look at the story of genesis as a literal description of uh you know events that took place john paul ii uses this language he says this creation stories in genesis use a mythical language now here he does not mean myth in the sense of something fantastic a fantasy something unreal but rather he says mythical language is an ancient way of getting at a deeper truth that cannot be easily put into words we need myth we need symbol we need metaphor to get at these primordial truths uh spiritual truths that have physical and even biological ramifications but we need a mythical language to get to them let me try to explain what i mean the the author of genesis is not a scientist uh in the sense that we understand science today the scientific method was not invented for you know centuries later the the author of genesis is a poet right we need the poets we need the artists we need the mystics who see something deeper and then can express it that's how catholic theology sees genesis these creation stories there was a fall it's a mysterious event we can't say here's how it happened and catholics don't believe that there was a talking snake and an apple tree right there is some event that took place at the beginning of human history and on this point catholics say the theory of evolution is plausible right we don't conclude therefore it's certainly true and in fact we speak of many theories of evolution rather than the theory of evolution and i think here the church is being very wise because the catholic church has had to learn the hard way from the whole galileo affair that that you know science has its own field of expertise that needs to be respected you know we can't turn it into an ideology but we can recognize that the perspective of the lover who looks into the eyes of the woman he loves and the perspective of the optometrists two different takes on the same reality right they don't contradict each other they're just two perspectives on the same reality that would be a in as brief a way as i could put it uh the way we need to to approach the text of genesis and also recognize that what science is proposing is not necessarily in conflict with a biblical reading of creation i i hope that's helpful at least in terms of pointing out some some lines of thinking and some food for thought yeah definitely and that's that's been a big theme of ours on this show actually we we that's how we read the scripture um i think there's i've loved hearing a lot of what you've said these beautiful images that you see throughout scriptural narrative that you see even in the cross and the how christ loves the church but then to take that and to tell my gay friend therefore any love that you have with somebody is is a false prophet sort of love those those are the lines i don't know how you can connect let me let me say this uh mike that i i believe that there was a leap that you just made based on what i said that is an assumption that i i do not actually hold okay so you you were saying that any love between your your two male friends or your two female friends is therefore false no that's not what i'm saying at all i am called every man is called to learn how to love other men every woman is called to learn how to love other women but we know very clearly everyone can recognize that there are certain relationships in which genital activity is a direct contradiction of love and so the question here becomes what are genitals for uh i love my my i have three sons i love them dearly i i have dear friends who are men but is it loving for me to engage my genitals with my three sons uh is it loving for me to engage my genitals with my male friends what is it that's that's a question i'm not i'm posing it and i'm and i think we can all recognize that there are loving relationships in which genital activity becomes itself a contradiction of love the real question here is why did god make us male and female what is the meaning of our genitals do they have a meaning we live in a culture that is telling us incessantly that our bodies have no meaning whereas we we have a faith called christianity which believes that god himself took on flesh and he took on flesh precisely to reveal in the flesh and through the flesh the ultimate meaning of everything and christ is calling us to become those who see there's a deeper message inscribed in our bodies and i'll be more specific there's a deeper and divine message inscribed in our genitals and christ is inviting us come and become one who sees i don't know if you've ever heard this expression but i i love it it's so true those who hear not the music think the dancer's mad i remember having this experience some years ago my wife and i was one of our wedding anniversaries and we were watching our wedding video at the reception and somebody called me from the kitchen and i put it on mute and then i look back at the tv screen and everybody's dancing but there's no music and everybody looked like a total idiot you know if if you don't hear the music the dancers look utterly foolish there is a love song that we are called to hear and dance to and and if we don't hear that music then the traditional vision of christian sexual morality just comes across as dry boring restrictive dance moves right and talk to anybody who teaches dance and if all you're doing is telling your students put your foot there but don't put it there well the student's gonna say why can't i put it there i don't know just the bible says so don't do that well that's really lifeless and meaningless and screw you i'm gonna put my foot there because it feels good well this is the problem of not hearing the music when that divine love song gets turned on and we actually hear it it is so stunningly breathtakingly beautiful you come from the very core of your being to desire to dance in step with it and in dance when you hear that music when you step out of the rhythm you feel it you feel it in your body and you don't want to do that because you want to stay within the beauty the parameters of what makes the music beautiful that's what i believe the gospel is holding out to us but it makes no sense if we don't hear the music analogy the bible uses from beginning to end to help us understand what we're destined for in eternity is the union of man and woman in one flesh which means if paul is correct that the union of man and woman in one flesh is the great icon of divine love then our sex understanding is going to have direct implication on our christology and ecclesiology that is our understanding of who jesus is and who the church is and i would even say if our sex understanding is off we're going to have a skewed understanding of jesus and the church if we dig our heels in and prefer the fallen manifestation of our sexuality and we say this is the way god made me well then we forfeit the possibility of being remade according to the original pattern and design and plan of god and rather than saying to all the world i'm okay you're okay which i understand why we do that because we want a level playing field self-righteousness condemnation of others there's no place for that but i think the level playing field is not i'm okay you're okay i think the level playing field is i'm broken and you're broken and we're all sexually confused we're all sexually disoriented the purpose of liturgy is to orient our deepest yearning towards the coming of christ the bridegroom it's this marriage metaphor why did the early church pray the liturgy towards the east because it understood the church was the bride and that the sun the rising of the sun is the coming of forth of the bridegroom just as it says in psalm 19 the sun comes forth like a bridegroom from its tent nothing is concealed from its burning heat the bride is praying towards the east saying precisely what scripture says that the final verses of the story the spirit and the bride say come come lord jesus that's the deepest orientation of human sexuality towards the infinite and so our culture likes to talk about an infinite number of sexual orientations whereas the bible likes to talk about an orientation of sexuality towards the infinite that's what i yearn for at the deepest core of my being and i i believe every human being does he's a nice person with a an impressively flexible hermeneutic uh that lands at sexual fundamentalism and um it was hard if i were to go like point by point on the issues he was covering it'd be a nine hour podcast because he'd want to refute my refutation and and back and forth but this whole idea the original plan is exclusively male female sexuality the original plan is cellular division without sexual reproduction and then we start forming colony organisms and multicellular organisms and we have a slower generation of reproduction and a slower rate of mutation and we've started to get by we i mean large multicellular organisms were being out competed by bacteria and single cell organisms and so we had to have a way to roll the dice more often to mutate to keep up with the pace of evolution and that adaptation was sexuality it was sex and it's an incredibly chaotic difficult process to merge and recombine dna from two organisms i mean it's right he talks about in the fabric of our genitals when the fabric of our dna is the evidence that sex is a a profound accident a deviation from life's original plan your mitochondrial dna comes from your mother why because it's not part of your dna at all mitochondria were captured bacteria larger cells consumed without eating that entered into a symbiotic relationship and that's why you can only trace maternal lineage through mitochondrial dna versus why dna that only happens through this strange broken x chromosome that ended up producing a specialized form of female we call male so of course sometimes that gets messed up during development but that's not a new thing that's been happening since homo sapiens was a species at all you cannot find in the fossil record anywhere an example that there's something special or evolutionary unique about homo sapiens where there was some original elevated state so we can appeal to a great mystery that's fine but don't use that to project on other people that the way they experience consensual romantic love does not reveal divinity or is anyway similar to freaking pedophilia it's not i wish you would have said that to him i can't say that to him like it'll just be i don't like to debate people because i i i just want to understand people and i don't understand the theology of the body i spent the afternoon reading about it i still don't understand it's a huge body of work so i don't want to just like start fighting the guy i'd rather ask interesting questions uh but at some point the the the gulf between our not just theological interpretations our epistemologies is so huge i know that there's things i can't really communicate to him that will land it's it's hard it was kind of hard to listen to some of that because a lot of it is i do think a lot of it is quite beautiful um the theology that connects sexuality to spirituality and to the infinite and to seeing how our sexuality is an expression of reality in its most fundamental sense i think all that there's a lot to be gleaned from um yeah i guess moving from that poetic seeing the spirituality and mysticality of sexuality into a sexual ethic that looks at some people's expression of that and says that doesn't belong that's what i don't i don't understand how that's anything but just authoritarianism using their own sexual ethic to flower it up with yeah beautiful theological language i mean i i find the idea of like well don't worry no matter what happens now in the resurrected life intersex people's genitals will be made whole so if they're just miserable now that's okay like to me that's not that's not the cosmic christ that's not the power of reconciliation something that happens later something that happens in the future if if if if the reconciling work of christ is what we claim it to be that invitation is always open and always happening that's tricky because like that's so much of that feels so fundamental to christianity how do you what i mean internally as an argument us with all the assumptions being made that god is a redeemer that is trying to redeem a fallen humanity that was once in in the perfect plan of god and then has fallen and then through the cross and the church and and will be redeemed back to that original purpose that whole thing how do you you place it in historical scholarship you were moving out of 99 of christianity 99.95 but that never concerns me at all [Laughter] that's that's what christians do every voice included in the bible past the torah was in some way an outlier that's why it's in the bible you have synoptic gospels and then a non-synoptic gospel you have the epistles exploring a gentile faith which for the early church was scandalous and insane the way this faith continues to reveal the reconciling power of christ and the love of the creator to the world is by being outside of that 99.9 percent and finding god there as well my name is darren calhoun darren is a justice advocate worship leader and photographer based out of chicago who works to bridge connections between people of differing perspectives through story and relationship [Music] you know the church has this really messy history where we have been involved in the sex lives of people around the world and when i say we i'm pretty much talking about um white european colonial missionaries and colonizers who have been telling people what is and what isn't about sex we see it on the continent of africa where they had multiple expressions of sex and gender that got wiped out by colonialism to the point that we often stereotype africans or people from the continent of africa as being homophobic to the way that pornography in japan looks is a reaction to christian missionaries doing really a great job of telling japanese people that what their experience of eroticism and and erotic art that wasn't okay and so the people responded by coming up with these very legalistic ways of thinking about what's okay and what's not okay which also left it to be okay to have pictures of people having sex with aliens or people having sex with octopus but not with another person and for me what that's meant is that we get things like the billy graham rule which i told to men all the time of this is how you stay pure um you don't spend time you don't you aren't alone in the company of a person of the opposite gender or another gender and what that means for a gay man is that i'm not supposed to be alone with a woman because that has the appearance of evil but if i'm going to be an honest christian i also shouldn't be alone with the man because those are where my temptations would lie who you going to hang out with right it's like so i the christian ethic for me here is that i should be alone at all times and that's what how i honor god and and stay in purity what we really have is this power play of men making decisions that are informed by their own desire so we see women constantly being told that they need to cover themselves up because they're temptation of men we see gay people constant or lgbtq people constantly being told that they're not in the image of likeness of god often it becomes the specific as because men are supposed to do this role in sex and women are supposed to do that role and if a man's not present it's not sex there's some wild advice that's been out there that gets codified that gets put into the laws of our land that becomes the definition of marriage that becomes who can own land and property all these things were tied to sex all these things were tied to how we relate to one another and for me that was also very personal because people asking whether or not i was having sex became a wedge of whether or not i had access to speak about my experiences for nine years i was public about being abstinent it was available on my website it was something that i talked about because in conservative spaces people could not hear what i had to say about being lgbtq unless they knew that i wasn't having sex with anybody which is a heavy thing to carry because when's the last time you asked somebody if they were sexually active to figure out if they could sing in the choir you know when's the last time that that we asked heterosexual people or we assumed that a heterosexual couple going to the movies equates to them being sexually impure the way that rules often apply to lgbtq people when they do something like go to the movies with somebody of the same gender there are ways that this just gets leveraged and and and weaponized against us that aren't about us about as whole humans they aren't about how do we are we going to make it hap to heaven is really about who we keep out and who do we define as not being in the within the rules and as soon as we answer that question we're really done with the person there's a point for me where i was scheduled to speak at the reformation project i was specifically billed as a person who was going to talk about racial justice but because my large evangelical church's name was attached to that um there was an investigative reporter who was doing this whole expose article about how my large evangelical church had abandoned the bible and they had this openly gay worship leader it was like what how how did that get to be the case but people were so invested in improving that my church was wasn't biblically sound anymore they were so invested in having a click-baity type of cover story that they were calling around to people and asking if i was really gay they're calling around asking um if my church had abandoned the bible and was suddenly supporting in their in their views suddenly supporting same-sex marriage it was a mess and i remember feeling like all these people who were making phone calls and inquiries don't actually care about my life because if i as many have done were to take my life as a result of all this public pressure then they wouldn't feel a sense of loss and mourning they wouldn't have this moment of really figuring out oh how can we make sure that we're caring for lgbtq identified people no they would just move on to the next headline and for me that's when i realized was like you know i'm not going to have any more public conversations about whether or not i'm having sex because while that was important for a season i really need to focus on how do i love god and how do i love my neighbor because i have to survive this world and people who are invested in that conversation about me aren't worried about my survival they're worried about picking who's on the winning team or not hmm you know you asked the question and and didn't quite get into it but there it there is a spectrum of who where people are who are lgbtq um plus and how they respond in faith and the journey that i've been on has really blessed me to be in deep relationship with people all over the spectrum starting as as wild and loose if you will as non-monogamy and people who are in open relationships to people who are deeply conservative and living in intentional community as they pursue celibacy as a response to them being an lgbtq person and what i found is that for us like this becomes such a point of hurt for so many people by well-intentioned nice uh toned not yelling not the people who show up with god hates [ __ ] posters but the nice folks that you've been leading worship with for the last several years or the nice lady who always bakes cookies who also pulls you aside to tell you what god doesn't like about your quote unquote lifestyle it's the nice people who are in our lives all the time who sometimes can do the deepest damage to us and the reality is that i don't think that any of us are going to do better by trying to find out what's the answer on what sin and what's not sin i think what we do better is how do we love each other well how do we disagree with each other in ways that are healthy and the ways that are life-giving rather than what's often happened which is 40 percent or almost 40 percent of homeless youth are lgbt that means that people who aren't even 18 years old are getting kicked out by families who god is entrusted to care for them because they're we see suicide rates that are much higher when families don't love and support or embrace their trans youth and the church is highly implicated in this we see the highest number of suicide rates in the bible belt and in places that have high high commitments to faith and that's that's what i want to change i don't want to tell people you have to believe this way or you have to interpret scripture a certain way that's that's not my that's not my role but what i do want to see is for people to really tangibly love everybody who's made an image and likeness of god and that includes lgbtq people wow sorry i'm a black preacher actually i'm not sorry about it but i'm a black preacher i'm gonna have a word he said i'ma have a word i'm gonna have a teacher oh yes i love the lord [Music] let it break all the love tears [Music] oh i keep thinking about um how this conversation would go if we were talking about something other than sex like sometimes when we take the baggage out of an issue we can see it so clearly from the outside for example if you asked me about food and you know my preferences around what i eat that would probably sound a lot different than what i think i would say about what i think is okay to eat i would say there are lots of things that are okay to eat and you're a total fundamentalist about food but there is like so there are so many things i would say of course eat olives i olives aren't for me but i think that you eating olives as long as they're not rotten and as long as they don't conflict with any medication you're on or they're not your olive consumption isn't hurting anybody else but i think that it's it's totally fine for you to eat olives but i'm not interested in it and so i think it's okay for us to have different uh different narratives about what we prefer versus what we think is actually okay and what we advocate for because i if we talk about food i would say i think that people should have access to food that is healthy and good for them and even if those are not foods that i enjoy eating their rights to access those things are really important for their dignity and their fullness of their humanity for some reason when we start thinking about sexuality and not food it changes the story because there's a moral component to sexuality or there has been as we've been indoctrinated but there isn't when it comes to food preferences but in any other sphere of our life we would say i absolutely want to advocate for your right to have access to that aspect of your humanity in a way that doesn't hurt you or doesn't hurt anybody else even if it doesn't work for me and i think it's okay to have those hold like holding those both at the same time that something that i endorse for somebody else or their their freedom to choose that may not be my preference but those can coexist together people why is that so hard for people is it the impetus to do you feel like there's a tide of being a good person and trying to make the world a better place trying to you know call a spade a spade and call out what you think is sin as sin or evil as evil i i have a really hard time understanding sometimes why people care like why do you caught them and gomorrah man could never bottleneck gomorrah yeah but god destroyed this city because of sexual impurity that i don't know how many times in my life i was told that story they never mentioned any verses from the prophets or in hebrews that talked about the sin of sodom being a failure to be generous or helpful to the poor it was always the sexual perversion that caused god to smite sodom and gomorrah and so the understanding i was given was the reason we confront people about sexual sin is a for their health and protection so that they can go to heaven and they can be with god for all eternity but second is so that god does not pour out judgment on our nation and literally destroy our cities which isn't helped when people like pat robertson say that 9 11 happened because of the gays or whatever whoever said that you know i think that like underneath the sodom and gomorrah story is like our fear our fear for ourselves like i would like to think that people are like oh i'm i'm telling you that that's wrong so that i can help you and i think that that may be the illusion or the mask on top of it but i wonder if at the root of it it's this cognitive dissonance piece of i can't allow you to to do that i can't support you to do that without feeling in some way like maybe i'm culpable or that i'm wrong or how can i how can i have this seemingly post-modern perspective of sexuality when i don't about anything else that what's right for you is what's right for you that doesn't fit with the rest of the story of my evangelical faith so i think that truthfully it's a defense i think it's people's fear speaking and it's covered up by the story of i want to protect you and here's a scripture to back it up but i think the truth is that it's so hard for us to sit in the not knowing of something just like i said before i don't i don't like simplifying and saying i don't there are very few things that i'll say like this shouldn't be this way or this should be this way and it often comes down to the oppression of people or what's safe or healthy but i think it's way too easy to simplify things and reduce them down to this is good and that's bad and then missing the complexity of an experience but i i don't think that people know how to sit in the tension of like i don't know the answer to this because i think that there's an incredible fear that we have of the consequences on us and through us and for us selfishly if we get it wrong i wonder if it's also a little bit like the second grade class for the first grade class that i went to uh drop off some donuts for it was homily's birthday and there was like they were all only allowed to have one and then one of the kids took two and it was just very much like hey this guy can't have two you know if i'm if i'm only gonna have one if i have to be married to this same person for my whole life and i can't do the things i want to do you don't get to do you know i wonder if it's kind of there's that little immature tattletale right at least the world sort of thing that you see also with like in the the lane that's going to close and you have the people that straddle the lane when they figure this is far enough nobody should come past this point they won't let people you know what i'm talking about in traffic when you're like the lane's gonna merge right people like yeah yeah yeah kind of straddle the line you're like you can't yeah i'm in this line which is mathematically a bad traffic strategy there would be less traffic jams if we fully filled multiple lanes and zippered in at the last moment but that shows how an individual instinctive defense of a perceived position sometimes undermines the collective good so it is with sexuality have you heard of symbolic interactionism no well you're about to all right [Music] symbolic interactionism is the sociological theory that looks at how our behaviors are given meaning based on the interactions we have with those around us so especially the individual and the personal relationship encounters that act as reinforcement to those behaviors into those meanings so these meanings could be explicitly communicated for example someone outright saying to you that's good or that's bad or you know i love you more or love you less if you did this or didn't do that but they're also modeled to those modeled by those around us and that we have an ident a shared identity with so for example what does the first sexual encounter person have mean well it means something based on what we're shown and told in our sociocultural context or in our religious context do we think it's important do we not think it's important all of the meanings that we give to our experience and how we feel about it and how that goes then consequently doesn't exist in a vacuum it's all shaped by the things that we're told around us so in some contexts people would actually be rewarded for having more sexual partners look at like i was mentioning hegemonic masculinity and this narrative of like this kind of hyper-masculine male who conquers the female body and owns women through his sexuality that in many circles is constantly being reinforced whereas in other contexts there is a narrative around sexuality which is that sexual expression or even sexual identity having some sort of ownership over one's sexuality is a moral failure so as much as we like to think that we're individuals and in control of our thoughts and behaviors including our sexual behaviors and what we do and how we evaluate what we do all of that exists in a social context so as a feminist i like to add a broader socio-cultural critique to the symbolic interactionism perspective and look at how the political forces as i've mentioned including patriarchal values add a whole other layer of influence within which these more personal interactions take place so interestingly in the church i think what we have is this very shame-based and fear-based culture around sexuality but also the patriarchal narrative that women are actually women are too powerful women's sexuality is too powerful and it needs to be controlled because it makes men sin and so the stories about sexuality i think we also need to look at through an angle that is one yes heterosexual but also patriarchal in that it is an acted oppression on women in silencing women's bodies often women are blamed for men's sexual transgressions i mean there's so many stories that i hear women who were sexually assaulted by a person in leadership and then told that they were the ones that sinned because they brought it on themselves they were the you know the person couldn't handle themselves they just had to have the woman because she was too promiscuous and she was asking for it so all of this i think also has to be filtered through a feminist critique which says that the church including using fear tactics and shame-based narratives to to silence and oppress people's sexuality has done um lots of damage to women's experience of their sexuality by holding them responsible for men's behaviors and that has leached over into a secular psychological view of human sexuality so often if you think about the degree to which like freud would say that you know women had to achieve pleasure through a vaginal orgasm and that there was some problem with clitoral stimulation and how much that has impacted the sexual experiences of women in the west today and it becomes this this reinforcing cycle of of demonizing women's sexuality and then um kind of forcing men into a sexual mold that they may not actually feel comfortable with and may never tell another man their entire life you know what i really would just be fine if i could cuddle with somebody right like it's this double doubly destructive narrative you know there's so oh man i could just go off for days about freud and not like for the reason that i think most people would but actually there's like there's so much that we this is probably like quite tangential but there's so much that isn't reported in popular media about freud and his work with women in fact he was one of the early trauma researchers who looked at how women's experiences of trauma was being manifested in their body and as they were like ab reacting in their body this is like their sexual trauma because it wasn't allowed to be spoken was manifesting in what they were calling it kind of hysteria he started looking at the similarities between these women's stories and realized that all of them were having experiences of sexual assault by men in positions of power over them turns out that the daughters that he was seeing or the women he was seeing were the daughters of some of his medical colleagues and so it put him in this really interesting moral position where he was like do i do i confront my colleagues about their sexual assaults of their own daughters or do i dismiss the daughter stories as being a function of their hysteria and lose um lose the voices of the women for the sake of upholding my reputation with my peers and chose the latter there's like this is actually oh yeah this is well documented in historical accounts of freud and letters he wrote and stuff like that that he he changed his theory of trauma and his work with women based on the fact that he was going to be ostracized and silenced politically medically because of what he actually initially alluded to in some of his like the early psychoanalytic society meetings and with some of his medical colleagues told them listen like we think this is going on and basically people said like shut up or you're out and so completely changed his theory about female sexuality and female trauma in the body darkness yep i was about to defend freud a little bit to make people think i wasn't totally anti-fraud i've just lost that influence he has so many good things to say but kind of like with sexuality all of this stuff exists in a context that shapes the stories that we tell and the story that he told ended up influencing other people's experience of their sexuality and their trauma and whatnot and everything like it's it's really hard for objectivity to exist as much as as much as we like to think that it's possible i think that when we're looking at sexuality and when we're looking at psychological research and even accounts of history we have to look at the context that those stories are written and told in uh there is research to show that sexual script flexibility is actually one of the most significantly important factors for creating sexual well-being so that script piece that we were talking about at the beginning of who what how the goals where all of that stuff the a person's ability to be flexible with that script actually impacts their ability to experience pleasure and well-being with their sexuality i think the reason why that's important to talk about is that we are working so hard to maintain a very rigid and narrow definition of a sexual script and yet what that's ultimately doing is is making our experience of joy and well-being and growth and and and and i mean fill in the blanks there but it's impairing that because we're working so hard to maintain a certain story that we were told once was gonna be good for us or good for someone else in the long run i've totally experienced that i you know when i got married i had a moral religious obligation to be faithful to jenny for the rest of my life and it's not that i found that to be an oppressive obligation i was quite grateful for the opportunity but i did find it to be like this lifelong moral ethical obligation this covenant and then when i lost my faith and i started to re-examine what i believed and what behaviors were appropriate because i no longer believed in sin as a concept i no longer believed in any objective morality this is when i started to re-evaluate my understanding of same-sex relationships when i started to look differently at extramarital or pre-marital sexuality in that process i said well what what what should i do you know what what is right for me because now i realize all these things there's no ethical prevention and i could have any conversation i wanted to with my wife about what was appropriate for us and on the other side of this new moral ethical flexibility i figured out you know i really just like this one girl a lot i happened to be married to her but on the other side of a flexibility with my understanding of sexuality it actually greatly deepened my feelings of intimacy it greatly deepened the sense of satisfaction that i have with our relationship and that's saying something because i was deeply satisfied before but with under this understanding that i'm not stuck on some rail some covenant that if i i veer off i get electrocuted or go to hell but instead am making a mutually consensual decision to invest in each other for a lifetime um that is somehow more valuable to me and and and a deeper feeling of intimacy than i've had before [Music] well there's i mean depending on what you're looking at often there's a connection in a few different ways between intimacy and desire and attachment and closeness and connection sexually and emotionally that it's pretty easy to see how when you had more access to parts of yourself and you weren't just following the same old sexual script that the shame came down and in the shame coming down like i said you had more access to yourself and so you could connect in a deeper way to somebody else i think that when we cut parts of ourselves off we can't expect ourselves then to experience the fullness of connection with somebody else because we don't even have the fullness of connection accessible to ourselves we're available then to anybody else so shame really tends to be both neurologically and relationally a very significant impairment to the experience of a pleasure but also of connection and intimacy shame often says to us don't be seen don't let this part of you be seen hide if someone sees who you really are if someone sees you if someone sees your pain your longings whatever it is they're going to want to get away from you and so you need to cut those parts of yourself off and make them go away so that when someone sees you they won't see those parts that you've decided that you're afraid that they'll think are really ugly the problem is that we actually can't get rid of those parts and so they end up just becoming like these rooms of a house that we don't let ourselves or other people into but there's something festering in there so shame has to go when we're thinking about having satisfying or meaningful relationships including our sexuality shame about sexuality has significant impairment in terms of our level of arousal and desire sexual responsiveness but on top of that the emotional connection that we feel with somebody else it's like saying to someone who's coming over to your house like i want you to come over and i want you to get to know me but you can't go into these rooms because there's really bad stuff in there and in fact i'm gonna hide that there's these rooms here with doors closed i'm just gonna hide that they're there and i'm gonna put something in front of them but we can never really cover up that there's something that we're trying to cut off and it acts as this spiritual existential attachment barrier for for us and for other people to enter into fullness what do you what do you see if society actually embraced this sort of sexual ethic systemically how does society handle that does it do you wind up with you know a brave new world children orgies happening at school and you know old men with a harem of young boys that are his you know where does it the the slippery slope argument from conservatives about society if you don't have firm boundaries but if everything's just like kind of do what's right for you like i know we've talked about consent and stuff how does how does age how how do those play into all these discussions i think it's really hard to to answer that question without considering that there would be a massive overhaul in other dimensions i mean as a as a feminist i think about the components that influence our sexuality that we're not even talking about here including pornography and including the media objectification of women consistently and the the pornification of women's bodies as well as the infantilization of women's bodies in which women's sexuality is often presented in such a way that the fullness of the adult mature female body isn't represented as being sexually desirable in any way and so people tend to desire younger women and i think that it's really hard to answer that question but rather what i would say is i can't imagine there would be negative consequences in this world to us actually thinking about how we interact with other people and if we're using them if we're using sex to numb something out i can't imagine that there would be negative consequences and that there would be these kind of massive massive orgies i think of us as having actually a more more healthy more constructive a more spiritually fulfilling sexual experience or sexual identity i think that's really key because so often the imagination when we consider a more progressive view on sexuality goes inevitably towards this increased promiscuity these increased high-risk behaviors and i think that's us responding to our own sort of puritanical protestant sexual imagination um and to some degree i think that does happen you know we respond to a critique of inequality and media of a hypersexualization of women's bodies today in hollywood by hyper-sexualizing men's bodies instead of presenting women and men as holistic individuals but i think a truly informed consent model of sexual ethic critiques hypersexualization of either gender of people of all ages it also includes eliminating sexual erasure in what way is an older woman or an older man's body non-sexual in what way is it not beautiful when they experience intimacy why would anyone feel squeamish about people in their 60s and 70s which many surveys say is actually the height of sexual satisfaction for people in the west why would we be squeamish about those experiences why would that be taboo all of these things come from this compartmentalization of our understanding of our bodies and our desires and our fears to communicate honestly about who we are and what we think and what we feel not only with other people but even inside our own narrative consciousness so often we divide and divorce our ethical system the way we see the world with what we feel and this leads to this this hyper sexualization this fetization uh this demonization of sexuality i think i think in reality it goes the other way you know i went through this this period of questioning and searching and becoming aware of things that i thought and why and it led me to a deeper monogamy and that's not true for everyone but i believe strongly seeing so many heterosexual relationships destroyed by people's late and sexual desires getting out of control i think it would be healthier for people in monogamous relationships to have an honest conversation about sexual changes sexual growth things they've become aware of if someone can't be satisfied in a monogamous relationship i think it's more healthy and less destructive to have a conversation and amend or eliminate the relationship as appropriate i think normalization or or making exclusively normative for marriage to be a heterosexual institution leads to immense suffering for people who try to through a social narrative enter into a heterosexual marriage and because of their innate and developed sexuality it's not sustainable because they are gay because they are a lesbian and all these things come from that compartmentalization i frankly believe the repressive divided approach to sexuality is more likely to produce inappropriate age inappropriate sexual behaviors and encounters than any informed consent model would [Music] [Music] there's something that happens when we've asked people to repress something and tell them that something is bad and and that too just like other sexual scripts has an effect on people's behaviors and so i think that there's something really interesting if we were to say not just about sexuality but could we cultivate a social narrative where we took responsibility for our actions and where we treated people differently where we actually respected equality and humanness and all the other people and and acknowledged our needs but didn't take that as a license to use other people to dominate other people just to feel like we had our wishes and wants satisfied that i think of sexuality as one facet of human experience but humanness is so much more than sexuality and there's something really valuable about saying with our actions both sexually and otherwise i i matter and all parts of me matter but you matter and all parts of you matter too and there's room at the table for both of us to have a dialogue about the things that we desire and that we want and i'm never going to use my positions of privilege to to silence or oppress you but rather going to look at how we can have a dialogue together about what makes sense in our interaction i can't imagine if that we were asking people to have those kinds of conversations that it would lead to a unhealthy sexual narrative culturally yeah it reminds me we were just in europe and we went to barcelona for a bit and had a few days off between gigs and they're on the beach like you know a lot of women go topless and as a westerner being there at first it's like wow boobies you know but it doesn't take long before it's like they're just they're women with their breasts like it's just those feed babies you know like it just after a minute you're like oh it's just it's just people and that's the way they act so like that's their culture is just like what you don't have these topless women and all these people like running by and taking pictures and giggling boobies um but that thing especially feels like in the united states i don't know what it's like up in canada where where does that puritanical thing the strange i know i know that the sexualization of over sexualization of women's bodies and everything i'm sure it exists in europe to a degree as well but i also kind of wonder how much we're exporting that everywhere else in the world with our media and everything that we've exported into the world like we were in iceland this last year and that's it you know going back to hot springs from what i've heard like a lot of these places where people just used to go with sasha pretty naked now it's like no now you got to be clothed and now people are becoming a little bit more conscious about nudity in these places and that seems like kind of the trend and i'm wondering is that an export through hollywood or through whatever what what and and marketing and what's happening throughout the rest of the world where it seems like some places are becoming more over sexualized and nudity again is getting weirder for them where they've been you know for however long it's just part of the culture yeah you go to the hot springs take a bath whatever what is it about this side of things of this side of the ocean the oceans that uh has seemed to amp up that fetishization and over sexualization and strange relationship with gender and all of that two words patriarchy and capitalism oh pumping my hand in the air [Laughter] what a marriage of [ __ ] that has been patriarchy and capitalism and then all that has filtered through not only our exporting of media but i i i get a lot of pushback from progressives here i'm deeply uncomfortable with the depiction of sexuality as we see in internet pornography yeah if you've ever studied the concept of super normal stimulus this is like exhibit a for super normal stimulus and uh i think leads to some really strange you know self-reinforcing conditioning behaviors that lead to sexual compulsions that change the way fundamentally that we view our bodies and the bodies of other people and that's not to say that there's something inherently about recording and distributing sexual images that's not what i'm saying i'm saying attaching that to big data analytics and ad revenue where like everything in our lives convincing your brain to click this most often is the metric of success and having this kind of unseen mathematical hand driving what's produced based on the way some of our least discerning brain regions respond is it is a troubling and difficult phenomenon that is completely altering human sexuality everywhere we can get high-speed packets of information traveling through wires or the atmosphere well research from 2013 2012 2011 even more recently showed that people who use pornography particularly violent pornography are more accepting of rape myths that after watching pornography people are more likely to actually identify that they would be one more likely to rape and two less likely to intervene as a bystander in sexual assault i think if we're going to have a conversation yeah this is like empirical data from north american samples pornography viewing habits and universities need to be addressed if we're looking at sexual assault policies on campuses you know there's we cannot have a conversation about the bystander effect and we cannot have a conversation about increases of sexual assault without also talking about where people are learning that that's okay i think as a feminist i'm extremely critical of mainstream pornography and particularly violent and gonzo pornography for the proliferation of the eroticization of violence against women not to mention that people who are watching that neurologically are linking arousal to seeing these images that there are significant neurological consequences to having an orgasm while consuming images of people being hurt and then we ask why do people why are rapes going up on campuses why is sexual assault happening so much but people don't like the idea that that we have to challenge our pornography consumption now that we have to challenge the porn industry because apparently that seems like to some an act of censorship but i don't think that it's okay for us to condone the use of pornography for the sake of you know protecting the the conversation about censorship and and rights of communication when we're saying that we actually when we actually have data to show that people who watch pornography are more likely to endorse rape myths and actually increase their behavioral intent to rape like these are statistics that we have and so if we're going to talk about sexuality and the sexual objectification of women and patriarchy and capitalism we have to have a conversation about porn use amen the big bang in my teenage years i often felt like boys were trying to take something like i was a means to an end a body to coax into submission but i just wouldn't submit because i didn't like that feeling taking it was that and also my conservative christian girl purity ring that staved off the taking and also i didn't know what to do with it it being the penis do you push it squeeze it it never occurred to me just what to do and my family never talked about it neither did any of my friends family so maybe it was all that pushing that staved off michael and i having sex before we were married or maybe that dented up purity ring still had some magic left whatever it was it helped build a fair amount of excitement mixed with terror as he scooped me up and carried me into our hotel room for our first night together amazingly it was good amazingly it was good three times but there was part of me that was protecting myself in this new ritual i didn't yet know how to fully trust someone else or even how to trust myself and didn't have any idea how good they could get immediately i feel as though i shouldn't be telling you this like it's two faux pas or not what ladies talk about to people on podcasts it's sacred and we've been taught to not talk about sacred intimate beautiful sex but like a life-changing book or sonnet or anything that leaves you stunned the beauty of it just has to be said out loud at some point so i'll say it i felt safe i felt free silly sexy and fully seen yes my body but not only my body all that i was was seen and cherished by him ten years into marriage and through all those years my body had become more alive more free more aware of its goodness but it was more than just me being seen by him i made him feel safe cherished sexy i saw him too and something happens when you fully experience the essence of another person and they you sex becomes not simply a means to an orgasm but the whole thing evokes connection and oneness i felt this and in this one particular beautiful erotic moment i had an experience it felt like like i was at the beginning of time watching the entire universe come to life with a single spark spinning and spilling into a vast expanse it felt like i was experiencing the birth of love like i was experiencing the big bang i can't help but laugh at the pun it made me wonder if all of this this beautiful universe exploding with life and pain and this creation that keeps creating may be the beginning of it all the voice of god the big bang whatever you name it maybe everything came into being like a great cosmic orgasm the great cosmic orgasm they didn't teach me that in sunday school as you may have gathered that was lisa [Music] gunger [Music] so we hope you've enjoyed as always this episode of the liturgist podcast on sex however i usually tell you to google the episode if you're interested i'd be careful googling the liturgist sex as you might get fanfic involving me and michael gunger and no one wants to read that but if you would like to comment on this episode you can go to our website at the littlejust.com podcast leave a comment there talk to other people go to our facebook page facebook.com the liturgists twitter and instagram at the liturgists we'd love to hear from you and of course now for every episode we have a patron discussion thread the first one was our last episode on body image and it was amazing so if you'd like to talk with us and other listeners of the literature's podcast at a little higher depth than is possible on the public internet consider joining us on patreon also as far as the questions that might come up um in the discussion of this episode and if you have any direct sex questions we're going to follow up this episode at some point this season by directly talking more about sort of the practical uh sex issues this one was kind of theoretical about ethics but we're going to get into some more specific sex talk sex advice that kind of world so start sending us your questions we can start gathering all that stuff together for that episode i'd like to thank greg nordin for help with putting this monster episode together corey pig for administrative help we'd like to thank all our guests for joining us be sure to check out the show notes on the liturgist.com podcast where you can find additional links to them and their work our patrons as always thank you so much we couldn't do this without you our hosts on this episode have been william matthews hillary mcbride michael gunger and me science mike thanks for listening [Music] ===