Sex Is Designed To Be Enjoyable

Athol:  I’ve had a hard time writing today’s post. It all started with this comment left a few days ago…

Dex:  Athol – you might consider also building on the success of MMSL by translating it into Christianese and marketing to churches. I bet you still speak the lingo…

Athol:  I ended up writing a very long post addressing that question, and it’s a great post, but frankly probably only myself is really interested in it. So let me cut out all 1500 words and just get to my Jerry Springer “final thought” on that question…

…once I start cloaking myself in Christianese and “crossing the border” into Christendom, I’m doing so in what many will assume as a covert manner and with evil intentions. Eventually someone is going to be seriously pissed about that, and there will be retaliation. I can cross the border as an Atheist “diplomat” wearing my shiny Atheist uniform with my Science Fair badges pinned to my chest, but I cannot cross the border as a “spy”.

Even more importantly, I simply detest pretending to be something I’m not.

So I let the post rot in the editing folder all day and answered email questions, determined not to write about anything religious in nature.

A few hours ago though, I got an email from a guy in a twenty year marriage. He and his wife are Christians, involved in ministry work for at least some of the time, and he’s basically going batshit crazy because the sex is so awful. Everything apart from lights out, her lying still, quiet sex is right out of the picture. I’m not talking “vanilla sex”, I’m talking bleached and bland instant rice sex. (I just made that up, I don’t even know exactly what “bleached and bland instant rice sex” is, apart from not wanting it.)

It’s not the husband’s fault either. He had pictures in the email, and pretty much has a A+ body. I mean I’d tell him to run the MAP but, great body, 100k+ earnings, house broken, mix of Alpha/Beta, I got nothing much left to tell him. The problem was very clear, she was just highly sexually negative. She could pop out three kids, but it seems kinda like the end justified the means rather than it was something enjoyable for her. By the husbands own statement, he was deeply resentful of “all the Christian teachings on sex”.

But I walked away from the computer just kind of annoyed about it all. If I say something, I’m a religion hating atheist. If I say nothing, I’m not helping anyone. So far not even 2% of my “religious issue” emails hit the blog as a post.

And then I go all Jimmy Neutron and it snaps into focus for me.

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.

So yes I am angry, and you should be too. And I know and appreciate that vast numbers of Christians are just as angry as I am about these issues.

So whether or not you believe that God created our genitals to vibrate with glorious pleasure during sex, or you think evolution and sexual selection has resulted in extremely pleasurable incentives to propel your genes into the next generation, it doesn’t matter that I am… well… right. Because either way, sex is meant to be just fucking fantastic.

But most of you already know all this, so please bear with me while I try and reach that tiny minority of MMSL readers that don’t.

/clears throat, climbs up on soapbox and strikes a heroic orator pose…

If you find sex with your spouse nasty, dirty, disgusting, wrong, bestial, sinful, degrading or frightening, then you’ve been fed horseshit and told it’s chocolate your whole life. Your right to grow up and experience a normal healthy sex life has been stolen from you. You have been knowingly lied to. It’s also destroying your marriage as your partner dies a little inside every time you flinch from them.

/steps off soapbox to sounds of a recording of thunderous applause

If that makes me an angry religion-hating atheist, then so be it.

There is, however, hope. It’s never too late to learn to enjoy your sex life. Your bodies are designed to experience pleasure, so almost as soon as you stop trying to repress that natural instinct, you can start to discover a whole world of enjoyment. It will take some time to unlearn the old things and enjoy the new, and you will have to experience feeling uncomfortable and weird as some of the boundaries fall away, but it’s possible. I’m not talking about having a threesome on the pitchers mound in Yankee Stadium, I’m talking about married couples getting it on in their bedroom… or on the trampoline in the backyard with an oversupply of blankets hiding them from the passing cars.

Or put another way…

…if you think you’re going to go to hell for giving your husband a blow job, what do you think your husband thinks he’ll be getting when he’s in heaven?

Jennifer: It’s all true.  It’s really okay to like (okay loooove) sex with your husband. What he wants most is you being excited to be naked with him.