This is a long-overdue post in response to those who’ve asked me to write something about asexuality and theology. I wasn’t sure where to begin, so I figured I’d share some observations from my own experience.
Obviously, my experiences won’t be shared by everyone on the ace spectrum, but I’m hoping they’ll provide some conversation starters.
Continue reading Some thoughts on being an asexual Christian married woman
A video of this post is also available on Facebook.
The middle of the night is not usually a good time to do things other than sleep. Lack of sleep makes us tired and most of us don’t get to snooze during the day. That said, sometimes our sense of nocturnal fun means we make exceptions.
Something you’ll hear me say is that marriage doesn’t give spouses a right to sex, but rather a right to approach each other for sex. So, in theory, sex in the middle of the night is on the cards.
Problem is — if your spouse is asleep, how do you know if it’s OK to have sex with them?
Well, for starters it is never ok to have penetrative sex with someone whilst that person is asleep!
Not even if that person is your spouse.
Continue reading On consent for sex in the middle of the night
(…and marital rape, 1 Corinthians and ‘disciplining your body’. This post is a response to another Christian blogger who I hope you haven’t heard of. I’ve made two videos covering this post on my Facebook: part 1 is here and part 2 is here.)
Photo credit: BreathlessDesign on Pixabay
There is this idea amongst certain Christians[1], that if a husband feels like sex and his wife is there, then she should habitually allow him to have sex with her even when she doesn’t feel like it. ‘Wives mustn’t deprive their husbands,’ they say, quoting 1 Corinthians chapter 7.
The problem with this kind of teaching is that it normalises prioritisation of the husband’s wants and needs over the the wife’s wants and needs, and it ignores the asymmetry of men’s and women’s bodies.
It’s also not what Paul was saying when he wrote to the church in Corinth. Back then, Christians had this idea that you were more holy if you abstained from sex continuously. But Paul was like, ‘Er, no. Husbands and wives shouldn’t deprive each other except by mutual consent.’
Why did he write that? Because, amongst other reasons, he knew that sex is one of the ways that spouses can celebrate their intimacy together. So unless there’s some adverse circumstance, it doesn’t make sense for couples to continuously abstain from this physical act of mutual affirmation. And I would agree.
That said, you can’t physically affirm someone when you feel that they pressure you, or ignore you, or use you.
And sometimes that’s how wives feel when they’re approached for sex.
Continue reading On wives ‘depriving’ their husbands of sex because she ‘doesn’t feel like it’
When it comes to sex, “consensual” isn’t the same as “no mistakes.”
Sure, consensual means no big, life-changing mistakes. It means no clearly and easily avoidable mistakes. It means avoiding all the nasty stuff like:
People talk about “active, informed and enthusiastic” consent because it goes a long way to prevent the above. Those kinds of things aren’t mistakes, they’re down too bad consent.
But even when you stay well clear of all that, even when your partner is a decent human being who would never want to violate or harm you — that doesn’t mean everything always goes to plan. Maybe an unwelcome memory rears its ugly head. Maybe your body starts feeling wildly uncomfortable when you didn’t think it would. Maybe you didn’t shut the door and the cat walks in.
Mistakes will happen; the question is, what do you when you realise it’s not working? And do you learn from your mistakes?
Continue reading Consent means communicating if something’s not going to plan (in a context of mutual trust)
Photo credit: sasint from pixabay
I originally wrote this post for abuse advocate Ashley Easter and you can find it on her blog. This post is long (5,500 words!) and that’s because I try to go beyond the basics. It’s aimed to help people work out what good consent might look like in their sex life together. Because when I first started having sex, I didn’t have much of a clue.
To this day, my husband and I are still unsure if some of our early sexual encounters with each other were consensual. Seriously. Make no mistake, we have a mutually fun and consensual sex life now and I believe we have loved each other deeply for as long as we’ve been sexually active with each other. But we didn’t always understand consent. Or sex. And I used to have some pretty messed up ideas about my place in the relationship.
How we got into that situation and how we got out of it are both stories for another time (though I have written about our experience of sex therapy as a Christian couple). Right now, I want to tell you about how we’ve come to understand consent. Continue reading Sex and Consent: How does that work in a long-term relationship?
It is 500 years to the day (well, sort of, if we don’t worry about the shift to the Gregorian calendar) since Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses onto the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenburg, on 31 October 1517. His actions kicked off the reformation – a movement during which the protestant denominations split away from the Roman Catholic church.
Coming from a protestant background, this seems a fitting time for me to write 95 short statements on the themes of this blog. Of course, they don’t cover everything! But you’ll find in them thoughts and theologies that either have been, or will be, very much an integral part of my writing. (And when I’m cribbing someone else’s work, I’ve put their name in brackets.) I’ve split them into ten categories:
Continue reading Always reforming: 95 statements on hope, sexuality and consent
So… the fabulous Sierra White has asked me to share some thoughts on modesty for her Facebook page Ezer Rising (and blog: Ezer Rising), which (if you didn’t know) is committed to sharing content about women’s equality from a Christian perspective.
UPDATE 2021: The Ezer Rising blog is currently down, but I did finish this series and I was very pleased with what I achieved. However, it’s the length of a book. And each post drew a parallel with characters and images from Harry Potter, which… has since become a bit problematic. Anyway, if you are interested in reading the other parts of this series, please contact me.
First thing I’ll say is that I’m going to approach modesty in a way that I haven’t seen done elsewhere. Not because other ways are necessarily wrong or flawed, but because different ways of looking at things work for different people. And sometimes a different perspective can help us appreciate things that we hadn’t seen before.
For the Christians reading this, this also means I’m not going to start with Bible passages to make my case. I love the Bible, but if we start with a question like “What does the Bible say about modesty?” then it’s very easy to look for the word “modesty” and find ourselves constrained to considering only a few passages. Instead of doing that, I’ll step back and ask “What is modesty?” You can then go away and weigh my ideas against what you find in the Bible. (Or not, if the Bible isn’t really your book.)
So: modesty.
Continue reading Modesty 101: modesty is not about clothes, rather glory and context
I recently had the privilege of being able to guest post on the blog of Ashley Easter. She asked me to write about how I understand consent – what it is and what it isn’t. Over 5,500 words later (and more hours than I counted) the essay was complete. I hadn’t meant for it to be that long, but it roughly breaks down into three segments:
I will repost the contents of it on this blog in a few months time, but meanwhile I wanted to post this picture. It’s a zoomed-out version of the full essay and everything highlighted in red is something my husband and I didn’t know when we married. Seriously!
The full post is on Ashley’s blog here: Sex and consent: How does that work in marriage? and reposted (with very minor edits) on my blog here: Sex and Consent: How does that work in a long-term relationship?
I changed the title because I haven’t written just about consent in marriage, though I do acknowledge that as the context from which I’m writing.
It staggers me sometimes just how much rubbish gets bandied about in popular culture as sex advice. Recently, it was the Guardian with an article titled “How to have sex with the same person for the rest of your life” but it presented good points poorly and made a lot of bad ones.
The way I see it, if you’re looking to have great sex with the same person for the rest of your life, there are three strands to work on:
Much sex advice focuses only on one or two of these, or (worse) focuses too much on detailed points or ideas without first asking other questions to give context. But the “key” to a lasting and satisfying sex life is never “just this” or “just that”. It’s the combination of many positive factors working well together and the absence of negative factors that would hinder it. So let’s have a look at these three strands and some of the sex advice given in relation to them.
Continue reading The key to lifelong sex? Get the right advice.
I recently wrote a post in which I mentioned that my husband and I went for psychosexual therapy (you can find it here: On the receiving end of sex – why it’s not just about giving). Much to my surprise, I was soon contacted by someone asking about the therapy – because they and their spouse were also thinking about it. Our correspondence was only brief, but in that time I learned that they, like my husband and me, were Christians and that they came from an evangelical background. Now, I don’t currently identify as an evangelical, but evangelicalism certainly influenced how I was brought up and how I thought about sex. So perhaps it was unsurprising that I felt for this person and ached to tell them something that would be of benefit to them. So I went away, thought about it, and wrote this (quite long) collection of thoughts. (If you’re after something short and sweet on what sex is about in the first place, try this: The key to lifelong sex? Get the right advice.)
Continue reading To the evangelical couple considering sex therapy
Photo credit: Toa Hefitba, Unsplash.com
EDIT: this post is aimed at people who feel guilty about being pleasured. If you want to read about consent and negotiating for mutual enjoyment as part of a long-term sex relationship, I recommend this post on Ashley Easter’s blog.
Every now and then I read something that suggests that if you’re not on the giving end of sex, you’re doing it wrong. The argument follows a few leaps of logic:
If you’re in a sexual relationship and you’re never or rarely at the giving end of sex (or not nearly as often as your intimate partner), then that points to an imbalance and imbalances raise questions about the overall health of the relationship.
But I cannot reconcile myself to a model of sex where the expectation is that you must always be giving. Or, to put it another way: I cannot reconcile myself to the idea that a healthy sexual relationship means you should always be contributing to the pleasure of your intimate partner.
To explain, I’ll need to tell you about some of my sexual history. Deep breath. Continue reading On the receiving end of sex – why it’s not just about giving