Real Sex: The Naked Truth
An Interview with Lauren Winner
by April Folkertsma
Lauren Winner was educated at Columbia and Cambridge Universities, and is currently finishing her PhD at Columbia University in American Religious History. She is the author of Girl Meets God and Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity and has written for the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post , Book World, Publishers Weekly, Christianity Today, and Christian Century. Lauren also teaches at Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina, where she lives with her husband Griff Gatewood. She hopes to resume work on her next book very soon.
April Folkertsma is a social worker living in Southern California who also works as a free-lance writer. She is Executive Editor of The Other Journal and has been published in Mars Hill Review. Currently she is writing about loneliness.
( Read more... )TOJ: Both you and Wendell Berry discuss the idea of sex outside of marriage as merely a distorted imitation of sex. When intercourse is portrayed in movies, T.V., or other media such as pornography, it becomes only what an artist, director, or screenwriter interprets it to be. So often, then, media defines for the rest of us what is erotic. Can you help to describe erotic and also what happens when the erotic becomes a commodity? Have we turned “erotic” into an idea about individual pleasure and therefore don’t have a healthy view of what erotic is?
LW: Yes – yes, we’ve done just that. Think of how many movies depict sex, and then think of how many movies depict sex between married couples – most depict sex between unmarried people, or between people who are married to other people. Pop culture gives us very few pictures of what sex looks like between a couple that has been married for 5 years, or 15 years, or 35 years.
So the pictures and scripts we have in our head are of decidedly unordinary sex. We learn from these images to equate eroticism with newness.
TOJ: In your book, you discuss the idea of chastity being more than merely saving sex for marriage. Can you discuss this and include in this discussion the idea that one of the churches only resources to discourage premarital sex, and sin, to be guilt. The result being, that when one doesn’t feel guilty, they continue to have sex or indulge in sins of their choice. What resources should the Church or communities be using to encourage chastity?
LW: For starters, we don’t always feel guilty when we sin. Our feelings are broken and fallen, distorted by sin, and thus not consistently in touch with what is really real – hence, sometimes we do something that is sinful, that is bad for us, and we don’t feel bad. So, for that reason (as well as other reasons) guilt trips are not great ways to keep people on the straight and narrow.
Further, Jesus did not run around guilt tripping people. He described for them the kingdom of God and invited them into it. And he also described the consequences of saying no to that invitation. I think we can model all of our discipleship—not just discussions of sex and chastity—on that – start with a positive presentation of what is good and true about the Christian story of sex – talk about how this is good news – and then also discuss what the ‘no’ to this good news looks like. When I speak to college students about sex, for example, I always include a discussion of the ways my years of premarital sex misshaped how I understand sex. I still, two years into my marriage, have to unlearn the idea that something has to be new and uncertain to be sexy; I am still learning what it looks like for stability and real intimacy to be sexy. But I also always discuss the promises of forgiveness and repentance. To talk about the effect of sinful behavior without proclaiming loudly that God forgives sin is patently unbiblical. Further, it is, in my view, always important to underscore that virginity is not the litmus test of sexual sinlessness. Though I certainly believe that one who, like me, marries after having sex has something to mourn, it is also important to recall that by Jesus’ standard – the standard of lust – everyone of us has sexual sin and sexual brokenness to deal with.
( Read more... )TOJ: How do love, sex, and marriage reveal God’s grace?
LW: Contemporary pop culture tells us that sex is always extraordinary – it is always about swinging from the chandeliers, extreme sports goes to the bedroom…and “great sex,” as defined by Cosmo and Maxim, is threatened by ordinary domestic practices; it is threatened by the household by the dishes in the sink, by the kids down the hall.
Christians ought to be critiquing this vision. Household practices are one channel through which Christians come to embody the Christian virtues of mutual care, forgiveness, generosity, community, interdependence, and reconciliation. Our humanity cannot be separated from the sorts of practices that are distinctly human: the moments of joy, anger, friendship, sadness, attention, confusion, tedium, and wonder that unfold over time and in specific places. Human intimacy is hammered out on an anvil made of nothing more than ordinary household practices. Love, sex, and marriage, to be theological, must drink from the very same wells. Love, sex, and marriage, to partake in their transcendent mission of encountering God’s grace, must attune itself and embrace life’s decidedly un-transcendent daily-goings-on.
In a Christian landscape, sex is indeed tremendously important—but not because each and every sex act is an act of emotional intercommunion. To the contrary, what’s important about sex is nurtured when we allow sex to be ordinary. This does not mean that sex will not be meaningful. Its meaning, instead, will partake in the variety of meanings that ordinary life offers. Sex needs to be clumsy. It should at times feel awkward. It should be an act we engage in for comfort. It should also be allowed to hold any number of anxieties—the sorts of anxieties; for instance, we might feel about our child’s progress in school, or our ability to provide sustenance for our family. Sex becomes another way of two people realistically engaging the strengths and foibles of each other.
Sexual intercourse is not only transformed as we allow it to take on the varieties of the commonplace; but the varieties of the commonplace themselves are transformed, as well. We might better understand that human love is forged in, say, time spent cooking together, or in picking up our loved one’s laundry, or in spending time calming our children’s fears. By opening up sexuality to these sources of our existence, we are doing nothing more than opening up sexuality to the sources of human love. Through sexual practice, we come to find each other fallible, and we come to love each other for the way we watch each other create very human lives out of those very fallibilities.
This gets back to the question of community. The sorts of challenges that attend creating community—all of which revolve around the complexities of being responsible to the other—are present in our sexual lives. The stuff of creating community—which we experience as work, as at times more than we can bear, as taking an extraordinary amount of time, and as requiring that we make ourselves present to the other—is the stuff of creating a Christian sexuality. To say that marriage ought not be a personal endeavor is to say more than that Christian marriage is transformed into a communal endeavor by exposing the deep inner workings of our marriages to members of our communities. Instead, we need to expose the deep inner workings of our communities to our marriages; we need to take what we know about being a community and bring it to bear on sex.
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