I know of two other Christian zinsters in the world. One of them sent me her latest project earlier this week. I really enjoy her stuff; her theology is not always the best, but she’s artistic about it and I get inspired.
And she wrote this great article about sex. I wasn’t really excited about it because sex was for some reason a hot topic this summer. Brian Zahnd talked about it for a few days, LifeChurch.tv talked about it for a few weeks … I assumed I’d heard the Christian response to the issues of sex and didn’t really need to hear them again. This article, though, was wonderful. Half-way through it I’m thinking, “How I wish someone would have told me this ten years ago.”
She started talking about how the media influences our perceptions of what sex should be and how we conform our body images, etc etc. Ya ya ya. Then she started talking about how, as Christians, we only put it off until marriage … and then we jump on the misconceptions-about-sex bandwagon.
Some of the issues that have been burned into the western brain:
1. Sex is always other-worldly, euphoric AND mind-blowing.
2. If you have sex that is not all of the above, you have just fallen victim to a tragedy comparable to the death of a child.
2. You ALWAYS want to have sex.
3. If someone doesn’t want to have sex with you, it’s because there is something wrong with you.
She writes about how this is what Americans are taught, and most Christians just ignore it until they get married. She goes on to plead with the reader that sex is just another part of life, and we really need to knock it off the pedestal it has been given. The sentence that encouraged the lament quoted above was something like, “Sometimes sex is great, sometimes its mediocre, and sometimes it is just bad.”
Imagine how free our young people would be if they could go into marriage knowing that, hey, sometimes it’s just not that and that’s okay. They probably wouldn’t believe it initially, but I’m guessing the first time it happened they’d be comforted to remember that bit of wisdom.
She went on to talk about how okay it is and a little bit about a woman’s hormones. Apparently by about the second (I think) week of a woman’s cycle, she is producing a lot of progesterine. This is a time when it will seem, for no apparent reason, that she is just not interested. Husbands, it’s not you – it’s the progesterine. (You can try to rebuke the progesterine if you want …)
I thought it was good, so there you have it. I also thought it was amazing that a woman would have the boldness to just come out and say, “Hey, sometimes sex is bad.” Or that her husband would be bold enough to let her … either way. Imagine the effect we could have on a generation of young people if we would just get over ourselves and talk candidly about “the marriage bed” all the time. Imagine a generation of Christian teenagers growing up with a well-rounded opinion of sex. Weird.
