Category Archives: Marriage & Divorce
What I Learned From Conservative Evangelical Sex Message Boards – HuffPost
After nearly a decade of studying Christian sex advice and talking to the evangelicals who write it, here’s one thing I know for sure: Evangelicals love pegging.
Not all of them, of course, or even most, but many more than you might expect. As I found while doing research for my book Christians Under Covers, many of the everyday posters on Christian sex advice message boards and blogs rave about pegging, the anal penetration of a man by woman.
White conservative evangelical Protestants are often anti-gay and anti-trans when it comes to political debates ― for example, they tend to oppose marriage equality and insist on binary and immutable definitions of sex and gender. But over the course my research, I have learned that the relationship between evangelicals and queerness is more complicated than their political attitudes suggest.
Evangelical Christians describe themselves as “in the world but not of the world,” and the same could be said of their sex advice. Evangelical culture creates boundaries between believers and non-believers by prioritizing “Christian” versions of everything, from politicians to rock music. To do that, they constantly chase and capitalize on secular trends, and that includes the secular world’s increasing acceptance of queerness. It is no coincidence that Christian sex advice as a genre emerged in the 1970s at the height of the gay rights and sexual liberation movements.
Evangelical Christians describe themselves as ‘in the world but not of the world,’ and the same could be said of their sex advice.
Evangelicals who write about sexual pleasure put a religious twist on the popular and marketable notion that sexual fulfillment is tied to one’s overall happiness. In addition to print self-help books, there are dozens of popular websites created by and for evangelical Christians who love sex. There are blogs for Christian wives to learn strategies to optimize their own pleasure (vibrators!), message boards where users troubleshoot their sexual problems and give advice on the best sexual positions and online Christian-owned stores where customers can buy sex toys and be confident they will not be exposed to pornography, like they would be in secular stores.
Authors of Christian sex advice generally avoid listing specific do’s and don’ts. Even in one of the oldest and stodgiest evangelical sex manuals, The Act of Marriage, published in 1976, authors Tim and Beverly LaHaye write that they “can’t recommend” oral sex but do not forbid it. Contemporary authors are more encouraging. Shannon Ethridge, author of the 2008 book The Sexually Confident Wife, says that sex is reserved for monogamous and consenting husbands and wives. But once that requirement is met, “just about anything and everything in the bedroom can be considered perfectly normal.”
As a result, Christian sex advice sounds similar to a lot of non-Christian sex advice. Sexual freedom is a key assumption. In Sheet Music: Uncovering the Secrets of Sexual Intimacy in Marriage, Christian author Kevin Leman writes that “the Bible is amazingly free in what it allows and even encourages a married couple to do in bed.” Rather than focusing on what God doesn’t allow, these authors focus on what is made possible within God’s parameters for who is allowed to have sex.
The Bible is amazingly free in what it allows and even encourages a married couple to do in bed.
Christian author Kevin Leman
Online, bloggers and message board users take the logic presented in these mainstream books and run with it. These online conversations take on a decidedly queer tone as users counter sexual shame, encourage sexual exploration, validate unique sexual desires and celebrate pleasure as a key feature of a sexual life.
And that’s how I found myself reading about pegging on a highly active conservative Christian message board.
In total, I analyzed 50 blog posts or message board threads that discussed pegging. Each justified the act by drawing from a broader evangelical logic that emphasizes the vast sexual possibilities available to straight married couples.
The first pegging thread I came across was as boring as it was astonishing. It was an exchange in which users offered reviews and recommendations for men who liked to use dildos for prostate stimulation. Of one product, a user noted, “it’s not very phallic looking, if you care about that,” voicing what surely is a concern for many of these men, who want to maintain their status as straight Christian patriarchs. But, at the same time, this comment suggests to me that not all evangelical men do, in fact, care if the dildos they use resemble penises. That may be extreme, but it shows just how far some evangelicals (notably, men) take what they believe is God’s complete validation of their sexuality.
Not all evangelicals would approve of pegging, of course. Christian sex advice books, reflecting evangelical culture more broadly, support “gender complementarity” — the idea that God created gender as a binary distinction between men and women who fulfill differing and hierarchical roles. This applies in the bedroom and outside it. Focus on the Family, one of the largest evangelical organizations in the U.S., puts it this way: “Her parts and his parts each have their own order and function.” Some evangelicals express disdain for pegging precisely because it challenges their beliefs about gender.
But on the Christian sex advice websites I studied, even those who disapprove of pegging are reluctant to cast judgment on the practice. On one blog post about it, a reader commented that “that is a complete role reversal, and I can’t imagine that God would be pleased with that!” The blogger responded, “I would caution any of you who presumes to know what God is thinking. Just because you are uncomfortable with a particular act doesn’t mean it’s inherently wrong or sinful.”
On the Christian sex advice websites I studied, even those who disapprove of pegging are reluctant to cast judgment on the practice.
The irony, of course, is that evangelicals who embrace the gender-subversive sex act of pegging rely on their normative and privileged identities to do so. In fact, website users justify their sexual interests by describing how their spouses, and God, affirm that they are cisgender and straight. A short comment on a blog post is an illustrative example of this accomplishment: “My [dear husband] is 100% man throughout, but he loves when I peg him.” Another website user writes confidently of God’s approval of his interest in pegging: “I was talking to God about it AGAIN, and I really felt the Lord say to me, ‘I love what you and your wife have together.’”
Despite the apparent “anything goes” attitude within Christian sex advice, there are still limits to evangelical sexuality, which borrows from queerness but doesn’t approve of queer people.
Evangelicals tout their conservative religious beliefs and use them as a jumping-off point to enjoy the sexual possibilities made visible and popular by the LGBTQ community. But outside the evangelical bedroom, LGBTQ people remain outsiders ― and that, too, is justified by conservative religious beliefs. Actual queer people may be married and practice monogamy the way Christian sex guides demand, but they lack the core foundations of heterosexuality and cisgender identity that make subversive sex acceptable to evangelicals.
The way evangelicals practice and talk about pegging is an example of how conservative evangelicalism thrives by drawing lessons from the LGBTQ movement ― while also opposing it.
To some, this all may seem hypocritical. Evangelicals don’t see it that way. They are, after all, in the world but not of the world, even when they’re engaging in a sex act that was named by gay sex advice columnist Dan Savage. But they are on tenuous grounds when they admonish and exclude gay couples and gender non-binary folks. Perhaps one day they’ll agree that everyone deserves consensual sexual pleasure and expression, even ― and especially ― the people who taught them about pegging in the first place.
Kelsy Burke is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She researches and writes about Christian sex advice, evangelical women’s ministries, religious freedom laws and debates over pornography.
Ask Amy: Husband wants to reignite passion in sex-starved marriage – The Ledger
Advice: You two make mutual decisions about your house, your friendships and your children. Your sex life should be mutual, too.
DEAR AMY: After 10 years of therapy and antidepressants for PTSD from childhood sexual abuse, my wife of 20 years has decided that she can no longer tolerate sex or sexual activity, including kissing. All she wants is to hug and hold hands.
She believes this state is permanent and necessary for her healing.
Amy, we are only in our 50s. I am far too young to no longer have any sexual activity.
I have compassion for her pain, but this feels unbearable to me.
I have supported her through all her therapy, but I also want her to support my needs and desires, also.
We have twin teenagers who are wonderful. We have lots of friends and a happy house.
I want to also have a wife, not just an affectionate roommate.
My own therapist thinks that my wife should try harder on my behalf.
What should I do? — DESPERATE HUSBAND
DEAR DESPERATE: Your therapist is most likely going to support your goals; your wife’s therapist will naturally encourage and support her goals.
Because you are both so open to receiving therapy, you should consider committing to joint counseling; that way, at least you will both be coached through a conversation about this very important topic.
Of course your needs are every bit as important as your wife’s, but in a partnership the person with the lower libido will control the connection.
You seem to have had a sexual connection at some point in your marriage, and it is natural to want to maintain — or restore — this connection. Some unknown event may have triggered your wife’s current reaction to you; menopause or medication for her depression may be a contributing factor to her low libido and sex aversion. Her sexual history is traumatic — this is the X-factor in your dynamic.
I hope she is willing to try to recover your intimate connection as a couple. The effort of keeping you at arms-length, and feeling responsible for your unhappiness, will contribute to the aversion cycle.
You two make mutual decisions about your house, your friendships and your children. Your sex life should be mutual, too. When your wife refuses to kiss you, you feel unwanted and unloved. If you describe your desire for intimacy in heartfelt and emotionally relatable terms, she might understand and empathize with your needs.
Esther Perel is a therapist specializing in working with couples. Her TED talks and podcast offer fascinating insight into relationship dynamics. Her book: “Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence” (Harper Paperbacks, 2017) will offer ideas for how you and your wife could try to relate differently.
You can contact Amy Dickinson via email: askamy@amydickinson.com. Readers may send postal mail to Ask Amy, P.O. Box 194, Freeville, NY 13068. You can also follow her on Twitter @askingamy or “like” her on Facebook.
How my ex-husband and I put our differences aside to raise our boys together – The Washington Post
About a year ago, my then-fiance and I were at lunch discussing our upcoming wedding when I received a text from my ex-husband. He and our younger son were spending the afternoon together.
“Do you have a certain color scheme for your wedding?” he asked.
“No, why?” I texted back.
“We’re shopping for suits and I wondered if there was a particular color of shirt and tie you wanted your youngest groomsman to wear.”
“No, anything is fine,” I wrote. “And I’ll pay for his shirt and tie.”
“It’s okay,” he answered. “I’ve got this.”
A year before my ex and I ended our 20-year marriage 10 years ago, we engaged in hurtful rounds of verbal volleyball while our two boys slept. While they were awake, we served as poor role models of how a husband and wife should interact with each other. Aside from growing apart, my ex and I no longer had anything in common, with the exception of our sons. We could have stayed together “for the children” in an anxiety-filled home that would have caused our sons irreparable emotional damage. The other choice was to divorce and provide two separate, stress-free homes.
The decision was clear, yet emotionally draining to implement.
Before filing for divorce, I did an Internet search for “How to make divorce easier on children.” Every website offered the same advice: Get along with your spouse (at least in front of the children) and don’t bad-mouth the other parent. We knew two other couples who had recently divorced and their incessant fighting was affecting their children. The kids alternately acted out and shut down. We didn’t want the same for our sons.
While we negotiated the terms for our divorce, we moved into separate homes — three short blocks from each other because of coincidence, not planning — and promised to put our children first and make peaceful co-parenting a priority. Although we still argued, it wasn’t in front of our boys. Instead, we saved our occasional snide comments and verbal gut punches for phone calls and texts.
Less than six months later, we started communicating more effectively than we did during the last year of our crumbling marriage. What changed, aside from no longer sharing a home? We stopped being defensive. We stopped all futile attempts to change each other. More important, we stopped expecting anything from each other, leaving little room for anger and disappointment.
Living in the same neighborhood, and working out a carpool schedule, made it convenient for us to see our sons every day. During the weeks my ex had the boys, then 11 and 13, I picked them up from his home and drove them to school. The following week, during my time with our sons, their dad picked them up and took them to school. We respected each other’s boundaries, and didn’t know if we were welcome in each other’s homes, so we waited for our sons to come outside. Eventually, I invited their dad to wait inside as the boys ate breakfast or collected their things. The next week, he did the same.
[When I became a single parent, I lost my tribe. So I built a new one.]
One afternoon, on the way home from picking up my younger son from school, I realized our system of informing each other about our kids was working. Earlier, my ex had sent me an email with a heads-up about the electronics ban he had implemented in response to our son’s poor choices over the weekend. He asked me to continue the ban through the end of the week.
“I heard you lost TV and computer privileges for a few days,” I said to my son as he climbed into my SUV.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “That was at dad’s house.”
“No, it’s at our house too, until Friday.”
“Why can’t you be like other divorced parents and not talk or text each other?” he said.
A few months after the divorce was final, I began my relationship with my now-husband, and my ex started seeing his now-fiancé. Before he brought her to school events, I hadn’t formed an image of how she would look, dress or sound. I even resisted the temptation to troll her profile on Facebook. My sons filled me in. They agreed that the new woman in their dad’s life treated them well and on the few occasions I saw my ex, he seemed happy. I sensed that she and I would get along well, and we do.
She has never attempted to be a “bonus mommy.” She adores my sons and has welcomed them into her family. With both my family and my ex’s relatives living hundreds of miles away, my boys have an extra set of grandparents, scores of aunts and uncles, and plenty of cousins nearby to celebrate special occasions. Their close relationship with my ex’s fiance and her family could bother me, but it doesn’t. My sons enjoy spending time with extended family members who treat them as their own.
A few years ago, around Christmas, my eldest brought home a clear-wrapped package filled with thick slices of rum cake. He told me it was a gift for me, from his dad’s fiance. A few days later I made a dessert, which happened to be my ex’s favorite, and asked my youngest if he would take half of it to his dad. We are expanding our relationship along with our waistlines.
Our sons are adults now. We still work diligently to provide them with a healthy family dynamic. Between their dad’s relationship with his fiance, and mine with my husband, we do our best to model what it means to have a positive, caring connection with a life partner. I’m proud that my sons treat their girlfriends with kindness and respect. And the lack of stress they feel at family gatherings, where they are enveloped by the love of their combined families, confirms that my ex and I made the right decision to divorce. A bonus: We were both lucky enough to get a second chance at finding love.
Lisa Kanarek is a freelance writer, essayist, and the author of five books about working from home. She lives with her husband in Texas, where they are parents to a combined six sons. Find her on Twitter @LisaKanarek.
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Amy Dickinson: Kids want to nudge their dad toward divorce – La Crosse Tribune
Dear Amy: My sister and I have recently found out that our father has been seeing a woman who is not our mother.
Our parents’ marriage over the last 15 years has not been much of a relationship. They are more like roommates, just living in the same house. They each go about their own business and come together only at family functions that we kids arrange. They don’t seem to fight, but we observe a total disinterest in each other. Years ago, I remember my mother saying that “we are not a family who divorces.”
We would like to tell our father that we know about his lady friend. We would like to encourage him to pursue a life with someone who has made an obvious improvement in his life.
He has seemed happier over the last year and we support any change he might make. We love our mother, of course, but she does nothing to be a couple with our father anymore. Sadly, couples’ therapy did not help because our mother did not want to change anything. She prefers the company of her friends to him.
We also think our father would not make any move to separate or divorce without our input, as we are sure he would think that we would think less of him, which is not true.
How can we convey our feelings to him? Or, should we even try?
Is it our place or responsibility to encourage at least one of our parents to be happier? — Sympathetic Son and Daughter
Dear Sympathetic: Thank you for offering a somewhat refreshing take on a very old story. I appreciate that you, as adult children, can actually see that your parents are individuals who have wants, needs, desires and paths to happiness that extend beyond their singular roles as parents. All the same, aren’t you a shred disappointed that your father has chosen this particular path out of marriage?
You hold a distinctly negative view of your mother’s role in this drama. I don’t know how you can know what happened during their couples counseling, but I take your word for it that she has not demonstrated an interest in maintaining a thriving marriage.
Yes, you should communicate with your father. Meet with him privately and tell him everything you say above. Tell him you are aware of his extramarital relationship, and say that you want him to be happy. Say that you will support whatever choice he and your mother make — and that includes staying together. Be loving and supportive, but don’t involve yourself further.
Understand that your parents have created a life together that might not look ideal to you, but which is a consequence of their choices over the years.
Even though you cast your mother as the villain here, if the marriage breaks up, she will likely require — and probably deserve — some empathy and understanding from her children.
Dear Amy: My husband has very poor hygiene habits. He brushes his teeth only at the end of the day and showers once a week, in spite of the fact that he exercises daily. Often both his breath and body odor are very unpleasant.
I have been upfront with him on countless occasions, gently explaining both the health benefits, as well as the “social” problem when he is in public. However, if he can’t smell the odors, he doesn’t believe they exist and that the problem is in my head. I’m only hoping that he and others like him will see this letter and make an effort to improve their hygiene. — Nose-Plugged Wife
Dear Nose Plugged: Does your husband like to have sex? Does he want a morning kiss from you? Does he want to spend time with you in close quarters?
You have some leverage here, and you should use it. If your husband is able-bodied and there are no obvious impediments to bathing, then he should clean himself every day, whether or not he has body odor, or regardless of whether he can detect it.
Dear Amy: “Still Here” described my exact frustration! Like Still Here, I am in my 30s and single with no children. I have spent literally thousands of dollars celebrating the life choices of my friends and family members, with nothing in return.
It’s not like I want total equality here, but honestly, I love your idea of a “singleton shower.” — Thinking About It
Dear Thinking: Whether or not there are gifts involved, each of us deserves to be celebrated.
You can contact Amy Dickinson via email: askamy@amydickinson.com. Readers may send postal mail to Ask Amy, P.O. Box 194, Freeville, NY 13068. You can also follow her on Twitter @askingamy or “like” her on Facebook.
