Religion Is Bad For Your Sex Life
I don’t write about religion much on ErosBlog. It’s a sex blog, not a religion blog nor yet a politics blog. But when talking about sex, religion is often the 800lb gorilla in the bedroom, which is probably why I get “you’ll burn in hell” emails on a regular basis.
Here’s college sex educator Emily Nagoski in what she calls her most offensive post yet:
Religion is bad for your sex life. I don’t mean it doesn’t help, I mean it’s actively destructive.
There are exceptions. I had a good friend in grad school who was a religious conservative. Her faith community strongly supporter her decisions around her sexuality and everything seems to have worked out fine for her. No irreparable harm done, to my knowledge.
But globally speaking, religion is bad both at the individual level and at the cultural level. Individually, it results in inhibitions, shame, fear, guilt, bias against others, and acceptance of gender-based stereotypes. Culturally it results in the oppression of women and sexual minorities, the spread of disease (stigma is as much a vehicle of transmission as any bodily fluid), and the obstruction of the scientific study of sexuality.
There I said it.
Go ahead and comment about how some religion or other isn’t like that. Tell me all about how your faith tells you to celebrate god’s gift of the body. I know. Whatever. You’re trying to make your religion work for you. Good luck with that.
I’d say “don’t yell at me, yell at her” except that would be cowardly. I’m not a sex educator nor nor any other kind of credentialed sex expert, but I agree with what she’s saying. It matches all of my reading and observations.
That’s what makes her post pertinent for ErosBlog. Well, plus this little pair of paragraphs from much later in her post:
None of this is aided by the fact that most of the work I do related to religion involves trying to untangle the knots religion has knit into a person’s sexuality. In my experience, in 90% or more cases religion has caused some form of damage to a person’s sexuality. Sometimes it’s indirect — like, a person has to learn that in fact gay people are completely fine — and sometimes it’s as direct as it gets — like the person is in recovery from child sexual abuse perpetrated by their church leader.
To say nothing of the systematic oppression of women, the violence justified by the fairy tales of idiots and madmen (teams of virgins in heaven, awaiting the arrival of a suicide bomber), and the devastating public health consequences of “morality.”
Now, I’m going to indulge myself. Because, however true the above blockquotes may be, they’re not why Emily’s post made me want to shout “Amen, Sister, preach it Baby PREACH it!” Nope, that happened when she got into why religion is absent from her own life. First sentence emphasis added by me:
But the worst thing about religion is that it makes it okay to just believe shit because you want to. No religion, no matter how liberal, escapes that.
I acknowledge a basic bias. For a variety of reasons not immediately relevant to this blog, I think faith/religiosity is an innate part of human psychology. I think human belief in an invisible family in the sky is either product or byproduct of evolution. However, it is, for no apparent reason, NOT an innate part of MY psychology. I had the capacity for faith (in the absence of any particular religion) when I was an adolescent, but the more my prefrontal cortex developed, the more impossible it became for me to believe in ghosts, fairies, invisible friends, etc. It was utterly gone by the time I was 25.
So I’m biased.
I know that the experience of faith is both real and important for lots of people, and I know it offends them when I discuss faith as a form of self-delusion, but I genuinely don’t understand, plain old don’t understand (like, imagine a terrier watching its owners have sex), how a person can CHOOSE to believe in something.
They choose to believe it because it makes them feel good. And I think this characterizes MOST people. I think MOST people are able to believe more or less anything they like the sound of. Indeed we’ve made a virtue of it. Just BELIEVE. It’s The Secret, ya know.
Well, shit, dude. If I could choose to believe whatever I wanted, I too would stop believing in global warming and start believing in angels. But I can’t. I can’t choose to believe anything; I believe what appears to be, given evidence and experience, true. As evidence and experience change, so does what I believe.
Just so.
I, too, lack the ability to “decide” to believe in something. I’ve never had it. I’ve never understood it. Like Emily, I don’t comprehend it. This. Does. Not. Compute.
All my life, people of faith have been urging me to join them. “Just BELIEVE”, they tell me, and all will be peachy.
“Just assemble the jigsaw puzzle”, they might as well be saying, “and when it’s all done and the picture clear and beautiful on your coffee table, the puzzle pieces will magically arrive in the mail.”
Like Emily, I can’t do that. I don’t know how to put the puzzle together before the pieces arrive. Don’t have the ability. At one time, around age 10 when all my friends were evangelical Christians, I wanted to have it; but I didn’t have it. And now, I don’t want it if I could get it. It’s not okay to just believe shit because you want to.
The reasons it’s bad for sexuality, Emily has covered. The other reasons it’s not okay are mostly beyond the scope of a sex blog. But it’s just not.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=5117
Oh ouch. If she were to limit her parameters to Christianity, Judaism, or Islam (all of which have the same roots), I would be more inclined to support her. Or if she wanted to limit it to patriarchal, authority-from-the-top-down religions, I might be inclined to at least listen.
All “religion” is not dogma propagated by organized social groups of males. Not all religions even address sexual behavior, per se, and some encourage various forms of it. Not all cultures on this planet are descended from puritans, and many of them historically treat sex as the health-endowing activity that it is.
My religious experiences teach me that sex is to be embraced, that it is a type of sharing that is both unique and unequaled, and that it is an integral part of any long-term committed primary relationship (not to mention a lot of fun). My religious experiences teach me that people are indoctrinated by social dogma and pseudo-intellectual dogma as much as religious dogma, and when it is done from fear, when it is done from hatred — then it is bad no matter what the source.
My religious experiences teach me to treat all other people as righteous individuals, not as groups. They teach me that it doesn’t matter what your body shape is (male or female, fat or thin), what your cultural or genetic ethnicity is — that everyone as an individual deserves respect on a basic level as a person (See, not a solipsist here).
As for the other issue, try this gedanken experiment. Pick any topic. Have someone ask you why you believe this. Explain. Have them ask you why you believe the assumptions in the explanation. Explain. Have them ask you why believe the root causes of your supporting answer in the explanation. Explain. Have them ask you why you believe the assumptions in *those* supporting root causes. Eventually, you will be forced into the position that you believe in something because at some point you *choose* to believe that set of data, and not some other set of data, or empirical experience, or divine revelation.
It’s not hard when discussing philosophy to get to the arguments about how much we rely on the evidence of our senses when it can be shown that our senses deceive us constantly. These arguments are covered extensively in nearly all sophomore college classes in philosophy.
What we mostly do is accept certain models of existence, and base our decisions on conclusions we try to infer or deduce from those models. Evolution is a model, a darn good one, but a model. Electrons are a model, another darn good one, but nonetheless just a model. Talk to any physicist about quantum theory and big-bangs (see, SEX!) and the average person can see just how much the physicists commit of their knowledge to a model of the world. Then we filter these models through reality tunnels (or to use another metaphor, a mesh screen) and pick and choose what we want to believe and what we don’t.
Yeah, sure, “faith” and “religion” are terms that are frequently abused by people who seek to pull the kitty litter over their messes. Organized religions can account for a lot of the pain and suffering in the world today and a lot of blood shed in our histories. But there is no reason to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Self-examination is a good thing. Thinking about why you believe something is a good thing. Understanding that at some point, unless you are just a robot run by other people, that You made the choice to choose what you believe is a good thing.
Ultimately, divine revelation is a personal thing. It consists of the direct experience of the individual in relationship with that which is divine. Religious experience isn’t something you can indoctrinate in people. You can only attempt to share, mostly by how you behave, and hope that others benefit from it. I know of no real guru who encourages “followers”, but it is the followers who haven’t gotten it yet who often distort or pervert the messages of those holy people who have walked on this planet and tried to make things better. Unfortunately we as a species have a tendency to do things like nail them to crosses or chop off their heads.
The best cartoon I ever saw had a bearded guy on a mountain top holding a couple of stone tablets while beams of light radiated down on him from the sky where a disembodied voice said, “think for yourself, schmuck!”.
I can’t stand most of the precepts of the catholic church, but the Ecstasy of St. Teresa is still one of the best pieces of Art ever, and it exalts the sexual within us.
Good night, and good luck.
What is missing is the thrill of guilt, seriously, you guys who aren’t Catholic will never know what you are missing.
Then again I wouldn’t connect HOT with DEVIL if I had been raised, say Ethical Culturist or something
My dear Fuzzy,
A point that I take Emily Nagoski to be making, with which I think Bacchus concurs, is that it is not “…okay to just believe shit because you want to.” I agree as well. Indeed, it’s hard for me to see how someone could not agree with this: it’s at the very core of epistemic rationality. Her subsidiary point is that religious belief undermines the core of rationality: religion somehow facilitates people’s believing shit just because they want to. This subsidiary point is more controversial: I’m inclined to agree with it myself, although I know some very smart religious (and for that matter, some non-religious) people who would dispute it.
You would have been on stronger ground disputing the subsidiary claim, but instead you seem to want to try to undermine the core point.
This will not do.
Here is a thought experiment (and please, let’s not use “gedanken experiment” or even the correct German Gedankenexperiment where humble English will do just fine) for you. Suppose you have a child who is sick but whose condition is routinely and successfully treated by a generally-accepted regimen. You entrust your child’s care to a physician. Instead of the generally-accepted regimen, the physician pursues an eccentric course of therapy rather than the generally-accepted regimen. Your child worsens and then dies.
“How could you have done such a thing?” you ask the physician.
“Well,” she says, “I just accept a different model of existence than most of the rest of the medical profession. And our models of reality are ultimately personal. We filter them through reality tunnels (or to use another metaphor, a mesh screen) and pick and choose what we want to believe and what we don’t.”
“But did you even test your model against empirical data?” you respond.
“Well, one could do that, but at some level you just have to make a choice.”
If you’re prepared to accept the eccentric physician’s explanation of her conduct as sufficient justification thereof, then I admit that I can’t touch your argument. But if you don’t, then perhaps you have some rethinking to do.
Man, this invisible dragon in my garage is always being SUCH a nuisance…
The issue is that humans have a) pretty active imaginations and b) are SURPRISINGLY bad at accepting large blank areas in their “map”, so they fill them in with dragons and fairies and moral rules about who gets to sleep with who. They also seem, in some cases, to be equally bad replacing their scribbles as the map gets filled in.
I feel like I should link http://www.less...g.com somehow, so I will!
To belted over the head by dogma or militant rationalism? Decisions decisions…
The physician thing really is a crock. Look up the difference between belief and knowledge. The physician is allowed to have any belief he/she wishes but is required to act on the basis of (publicly verifiable) knowledge.
I can’t resist.
I’m going to put in a plug for Unitarian Universalism.
We take in the refugees from all the other religions.
From http://www.uua.org:
Unitarian Universalist congregations affirm and promote…
A free and responsible search for truth and meaning.
I stand on the word “responsible” as meaning that you can *not* just believe whatever you like.
Both our kids went through the UU sex ed program (Our Whole Lives). We think they were well served.
Thanks, JohnJ. You saved me some time there. And Steven makes a good point as well.
Nowhere in my post am I trying to be flip, or indoctrinate anyone to *my* beliefs.
In no way do I advocate believing in anything randomly, or crazily. I have been a proponent of education on human sexual behavior since 1979, when I joined alt.sex.wizards.
I completely understand Emily Nagoski’s frustration with your typical protestant citizen of the USA. (if that is in fact what she means to describe). They are severely undereducated on sexual behavior of all kinds, and the social/religious strictures that further regulate the boundaries of what they will even allow themselves to think about rationally are so strong that many people don’t even know they have them. It is sad to see someone who self professes being an agnostic who exhibits perfect unconscious compliance with protestant or even catholic thought.
Even those people who manage to confound their upbringing (and btw, I completely agree with stacey) tend to think that sexual ability is something that you come naturally endowed with, when in reality, SEX is something that requires study and training and practice to get really good at. I don’t know anything who thinks that rhythmic gymastics is something you are born doing, but when I suggest that practicing a given sexual behavior I get a lot of blank looks or the attitude “why should I have to practice giving cunnilingus, that would take all the fun out of it?” Oh so sad.
One of the main sources of the disconnect that we are discussing is pointed out by ADreth. People fill in for themselves things that aren’t explicitly taught to them, and then they blame it on any other source but themselves (religion, parental injustice, the schools, etc). One of the main things that people ignore consistently is that we are animals. They don’t like thinking that animal behavior can model our own behavior. Robert Anton Wilson pointed out in one of his books that if you write a thousand page book and point out that humans are primates on pages 1-600, and then point it out again on page 999, that most people would be surprised to read it.
And Dr. Faustus, I am making a difference between someone “only” believing something because they “want to”, and between *choosing* to ultimately believe *something* because if you don’t. .. well you don’t end up believing anything do you?
As logic is a limited construct when compared to mathematics, so rationality is a limited construct when compared to life. (ok, now *that’s* a controversial statement!) And if I could, I’d force the teaching of semantics and rhetoric to all children in our schools. I think that one of the reasons that we’re all flying through space in this handbasket is that we don’t.
I wish I could have this conversation in person. Basically my point here is that Emily Nagoski is being waaay overly simplistic, and sounds totally frustrated. I agree with her as a matter of frequent daily experience, but completely disagree with her as a matter of principle.
JohnJ: Beliefs inform knowledge, both the having and the search for.
Fuzzy: I love RAW as much or more than the next guy, but if you’re honestly mistaking the reality tunnel described in Quantum Psychology for the real deal, well, good luck to ya.
I like to imagine a world in which religion never got involved with politics. Maybe then after the advent of the scientific revolution, religion could have evolved into an art form and would no longer be a matter of faith at all. We’d judge religion in the same way we judge literature, music, and visual art, by whatever inherent beauty or truth it possesses or in what ways it helps us understand what it means to be human.
Unfortunately, this is not the case, and I really think the worst aspects of religion come from its being used as a political tool since the dawn of civilization. For example, some of the most restrictive (and militant!) religions are those with histories of political tension among different religions or religious sects or with secular rulers. Whereas traditions that are polytheistic (less emphasis on supreme authority) or basically philosophical in nature (Buddhism [Tantra!] or Taoism) tend to be less restrictive.
Nevertheless, when I evaluate the worth of any particular religion, I try to do so as I would a piece of art. I’ve found this to be very rewarding. After all, different religions have formed the basis for many, many human lives, and inside each religion’s teachings are valuable lessons on how to live. Even though they are, in my opinion, guesswork and require scrutiny and sifting, they are more rich with information relevant to the human struggle than any artwork created by a more limited number of people over a more limited amount of time.
It upsets me that the (also political) strife between religion and science nowadays would cause so many people to reject the good along with the bad in religion. Too many times in the world’s history, a new political order has destroyed the teachings of the former order. Bad-mouthing all of religion without a serious look at both its negative and positive effects is an example of this attitude. Even though advances in science have made it so we no longer believe what we did when the first myths were created, we share a common human experience with all of our homo sapien sapien ancestors, and there is value in our old stories beyond the value of faith.
As a mathematician I felt the need to make a few minor comments here.
1. Fuzzy, just a minor quibble, I don’t think that you can say that logic is a limited construct as compared to mathematics. Logic is a framework that allows for the entire field of mathematics, or is a subbranch, depending on what precisely you mean.
2. There is something to be said for “choosing” to belief something. Although with verifiable empirical facts one wants one’s beliefs to correspond with the general perception of reality, there are many times (even, or maybe especially with the hard “science” of mathematics) that one needs to “choose” to belief something, since it is something that is (at the moment sometimes, never in other cases) not verifiable. For example the axiom of choice is “believed” by most mathematicians (even though it leads to very paradoxical seeming situations http://en.wikip...radox) because its useful. I really don’t see a belief in certain supernatural entities to be much different. (Although maybe my faith has allowed me to grow as a mathematician because I can understand taking something to be “true” because it is useful.) Since by construction the existence of God cannot be verified, I see no harm in taking its existence as an axiom…and I don’t see that this causes me to believe in things that are harmful, or empirically false.
3. Sex is hot, fun and I will readily acknowledge that most (not all but most) of the world religions mess people up in regards to sex, and I am perfectly happy with the fact that all my current sex partners are agnostics/atheists.
As a born and bred fundamentalist Christian who has managed to study my way out of most doctrinal beliefs, I tend to now take an anthropological view of religion. I can’t cite any instances in my personal experience, of which I have many years worth, where religion has contributed in any way to my sexual enjoyment. (Pornography, on the other hand, has contributed greatly to my sexual pleasure.) Religious belief, I finally concluded, really does get in the way of enjoying life, and for many makes life a living hell.
Man, all I know is that my upbringing was miserable because I refused to believe in my parent’s imaginary friends. I turn 40 this summer, and I’m still a little pissed every time I think about it. I get along with my parents, but we sure as hell never discuss religion any more.
I have actually joined a group called “the Brights.” It’s a group that promotes a rational, science-based worldview. Kind of like a loose church for people who refuse to believe bullshit. I’m not big on the name, i.e. “we’re brighter than you because of our lack of bullshit-believing,” but what the hell, rational people are pretty few and far between these days, so I’ll take what I find.
Hey Amerlinh!
I said that logic is a limited construct compared to mathematics because everything in logic is provable by its assumptions, i.e., it is a “complete” set. This is not true in the “larger” construct that is mathematics, as evidenced by Godel’s Incompleteness theorem and a host of other evidence including the stuff you mentioned.
If I have erred in my phraseology it is because I didn’t want to get into an extended mathematical discussion. I love equations as much as the next person (ok probably more than the next person) but I’m guilty of trying to keep it as simple as possible.
What makes me crazy are people who use such arguments as excuses to believe any old thing they want without recourse to any self-examination or critical thinking, which is something I’d have preferred Emily Nagoski to say.
Most beliefs are not actively chosen but installed by cult’ure etc. I think the author and the commentators are choosing beliefs that make them feel good. This belief makes me feel good.
I live with an appreciation for the unseen, the unknowable and believe that consciousness is a very fun subject to study. I let my results be my guide. I have a tremendous sex life with my wifey of 16 years today. Life is good, better than good. I choose to believe that. It seems to be working.
Be well! and keep fucking ; )
Arguments about religion, choosing to believe, “family in the sky”, really, really, and I mean, really, need to incorporate more than the Judeo-Islam-Christian model for religion / spirituality.
While this doesn’t invalidate the points in the post about major world religions causing all sorts of harm to sexuality, etc…, the “choose to believe” argument, to be frank, is 100% bullshit. You’re setting up a straw-person. And you’re hanging out with the wrong religious folks. Broaden your (generic “you”) perspective and get into some real conversations with people who have really studied and pursued their spirituality / religion *and* are educated about sexual / psychologic issues. I’ve met some Catholic priests, community organizers, and even Catholic yoga teachers who could all have a respectful, involved, and entertaining conversation about what faith and belief are, and they’d be very different than that portrayed in your post.
As for myself, I can’t imagine “choosing” to believe what I do or not. It’s a matter of direct experience– my own faith / religious practice stems from my own experience of the divine… there is no choice in the matter for me, just “gut” knowledge. I could delude myself into dismissing my experience by boxing it into any one of many “rational” explanations: hallucinations, unexplained “natural” phenomenon, etc… etc…, psychology, etc… but it still doesn’t cover the gut-knowledge-that-what-I’m-experiencing-is-true-bit.
A few secularists and atheists I know like to chalk it up to some mental impairment or cling to their “if science hasn’t documented it’s not real” belief (which somehow isn’t religion?) [disclaimer, I am a scientist for a living]. These same people also get noticeably uncomfortable any time the word “Jesus” gets mentioned– they got some issues to work out, I guess. And no, I’m not Christian either…
You have the tail wagging the dog. It is not that religion has screwed up sexuality; it is that our screwed notions of sexuality have infiltrated and screwed up religion, so much and for so long we have lost sight on what came first.
Sexuality, which affects us all psycholgically on such deep and profound levels, no doubt hard wired within us long before we cpuld even entertain concious thought–sexuality, the awesome power to create and bring forth new human life and thus a truly dynamic power in shaping any society would have been an arena for complex rules and ideas about behavior had human beings had no propensity for religion at all.
Because sexually is inextricably linked to al kinds of power constructs-need I have to illustrate this on a site that routinely promotes BDSM?–it should come as no surprise that any human society which does not necessarily separate religion, politics and mores–which was every culture prior to the industrial revolution–would seek to use religion to codify and justify its rules governing sexual behavior. Thus spiritual beliefs developed at the least concurrently with sexual mores as a way to control the awesome power that is sexual reproduction. The cocept of God was thus appropriated to this end. In the absence of religion some other social force would have done it.
In regard to choosing to believe, etc. Whenever you affirm a belief in the reality of anything that is abstract you are making a choice to believe in the reality of something non material. Do you choose to believe in good? When you describe any act as good or bad have you not chosen to believe in something unreal? If you believe that goodness is real, then you are entering the metaphysical.
All religions consider the sexual act called pardon the expression “FUCKING” bad, unless you wish to ‘make babies’ I consider all RELIGIONS fake. so they can all can FUCK OFF in my opinion. To me “FUCKING” the sexual act is one of the most beautiful emotions that mankind has devised, and will be so forever more. And eventually RELIGION in the near future, will be put out of business,