America Unzipped (7 page)

The early church fathers—Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine—looked at the same scripture Joe is using and preached virginity, the better to hasten the end of the world and call forth the Second Coming. They were suspicious of the erotic power of women, and the role of lust even in marriage, the very thing Joe is celebrating. I'm on Joe's side when it comes to the value of lust and good sex, believe me. But as I sit and listen, I don't see how he can base this teaching on the Bible, and honestly, though it pains me to suggest it, I think Joe might be tying himself up in a knot of logic. I'm pretty sure Paul would not have been a fan of going down on your wife, no matter what the Song of Solomon says.

 

S
o I wonder if even fundamentalist Christians are having to accommodate, and if all the contradictions in the Bible could be one reason evangelicals long preferred to ignore the topic. Why would they even have to mention it? Every believer knew what was sinful and what was not, and pretty much everything was sinful unless official doctrine explicitly approved it. Actually it was assumed to be sinful because church leaders didn't address it. Sin was simply the default position. Masturbation wasn't just sinful, it was bad for you, a sign of perversion, a weak mind, a drain on manly reserves. Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, famously told his youthful acolytes in the first 1908 manual that a masturbating boy “quickly destroys both health and spirits; he becomes feeble in body and mind and often ends in a lunatic asylum.”

All that changed around 1970. A few Christian leaders realized that pop culture had changed the dialogue. TV increasingly beamed hints of sex into the homes of America.
Playboy
was mainstream. Naked hippies mucked around at Woodstock. The church was no longer a refuge. Believers could see for themselves what the unbelievers were up to. Somebody had to say something.

In 1969 Charlie Shedd, a Presbyterian minister, wrote
The Stork Is Dead,
followed by two other books,
Letters to Philip
and
Letters to Karen.
They contained mostly unobjectionable advice to teenagers. But Shedd also called masturbation “a gift from God” and told the kids that even though sex before marriage was wrong, if you were going to do it, for crying out loud use a rubber.

Shedd created a furor. He was harshly criticized for legitimizing masturbation and premarital sex.

Then, in 1975, psychologist Clifford Penner was asked to give a lecture on “sexual adjustment in marriage” at his alma mater, the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. The wives of the seminarians—all the seminarians being men—needed help with the very problem Joe Beam has told us he sees all the time: If you think sex is bad all your life, how can you switch to thinking it's good on the day you marry?

Realizing he was going to speak to a group of women, Clifford asked his wife, Joyce, a trained nurse and an educator, to help. After their talk, a number of the seminarians' wives had their first orgasms. The Penners become popular speakers.

Just a year later, the
Los Angeles Times
ran a story on the Penners, headlined “Sex Revolution in Church Seen: Right to Pleasure Being Taught.” That same year, Beverly and Tim LaHaye published
The Act of Marriage.
(LaHaye would go on to fame as one of the authors of a series of apocalyptic novels called Left Behind whose animating idea was that people who did not think like Tim LaHaye would miss the Rapture and be, well, left behind when everybody else ascends bodily into heaven.)
The Act of Marriage
was essentially a sex manual for Christians, which didn't just stress the duties but also talked about the fun.

A small wave of Christian sex books with titles like
A Celebration of Sex
by Douglas Rosenau,
Intended for Pleasure: Sex Technique and Sexual Fulfillment in Christian Marriage
by Ed Wheat, and perhaps the most famous,
The Total Woman
by Marabel Morgan, now best remembered for her suggestion that wives gift-wrap themselves in Saran Wrap to greet their husbands at the door, broke on the shore of evangelical America.

The Penners, however, were recognized within the fundamentalist world as the reigning experts because of their formal training. At first they were uncomfortable in the role, so they eventually took sexology courses at the Masters and Johnson Institute, just as Joe is earning a graduate degree in sexology from the University of Sydney. They consulted for 1970s TV shows like
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,
and with producer Norman Lear. They conducted seminars in churches. They appeared on James Dobson's radio program.

They wrote books, too. In
The Gift of Sex,
the Penners include suggestions for how marrieds can have fun in bed.

The man needs to be as active as the woman in creating new ways to tease and in preparing enjoyable surprises. One man came running out of his bathroom without any clothes on. He leaped over the bed on which his wife was lying, and then asked her to guess what Bible verse he was acting out. The verse was “Listen! My lover! Look! Here he comes, leaping across the mountains, bounding over the hills. My lover is like a gazelle.” (Song of Solomon 2:8–9). They've had fun with that ever since.

They even include pencil drawings of sex positions featuring a couple that looks disturbingly like Rob and Laurie Petrie from the old
Dick Van Dyke Show,
drawings that led some to accuse the Penners of being pornographers.

Today, if you spend enough time on the Internet, you might conclude Christians think of little else but sex. Websites are devoted to sex techniques for Christians (“The male G-spot—how to find and utilize this little-known pleasure trigger to create mind-blowing pleasure for yourself”), sex toys for Christians, sexual counseling for Christians.

There are even sex therapy organizations for Christians, including one, the Institute for Sexual Wholeness, that boasts Douglas Rosenau and the Penners as staff members.

As Joe is doing, the Penners and the other Christian sex writers and advisers use philosophical and biblical justification. Like Joe, for example, the Penners say oral sex in marriage is fine. Everybody always asks them about it, they write, and in response, they cite the Song of Solomon again, arguing that it “speaks of total body involvement.” “For some of us this freedom seems strange, unusual, and not part of the natural order, but the biblical model in the Song of Solomon seems to embrace such freedom.”

A key question to ask, they suggest, is “What is natural” and therefore part of God's perfect plan? This is precisely the question American states asked when they wrote laws, like this one, in Maryland:

Every person who is convicted of taking into his or her mouth the sexual organ of any other person or animal, or who shall be convicted of placing his or her sexual organ in the mouth of any other person or animal, or who shall be convicted of committing any other unnatural or perverted sexual practice with any other person or animal, shall be fined not more than one thousand dollars ($1,000.00), or be imprisoned in jail or in the house of correction or in the penitentiary for a period not exceeding ten years, or shall be both fined and imprisoned within the limits above prescribed in the discretion of the court.

The Penners, like Joe, argue that when it comes to married sex, “nothing is said directly about what is acceptable in our lovemaking activity. Hence what comes naturally must be the product of what we feel inside us.”

That's a pretty big loophole. As long as one spouse does not feel violated, let the blow jobs begin. In fact, the Penners and a few other conservative Christian sex advisers were ahead of the government that claimed to be upholding Christian morality. It was not until 1990 that Maryland's law was found unconstitutional for heterosexual couples, a finding extended to homosexuals in 1998. Similar laws in twenty-four states were effectively repealed in 2003 by the Supreme Court decision in
Lawrence v. Texas,
which struck down Texas's antisodomy law over the vituperative objections of Justice Antonin Scalia and many of America's cadre of fundamentalist Christians.

That decision made anal sex legal, but the Penners don't approve of anal sex. They dismiss it in a paragraph arguing that it's dangerous. Unlike every other sex act they discuss, they cite no scripture.

Masturbation, though, is pesky. The Penners pump their hermeneutical muscles defending their view that masturbation is a natural gift from God. They cite the Song of Solomon again (“One night as I was sleeping, my heart awakened in a dream…My hands dripped with perfume, my fingers with lovely myrrh”), but the argument largely depends on refuting other Bible passages. And, as Joe has told us, there are criteria that must be met in order to assure that a jerk-off session doesn't veer into sin.

“The question is often asked,” the Penners write, as if reading my mind, “‘is not all masturbational activity a lustful act?'” Like Joe, they say no if you're focused on your husband or wife or if, by some amazing act of willpower, you are not thinking about Halle Berry or any other human unless it's an “unidentifiable person” and you think only in “a peripheral, still-life way.”

If you're a kid, the Penners leave the issue of what you can think about—except to say that porn is always bad—a little fuzzy. The head cheerleader at school might pass muster or she might not. This is mysterious. But in case anybody has any doubts about the rightness of their stance that masturbation without sinful lust is acceptable to God, they appeal to the lead general on the side of the Christians in the culture wars, James Dobson.

Dobson himself wrote a book,
Solid Answers,
in which he calls self-love “as close to being a universal behavior as is likely to occur.” So we should not feel guilty; should not let it become obsessive (a relative term when it comes to teenage boys), lest it cause us to be hooked on porn; and should not slip into using it as a substitute for actual sex once we're allowed to have actual sex after marriage.

Dobson's endorsement of masturbation is now used as cover by other fundamentalists wrestling with demon lust. Dobson says it's okay, goes the argument. You can't criticize me.

“And as you already know, I quote in
Lust Free Living
one of the most notable Christians who has done the most positive work in these areas, Dr. James Dobson,” writes Lowell Seashore, the founder of a group called Lust Free Living. Seashore is responding to an e-mail from a rival, Craig Gross, a founder of an antimasturbation, antiporn outfit called XXXchurch. Seashore argues that “m'n” (he treats the word
masturbation
in the abbreviated way the
New York Times
might treat
fuck
or
shit
), if properly scheduled like a colonoscopy, and if it's a rare event free of lustful thinking, is not a sin.

Gross doesn't buy it. “What is XXXchurch's stand on masturbation?” he writes on the organization's website.

We have had literally thousands of emails about this particular issue. We have heard all the scenarios. “Well if I think about fruit while I'm masturbating, then that is not sin.” Well isn't that clever. Or…“If I'm giving glory to the Lord while I'm doing it, then that can't be wrong.” Hmmm. Why don't we just make that part of our Sunday morning services then? We have heard all the Pro-Masturbation Christian arguments and I wonder if these people are really dealing in reality. It's all very intellectual and quite scholarly, but we still don't get it. Sorry…You want to live a life that is honoring to God then start pleasing him and stop pleasing yourself. Stop making excuses and get some control over your life. Yes, it is tough. Yes, we know hormones are raging. However, God is calling us to holiness. Live an extraordinary life. Masturbation will leave you hanging every time!

Gross and his fellow XXXchurch members call their website the “#1 Christian Porn Site.” They have become regular attendees at porn-industry meetings, where they hand out “Jesus Loves Porn Stars” Bibles and T-shirts that have become, naturally, hugely popular among porn stars. Unlike the buttoned-down earnestness of Lust Free Living, XXXchurch uses pop culture goofs that can make it seem like a goof itself. The line between spoof and real theology is so vanishingly thin at XXXchurch the whole organization is sometimes suspected of being satiric performance art. It has run a campaign called Save the Kittens based on an old ad parody declaring “Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten.” In 2007, Gross even mounted a debate tour, traveling by bus with none other than Ron Jeremy.

But whatever Gross's motives, young men and boys do visit the site looking for inspiration, tips on quitting masturbation, and mutual support.

“For lent, a couple friends and me decided to stop masturbating,” one writes by way of introducing the text of a pamphlet for “Masturbation Anonymous.” “It was kind of a joke at first but eventually we were really gearing into destroying masturbation in our lives. A friend of mine and I got a few ideas together on the bus one day and I eventually ended up writing a whole pamphlet on why masturbation is wrong…we were able to convince about twenty people to stop masturbating in my school for lent.”

He describes the psychological horror of masturbation.

After this ordeal I was ashamed of myself. Suddenly, I felt uncomfortable and guilty around girls. I could not get the idea out of my head that some how they knew that I had masturbated the night before…This may be why you feel disgusted with yourself, you cannot help but to imagine women you know naked offering you sexual favors, and you feel like it is unhealthy. As your morals slip you may start doing other unhealthy activities, or giving in to your sexual urges in “strange places…” Remain calm and tell yourself, “You don't own me masturbation! I'm taking my life back!”

The site also contains forums where young men and boys go for mutual aid in going cold turkey. Victory is declared if they have managed to be masturbation free for forty straight days, the length of time Jesus fasted and prayed in the desert.