Jesus loves you -- and your orgasm

The religious right is celebrating sex to stroke its conservative message. Liberals better rise to a secular defense soon.

By Louis Bayard

Read more: Books, Sex, evangelicals, Conservatives, Religious Right, Teenagers, Abstinence, Reviews, Book reviews, Louis Bayard

July 8, 2008 | "My worst one was right on the money."

The subject is orgasms. The speaker is pretty clearly a man. (Woody Allen, to be exact.) And the time is just as clearly the late 1970s -- that cresting point of sexual liberation when orgasms were an unqualified good, no matter who was having them.

Those really were the days. In our modern times, suggests historian Dagmar Herzog in her new book, "Sex in Crisis," the twin titans of Viagra and Internet porn have made the orgasm so large an imperative that we can no longer consider ourselves complete without one -- which has naturally resulted in making us less likely to achieve one. Today's man must, at every available moment, be rocking his partner's world. Today's woman must demand nothing less than to be rocked.

Small wonder, then, that we have become an anxious nation -- forever wondering if we're having enough sex -- or good enough sex. What if our orgasms really aren't right on the money? "Never have so many Americans," writes Herzog, "worried so much about whether they really even want sex at all."

Being a man, I tend to think sex will shrug off this particular slump and come roaring back for next year's pennant race. But I wonder exactly how many Americans are, as the author claims, on the verge of swearing off coitus. (Is one of them my partner?) Herzog never offers much in the way of hard answers. Which makes the starting thesis of "Sex in Crisis" -- that we are in the midst of a "sexual revolution," or more properly a devolution -- look pretty damned soft, even by the loose standards of sociological treatise. The good news: Herzog has a more interesting agenda up her sleeve than critiquing our ejaculations. She wants to anatomize the subtle and unsubtle ways in which the Religious Right (a rubric that, in her cosmos, must always be capitalized) has warped our sexual politics and forced even the most hardened secular humanists to sing from the Christian hymnal.

"For liberals, sex has become the problem that has no name; one simply does not hear liberals articulate a defense of sexual rights. Instead, what we have witnessed is a coalescing of conservative evangelical and mainstream secular perspectives on sex. The conversation on sex in America -- when sex is discussed in a serious and earnest way at all -- tends largely to adopt the parameters set by the Religious Right."

Assuming this to be the case, how exactly did it happen? Herzog's intriguing and deeply researched thesis is that evangelicals, over the last couple of decades, have beaten liberals at their own game by adapting liberal rhetoric for conservative ends.

As recently as 2003, for example, a certain public figure was arguing that voluntary prostitution was "despicable" because it "demeans the value of women" and promotes "the severe degradation and exploitation of women, the literal rape of countless women around the globe." Was it Andrea Dworkin? Catharine MacKinnon? The correct answer: pro-life Rep. Smith, R-N.J., whose distinctly illiberal purpose was to limit AIDS outreach efforts to prostitutes and sex workers in developing nations.

Or consider these descriptions of the female orgasm: "waves of pleasure flow[ing] over me ... like sliding down a mountain waterfall ... like having a million tiny pleasure balloons explode inside of me all at once." Erica Jong and Xaviera Hollander? Try evangelical sexologists Linda Dillow and Lorraine Pintus. (Even their names are suggestive.) Far from scorning the pleasures of the flesh, evangelical and marriage experts -- recognizing, in Herzog's wry phrase, that "repression alone is not sufficiently appealing" -- have made their careers by hymning the joys of strictly marital sex.

"We think the G-spot should be seen as one more way God gave us to share in the pleasure of sex," announced the Revs. Paul and Lori Byerly, hosts of the online site the Marriage Bed. Evangelicals Melissa and Louis McBurney have endorsed oral sex, mutual masturbation and rear-entry vaginal penetration -- between spouses. The Rev. Charles Shedd has declared that he and his wife, Martha, like anal sex just fine. As Herzog notes, these sex-positive Christians have absorbed from the women's movement of the 1970s and 1980s "an interest in intensifying women's sexual pleasure," as well as "the frustration at male fascination with pornography and emotional nonpresence during sex." The result is a kind of "Christian porn," as sexperts guide their married readers toward the holy land of "soulgasm," where spirit and flesh come ecstatically together. If you follow the rules, Herzog writes, "magnificent sex will be yours forever."

Ah, yes, the rules. A Christian wife, if she wants to keep her husband's mind off porn and his hand off his own penis (onanism is still a big no-no), will have to be a 24/7 tootsie. She is advised to wear sexy lingerie and to keep her legs shaved and her nether region douched at all times. ("Wives," as Jack Jones once crooned, "should always be lovers, too.") And she has to give it up whenever her man comes calling. The example of a woman named "Ellen" is approvingly cited. "[My husband's] purity is extremely important to me, so I try to meet his needs so that he goes out each day with his cup full. During the earlier years, with much energy going into childcare and with my monthly cycle, it was a lot more difficult for me to do that. There weren't too many 'ideal times' when everything was just right. But that's life, and I did it anyway."

In a dismayingly familiar pattern, the needs of wives give way more often than not to the needs of husbands. Writers like John Eldredge, Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker, borrowing from the archetypes of the New Age men's movement, have exhorted Christian men to embrace their Y chromosome, to turn off the Internet and tap into their own "mustang minds," to become "dangerous," "wild at heart." And to somehow remain, in the midst of this testosterone sea, anchored to their wives.

Under these terms, it seems, Christians really can "have it all." But only if others can't have any. As Herzog writes, this model of Christ-sanctioned bliss depends on "the construction of homosexuality as the disgusting opposite of heterosexuality."

And here, too, the religious right found a way to couch its arguments in secular, even quasi-psychological terms. Homosexuality was no longer simply a sin but a disease, eminently curable. "You are heterosexual in Christ," announced a speaker with the ex-gay ministry Exodus International. "No matter how deep your homosexual feelings are, deeper still lies your heterosexuality, buried under a thousand fears." Preying on those fears, Exodus has mushroomed to more than 100 chapters across the United States, and zealots like Dr. Joseph Nicolosi have undertaken "conversion therapy" on boys as young as 3.

Of course, to guarantee truly awesome sex, you have to be more than simply heterosexual. You also have to be chaste, at least until you're lawfully wedded. "Sex is progressive in nature," warns Focus on the Family founder James Dobson. "Kissing and fondling will lead inevitably to greater familiarity ... Tell [boys] not to start the engine if they don't intend to let it run."

Next page: Should teens have sexual rights?