Tag Archives for sex

What IS Acceptable Sex?

Elspeth defends the distinctively Protestant position, over and against the Catholic one.

This is a post about the sacredness of sex in marriage. The mechanics of it, I mean. Consider yourselves warned.

When I was about 13 years old the pastor of the small Baptist church I attended as a child took to the pulpit to rail about the evils of oral sex. He was gone not long after that, ostensibly because of the children in the pews, but I don’t really know. Clearly this was before the days when oral sex was nothing more than a way middle schoolers passed time on the bus ride home.

As a young wife and mother, I read Mary Pride’s The Way Home. In it she went to great lengths to discredit all forms of sex besides vanilla, missionary position style sexual activity in marriage. Because of my fervent belief in wifely submission even then, I summarily dismissed her opinion of what is right for me and my husband to engage in when we shut our bedroom door. Nevertheless, it was clear to me that the issue of what is considered an acceptable sex act, even in marriage, was something that has been a hot topic for quite some time.

The editorial staff of this blog is primarily Catholic. I am the lone token Protestant voice, and when we discuss these issues the default assumption is that the Catholic approach to sex and marriage is more sacred, more chaste than the Protestant position. While on the surface it may appear that way, I have on a number of occasions respectfully disagreed.

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The question that inspired this post was about oral sex. Does it violate natural law?

Protestants do not have Biblical add-ons such as  the Magisterium or the Theology of the Body to guide us when making these decisions. The general consensus among Protestants is that whatever a man and wife agree to do in the privacy of their own bedroom is their business. I agree fully with this even though we are, as in many areas, quite Catholic in our approach.

The Catholic position as I understand it is this. Oral stimulation as foreplay is acceptable. Oral copulation is considered sodomy, therefore not sex, and the spilling of the man’s seed anywhere beside a wife’s vagina undermines the sacredness of sex, ignores the procreative nature of sex, and defies natural law.The Catholic position also leaves little argument of this; that what’s good for the goose is not at all good for the gander, since the goose has no seed to spill.

But what does the Scripture say?

Paul warns us about the dangers of moving away from “the natural use” of sex. I am aware that he was referring to homosexuality. Still,  it would be obtuse of us to ignore that any sexual relationship that depends more heavily on activities that ignore the key and lock  design God created to solidify the one flesh union and bring forth life potentially defiles the marriage bed.

There are passages in the Song of Solomon that theologians interpret as a clear reference to oral sex, and I agree. This is not a picture of  couple following rules and doing their duty solely for the purposes of procreation. They are enjoying one another in every way. It’s a beautiful picture of sexuality in marriage. Passages such as these come to mind:

(Bride) Awake, O north wind And come, wind of the south Make my garden breathe out fragrance Let its spices be wafted abroad May my beloved come into his garden And eat its choice fruits! (4:16)

Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest So is my beloved among the young men In his shade I took great delight and sat down And his fruit was sweet to my taste. (2:3)

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We can argue whether or not the increase in freedom that Christians claim a right to is simply an extension of our pornographic culture, and whether the elevation of the sensual to the level of preeminence at the expense of spiritual oneness and the procreative nature of sex is damaging to marriages. These are valid questions and each couple should examine them closely for themselves.

Given the often repeated meme that most marriages are miserable and sexless, I am loathe to attempt to use religion to discourage couples from doing the things they enjoy within the confines of matrimony. When Scripture offers no clear prohibition,  married believers should enjoy their sexual relationship in whatever way they feel comfortable. This is certainly preferable to the alternative, where ambiguous  rules not in found in Scripture overshadow the beauty of uninhibited marital pleasure.

Catholics, of course, will disagree.  Oh well! :)

Los Angeles Mandates Condoms for Porn Actors, Industry Threatens Suit

Sign of the times…

Los Angeles County voters passed a ballot initiative mandating that pornographic film actors wear condoms during sex scenes, prompting a trade group on Wednesday to threaten to sue and take production elsewhere.

Measure B, which was sponsored by the group AIDS Healthcare Foundation, won approval on Tuesday by a margin of 56 per cent to 44 per cent, according to the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder’s office.

“This is what democracy looks like; we took this to county government, and they didn’t act so we took it directly to the voters, and they spoke conclusively,” AIDS Healthcare Foundation President Michael Weinstein said.

The law requires adult film actors filming in Los Angeles County to use condoms during sex scenes. Most U.S. pornographic productions are made in the county’s San Fernando Valley.

Diane Duke, chief executive for the industry group Free Speech Coalition, told Los Angeles County supervisors in a letter on Wednesday that the law was unconstitutional and that it fell under state jurisdiction, not that of local government.

“Therefore, we will file suit and challenge this intolerable law in court,” Ms. Duke said in the letter. A copy was provided to Reuters.

She said the adult filmmakers had been approached to move elsewhere, adding: “In the upcoming weeks and months, we will provide a roadmap for adult production to move its over a billion-dollar industry and its accompanying 10,000 jobs to these welcoming communities.”

Doctor Traded Oxycontin for Sex

And billed taxpayers for it.

A Winnipeg doctor traded Hillbilly Heroin for illicit sex, and billed taxpayers for the time he spent doing it.

Dr. Randy Raymond Allan pleaded guilty to professional misconduct before the Manitoba College of Physicians and Surgeons on Sept. 11.

In the report of the College’s disciplinary tribunal, Allan said that billing Manitoba Health for the sex-trade visits was “horrible conduct, absolutely inappropriate.”

Allan was working out of a Kenora, Ont., clinic in early 2009 when he met Patient A in a massage parlour and paid her for sex. They began a personal relationship and began meeting outside of the parlour. That’s when she told the doctor she was addicted to Oxycontin, and asked him for some — supposedly to hold her over until she entered a Methadone program.

Their sexual relationship ended in August 2009, by which time he’d given the patient four prescriptions in exchange for sex.

In November 2009, Allan began a similar process with Patient B. He met her in a massage parlour but soon after started trading Oxycontin prescriptions for sex instead of cash. Patient B told Allan she could no longer afford her Oxycontin addiction at street-drug prices, so between January and May 2010 he wrote her 23 prescriptions.

“It is necessary to state in the strongest possible terms, that Dr. Allan’s actions and behaviour were reprehensible,” the College of Physicians and Surgeons wrote in a legal decision suspending Allan from medical practice for 18 months.

Based on his suspension during the tribunal, it ruled that he can be reinstated in March 2013 if specific conditions are met, including counselling, multi-disciplinary training, an ethics meeting and the payment of $12,893.40 in tribunal costs.

Allan is required to have a chaperone present for breast and genital examinations of females and the chaperone would also inspect his patient list.

Couple Caught Having Sex on Restaurant Patio: Police

Naturally, it happened in Florida, the Weird State.

Police say a couple caught having sex on the patio of a Florida restaurant won’t face charges for their interlude because none of the witnesses wanted to give statements to police.

Police said they were called to Paddy Murphy’s in Orlando after patrons saw Jeremy Calo, 32, and his date “having sex on a table in view of minor children,” according to the report Tuesday night on Local 6 News.

The report said the couple started making out and then it escalated.

The outdoor table is in plain view of restaurant customers and passersby.

Restaurant manager Tom Murphy told Local 6 he warned the couple to stop and then called the cops when they didn’t.

Calo was arrested for fighting with Murphy and refusing to pay his $101 bill, but neither he nor his date were charged for the public sex acts.

BTW, why is he named, but she isn’t?  Double standard, once again…

*Update: elsewhere, her name is revealed, as well as the correct spelling of his name:

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/outdoor-restaurant-table-sex-687451

http://gawker.com/5952569/customers-refuse-to-press-charges-against-couple-having-sex-on-restaurant-table-because-hey-dinner-and-a-show?popular=true

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/jeremie-calo-tiffani-lynn-barganier-restaurant-table-sex_n_1974199.html

They’ve been banned from that pub for a year.  But as HuffPo asks, one wonders what one would have to do to warrant a lifetime ban there!

Another Reason Why Women Should Not Be Pastors

In addition to what the Bible says (see Paul’s teachings in his letters).  (HT: Alkibiades)

A New York minister has been accused of seduction and sexual misconduct to a male parishioner after a four-month affair that included naked webcam meetings on church computers and meet-ups in rectories.

Rev Ginger Strickland, 33, used her religious authority to take sexual and emotional advantage of the church volunteer according to his report before abruptly ending their relationship leading to his contemplation of suicide.

‘God brought you to me,’ Ms Strickland of Manhattan’s Church of the Incarnation allegedly told Erik Campano while pursuing the 34-year-old according to his filed report obtained by the New York Post.

Hey Episcopalians / Anglicans; time to undo your wrong policy of ordaining women.

I Want to Know Where Love Is: First Brain Map of Love and Desire

A research team at Concordia University in Montreal has determined that different parts of the brain are associated with love and sexual desire.

Love and sexual desire activate different areas of the striatum. The area activated by sexual desire is usually activated by things that are inherently pleasurable, such as sex or food. The area activated by love is involved in the process of conditioning by which things paired with reward or pleasure are given inherent value. That is, as feelings of sexual desire develop into love, they are processed in a different place in the striatum.

Somewhat surprisingly, this area of the striatum is also the part of the brain that associated with drug addiction. Pfaus explains there is good reason for this. “Love is actually a habit that is formed from sexual desire as desire is rewarded. It works the same way in the brain as when people become addicted to drugs.”

The latter may help explain why divorce is so painful; perhaps it’s somewhat akin to the process of quitting an extremely habit-forming drug like heroin ‘cold-turkey’…  (Not that that takes into account the spiritual dimension, of having part of ‘one flesh’ being ripped away, of course.)

Should women be able to profit from false rape accusations?

Wintery Knight’s cheekily-titled, good post on false rape accusations.

Studies show about 40-50 percent of rape accusations are false

False accusations of rape or sexual assault are commonly used by women to get attention and sympathy, or to get an alibi when they’ve done something wrong, or to get revenge on someone.

Here’s a Fox News article from a prominent equity feminist, Wendy McElroy.

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If you would like to get an idea of how false rape accusations are handled by the police, here is an example. Usually no charges are filed, or if charges are filed, then they get off without jail time. (But the accused men can go to jail for years, see below)

False accusations in divorce trials

False accusations of domestic violence and sexual abuse are also commonly made during divorce settlements in order to get custody of the children, and the attendant benefits.

Consider this article from Touchstone magazine, by Stephen Baskerville.

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I often hear men, especially men in the church, complaining that young men won’t get married because they are too busy watching porn and playing video games. But maybe the real reason is that they don’t want to be exposed to domestic violence laws and divorced courts that are waiting to separate them from their earnings. And they can already get sex for free before marriage. If the church isn’t speaking out against premarital sex (to women) and against no-fault divorce and against biased domestic violence laws, then they have no one to blame for the so-called “marriage strike” but themselves.

Corn Flakes Inventor John Kellogg Wanted to Sew Your Foreskin With Silver Wire

Yes, you read that correctly.  (HT: Ray Sawhill)

We know John Harvey Kellogg as the founder of the Kellogg’s cereal company and the inventor of corn flakes. However, around the turn of the 20th century, Kellogg became renowned for his work as an anti-masturbation crusader, prescribing unusual — and borderline sadistic — solutions to the menace of young boys and girls touching their privates.

And by “uncomfortable,” we mean that even reading about them will make your genitals retreat into your body and grow an exoskeleton.

The Wikipedia entry is also quite thorough.  He was a Seventh-Day Adventist, one of those vegetarian teetotalling non-caffeine-using Saturday-worshipping heretical* evangelicals.  (*See the wiki on the SDA church for info. on their heretical beliefs.  Interestingly, they came out of the Millerite movement, originally, who had predicted the world would end in 1844.)

He was one of those vegetarian freaks who thought they knew better than everyone else, how everyone should live.  And so because of him, instead of good old bacon and eggs, millions eat carb-laden, zero-protein corn flakes for breakfast instead; and millions have pointlessly circumcized their male children, for non-religious reasons.  May everything he stood for, one day be utterly repudiated as pure nonsense by everyone.

More Mainstream Media Attention for the Manosphere

In a Sydney Morning Herald piece.  (HT: Ray Sawhill)

But there is another conversation going on – a fascinating exchange about  what is happening from the male point of view.  Much of it thrives on the  internet, in the so-called ”manosphere”. Here you will find men cheerfully,  even triumphantly, blogging about their experience. They have cause for  celebration, you see. They’ve discovered a profound change has taken place in  the mating game and, to their surprise, they are the winners.

Dalrock (dalrock.wordpress.com) is typical: ”Today’s unmarried  twentysomething women have given men an ultimatum: I’ll marry when I’m ready,  take it or leave it. This is, of course, their right. But ultimatums are a risky  thing, because there is always a possibility the other side will decide to leave  it. In the next decade we will witness the end result of this game of marriage  chicken.”

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During their 20s, women compete for the most highly desirable men, the Mr Bigs.  Many will readily share a bed with the sporty, attractive, confident men, while  ordinary men miss out. As Whiskey puts it at whiskeysplace.wordpress.com: ”Joe  Average Beta Male is about as desirable to women as a cold bowl of oatmeal.”

Data from American colleges show 20 per cent of males – the most attractive ones  – get 80 per cent of the sex, according to an analysis by Susan Walsh, a former  management consultant who wrote about the issue on her dating website,  hookingupsmart.com.

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These internet sites are not for the faint-hearted. The voices are often  crude and misogynist. But they tell it as they see it. There is Greenlander, an  apparently successful engineer in his late 30s. In his early adult life, he was  unable to ”get the time of day from women”. Now he’s interested only in women  under 27.

”The women I know in their early 30s are just delusional,” he says. ”I  sometimes seduce them and sleep with them just because I know how to play them  so well. It’s just too easy. They’re tired of the cock carousel and they see a  guy like me as the perfect beta to settle down with before their eggs dry out … when I get tired of them I just delete their numbers from my cell phone and stop  taking their calls …  It doesn’t really hurt them that much: at this point  they’re used to pump & dump!”

New Porn Niche: Fantasies About Happy Married Sex

According to Rollo Tomassi (hat tip: Vox Day), a new niche in porn has arisen, fantasizing about normal, married, heterosexual relations:

one of the fasest growing sexual fetish (if that’s the proper term) porn sites and this is, believe it or not, married sex. No, I don’t mean cheating housewives (that’s been done to death), but actual married sex between couples that is in fact well done and pretty hot. I wont post the link, but you can Google Housewives 1 on 1 or the like and see what I mean. In each fantasy scenario the husband’s wife (all porn star hot) seduces him with a combination of lingerie, dirty talking, and at least a pretty convincing display of actual desire/lust/passion for having sex with him. After watching the trailer videos I couldn’t help but think that the reason for this becoming such a popular genre of porn is due to an unbelievability that in all rights should be believable, if not desirable. How pathetic a statement is it to think that within all of our over eroticizing society that we should come full circle and have made hot, married sex into sexual niche fantasy?

Sad indeed, that what, IMO, should ideally be a reality at least some significant portion of the time for most married men – hot, passionate, wife-initiated sex - is so rare enough, that money can be made in porn exploiting men’s desire for such.

The Case for Christian Pre-Nups

Great blog post over at the Christian Men’s Defense Network.

A bit of history:  Following the Babylonian captivity, it became common practice that Jewish males had to give their brides a pre-nuptial agreement, called a ketubah.  This tradition is still carried on within Orthodox Judaism.  The purpose of this agreement was to define the requirements for the marriage, and to dictate the minimum support a Jewish man was required to pay his ex-wife in the case of a frivolous divorce (she would get nothing in the case of adultery–in fact, she would be stoned to death).  As such, this dis-incentivized the Jewish man from divorcing his wife for just any old reason:  He would still have to support her, without his household being able to profit from her labor.  This is illustrative of how pre-nuptial agreements worked throughout history.

Swedes Wage War on Biology

Slate:

But for many Swedes, gender equality is not enough. Many are pushing for the Nordic nation to be not simply gender-equal but gender-neutral. The idea is that the government and society should tolerate no distinctions at all between the sexes. This means on the narrow level that society should show sensitivity to people who don’t identify themselves as either male or female, including allowing any type of couple to marry. But that’s the least radical part of the project. What many gender-neutral activists are after is a society that entirely erases traditional gender roles and stereotypes at even the most mundane levels.

This stupidity is not innocent:

Ironically, in the effort to free Swedish children from so-called normative behavior, gender-neutral proponents are also subjecting them to a whole set of new rules and new norms as certain forms of play become taboo, language becomes regulated, and children’s interactions and attitudes are closely observed by teachers. One Swedish school got rid of its toy cars because boys “gender-coded” them and ascribed the cars higher status than other toys. Another preschool removed “free playtime” from its schedule because, as a pedagogue at the school put it, when children play freely “stereotypical gender patterns are born and cemented. In free play there is hierarchy, exclusion, and the seed to bullying.” And so every detail of children’s interactions gets micromanaged by concerned adults, who end up problematizing minute aspects of children’s lives, from how they form friendships to what games they play and what songs they sing.

If deliberately hampering your children’s development is not abusive, I don’t know what is.

Being Attracted to Teenage Girls isn’t Pedophilia

Notwithstanding the womanizing attitude of this guy (HT: Ferd), he’s right, as regards attraction.

We’re biologically programmed, thanks be to God, as men, to be potentially attracted to any sexually mature females, even if they haven’t reached the age we consider adulthood (and remember, adulthood is culturally defined; in centuries past, people got married much, much younger than they do today).

Pedohysteria is male-bashing.  Real pedophilia, is a sickness; a teenage guy being attracted to a teenage girl isn’t, so why, if a man continues to find girls in their prime sexually attractive, do we consider it a perversion?  It is not.  Acting on it, in terms of fornication, is; marrying a woman much younger than oneself is questionable (due to maturity differences), but simply finding them attractive, surely is not.  Masculine attractine to feminine characteristics is God’s original plan; that hasn’t been tainted by original sin.

The Ethics of Roosh

Modern-day Casanova Roosh Vorek is doing an AMA on Reddit. I asked him: “Do you consider yourself to be a bad person?” His answer:

I don’t think I’m a bad person.

As a man who wants sex, I will act in a way that gets me to my goal. In America, the more poor you treat a woman, the more likely you will have sex with them. I will do this even though my instinct is to treat a woman well, believe it or not.

Denmark is a weird place. Girls don’t want to be treated bad, they want to treat YOU bad by forcing you to listen to their inane opinions and put up with their masculine attitude. I did this in order to get laid.

In Poland, treating women like women, taking them out, having sweet conversation, and so on led to intimacy. This is why I prefer Eastern European women.