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Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity by Lauren F. Winner Brazos Press, 2005 160 pp., $17.99 |
The title of Lauren Winner's first book, Girl Meets God, invoked courtship to describe conversion; her new one gets right down to the earthy aspects of human romance. Real Sex aims to rehabilitate the virtue of chastity in the Christian life. This title seems calculated to raise eyebrows on both sides of the colon. First there's real sex—wow!—and then we hit "chastity" in the subtitle, a noun scarcely in the language any longer, hard to speak without either a smirk or an embarrassed inflection (or both?).
Some words of definition are in order straightaway. For Winner, "real" sex means the gift of embodied love that is only authentic when it conforms to God's creative intent, within marriage. This is decidedly not the "faux sex" to which Americans have grown accustomed. To our spiritual peril, we have gotten used to the "lies our culture tells about sex": that sex is for adventure and pleasure (not babies), hugely important to happiness but also no big deal, just another form of recreation, my affair and none of your business.
Christians, especially singles, need help if they are to remain faithful in such a vale of temptation. To the author's regret, the church often does a poor job providing this help because it is hampered by its own untruths. Too often churches are hysterical about sex, or else make chastity sound easy, "sweet and obvious." Unrealistic abstinence preaching gives struggling singletons only the thinnest support in romantic temptation and makes forgiveness hard to grasp when they fall.
It's a little disconcerting that a book on chastity repeatedly has to remind readers that sex is important. Even Christians seem to need persuading. A Christian friend asks Winner, "Shouldn't I focus on learning to pray, and deal with the sex stuff later?" Another, not identified by faith, demands, "Look, we're two consenting adults. Why is what we do under the sheets anyone else's concern?"
Or, since Winner is writing from Charlottesville, Virginia, we might ask the question in terms lifted from that town's patron saint, Thomas Jefferson: does it break my leg or pick my pocket whether my neighbors have no sex partner or twenty? What difference does it make? It makes a great deal of difference, Winner insists, but explaining why takes some effort. Sure, there are possibilities of unplanned pregnancy and the costs of unwanted children and social breakdown. The case becomes more convincing when she returns to Scripture. Two points of theology indicate why the intimate behavior of Christians matters: because God intended sex to be exclusive and marital, and because Christians are united in the body of Christ. Therefore, what I do with my body touches everyone else in the Body of Christ. What we do privately matters because community matters.
Community looms large throughout the book. It is both a motivation to purity and a big part of the solution to sexual temptation. Here Winner speaks beyond the singles crowd to address Christians more broadly. She reminds us that congregations pledge to support baptismal candidates and married couples in keeping their vows. Thus, it is the community's responsibility to help its members embrace discipline, uphold accountability, and mediate forgiveness. Purity is an active practice. The book's second half explores particular means, like prayer, fasting, and pastoral care, that church communities can use to nurture chastity.
Married people are supposed to serve the community by imaging God's love—another reason why what we do in our private lives matters to everybody else. Married couples, though, can run aground on the culture's falsehood that sex always is supposed to be exciting. Winner musters some enthusiasm for Christian marriage manuals that translate "The Joy of Sex into a Christian idiom," but she also acknowledges serious reservations about them. Her objection is that these books often accept the claim that sex must be thrilling, a transportation out of ordinary life. In response, she takes inspiration from Wendell Berry to offer a paean to "household sex," sex amidst the sock-sorting and dishwashing and bill-paying realities of everyday existence, rather than sex as deliverance from the dreary routine. Sometimes awkward, this kind of intimacy is nevertheless real and good: "Our task is not to cultivate moments when eros can whisk us away from our ordinary routines, but rather to love each other as eros becomes imbedded in, and transformed by, the daily warp and woof of married life."
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