I grew up in a quazi Christian household. Going to church on Sundays was second to watching my dad's USC Trojans play on TV and me and my siblings didn't put up a fight because there were always Dunkin Donuts offered after church. I do remember that not having sex before marriage was something that my youth groups and pastors drilled in our heads. "Sex will be horrible if it is not under the contract of marriage!!" " You will lose a large piece of yourself everytime you have premarital sex, until your wedding night when you offer yourself up as a tattered incomplete person." It was freaky. Promise rings (where you promise the world, who doesn't care and is having sex, that you won't have premarital sex) were handed from Dad to daughter in a reverse creepy "Oedipus complex" manner. Yet pretty much by my junior year of high school the majority of the youth group at our church was having sex, especially at the youth group summer camps. WTF?? Haven't been able to explain that one yet, but I'm working on it. I went to a Christian college and there were hoards of girls still clinging tightly to those promise rings, opting to not even KISS thier boyfriends until their wedding day. Except they would have ANAL sex because they didn't consider that to count as sex...WTF again!?!? That's like smoking crack instead of marijuana because you think it's a gateway drug. My friend Amanda put it the best way, sex isn't just one thing. It dosen't only make sense within marriage and become a castastrophe everywhere else. Take even LOVE for instance: You can love your best friends much differently than you love your siblings, parents, mentor, boss, boyfriend, that asshole you can't get over....and you can have passionate relationship sex, fun one night stand sex, freaky deaky sex, immature jackhammer sex , sultry R&B bumpin and grindin, and otherwordly tantric "Sting Style" sex. To say sex is only going to be good once you have said the magical vows and removed that promise ring is scary as hell. Imagine thinking your whole entire life that sex was BAD and wrong.
That having sexual desires and thoughts made you perverted and morally weak. Then you get married and it's all washed away and it's supposed to be this beautiful thing. In like an hour youre supposed to change your whole pyschological view of sex. I'm almost positive that first night marriage sex is not only awkward, scary and very uncomfortable, but it is hugely disappointing and confusing. Might even be one of the reasons why Christian marriages have a 70% failure rating as compared to 50% of other marriages. Oh and since Christians are busy teaching their kids to just NOT have sex, they don't teach them how to prevent unwanted pregnancies and the spread of STD's. Real smart. This is why the Christian church has seen HUGE surges of pregnant teenagers (aka Bristol Pallin being lauded as a modern time hero for starting the path toward unwed teenage mother land). We can't keep using these outdated teachings and farces that NO ONE can relate to and therefore doesn't listen to. Our world is dynamic, it changes, we progress and so should the way we go about educating and guiding our youth. My sister sent me a pretty interesting article from the New Yorker about all this. See Below...
From The New Yorker:
"The vast majority of white evangelical adolescents—seventy-four per cent—say that they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage. (Only half of mainline Protestants, and a quarter of Jews, say that they believe in abstinence.) Moreover, among the major religious groups, evangelical virgins are the least likely to anticipate that sex will be pleasurable, and the most likely to believe that having sex will cause their partners to lose respect for them. (Jews most often cite pleasure as a reason to have sex, and say that an unplanned pregnancy would be an embarrassment.) But, according to Add Health data, evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. On average, white evangelical Protestants make their “sexual début”—to use the festive term of social-science researchers—shortly after turning sixteen"
THE NEW YORKER ARTICLE "RED SEX, BLUE SEX"
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