Can spiritual women also be sexually satisfied? It's a sad question to have to ask, but the incomplete manner in which the Church has answered sexual questions does mandate that we discuss it.
If you're one of my more modest followers, please don't be disappointed but this article isn't for you. However, if you're a spiritual woman trying desperately to make sense of sexual desires and often finding answers outside of the Church, read on! I don't want you to find yourself falling for counterfeits in the quest. A lot of women have.
Fifty Shades of Grey had a seat on the New York Times Best-seller list for 100 weeks straight. It became a blockbuster in the movie theaters with Fandago presales setting records. The book has revived the sexual appetites of many women. But is that good?
I'd like to suggest that it's not so great and that the best way to a vibrant sex life might just to become an "official church lady!"
While I won't deny that some Christian women with dead libidos got a dose of CPR through the normalization of erotica, I will also not deny the fact that many of them found that the initial thrill faded quickly. This has led some women to affairs. Huffington Post reported an initial increase in extra-marital affairs after the series took off. Other women —both married and single—that I've talked to found that erotica drew them away from the desire to be in a relationship with someone and towards more erotica—maybe a little porn—and self-pleasuring. (Both SELF Magazine and New Yorker ran articles in recent years claiming that porn pulled men and women away from the desire for a real life partner.) This is because addiction to erotica or porn (if it comes to that and I admit that it doesn't always), is an arousal addiction. As opposed to a substance addiction which makes you just want "more", arousal addiction makes you want "different." The brain just can't sustain the same potency of pleasure hormones with the same kind of turn-ons when it comes to arousal addiction. It needs new things.
Affairs? Relationship withdrawal?
That sounds like bad sex to me.
Dr. Juli Slattery and I co-wrote a book entitled Pulling Back the Shades for every spiritual woman who wants to understand her sexual desires. Because we believe it's possible to be both spiritual and sexual. In fact, I think spiritual women have the best sex.
Ok, I don't just think it, I know! One of the nation's most liberal sexual studies ever conducted and summarized in a book called Sex In America revealed that religiously active middled-aged women who were in mutually monogamous life-time partnerships—I call that marriage—were more sexually satisfied than those with little or no faith present in their lives. And I like to call that the "revenge of the church ladies!"
Look closely.
This stat is not really about sex at all.
It's about God.
The not so obvious fact is this: a deep and abiding love relationship with God is a woman's deepest longing. Finding that enables a women to have a deeper and more abiding loving relationship with their husbands now or in the future if they are not yet married.
Jesus met a woman at a well who was desperately trying to feed her sexual longings through men. He revealed a deep truth to her: her thirst was never going to be satisfied at the well of sexual desire. She needed Living Water. She needed a spiritual revival.
"A man knocking on the door of a brothel is really looking for God."
-G.K. Chesterton
Whether you're married or single—if your sexual appetite is unmet, you need much more than a sexual revival. You need a spiritual one.
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