Sex After Jesus
By: Lyz Lenz
Tags: Sex, Pleasure, Religion, Divorce

I bought my first vibrator at thirty-five, off the dusty shelves of a sex toy shop in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I tried not to be embarrassed. After all, I was a grown-ass woman. The mother of two children. Certifiable sex-haver. Anyone could look at me and see the mom jeans, sneakers, ruffly blouse and know that I was a Midwestern mother. And as such, it was very likely I had had sex at some point. Still, I parked around back and hoped no one saw my car. Not too far from this sex shop was where I had once attended church with my ex-husband. An Assembly of God church, where pastors preach about the evils of lust, the horrors of porn, the sin of sex outside of marriage — all the new joys I was just discovering. A town of 132,000 people can feel small when you are newly divorced and dating.

The store looked like it was in a perpetual state of going out of business. The fluorescent lights flickering, and the gray walls were studded with empty shelves. The plastic packaging on the wall of phalluses was dusty, and each vibrator bore a small neon pink sticker with handwritten prices, like a garage sale.

I found the most expensive vibrator — a clear plastic phallus with a white handle, for 40 dollars. I figured it would be fine. Just fine. Sturdy and dependable. Effective. Then, I walked up to the counter. The cashier smiled at me. Another woman shuffled in the corner near the lube. She sighed and seemed tired.

I drove home. Opened the package. Got to work.

I was raised Evangelical. Taught to believe that sex was a tool for reproduction. To be fruitful and multiply. It was not about our pleasure. In fact, little in life was about pleasure. Pleasure had ended in Eden. Sex, desire, all felled by one woman with a single bite from a single fruit. Eve’s curse was not only the pain of childbearing, it was also her “desire for her husband.” Her desire, her sex, this was the curse.

“Even if you use protection you could get pregnant,” my mother told me. Desires had consequences. She said she had used birth control for two out of eight of us and look at where that had gotten her. At 14, a girl in my church in South Dakota got pregnant from one night with a boy from the youth group. She had to quit the worship band because her growing belly was evidence of her sin. Nothing happened to that boy. He played football. He went to college. Sarah didn’t. She graduated high school and got a job.

“All it takes is one time,” my mother said.

I had dreams. I had desires. And dreams and desires, for American Christian women, rarely align with sex. So, I stayed abstinent until marriage, wearing a ring of Black Hills gold that symbolized my purity. I gave it to my fiance when we got engaged. I did it as a joke. I hadn’t worn it since I was 18. I would have had sex, but there had been no offers — not from the two other men I dated before getting married. Then, I started dating my husband and he was committed to his faith and abstinence. So we didn’t.

Dreams and desires, for American Christian women, rarely align with sex

At a marriage conference two months before our wedding, I sat in on a session for engaged couples. A pastor’s wife with big hair and gold jewelry told us sex wasn’t something she ever enjoyed: it was a duty, something she gave to her husband out of loyalty and love. Her voice was soft and her eyes wide as she spoke as if she was telling us a wise secret, and not a horrifying truth.

This is the woman I was supposed to be — passively receptive, a pure and holy vessel, empty and waiting, a receptacle for all of a man’s needs, desires, and sperm.

I am sure I must have enjoyed married sex at some point. I know there were moments. Intimacies. Small efforts. Some of these things were good. That’s the hardest thing to understand about a bad relationship: it has so many good moments. We hold together those ragged good scraps, piecing them together, hoping to make a complete thing of it. Something that will cover us, and maybe we can. Maybe some of us can survive long enough that we can forget the bad. I could not.

I am sure I must have enjoyed married sex at some point. I know there were moments.

Eyes closed. Exhausted. Duty to be done. For twelve years my sexual identity was pure sublimation. Bent always to someone else’s greater plan — God, husband, children. My vagina a conduit.

Twelve years, and then I left. One month after I left, I slept with the first man who wasn’t my husband. I slept with him so I could burn my old life to the ground. So I could never look back. This was the first time that sex was a choice rather than an obligation. A hotel. Some whiskey. A cliche that I understood even as I was making it happen. What I didn’t expect was to like it. And in liking it to find freedom.

Sex, once liberated from duty, became a pleasure. I had sex again and again. Each time it felt like a revelation. These pieces of me were more than a function of procreation, more than a tool of motherhood, or a transaction in a relationship. Each of those nights was a lesson in autonomy, in desire, in asking for what I wanted, and in not accepting less. Because I didn’t have to. I could just tell them to go. And I did, if it didn’t feel right or they were too aggressive, or not interested in what I wanted or who I was. I owed them nothing. They owed me nothing. “Goodbye,” I’d say. And that’s it: I would leave. Once, as I walked out, a man looked at me astonished. “That’s it?” He said. “You are gonna go just like that?”

These pieces of me were more than a function of procreation, more than a tool of motherhood, or a transaction in a relationship.

“More like this,” I said and slammed the door.

For once, I was in possession of my body. For once, my body had no other function than what I wanted for it.

During the mornings, I began working out at a boutique fitness gym. Pushing the limits of what I had been told I could do before as an out of shape nerd. But I began lifting weights, learning to run a mile, faster and faster. Because I could. Because my body was mine, at my command. I owed no one the muscle that began to define my arms, I owned no one the desire that filled me at night.

I also learned to define my pleasure outside the confines of what a man could do. I got that vibrator. Friends sent me links to sex-positive porn. I waited to be destroyed by the lusts of the flesh, like my Evangelical childhood promised, but instead my sins rebuilt me.

I had been taught that my body was a tool of reproduction. A temple for man, for God, for children. But once I left my marriage, I didn’t have to think of my body like that. Instead, my body was simply my body. Something to enjoy, to explore, to be dealt with, to be loved. Something I could use for my pleasure, my purposes and no one else’s.

I waited to be destroyed by the lusts of the flesh, like my Evangelical childhood promised, but instead my sins rebuilt me.

In a small purple socialist pamphlet titled “The Subversion of Women and the Power of the Community,” by Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, it says that true female autonomy comes from divorcing our bodies of the expectations of men and capitalism. “Our childhood is preparation for martyrdom,” they write.”We are taught to derive happiness from clean sex on whiter than white sheets: to sacrifice sexuality and other creative activity at one and the same time.”

I read and re-read that pamphlet. Carried it in my purse and read it outloud to women on school playgrounds or at dinner with friends. “You have to radicalize your vagina,” I’d say and they’d laugh, but I wasn’t kidding.

In sublimating my sexuality, I had ceded my autonomy. Everything, it seemed, conspired to compel me to do this — the church, marriage, even political powers, which cuts off access to healthcare, regulates and criminalizes the power of my body and choices. But pleasure was my revolution.