Episode 73 - The Ethics of F***ing (Part 1)

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well i've been trying to get you to do this episode for a very long time so i'm very excited about today so has mike yeah this is what i've wanted to do for uh since about episode 12. we're talking about fucking so i think this is a question for you michael what's coming up for you that you're finally ready taking off the prune pants [Laughter] i feel like sexual taboo and sexual shame is at the core of so much religion i just feel like this is an episode that will draw lightning bolts because you're obviously afraid of controversy yeah that's what that's what you could put on my tombstone a man who's afraid controversy you just walk around bringing people together so they all unify on one idea i mean i knew we would do it eventually we first talked about doing it shortly after the ken hammer deal so like we can't talk about evolution but we're going to talk about sex i don't know yeah since you mentioned ham we might as well move into beef oh man so basically i think that sex is such an interesting topic because obviously a lot of people are having it if we're here and yet we're not allowed to talk about it and growing up in a conservative state and having a lot of people around me be raised in the purity movement of wait to have sex until you get married no sort of um promiscuity is is advised or allowed we don't talk about sex um if anyone has it there's something wrong with them and yet then there's just this idea that then you get married and have amazing sex but you still don't talk about it um but you have sex with one person until the day you die and you're fulfilled and see lots and lots of like unicorns and glowing stars when you have sex all the time and it's just amazing and yet there's no there's no education in it there's no discussion about it there's no space to ask questions about it and so when i look at the bible and i look at people in the bible who clearly were with more than one person and may or may not have still been called a man after god's own heart there's a part of me that says well hang on a second where did that come into history and where where did that get put on us as a rule that is just the way that it is i've heard people say you know marriage is something that god created between a man and a woman it's that is exactly the way that it was and i just like to challenge those things and and and say maybe that's true and maybe it's not [Music] so as our good friend caroline points out so many of us have grown up in environments where our views on sex and sexuality were informed primarily by spiritual theological concerns and for so many americans that's fallen away they've gone through faith transition they don't believe what they once did they may have no specific spiritual belief now or no spiritual beliefs at all but then what do we do with sex so in this episode we can't talk about everything involving sex and sexuality in one episode but we do want to explore one of the most foundational aspects of sex how do we make good decisions regarding sex and sexuality how do we form a sexual ethic in these times how do we decide what's right and wrong that's a question most of us probably don't think about too often instead we usually just kind of feel it out we go with our gut murder nah shouldn't do that we feel like murder is obviously wrong and it just seems like a no-brainer to us but do we ever really think about what's under that why do we all consider murder to be wrong what metric do we use to say this action is right and this action is wrong in the case of murder someone you know might quote the ten commandments as their first answer thou shalt not kill there you go black and white creator of the universe commanded it so don't do it yet the person who references the command to not kill is somebody that is alive which means they kill countless organisms every day you know to eat is to kill to wash your hands is to kill okay so the biblical apologist says that verse isn't for that kind of stuff that verse the commandment is for people people killing people but but then what about war what about the police what if someone broke into your house and tried to kill your family even if you're a pacifist would killing and self-defense still be the same level of evil as say a serial killer most people would say of course not it's different but how do we make that decision how do we distinguish between the two of those there must be some sort of underlying matrix of meaning making stories that help us distinguish between good and evil or make moral or ethical judgments you don't have the ten commandments to clarify that sort of nuance for you the truth is that as human beings our ethical frameworks come from the same place as everything else in our minds our cultural context whether you speak english or swahili whether you wear blue jeans or asari whether you listen to solange or the beatles or didgeridoo music and even whether you're a christian atheist buddhist or whatever else all of this is a result of the context of space-time that you were born into and that you've experienced up to this point in your life you may like to think that the reason you find something like child sacrifice abhorrent is because you are so wise and enlightened but do you really think you would think exactly like you do now if you had been raised in a culture that accepted child sacrifice as normal and important it's easy to see from this side of history how evil the nazis were but if you had been born into the family of a prominent nazi general do you think you might have seen things at all differently than you do in your current address of space time my point is that all of your gut feelings about what's right and what's wrong have been handed to you from your culture the mythical meaning making stories under all of these gut feelings that we have about right and wrong are very difficult to see because they're the very mechanism by which we see and experience the world in my senior year of high school i went to a christian school in oklahoma that did not allow dancing to someone that wasn't entrenched in that evangelical pentecostal sort of subculture that may seem like a ridiculous rule but within that set of myths within that set of meaning-making matrices by which we made sense of the world it seemed the most natural and wise decision dancing just seemed wrong it just seemed fleshly all these kids gyrating around a dance floor with their hormones holding each other and wiggling of course this feeling this gut feeling came from somewhere there were some underlying assumptions beliefs and myths that we largely unconsciously created our world with in that matrix of ethical assumptions that i can now see included patriarchy sexual repression existential shame and of course a really screwed up eschatology it made more sense to prohibit dancing than you know the fort with the flesh that could lead us all to burning help [Music] so how surprised would you be to learn that a good number of these christian school kids forbidden from dancing with one another on the dance floor were not deterred from their favorite dance the no pants dance my guess is maybe you're not that surprised you can't successfully quash a teenager's sex drive by forbidding school dances or making sure the girl's skirts are at least two fingers below the knee the truth was that our sexual ethic was too simple and unrealistic to yield its intended results so how can we build a healthy sexual ethic in our lives are there any metrics we can use to guide our morals and decisions in regard to our sexuality that don't lead us into unhealthy repression and shame on one side or destructive hedonistic behaviors and addictions on the other is stringing a few verses from the bible together good enough is saying you know whatever is good for you dangerous does science have anything to offer us in the way of a healthy sexual ethic does faith welcome to the liturgist podcast everybody [Music] [Music] this first conversation is with science mike hillary mcbride before we asked her to be a co-host of season four and myself michael gunger for a large portion of people who listen to this podcast they are stuck in a place where neither a traditional american protestant sexual ethic makes sense to them but a modern progressivist secular ethic doesn't seem to fill in the blanks for them either so we're trying to help people figure out what does a healthy sexual ethic look like today how is that related to healthy relationships to what degree should sexuality be tied to monogamy we're treating these as open questions and and i think a huge problem uh in planning and preparing this episode is we have an audience going what do we do about sex what do we do about marriage uh and and the two hosts of this program have both been married in monogamous relationships for a long time and are actually as much as i have like a theoretical academic sexually progressive bent i am super comfortable in a lifelong monogamous arrangement so we're trying to bring in the big guns bring in expertise and shake us out of the uh the rut we live our lives in okay yeah i feel like i'm i come across all free love like i'm kind of a hippie a little bit i'm i'm very in in that kind of zone with my beliefs right now but i've only kissed one girl my whole life uh i met lisa my only other girlfriend was um i kissed her hand one time and her dad the reverend told us that we were moving too quickly wow um okay i was very chaste very frustrated and very horny did you ask for forgiveness from lisa uh oh for kissing the other one's hand no lisa was not quite as chaste as i was okay because i was but she was still i mean she was still yeah but close she wasn't she wasn't a harlot so what i'm thinking is that already in the conversation it's easy to see how difficult it is to separate the idea of sex from the idea of relationships that those things seem to run concurrently and just knowing we were going to talk about sex i was thinking like well what is like what is it what is sex and how is it show up in our lives and it seems that how we answer that question is actually something that's worth talking about as well that what is sex the the goals of sex who has sex what it is how it happens where it happens that the ways that we answer those questions are all part of the stories that we've been told and that we continue to tell or resist that would be defined kind of academically as our sexual scripts those are the stories that we that we tell that we've been told that we continue to push against or to align ourselves with and so in a conversation about sex having a conversation about sexual scripts seems to be just as important because that sounds like that's the thing that people are really struggling with like what is the script that i've been given and do i have the ability to separate myself from that script and choose something for myself and if i don't choose something different does that mean what does that mean about me if i choose the same thing but i'm progressive in every other area of my life how how do i sit with that well that's such a key insight one thing i've thought a lot about sex and sexuality is how complicated this topic is for homo sapiens versus other species and it's because we create these elaborate scripts and narratives and models and understandings of sexuality that are as far as i can see are relatively unique in the animal world are you saying that there's no uh marriage in the animal world mike many mammals are monogamous many mammals are not and we've got to be careful over generalizing what science says biologically about all mammals because mammals are a pretty diverse group of animals when we look at probably the most relevant mammals to human behavior the primates we find a spectrum between you know kind of lifelong pair bonding to no pair bonding whatsoever and among the great apes the the absolute closest relatives of ours on the the most committed which is not a great word to use in biology but i'm trying to help it make it accessible to people uh if you look at gorillas a gorilla will have exclusive sexual access to a group of females a male gorilla for the entire duration of the time that he is the dominant male in his troop and geographic region uh gorillas from everything we can see tend to be relatively attentive to each other we don't see a lot of what would appear to be coercion in uh gorilla sexual encounters and then on the other end of the spectrum are chimpanzees and bonobos who really don't pair off at all chimps are very likely to mate with multiple members of the other gender in a given day there's a lot of violence and what if they if they were humans we would call rape in chimp societies which is very contrasted with bonobos who are very very very ready to mix it up but without any of the dominance or coercion and chimps and bonobos are genetically closest to us and so this tells a pretty broad tail in the area of primates and what primatologists have discovered is there are biological traits which predict how prone to something like monogamy or promiscuity a given primate is and the main measure that tells that story effectively is the ratio of body size to testicle size because if you're competing with other males frequently you need to produce a lot of sperm so you look at gorillas gorillas have very small testicles compared to their body mass because they don't have to compete their sperm doesn't have to compete with other sperm in order to lead to gestation of the fetus whereas chimps and bonobos have very very large testicles compared to their body size because they can't just compete physically with other males it's very likely that they have to put more semen and a female more recently to have a chance to spread their dna and when you look at chimps as primates as apes and use this model to predict we're almost exactly halfway between chimpanzees and apes and so many primatologists and sociologists and anthropologists say that human sexuality exists on a spectrum in this middle place between an extremely promiscuous primate and extremely committed primate each individual human is going to have a different propensity but it's likely that for a majority of humans based on our pair bonding behavior the size of our testicles we do have a scoop on the tip of our penis which is very clearly to a biologist designed to scoop out competing sperm from a vagina lovely that's what that's what the the head of the penis is most suited for uh we are probably most suited for serial monogamy where if you look at statistics human relationships tend to have about a 12 to 18 year run pretty naturally it looks like we're most uh biologically suited to pair bond long enough to get successful offspring independent so the theory is that because males prove their social work through labor and fields the relative value in a hunter-gatherer society men and women really contribute dramatically equal roles in securing food resources and then they also tend to commit pretty similar amounts of engagement in raising and protecting children the agrarian situation uh well it was nice it created civilization that's a nice feature but on the other hand it introduced resource inequality and introduced new ways of measuring the value of individuals and so suddenly like the main thing women can do is what produce offspring and women shifted from partners to property at that point and that's when you see the formation of like i said exclusive access to women by a single male but the inverse was not true at the dawn of civilization if you were successful if your farms were large and your herds were large in order to maximize loyal workers you would need additional reproductive capacity which means you need more wives and so we see this in the old testament very clearly in these agrarian societies it was common for a single male to have multiple women multiple wives even as civilization continues to concubines to wives acquired and con conquest and war and this was all very very very clearly described and supported in the old testament text now when you get towards the new testament you see a decline in polygamy in the post-exilic period in the old testament and then in the intratestimal period between when the old testament was finished and then was finished and the new testament began you saw a dramatic decrease in polygamy to the point that it was a rare and strange practice in some parts some sense of judaism in first century palestine it had lost anything commonplace and it was not common in greco-roman society in the first century as far as historians know instead what seems in the greco-roman context there wasn't a gender binary that we have today there was a gender monary there was one gender male and it's inferior and opposite gender female man and woman and men only had one wife but a roman man had the right to penetrate anyone at his pleasing who was below him in social hierarchy male or female it didn't matter so you had monogamy but you had no expectation of fidelity but you couldn't penetrate another man's life because that was a violation of our property and if you look at the way both roman and old testament judaism structured sexual norms they're very clearly designed to protect property we have a dowry and a property transfer with a marriage if you're to rape an unmarried woman you now have to pay for that daughter and marry her right so you have to commit by having sex you've taken access to these sex organs they're no longer valuable in a sadly appropriate modern parallel once the car is driven off the lot it depreciates so a woman who's not a virgin no longer has value and so there has to be financial restitution not for damage to her but damage to the wealth of her father and family and that is the ethic in which the rel the the understanding of marriage is born so when you get to the new testament and we do start having language about one man one woman the expectation is still of property rights the expectation is still of a union yes but a union in which one is inverse and inferior to the other and it's it's impossible for me to ignore no matter how much we might value romantic relationships today and romantic marriage no matter how much yes the way we've read the bible has dramatically changed especially from the victorian era on especially from the 1940s on that the assumption of monogamy is designed to disproportionately benefit men and to carry the implicit assumption that women are property an engaged couple has sex before being married it gives legal ground to satan it gives him some turf it gives him some space it gives him some part of that relationship over which he has control i think it's like it's important to look at sex and our sexual scripts from a biopsychosocial model i mean i talked about that in the in the trauma and spirituality podcast but to see that sex really sits at the seat of the intersection of all of those different domains of human experience including like existential and spiritual what are what do we believe about what our worth and our value is and our moral compass all of those things influence pleasure arousal shame about arousal interest what we pursue what we avoid even though i think we'd like to be able to say that we can tease out the social context from what we desire i think that that would be a devaluation of how influential our social context is on shaping what we actually feel that we can't separate our social context from a biological response to sexuality because there are people who growing up in a different context would desire something different but because they've been told their whole life it's bad they actually don't respond physiologically to it so sex in so many ways is this beautiful tension of all of these different dimensions of human experience but it is pretty difficult to talk about it without getting political pretty quickly i think we could start without getting political because one thing you mentioned was shame and i've noticed that very common in my years as teaching a young adult sunday school where i'd been married a few years longer than the people in my class who were all newlyweds there was a very frequent people would share that they were married now and so according to their own sexual ethics sex was okay now it was inside of marriage and yet they experienced guilt and shame oh yeah about intimacy how much do you see that oh consistently for people who then on top of that feel shame about the shame because they think is there something wrong with me that i'm not desiring this so i'm having a hard time desiring but i'm feeling bad about the fact that i'm having a hard time desiring and he can go around and around and around i see it a lot intertwined as well with scripts around femininity and masculinity so women saying to me i mean in heterosexual dynamics women saying to me how come he doesn't want me all the time he was supposed to want me i thought that all the wanting would just be you know the floodgates would open of arousal and desire after we were married and is there something wrong with me or is there something wrong with him that he doesn't just want to like you know have sex with me all the time and so there is a blame game or a shame game that starts around like what does it mean about us that everything we were always told was really good feels hard and everything we actually want is is confusing and scary what percentage of people do you think consider their sexuality broken in some way [Music] i feel like that's such a complex question i don't even know how to answer it but what i would say is that in in cultures where we have a dualistic definition of human experience where the mind and the body are separate that anything related to the body is kind of fragmented or shut off and kind of dissociated from the full experience of being human i don't know how many people in that context could actually have experience of sexuality which would be completely healthy i mean my ideas about what healthy might be are probably different than a few other peoples but i think it's pretty hard for us to be integrated and experience the fullness of pleasure and joy and relationship when when we've cut our bodies or our feelings off from other parts of ourselves this is something that you know several other researchers have talked about and it's kind of around in the in the context of sexual clinicians or clinicians who work with couples sexually but there's this idea that we in in western patriarchal north america divorce men from their experiences of emotions and so they cut cert have to cut certain parts of themselves off in order to maintain this kind of hegemonic masculinity for women it tends to show up in the body that women have to dissociate from their body because their bodies don't look the right way or are bad or shameful or impure or too powerful for men and so it seems like it's really hard for people to experience the fullness of sexuality and sex as it could be available to them in particular because of the way gender scripts limit often limit our expression or experience of ourselves and other people so it's not unusual for me to hear in in couples work people say you know i want to have let's just say again in a heterotypical heterosexual relationship a man say i want to have sex with her and then i'll feel like i'm close and then we can go to some of those emotional places that she wants to go i hear her say but i feel like i want to feel close to you emotionally before i'm ready to go there physically and both of them are waiting for the thing that they're most comfortable with to happen until they can go to the place where the other person wants them to go and that seems to be a reflection of these extremely gendered narratives of what sexual expression and desire and arousal look like not to mention kind of fear in relationships and what vulnerability means so i asked about the brokenness because i heard there was a friend of mine that he was speaking with a room of conservative evangelicals and someone brought up questions about lgbtq sexuality and and how the church should respond for some reason the conversation led to a place where he asked how many in the room would consider their own sexuality broken or maybe yes in the reverse how many you don't consider your own sexuality broken and nobody in the room raised their hand yeah there wasn't one person in that whole room that uh thought their sexuality was not broken they all assumed brokenness of their own sexuality and having grown up evangelical i know for me my discipleship my entire thrust of my faith up until i was married was about keeping a pure heart and living a holy righteous life and when you really got down to what that meant sex was at the center of it yeah it was being a pure holy the opposite of what we were seeking was secular sexual you know rampant hedonism out there in the world so everything was about like it's centered on that it was at the core of it is key and so you have this core human drive of what it means to be an organism this existential drive that we're at war with in trying to channel it into one very specific channel which is i need to find a wife so that i can unleash the beast [Laughter] and that was my whole life i ca the amount of brain space that freed up upon i do i can't or well upon the wedding night for me i i really felt like a different human being i was like oh i don't have to spend my whole life trying to figure out how i'm going to be able to have sex wow but you were statistically strange because you had a belief that was very common but a faithfulness to that belief that was not i grew up i you know baptist sex is terrible like married people should be careful with it right but uh i i didn't i didn't adhere to that belief at all you know my my experience with with sex and sexuality at least pre-marriage was a constant sin guilt repentance cycle right that i felt pretty powerless in the face of especially as someone who you know grew up with a lot of social uh rejection and kind of used intimacy as a form of self-medication and i think if you would have asked me any time before you know my processing of morality and ethics as an atheist if i thought my sexuality was broken i would have absolutely said yes i think that's a a very common perspective you know and and something frankly that underlies the entire conversation about sexuality is how often people's behaviors differ from what they believe to be ethically just with sexuality well i was at i was at a hot springs i'm a i'm a fan of of hot water and no clothing whenever possible in my life and i was at these hot springs in colorado and this guy came up to me and it was hitting on me i mean like quite overtly which doesn't happen to me a lot and uh especially not when i'm not wearing clothing in a public place but but he was he was like really aggressive but then he was also he would switch it was like jekyll and hyde he would switch into this sort of uh witness christian he was talking about like how much of a sin homosexuality was and he's like it's disgusting and it's perverse and it's against the nature of god and the will of god but what he but then he'd go right back to hitting him it was the weirdest one of the weirdest thing they were experienced it was like back and forth he was like warring with himself wow he was obviously like on the prowl he was there talking to all different guys and looking for something but then would just launch into these tirades about how evil homosexuality was it's very bizarre when all this this war this sexual war that so many of us have that lead so many of us to think that our sexuality is broken yeah and that we have we don't behave in the way that we believe what's what's going on in our brains when that's going on yeah yeah well i would say like right off the bat probably a cognitive theory around cognitive dissonance shows up that there's one part of us that wants something but another part of us that wants something else and we don't know how to make sense of them too and so we oscillate between the two of those things i mean that particular individual might have had some psychopathology going on i don't know that might have contributed to the ch like the challenges of that dynamic and and kind of the um the overt presentation of that struggle and the switching between parts of himself but i think that dualism we're saying like one part of us is good and one part of us is bad including like spirit versus flesh is seriously problematic for our health as individuals for our relationships even for our understanding of our spirituality but most obviously it shows up in our sexuality and in our feelings of shame and guilt that actually inhibit our ability to experience the richness and depth available to us when we allow ourselves with freedom to enjoy these domains of human experience think of sexuality and spirituality as actually not being very different the the definition of spirituality i think i read this last time but was from mcnee that spirituality is defined as the core dimension of humanity that seeks to discover meaning purpose connectedness with self others and ultimately god and the definition of sexuality that i really like by whitstock 2009 is the physical emotional psychological and spiritual energy that permeates influences and colors our entire being and personality in its quest for love communion friendship wholeness self-perpetuation and self-transcendence when i hold those two things together what i hear is just different facets of the same longing for connection for wholeness for something outside of ourselves for an undoing of our aloneness for a sense of belonging for a sense of being seen and seeing if we had to reduce the human experience to different dimensions one would be kind of transcendent one would be physical but i see them so connected to each other and i can't i can't help but see people who have this kind of dualistic split it seems so inherent that there would be a split in their experience in other dimensions of themselves that that it would limit their experience of sexuality or connection or self-knowing or spirituality even [Music] you're both brain nerds science people where do you draw sexual ethic boundaries and why obviously you know the simple thing growing up for me was there was this narrative spun that the bible and god's clear plan for humanity was adam and eve one man one woman and even though you didn't really ever see that play out in any of the major bible characters that still was sort of the original dream that god had for humanity and so that's sexuality works within that boundaries outside of those boundaries you have all the things like unwanted pregnancies and diseases and pain and all the things uh the destructive about sex outside of those boundaries so that was a very easy and clear thing to understand it obviously creates a lot of simplicity for situations that are not simple so what about the lgbtq spectrum what about multiple partners what about the sex drive before you're able to get married it obviously has never been an easy thing because is anybody more broken with their sexuality than religious people the christian people even you know look at the cr the catholic church that require their priests to be chased and celibate and then what's the result that beast channels into something really dark and there ends up being abuse and child molestation all sorts of horrible gross ugly ways that damning up the sexual river rears its head so how do you draw boundaries in ways for sexual ethics without relying on the old tropes and the old simplistic narrative yeah you know my thinking uh in response to that question is actually that there are experiences of incredible sexual health within people who have religious experiences and religious identity but we all we don't often talk about those because there's so much shame there is a really amazing study that was done about people who have peaks peak spiritual experiences during sex where they encounter the divine and research about what that does for them and what that does after for them but i think there's so much shame that often those experiences aren't talked about or they're beaten down so i wanted to be clear that there i hear just as many unhealthy stories from people who have no religious affiliation or identity about unhealthy sexual activity or ethics as people within within the church but maybe it manifests differently in terms of the emotional and spiritual toll that people feel like it takes on their identity but in terms of my idea of sexual ethic the same reason why i don't like the simplification that the church has created in terms of our sexual ethic is the reason why i don't like this question is because i think we want we want an answer that makes us feel like something is okay and that we're off the hook for thinking about our sexuality critically but actually what we need to do is continue to wrestle with that on our own and so i feel resistant always with this kind of question to say like this is okay or this is not okay for other people besides myself because i don't feel like i should have the authority over anybody else's body in such a way that limits their experience of something that is beautiful for them but what i would say is that i think we should be really careful just like with every other aspect of our lives no differently with sexuality like asking ourselves are we hurting somebody else are we using somebody else are we numbing our experiences of pain or life by avoiding by distracting by using by numbing out i think it would be really interesting if each of us asked that question about things like am i feeling bored and so i'm using people or using behaviors as a way to compensate for perhaps a lack of meaning in my life or do i feel alone and so i am acting in a way sexually that you know helps me feel less alone but doesn't actually honor the experience or the identity of the other person and really to me those are the only things that i can come down to that feel like they stand regardless of culture religion or any other kind of narrative or sexual script that are we honoring other people are we honoring ourselves are we being healthy are we hurting people and answering those questions honestly and with authenticity for ourselves and choosing to ask those questions of the people that we're with too but i don't know if i feel or will ever feel comfortable saying anything more than that because of the implications that that has on somebody else's identity the strange thing for me is the vast gulf between my sexual ethic and my sexual practice my sexual ethic really allows a lot of behaviors i really wouldn't ever go for um and are far outside anything any church denomination or tradition i'm aware of is comfortable with but i formed my understanding of sex and sexuality during a period that i didn't believe in god and frankly have rarely seen something within christian teaching that improves upon it in terms of how i feel comfortable telling others is a healthy way to relate to their sexuality i hear things all the time in christianity and in the church that helped edify my personal sexual experiences as a married man that helped me understand how to relate to my wife better but i would have a hard time prescribing those to other people be they christians or not and i'll talk a little bit about that in a second but basically the core of any sexual ethic to me must be based on the idea of consent and this is because no one ever has a right to someone else's body for labor for comfort or for access to sex acts that's right so someone's body autonomy must always be respected and frankly all of my ethical considerations but sex as well um but but consent can't be simplified to yes and no no always means no but i don't think yes always means yes because consent has to be informed both parties have to be capable of an informed understanding of what consent means and i think to be ethical in any situation power dynamics have to be considered sex doesn't exist in isolation from the rest of our societal and social practices is it consent when a person who lives on the edge of poverty or below the poverty line consents to a sexual encounter in exchange for currency or food or drugs see what i mean so power dynamics very quickly blur the lines around consent it has been reported in many cases of very large age dynamics an adult an older adult with a minor that the minor verbally indicates that they consent but i think one can make a strong argument that that is not an informed consent that there's a very strong power dynamic and power differential in that situation and so the the hallmark is consent but beyond that i would also encourage people to ask am i being as safe with my body in this sexual decision as i can be and if not am i am i thinking this through well why do i say that well there's an entire category of pathogens that specialize in propagating through sexual activity and if you're careless with that you stand to not only harm yourself but potentially unknowingly to harm future sexual partners and in doing so actually violate their body autonomy if you pick up even a minor sexually transmitted infection or disease and pass that along to another person in two totally in the open consent relationships the second person probably is not consenting to receiving a sexually transmitted infection so it's important to be safe it's also important i think for people to be as educated about their bodies as possible not just so that people can enjoy the act of sex and sexual behaviors as much as they can but also to understand what is physically appropriate what sexual acts require more from the body require more recovery time may require more preparation and what i have found is that american society does a very poor job of preparing people inside and outside the church for those decisions which is why we see high levels of teen pregnancy which is why we see high levels of teen abortion we have done a poor job preparing people to make sexual decisions and relied on shame as the primary mechanism for sexual control in people's lives which is extremely unhealthy the reason i base my understanding of sex and sexuality in a secular place is because i think you can make a biological argument that most humans exist on a spectrum somewhere between fairly promiscuous and serially monogamous we're apes we exist somewhere between chimpanzees and gorillas in terms of the physical markers for multiple partners and it seems like you know not everyone's cut out for lifelong monogamy uh whereas other people like me that's a pretty easy comfortable thing and my sexual script if you will has to make room for people to make their own sexual decisions because i understand that the script i was given from the church is largely based on an ethic that considers women to be property and not partners in marriage my sexual ethic must include an understanding of the inherent dignity and beauty of same-sex relationships of differing sexual orientations of differing gender identities and indeed must honor people who consider themselves to be asexual who are so frequently forgotten in discussions about sex and sexuality that i can't also say that in some way sex is elevated or unique in the human experience or that an understanding of god and spirituality is impossible outside of sexual activity or a sexual understanding so i think like hillary said this breeds a really nuanced frankly difficult introspective journey for each of us and i think to be healthy we have to be very open-minded and open-handed towards the sexual practices of others structuring our legal ramifications around the barest possible consent and power dynamic interpretation of a sexual ethic in that way we can also be free to explore a deeper personal understanding of sexuality that includes our faith our life experiences the tradition our family is within and how much we choose to identify with that i'm a lifelong married monogamous christian in my personal sexual ethic but in my societal sexual ethic i think informed consent and education are the backbone of a valid perspective on sexuality [Music] stop telling women what they can and cannot should and should not do with their bodies teach them about the worth and value of their bodies teach men about the worth and value of our bodies speak of intimacy speak of connection just speak about sex at all stop misinterpreting a myth to say that it was the naked body of a woman that caused the downfall of all of humankind stop taking that myth literally in the first place and start prioritizing pleasure stop telling women what to wear start telling men not to rape keep telling men not to rape tell them again and tell them again then tell them again and again and again and again and then one more time again because they still don't seem to fucking get it stop circulating the lie that it's a virtue for a man to make the decision to not be alone with a woman [Music] stop telling men to guard women's hearts as if they own something that is not theirs stop telling fathers their daughter's virginity is their responsibility as if they own something that is not theirs start telling girls the good news that there is no such thing as virginity in the first place talk about autonomy talk about respect talk about consent name our anatomy appropriately call it a vulva call it a clitoris talk about the clitoris just say the word clitoris stop telling homo sapiens that anything other than heterosexual married sex is unnatural read a biology book so you can learn how to properly define natural sex in the first place circle back one more time and remember that you still have to teach men not to rape tell women their bodies are not the problem stop asking what she was wearing stop asking what she was drinking stop saying anything other than i believe you stop telling women they're less sexual than men stop telling women they're less visuals and men stop telling women that men only want one thing stop telling men that men only want one thing stop assuming that men only want women and women only want men and while you're at it stop assuming that there are only men and women around who want one another in the first place stop confusing sex and gender stop pretending that either exist in a binary because science disagrees with you no matter what it is that you think some snakes said stop teaching women that their virtue is exclusively weighed by whether or not their hymen is intact get rid of abstinence-only education and start having conversations about intimacy connection and powerful communication start telling teenagers that their sex drives are normal and then teach them again about autonomy respect and consent stop using metaphors for women's sexuality like plucked flowers damaged cans chewed gum crumbled paper and cows stop telling women that men can't be trusted stop telling men that men can't be trusted stop telling men that women can't be trusted stop telling women that women can't be trusted stop telling women that they can't trust themselves stop telling anyone ever anywhere that sex is dirty and start teaching them about the possibilities of everything it can and could mean to them physically mentally emotionally spiritually when treated like the incredible embodied erotic experience it has evolved itself into being that was jamie lee finch