Tag: sex

Masturbation Part 2

Posted on by Elissa Anne

There was a lot of discussion on my previous blog about masturbation. Some of the questions that were raised were:

Is it possible to masturbate without lust?

What about the fact that a lot of masturbation is pornography based?

What if I’m addicted to masturbation?

I’m going to address these questions one at a time, however, I am not an expert. This is my personal opinion based on my personal experiences and relationship with God. I don’t expect everyone to agree and at the end of the day, we all choose for ourselves. I also want to clarify that this particular discussion around masturbation is geared at single/unmarried people and not related to masturbation within the context marriage – that is another discussion for another time. My motivation for writing about this is to help people like myself who were raised with legalistic views of the topic and need permission to talk about the subject and fresh ideas about how to express their sexuality.

Masturbation and lust are not synonymous.

Just as it is possible to have a wet dream or nocturnal emission (females have them too) without lust, it is possible to masturbate without lust. I’ve masturbated with my thoughts focused on men, I’ve masturbated with my thoughts focused on my body and physical sensations, and I’ve masturbated with my thoughts focused on God. Now, I’m not saying that every time we focus on male or female anatomy during masturbation it is always lustful, but for argument’s sake, let’s talk about the other options of focusing on one’s own body and on God.

It was my husband (when we were dating) who first suggested to me that people can masturbate and worship God at the same time. He asked how can we honour God with the sexuality He’s given us in our singleness? This got me wondering is it possible to do so in a way beyond just being chaste? I’m not talking about fantasising about having sex with God, I am talking about masturbating before God. He is the one who created us as sexual beings. He sees and knows everything right? So whether we are masturbating with pornography, having sex with a person or masturbating on our own, He is right there with us, loving and accepting us exactly where we are at. So why not turn our hearts toward him in gratitude for our sexuality, and enjoy sexual expression in his presence?

It is possible to masturbate to worship music, masturbate with prayer and masturbate with our thoughts on God’s love for us. My husband and I have both individually masturbated to worship music. For me personally, I have always been aware of God’s presence while I masturbate. Whether I’m feeling irrational guilt and shame (that don’t come from God but rather taint my experience of him) or I’m feeling God’s love and acceptance of me and my sexuality, His love is a constant that we all need to focus on it more. It is also possible to masturbate with lust and still know that God is there and that he still loves you and, in fact, the more you are aware of his love for you, the more likely you are to let go of the lust that entangles.

It is not necessary to kick God out of the bedroom (not that anyone could). Instead we need to recognise that God is actually in the bedroom while we express our sexuality. Let’s re-contextualise our experience of God during masturbation and/or sex by including him. Invite Him to teach us about our bodies. Thank Him for orgasms. If you struggle to orgasm, ask Him to help you. Receive His love, acceptance and forgiveness for all the things we’ve done that we perceive as sexually impure, and ask Him to teach us more about healthy sexual expression in His presence.

During masturbation we become quite attentive to our bodies. I want to talk about the second question “What about the fact that a lot of masturbation is pornography based?” in the context of focusing on our bodies. When we are focused on pictures of naked men or women, we lose some of the connection to the feelings and sensations in our bodies, our hearts and our minds by relying on external material to stimulate us, rather than listening internally. I am not discussing the morality of using porn, I’m talking about the effects of relying on porn.

If you are a regular pornography user, ask yourself this: “Can I masturbate without porn?” If the answer is no or that it has become difficult to masturbate to the point of orgasm without porn, then I suggest a re-invention of your sexuality. Approach it like an adventure: it is time for me to re-discover my body. I don’t want to just rely on external materials to bring me to a climax, I want to be able to do this to myself. This requires listening to one’s body: tuning into physical sensation.

Here is my best attempt at instructions:

  1. Don’t be in a rush
  2. Take some very deep breaths, deep into your loins
  3. Focus on the air circulating throughout the body
  4. Breathe out all that is distracting and hindering you
  5. Breathe in thoughts of love like: “I am loved. God loves me.”
  6. Concentrate on your sex organs and welcome the stimulation that comes from simply sensing internally
  7. Move your body in ways that sexually stimulate you without touching your sexual organs e.g. tighten muscles, raise/lower or extend/retract pelvis, etc
  8. Delay manual stimulation for as long as you can by focusing your thoughts on the sensations in your body and on emotions of nurturing your sexuality
  9. If you feel turned-off by thoughts of nurturing your sexuality, ask yourself why and really listen to the answer. Are there religious lies that stop you? Do you see all forms of sexual arousal as ungodly?
  10. Ask God to change the way you think about your sexuality and to help re-invigorate your sexual expression without always needing pornography and without attaching guilt to all forms of masturbation

Now we turn to the final question: what if I’m addicted to masturbation? In my opinion there are healthier things to consider first. We need to be addressing things like:

  1. How do I feel about God when I masturbate? Since God sees everything I do sexually, am I comfortable with my sexuality before God?
  2. If shame/guilt feelings arise it is important to prayerfully ask God whether they are produced by healthy behaviour or unhealthy behaviour. I can’t tell you exactly where to draw the line on what is healthy or unhealthy, but to be more specific I don’t believe we need to feel guilty for all forms of masturbation. So if guilt feelings arise in this area, we need to ask God for help to remove it. If guilt feelings are produced by behaviours or thoughts we consider unhealthy then we need God’s help to re-invent our sexuality in ways that we believe are healthy.
  3. What are my thoughts about others when I masturbate? Let’s be honest: we’ve probably all had some unhealthy thoughts toward other people during masturbation. The best solution I can think of is focusing more on our own bodies and on God than on other people (while we are still single).
  4. How do I feel about myself when I masturbate: am I nurturing my sexuality or abusing it?
  5. Don’t be too hard on yourself for the things you have done that you perceive as “wrong.” Let God’s grace into every area of your sexuality and turn your attention more to what you can do that is healthy, and less to what you have done that may not have been so healthy.

 

Is Masturbation a Sin?

Posted on by Elissa Anne

Have you ever heard anyone tell you to let your conscience be your guide? Back in the days when I used to let my conscience be my guide, I felt guilty about everything. I thought that picking my nose was a sin–and yes, most of the time I ate the fruit I picked! My first attempt at shaving my legs made me feel so guilty that I reverted back to not shaving them, until I saw someone staring at my hairy legs on a bus one time and decided: enough was enough! I debated dying my hair for a really long time before having it done. I was never comfortable with the lengths I saw females go to, to make themselves “beautiful.” I worried about the sins of vanity and pride. I also believed it was a sin to be overweight, and I felt very ugly in my own skin. But I strangely suspected that there was something holier about being plain and ugly than about being beautiful and … well … sexual.

If I were to let my conscience be my guide, I would have a miserable life in which I avoided doing anything that might have the slightest appearance of being “wrong.” But when I was in high school, one of my teachers told me about a “seared conscience.” He said there were kids out there who were able to commit murder without feeling any remorse whatsoever, because they had a seared conscience. It was then that I realised that no one’s conscience can be trusted. No two consciences are the same. I might feel like it’s sinful for me to shave my legs because God put hair there on purpose, but most women in western society would never think twice about shaving their legs because it is socially accepted. The Bible tells us that our hearts–which I believe includes our consciences–are deceitful (Jeremiah 17:9).

In a similar way, when I started masturbating at age 22, I felt sick with disgust. I was convinced I would never do it again after that fateful first time (in another country–might I add), but I was already addicted. We really can, as human beings, hate the things we love and love the things we hate. I spent the next five years feeling guilty every time I gave into the desire to masturbate, which was about once a month. Sometimes I cried afterward and I prayed and begged God to make me stop. My conscience told me it was a sin.

But interestingly, the Bible never once ever addresses masturbation. You would think that if masturbation was a sin, then Leviticus 18 would have something to say about it in its extensive list against certain sexual behaviours. But it says nothing whatsoever about touching one’s own sex organs, sexual arousal, wet dreams, erections, orgasms or masturbation. Similarly in the New Testament when Paul addresses sex and marriage, he says nothing about touching oneself or getting off and he certainly doesn’t say it’s wrong. If anything, he says that those who burn with passion should get married. I can make a stronger biblical case against wearing make-up, jewellery and cutting hair than I can against masturbation.

There are a lot of mixed opinions about masturbation. I’ve heard some people label it “self-gratification,” and declare it a sin because we should be seeking God for our needs, not trying to satisfy the lusts of our flesh. But when you think about this argument logically, is it self-gratification to eat food? Who is going to determine whether the food is a gift from God, or whether it was the selfish indulgence of the consumer?

Other people say that masturbation is healthy for the body. But then again, sex is also healthy for the body. Some say that masturbation takes away the temptation to have pre-marital or extra-marital sex, while others testify that once they started masturbating, sex was the next logical step. At the end of the day, all I can do is open up the discussion by talking about my own experience in this area. You will have to decide for yourself whether you find this practise healthy or unhealthy.

My experience is that after five years of feeling ashamed of myself every time I succumbed to the feelings in my vagina that demanded my attention, I decided not to trust my feelings anymore. After talking with a pastor and a naturopath, I concluded that it was healthy for me to masturbate, since I was not having sex, and my body was horny. In deciding not to trust my feelings, I learned how to retrain those feelings. This might be called desensitisation, but one can’t assume that desensitisation is always a negative thing. Our ears become desensitised to certain sounds so that we do not become distracted every time a bird sings or a car drives past the window.

In order to retrain my feelings around masturbation, I decided to deliberately masturbate much more regularly and to self-soothe if I experienced any guilty or negative feelings afterward. There were times I bawled my eyes out after masturbation, called myself a slutty whore and prayed that I would just stop experiencing all sexual arousal. My feelings were often extreme because I had learned to feel wrong about all things sexual. I needed to learn to tell myself that everything was okay. It doesn’t matter whether I’m a slut or not because God still loves me. There is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1) and I refuse to continue feeling guilty. God made me sexually female. He gave me my sexual organs. In fact he gave me a clitoris on purpose and the only function a clitoris has is sexual pleasure! If my body can orgasm in my sleep–and it can and has–then how can it possibly be a sin to enjoy climaxing?

Why I am Obsessed about Sex

Posted on by Elissa Anne

An obsession is a fixation. Most of the time, people with an obsession or fixation, try to keep it hidden, but when the topic comes up the person usually reveals hypersensitivity in the area of their obsession.

In my previous bog I suggested that the western church is obsessed about sex. I said this because my experience of Christians in general growing up, was that they desperately wanted to keep human sexuality under control. It is my observation that sexual immorality has stricter church-discipline-related consequences than any other kind of alleged-sin. It is the thing we are most secretive about because we know the moral police will judge us, but it’s also the most widely discussed topic when it involves someone else. In my opinion, this constitutes a hypersensitive area of fixation: an obsession.

I concede that part of the reason the western church is obsessed about sex is because western society is obsessed about sex. But if the goal of our obsession is, in fact, to control how Christians behave sexually, then this obsession will never reach its target. It is failing and will continue to fail us. I would like to suggest that we redirect our obsession and, instead of using it to judge and gossip about others while avoiding our own sexual secrets, that we start having honest-to-God conversations about our obsession with sex.

I’ll start.

I’m obsessed with sex partly because I was raised in sex-crazed western society and the sex-crazed western church. I, like the Christians around me, learned to speak religious-virginese about how sex before marriage is wrong and was interviewed by “Girlfriend Magazine” at the ripe old age of 14. I said things like: “True love waits,” and I want to “Save myself for marriage.” I talked about how sex joins people for life and asked the question “Why would you want to be joined with more than one person?” What I didn’t understand is that this mostly comes across as condemning, judgemental and legalistic.

I didn’t even realise that I was obsessed with sex when I was a teenager, but the fact that I ended up in a pretty popular Australian magazine for teenagers, certainly begs the question. There were other clues as well. At my bridal shower just two days ago a high-school friend reminded me that I told my whole class I was scared the rapture would happen while I was still a virgin and I didn’t want Jesus to come back before I’d had sex! (That was 15-20 years ago and I no longer agree with the rapture interpretation of Biblical passages.) Some of the people in my high-school class were shocked. I was known for being a passionate Christian, yet I was talking about the desire to experience sex. I don’t remember being very embarrassed though. I would shrug that kind of thing off by saying: “Doesn’t everyone want to know what it’s like to have sex?”

Meanwhile, I avoided sex like the plague. I never masturbated in high-school. If I felt aroused while watching a movie, I would generally avoid my feelings because I thought that they were wrong or at the very least, dangerous. I was obsessed about sexual purity and sub-consciously kept myself overweight throughout my teen years in order to avoid being sexually attractive to the opposite-sex. Sexual repression, hypersensitivity to all things sexual, guilt connected to any sexual arousal and extreme perfectionism in the area of my sexuality should have been telling signs.

When I was 18-19, I became depressed because I felt guilty about everything. If I forgot to brush my teeth, I felt guilty because I was “supposed” to brush my teeth. If I shaved my legs, I felt guilty because God put hair there. If I watched a lot of television, I felt guilty for being lazy. I remember one time wondering if it was a sin that I walked around stepping on ants and prayed that God would forgive me for being an ant killer. If ever I felt angry or hateful toward anyone, I would pray for days “God please make me love them. Please make me love them. Please make me love them.” Most of the time, the people I didn’t like were men around my dad’s age. This should have been a telling sign too. I would actually get sick feelings in the pit of my stomach and find myself feeling repulsed by certain men 2-3 decades older than me–for no apparent reason–and thought for sure there was something wrong with me.

When my depression grew bad enough that I started wondering if death would be kinder to me than life, I knew I had to seek counselling. One of the counsellors I saw asked me if I had been sexually abused. I said I didn’t know and she explained to me that most people that present with my level of irrational guilt have experienced abuse. I became hysterical and I asked God to tell me whether or not it was true. It took me another nine years to really become convinced that I was molested as a three year old and to face the experience as God gradually reconstructed my memory of it.

I’m not writing this to stir anyone’s pity or empathy. I’m writing this to help readers understand why I have this desperate desire to openly discuss my sexuality. Because on the one hand, religion told me that sex before marriage was wrong. But, on the other hand, my abuse told me that I’d already experienced some kind of sex before marriage. And that made me feel very, very wrong. And I have carried the weight of my sexual-wrongness around with me all my life. Even now, as I prepare to be married, I am struggling with sexual anxiety. I don’t want to live with this secret, obsessive sexual anxiety on my own anymore. I want to talk about it!

“Let’s talk about sex baby

Let’s talk about you and me

Let’s talk about all the good things

And the bad things that may be

Let’s talk about sex!”

This song made me cringe (with judgementalism) in high-school, but now it’s probably the thing I want most in all the world for people like me who have suppressed their sexuality long enough. So I am writing these blogs to encourage much more dialogue amongst my peers about human sexuality.

Navigating my singleness and sexuality throughout my twenties and early thirties has been a complex and emotional adventure. I struggled with people giving me the Christian-virginese answer to singleness and sexlessness: “God is all you need.” And I struggled with mixed messages around masturbation and sexual arousal (amongst other struggles). There are many other topics I look forward to discussing in future blogs, but we will start with masturbation first.

So stay tuned for blog 3: Is masturbation a sin?

Why is the Church Obsessed about Sex?

Posted on by Elissa Anne

While I was growing up, I felt like I was taught a postmodern version of the 10 commandments:

  1. Worship the Trinity only
  2. Don’t love material possessions more than God
  3. Don’t swear
  4. Go to church every Sunday
  5. Obey your parents
  6. Don’t commit murder
  7. Don’t commit sexual sin including but not limited to: lust of the eyes, lust of the heart, pre-marital sex (including dry-humping, inappropriate fondling or caressing, oral sex; other grey areas may include: kissing, holding hands, cuddling, touching in any way, shape or form), extra-marital sex, polygamy, divorce and re-marriage, fantasy, indulgence in pornography, homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality, transvestitism, intersexuality; other grey areas may include: masturbation & oral sex in marriage!
  8. Don’t steal
  9. Don’t lie
  10. Don’t be jealous

From my perspective “sexual sin” seemed to be the most talked about of all the postmodern-day commandments. In my teen years I heard stories about the days when parents used to disown their own daughters for coming home pregnant and unwed teenage mothers had their newborn babies forcibly removed.

I heard about young adult friends and family being stood down from being part of the church worship team because they either confessed to having premarital sex, were dobbed in for premarital sex, or became pregnant out of wedlock. I watched as some Christian couples made the fateful decision to move in together and about a minute later, felt unwelcome at church and left, only to return within a year or two when they were legally married. Others rushed down the aisle to cover-up the possibility that they may or may not have conceived before marriage.

I heard gossip about which young people at church were secretly having sex, which older married couples had confessed to sex before marriage, and the double-standards applied to elite members of the church whose sexual sins were kept forever on the down-low–presumably below the belt.

“Sexual immorality” always seemed to be dealt with more harshly than any other moral failing: pastors ex-communicated for adultery; pornography burning ceremonies; exorcisms performed on homosexuals; abortions to cover-up premarital sex; verbal abuse, gossip and slander about or toward the promiscuous; and a church-wide fear of admitting to any sort of temptation or mistake.

It’s interesting because we don’t stand down pastors who are clearly overweight, which indicates the likelihood of gluttony, laziness or both, but if there is a hint of sexual sin, you can bet-your-britches that pastor is in big trouble! Most of the time we don’t even discuss whether it is right or wrong to buy houses and cars that pollute our environment, destroy the ozone layer, wipe out forests and rape the earth, but we will talk incessantly about how much of a slut little miss so-and-so is, and how GLBTI people are really perverted heterosexuals! Just last year (2014) an American preacher said that God gave us clear instructions in Leviticus that we are to wipe out–and I do mean murder, which, by the way, goes against commandment number six–all homosexual people. Another pastor from New Zealand said he was praying that a certain gay man would off himself.

Why is the western church so obsessed about sex?

I don’t know about you, but I tend to obsess over the things that I covet. Commandment number ten: don’t be jealous. I once heard a poem that I have never forgotten:

“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods

Not even a penny bun

But say thanks to the Lord that he did not forbid thee

To court thy neighbour’s son!”

I believe that the western church obsesses over sex because we are generally jealous. While I was a very chaste virgin in my early twenties, rarely masturbating and certainly not engaging in any sexual activities with other people, I envied every friend who became engaged and got married. A big part of this was because they were about to begin–or were already enjoying–their sex-life and I was still keeping my legs tightly crossed in abstinence. For some people, abstinence and virginity last longer than others, but most of the time, this is not because we don’t “want” to have sex.

I don’t think it’s all that much of a stretch to conclude that in the deepest parts of many virginal Christians’ hearts, there is a secret envy toward the more promiscuous. This is not necessarily because we want to indulge in promiscuity, but because we think it is unfair that other people get away with it, while we don’t. We feel disgusted by certain types of “slutty behaviour” because we would never conceive of doing such a thing! But our claim that we would never entertain the idea is a downright lie. It’s something we think with our cognitive minds, while our subconscious is still reacting in immature jealousy saying “that’s not fair!”

This is also known as self-righteousness.

When we think we are better than other people; that we would never traverse the boundary the way someone else has; that we would never even be comparably tempted; then we have succumbed to the delusion of our own self-righteousness.

Jesus said: “Anyone who looks at a woman [person] lustfully has already committed adultery with her [that person] in his [or her] heart,” Matthew 5:28 NIV. I do not believe for one second that there is a single Christian, or even a single human being (who has reached puberty), who has not committed adultery of the heart. We are all adulterers and no amount of abstinence, self-righteousness or judgemental pride toward other adulterers, is going to change that.

I am not writing this to condemn anyone. I am writing this to liberate people. We are all on an equal playing field. We are all sexually immoral. So why do we need to point the finger at other people’s sexuality and beg them to conform to our self-righteous standards?

“Let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone.” John 8:7 NLT