Not surprising. It'd be hard to have a healthy mentality about sex when you spend your entire life being told it's dirty and shameful and you'll go to hell if you think about doing it.

Dan, you should look into the debate that has been going on for a couple of weeks in Fremont, CA where some parents want to water down the sex ed curriculum because the McGraw Hill text book focuses too much on sex.

But once you are married, you can't be tempted by [premarital sex] anymore, so you get attacked by completely different things. Essentially Satan has to find a new angle to attack on.

I feel so sorry for all of those people who have been so estranged from their own beings that their healthy and vital selves are felt as attacks by a personally malevolent entity.

I'm generally a supporter of religion and the spiritual life, but "nondenominational evangelical megachurch[es]" are where religion goes to die and be twisted into perverse delusions. Disgusting.

I pity those guys.

Oh, and fuck religion.

Churches rely on a source of guilt in order to keep people tithing and in the pews. Sexual desire is one of the most powerful sources of guilt since it is nearly universal. However, even without church there's already a lot of emotions surrounding adolescent sexual desire. The church's drive for self preservation exacerbates personal problems rather than helping people find peace.

"Are you behaving?" is that a text or a sext?

Yeah. I don't talk with friends about the details of my sex life, and don't care to hear details about theirs.

Depraved things like Savage wouldn't understand this but it's basic respect for your wife and your marital privacy.

As for the claim that it "hurts guys too" the thing called Savage is as usual lying about the article to which it links. First, the sociologist doesn't mention a negative effect on men, nor mention women at all. She merely notes what anyone who's been married could have told her. Some things about marriage are better than you expected, some worse and some you didn't expect at all.

But hey, Savage hates decency, family and sexuality not expressed as animalistic promiscuity so its lies don't surprise me.

Oh SB, please keep the unintentional irony coming.

Man, this is sad.
It's just sad.

@1, not only that but they are told sex is dirty, shameful, depraved and bestial. Then they get married to what they consider the pure, angelic woman they are supposed to protect and are told, "OK, all that dirty, shameful, depraved and bestial stuff we told you was so bad? Now you can do it with your pure, angelic wife."

That's got to fuck you up in the head.

last week I had an evangelical client tell me that "hell is real". I laughed and said "prove it".

whoops.

@7: Man, I bet you do not even realize why your comment is so hilarious and illuminating. Never stop talking.

LOL I going to comment that Subhumanblues is the poster child for this post but the Subhuman one took care of that for me. LOL

^ *was* sorry that' what I get for laughing while posting.

@7 You're only a few insanely clueless comments away from winning us all over to your side. I'm going to echo @13's request that you keep at it.

Although I, too, am certain the purity pledges screw people up, it was only a study of 15 guys, so I would only treat it as an interesting data point. Get a few hundred more of them from across the country and let's see what screwed up really looks like.

I have firsthand experience with this. My ex-husband was a hyper-religious virgin when we married (I know, I know, I was an idiot). Even though I was very sex-positive and experienced when we married, he was so convinced that sex was eviiiiil having mostly avoided masturbation as a teen and young adult and abstaining from sex, that he had a really bad case of madonna/whore that only got worse after we had kids. We are now divorced, and no matter how bad my life gets now I thank my lucky stars every day that I escaped a worse fate.

The irony of course is that he could only get off with filthy, degrading sex. Which I was okay with, because that's how I roll. Rarely vaginal, almost always anal. But what was wearing was he wasn't interested in any sort of foreplay. And even worse, the contempt he felt towards me for letting him have sex with me that way seeped into the rest of our marriage, so there was contempt towards me all the time.

Oh Seattleblues...
Some day someone will take pity and you will have sex too.

"The newly wedded men also expressed surprise that sexual temptations continued to taunt them."
I laughed.

@ 19, 20 - That's why he's got the Seattle blues.

The striking thing to me was that 3-4 years later, 14 out of 15 WERE MARRIED. 18-22 + 3-4 = 21-26 (but some earlier than that). Apart from not figuring out sex, how can anyone choose a partner carefully when they are that desperate to get married so soon (so they can get some of the Jesus-approved marital sex?)?

I'm going to drive only one car for my entire life, I'm not going to take any lessons, ask my friends how to drive, nor test-drive the car I pick out.

And it's going to be a AMC Pacer, cause Mom had one. But I'm sure it will be great, unlike hers.

And I'm going to be surprised at my curiosity about all those Miatas and Priuses I see drive by.

@7-- you said, "As for the claim that it "hurts guys too" the thing called Savage is as usual lying about the article to which it links. First, the sociologist doesn't mention a negative effect on men...."

How about:

"Studying a group of 15 young evangelical Christian men, Diefendorf found that support groups and open discussions about sex with trusted companions were key in helping the men during their pre-marital years. But once married, she found these men encountered trouble."

OR

"Many of them opened up to struggles with pornography and masturbation, which some considered "destructive" and a threat to their commitment to abstinence."

OR

"They wished for more guidance from the church"

OR

"While the whole point of these support groups is to honor sex in marriage, these men have gotten so used to thinking about sex as something negative that they bring those concerns with them to the marriage bed,"

Sounds to me like there is a lot of stuggling going on, and a conflicted attitude toward sex even within marriage seems, to me, to be a negative effect.

@26 FTW *thread closed*

DAVID @24, +1.

Sex is dirty, shameful, and sinful. That's why you should save it as a gift exclusively for the one special person you'll be loving the most for the rest of your life. Because it's the greatest thing that two people who love each other can do. But don't talk about it, because it's dirty, shameful, and sinful.

@28, That's so gay.

Think reading the posters answers might depress me.
But, enjoyed your response Dan.