Our Weird Relationship with Sex and Nudity

In our upcoming book Married Sex: A Christian Couples’ Guide to Reimagining Your Love Life (October 2021 release date), Debra Fileta (https://truelovedates.com/) and I make it clear that porn is destructive to a marriage’s sexual relationship. If a guy tries to push back and says watching porn with his wife gets him excited, my response is, “Is it your wife you’re excited about, or the thought of sex? Because those are two very different things.”

As I say in my Cherish seminars, we should use sex to cherish our spouse, not use our spouse to cherish sex. Wives in particular know the difference, and it’s huge.

But, having said this, shaming someone who gets excited by sexual images doesn’t help, and far too many sermons and books do that.

It’s normal to notice an attractive body, much less a naked one. It’s normal to be excited when you hear people having sex. For men in particular (whose initial sexual interest is often generated in the limbic portion of their brains), it’s close to inevitable. Our modern society makes sex and nudity seem forbidden which, for some people, only adds to the allure.

The way we live today is weird, historically speaking. For most of human history, married couples didn’t have master suite bedrooms with thick walls. Many children were conceived in one-room farmhouses with perhaps even a mother and father-in-law on the other end of the room, or neighbors in tent-like structures within hearing distance. You bathed, you dressed, you got undressed, and yes, you had sex in semi-private surroundings, at best.

We’ve taken our bodies and sex and tucked them away into these private boxes, making it mysterious and a little naughty, and nudity a bigger deal than it is. For instance, can we just be honest and state that it’s infantile for an adult male to get excited or upset about a woman breastfeeding in public?

Christian culture can make things worse by acting as if seeing a beautiful body must lead to getting sexually aroused which must lead to acting out. You can appreciate a body, you can smile at what you overhear, without getting all sexual about it.

It’s safe to say that in one sense we are more private than just about any point in history, and in another sense we are less private than at any point in history.  A twelve-year-old boy a thousand years ago would have seen multiple real female bodies in various stages of dress and undress. A twelve-year-old boy today has likely seen hundreds of images of female nudity, but perhaps not one real body. The shame that has come out of this bizarre digital divide hasn’t helped us be healthier. Sometimes, it just makes us weird, neurotic, and obsessive.

A Modest Mind

Ambrose, one of my favorite early church fathers, urges men to adopt “modesty of the mind” as much as he urges women to adopt modesty when it comes to clothing. He tells men that looking at a beautiful woman and feeling that “brain spark” (my phrase, not his) isn’t a sin: “To have seen is no sin, but one must be careful that it be not the source of sin. The bodily eye sees, but let the eye of the heart be closed; let modesty of mind remain.”

Teaching young women about modest clothing without teaching young men about “modesty of the mind” is pathetic. But if we teach young men that they are not supposed to be attracted to attractive young women, we are confusing and torturing them. They can’t help but be attracted! But they can stop short of lust.

Ambrose explains,“ Jesus does not say, ‘Whosoever shall look hath committed adultery,’ but ‘Whosoever shall look on her to lust after her.’ He condemned not the look but sought out the inward affection.”

So guys, it’s not shameful to be tempted by porn (and I realize that about twenty percent of porn consumers are women, so this applies to both genders, even though Ambrose, true to his time, exclusively addressed males). If you apply wisdom, there’s definitely a repugnant underbelly to porn that should be more than enough to warn you away. But there’s not something wrong with you when you see a beautiful woman showing a little skin and your brain goes “ping!” What you do with that spark might become shameful, but the spark isn’t shameful. If you cross over from appreciation to sexualizing, you’re going to torture yourself. That’s why Ambrose gently counsels, “let us not instill this fire into our bones.” Nothing good can come of letting your mind roam into forbidden territory. Don’t let the “spark” become a raging fire.

In one sense, many of us simply need to relax, smile, and chill. If you’re a sexual addict, you may need to unleash strong defenses, just as an alcoholic has to be careful about his or her environment. But for the majority of men and women, noticing doesn’t need to lead to lusting.

Let’s seek to have a wise and mature attitude about what it means to be a sexual human being who lives in a body. Don’t let yourself be shamed for a normal human reaction, but also guard against being entrapped by a fallen sinful reaction.

I’ve spent thousands of nights in hotel rooms. One night the walls were paper thin, and I awoke to the sound of a couple enjoying each other. The wife was excited and said something very intimate in a loud voice. Unfortunately, I could hear every word.

To make matters worse, when I left my room the next morning, guess who opened their door five seconds after me, and then shared an elevator ride with me all the way to the lobby? The healthiest thing to do in these situations is laugh (not out loud!) and smile. It’s just life, as God made us. Don’t make more of it than it is.

People have bodies. People have sex. Let’s not make something that is natural a source of shame or even undue embarrassment.

(If you’d like to get an early preview of some portions of Married Sex: A Christian Couple’s Guide to Reimagining Your Sex Life, stay tuned. We’ll be announcing a launch team sometime this summer and will make some of the material accessible for preview then.)