Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity (Review)

I have finally read this book. I had wanted to read it since July after reading part of its excerpt on how chastity can be used to develop spiritual discipline.

It's really an amazingly good book. It didn't treat me like an idiot and say things like "Don't have sex before your marriage because there are sexually transmitted diseases" OR "You are NOT married so you REALLY do not understand, guys think differently from women, you need to dress modestly as they ARE different." (You can't believe how many times I was being told that... sigh...Do we really look this dumb??) This book actually told men to cover themselves up when they go jogging. HAHA! Just an example to show how different this book is to what you usually hear in church.

Because I'm too lazy to actually type a passage from the book, so here are parts of an interview with Lauren F. Winner about this book, they should be able to give you a glimpse on what to expect from the book.

The book first started with why we need another book on chastity-- how the church failed in this task.

Is the `True Love Waits' pledge program one of those?
I don't want to pick apart a particular program. Recent studies have come out to show that abstinence pledge card programs tend to delay sexual activity in teenagers by 18 months. So the average non-pledge-card-signing teenager has sex at 18, the average person who signs a pledge card has sex at 19 and a half.

But these programs also don't do college-aged or teenage girls any favors in basically denying that women have sexual desires and saying that their job in remaining chaste is to fend off the walking ball of hormones who takes them to the movies and tries to have sex with them.

One of the things I talk about in the book is in particular how we talk about women's sexuality. So many `Christian' books that I've read on sexuality really don't acknowledge that women have libidos. I don't think that we have to say that men and women are identical, or that men and women experience sexuality in identical ways, to recognize that women do have libidos. We would better serve unmarried women in the church to instead say, look, women also feel sexual desire, and here are some ways that you can discipline that desire rather than saying, eh, you're not really going to have to worry about this.

And then continues to talk about what "Real Sex" is. Apart from the lies our culture tells about sex, there's also a chapter on the LIE OUR CHURCH is telling us about sex. =) And Lie # 1 is "Premarital sex is Guaranteed to make you feel lousy." HAHA!!

Hooked you yet??

Then it goes onto part 2 about how to stay chaste.

It talked about line drawing. It's like one of the top FAQs, "how far can I go with my gf/bf?"
Again an excerpt from the interview for an unmarried Christian.
It's the story of how the man that I'm now married to and I navigated sexuality when we were dating. We got this advice from a very good friend of my husband Griff's, a man who's a campus pastor at the University of Virginia, which is near where we live. He said, what you can do sexually with each other in private is whatever you would feel comfortable doing standing on the steps of the Rotunda, which is the architectural capstone of the university's campus.

And how then how to do it?? As I have posted some excerpts in my previous post on Chastity as Spiritual Discipline, so I'm not going to repeat it. Here's a little bit more from the interview.

What we have to recognize is that the Christian life is full of loss, suffering, and difficulty, in addition to being full of joy, contentment, and peace. Part of what unmarried Christians cope with is that stark recognition that chastity is sometimes really difficult. You have sexual desires and longings that are not fulfilled, just as married Christians sometimes do. The answer involves recognizing that this is a discipline of abstinence, and sometimes it is really difficult and doesn't feel good.

And then followed by " What Marriage Teaches the Church: God's Love Actualised among God's people" and "What Singleness Teaches the Church: Vacancy for God", here's part of it from the Singleness part.



Borrow the book from me or buy it yourself!!

P.S. I have also written about marriage and this book here on my other blog.