Best Sex Writing 2012: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (7 page)

So what is going on here? What does this report say, and what is its take-home message—both for believers and atheists?

Atheism Is for Lovers

Here’s one take-home message: atheists fuck better. Or rather, atheists have a better time fucking. They feel less guilt about it; they experience more satisfaction with it. And the effect on their sex lives of leaving religion is almost universally positive.

These effects vary with the religion. According to “Sex and Secularism,” some religions have a harsher impact on people’s sex lives than others. People raised as Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, for instance, ranked much higher on the sexual guilt scale than people raised as Buddhists and Episcopalians. And no, we shouldn’t just assume that Catholicism is the guiltiest party. In fact, when it comes to which religions make their practitioners feel guilty about sex, Catholicism is pretty much smack in the middle. At the top of the list are Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witness, Pentecostal, Seventh-day Adventist, and Baptist. This is just one of many results in this report that run counter to conventional wisdom.

A similar pattern shows up again and again throughout the report. Conservative religions have a much more harmful effect on people’s sex lives than more moderate or progressive ones—in terms of guilt, sexual education and information, the ability to experience pleasure, the ability to accept one’s sexual identity, and more.

But with only two exceptions—Unitarianism and Judaism—atheists experience less sexual guilt than religious believers of any denomination. On a scale of 1 to 10—1 being no sexual guilt and 10 being extreme sexual guilt—atheists ranked 4.71 and agnostics ranked 4.81. Only Unitarianism and Judaism ranked slightly lower, at 4.14 and 4.48 respectively; all other religions ranked higher in sexual guilt: from 5.88 for Lutherans to 6.34 for Catholics, all the way up to a whopping 8.19 for Mormons.

And sexual guilt doesn’t rise only with the conservativeness of the religion. It rises with religiosity, period. The more religious your upbringing is, the worse your sexual guilt is likely to be. Of people raised in very religious homes, 22.5 percent said they were shamed or ridiculed for masturbating (to give just one example), compared to only 5.5 percent of people brought up in the least religious homes. And of people raised in very religious homes, 79.9 percent felt guilty about a specific sexual activity or desire, while among people raised in the least religious and most secular homes, that number drops to 26.3 percent. That’s a huge difference.

But one of the most surprising conclusions of this research is that sexual guilt from religion doesn’t wreck people’s sex lives forever.

According to conventional wisdom—and I will freely admit that I held this conventional wisdom myself—religious guilt about sex continues to torment people long after the religion itself has lost its hold. But according to “Sex and Secularism,” that’s rarely the case. Once people let go of religion, they report positive experiences of sex, and relative lack of guilt about it, at about the same rate as people who were never religious in the first place.

Ray was surprised by this result as well. (Surprising results—a sign of good science!) “We did think that religion would have residual effects in people after they left,” he told me, “but our data did not show this. That was a very pleasant surprise. That is not to say that some people don’t continue to experience problems, but the vast majority seem to shake it off and get on with their sexual lives pretty well.” So letting go of religion means a rebound into a sex life that’s as satisfying, and as guilt-free, as a sex life that was never touched by religion in the first place.

Now, some hard-core religious believers might argue that this isn’t a good thing. “People should feel sexual guilt!” they’d argue. “Sex is bad, mmmkay? God doesn’t approve. People should feel guilty about it.”

But two things are worth pointing out. First of all, the activities studied by this research are, from any rational perspective, morally neutral. This report doesn’t consider rape, or nonconsensual voyeurism, or groping people on the subway. It considers masturbation, oral sex, nonmarital sex, homosexuality: sex acts and sexualities that are consensual, egalitarian, reasonably safe, and harmless to society. The taboos against them are just that: taboos. If there ever were any solid practical or moral reasons behind them, they’re buried in the mists of history. And different religions have entirely different sets of these sexual taboos: One religion may denounce certain sex acts and accept others, while another accepts Column B but denounces Column A. If God has a message for us about who and how he wants us to boff, he’s not being very clear about it.

Maybe more to the point, religion has essentially no effect on people’s actual sexual behavior, according to the report. Atheists and believers engage in the same practices, at basically the same rate, starting at essentially the same age. We’re all doing pretty much the same stuff. Believers just feel worse about it. As Ray told me, “Our data shows that people feel very guilty about their sexual behavior when they are religious, but that does not stop them: it just makes them feel bad. Of course, they have to return to their religion to get forgiveness. It’s as if the church gives you the disease, then offers you a fake cure.” So the argument that religious sexual guilt is good because it polices immoral sexual behavior fails on two fronts. The sexual behavior it’s policing isn’t actually immoral—and the policing is almost entirely ineffective.

Oh, by the way—this improvement in people’s sex lives when they leave religion isn’t just about relieving sexual guilt. The improvement shows up in many aspects of their sex lives, such as their willingness to share sex fantasies with a partner, for example. Most important, it shows up in people’s assessments of their sex lives overall. This is truest of the people who were heavily religious before their deconversion. On a scale of 1 to 10—1 being a sex life that is much worse after leaving religion, 10 being a sex life that is much improved—people who had the most religious lives before averaged a very high 7.81; 61.6 percent gave an answer of 8, 9, or 10—“greatly improved.” People with little or no religion in their life before they became atheists mostly report that their sex lives didn’t change that much.

In fact, for the handful of atheists who reported that their sex lives worsened when they left religion—2.2 percent of participants—almost all tell the same story: their sex lives got worse because—well, to put it bluntly, their partners or potential partners were still religious, and now that they were atheists, they weren’t getting any. Their spouses got upset because they’d become atheists ; their pool of potential sex partners dried up. As one respondent commented, “My wife said to me, ‘How can I sleep with someone who doesn’t share my faith? ’” Another, somewhat more waggishly, said, “When I was a Christian I could lay any girl in church, now that I am an atheist, they won’t even talk to me.”

Perhaps one of the most powerful messages in this report—if one of the least surprising—is the decidedly negative effect of religion on sexual education and information. People raised in more strongly religious homes ranked the quality of their sex education as significantly worse than people raised in less religious homes: 2.4 on a 5-point scale, as opposed to 3.2 from the less religious folks. And the more-religious kids were less likely to get sex information from their parents than the less-religious ones—13.5 percent, as opposed to 38.2 percent—and more likely to get it from personal sexual experience and pornography.

In case the irony escapes anyone, let me hammer it home. The highly religious, “family values” crowd are more likely to get their sexual information from porn and fooling around—while the less religious folks are more likely to talk to their parents. And in case anyone is wondering why sex education was included in this study on sexual happiness: accurate sex education and information has been consistently shown to be one of the cornerstones of a happy, satisfying sex life.

Which, again, atheists are a lot more likely to have.

Happy Endings

So what does this research say to believers?

Well, the most obvious message would be: come on in—the water’s fine.

In debates with atheists, many believers argue for religion on the basis of how good it makes them feel. They argue that religion is emotionally useful, psychologically useful, socially useful: that religion gives people a sense of meaning, moral guidance, comfort in hard times, etc. It’s an argument that drives many atheists up a tree—myself included—since it has absolutely nothing to do with whether religion is, you know, true. (Believing in Santa Claus might make kids happy and better-behaved, but you wouldn’t argue that people should keep putting cookies by the fireplace on Christmas Eve well into their adult years.)

But if this report is to be believed, this usefulness argument is conclusively shown to be bogus—even on its own terms. At least when it comes to sex. (It’s probably bogus when it comes to the rest of our lives as well—or rather, it would be bogus if our society didn’t privilege religious belief and treat atheism with bigotry and contempt. Countries with higher rates of atheism actually have higher levels of happiness and social functioning than more religious countries. But I digress.)

Religion doesn’t make people happier. Not in the sack, anyway. Religion makes people less happy. Leaving religion makes people happier. There’s no reason to hang on to beliefs you don’t actually believe in and that don’t actually make sense to you, just because you can’t imagine a happy and fulfilling life without them. We know that leaving religion can be a scary and painful process—but once it’s behind you, life is good. And the sex is great. Come on in. The water’s fine.

And what does this report say to atheists?

This report, people, is our sales pitch.

Again, I will make this very clear: The fact that atheists fuck better has no bearing whatsoever on whether atheism is correct. And atheists should not pretend that it does.

But when believers make the argument from utility—when they argue that religion is important and necessary because it makes people happy—we don’t have to just tear our hair out and say, “Does not! Does not!” We can print out this report and hand it to them with a smile.

A satisfied smile.

To All the Butches I Loved between 1995 and 2005: An Open Letter about Selling Sex, Selling Out, and Soldiering On

Amber Dawn

You were a set of sturdy boys in well-worn Carhartt jeans and rock T-shirts. Rough scrubbed, each one of you, from your Brylcreemed hair to your polished black jump boots. You rode bellowing 1970s muscle bikes, drove cars with duct-tape interiors, walked with practiced swaggers. You could hold your own at the pool table and in the kitchen—cooking your mamas’ comfort-food recipes. You played “Ace of Spades” on electric guitar and hemmed your own pants. You spent your days painting six-bedroom houses in Shaughnessy, tending to show-jumping horses, keeping university grounds, or otherwise soiling your fingers. You were evolved renditions of the very boy a small-town slut like me was expected to wind up with. But unlike that probable boyfriend, you were a feminist, you rejected the status quo with much greater consideration than it rejected you, and you didn’t leave me a knocked-up single mother-to-be. I couldn’t possibly have told you enough how truly remarkable you were.

To all the butches I loved between 1995 and 2005, there is a consequential and heartfelt queue of things I never said to you. Blame booze or youth, frequently practiced self-flagellation, homophobia, or a brew of stinking societal influences for me holding my tongue. What matters now is that I put some honest words to our past and—if the graces allow—that you will hear me.

If the details are a blur (and I don’t blame you if they are), let me remind you that I was your girl, your mommy, your headache, or your heart song (depending on my mood). On a good day I wrote poetry, walked rescue dogs, or led survivors’ support groups at the women’s center. I’d all but quit rush drugs, but on a bad day I drank like a fancy fighting betta fish in a small bowl. I spent my nights gliding around softly lit massage parlors in a pair of flitter-pink stilettos. Personal economics informed my femme identity. My transition took place in prudent increments: I grew my neon-orange dyke hair into a mane of bleached blonde; I shaved my armpits and pussy; I dropped down to 100 pounds, and, in effect, I learned to indulge the tastes of men with money to spend. When the business was good, I made more in an hour than you did all week.

This is where my overdue disclosures begin. Whenever I picked up the dinner tab or put gas in your tank, we’d both swallow a quiet shame. I might have mumbled something aloof like, “Easy come, easy go,” handling the neatly folded bills with the same cool discretion as my male customers did when they paid me.

For a good long time, I positioned this shame entirely in a have-and-have-not credo. I believed that all my shame came from the very same grounds as my pride: my humble class background.

I’ve since realized that this summation is too easy.

You and I and just about everyone we knew were salt-of-the-earth folk. Salt of the earth meets pervert, that is, on account of our being the kind of kinky, tough-love queers that set us apart from our back-home birth families. Ours was an elbow-grease, adult-children-of-alcoholics, there-ain’t-no-such-thing-as-a-free-lunch butch-femme. That’s right, let’s say it again. Our was a damaged-goods, bitter-pill, better-luck-next-time butch-femme. We were cut from the same threadbare cloth, and we wore it well. Our world was filled with modest yet revered codes and traditions. When guests came over, they were offered mismatched kitchen chairs to sit on. If there was whiskey in the cupboard, it was either Jim or Jack. Clothing was swapped. Tools were shared. There were logging-road camping trips and back-alley bonfires. We danced like crazy in creaky-floored rental rec centers and declining dance halls; we’d make the air hot and muggy, the old wood floors stickier than flypaper. And in the dark safe corners of the night, we fucked with our fists, teeth, and hearts like we were indestructible. This was our behind-the-eight-ball butch-femme. I was never ashamed of it.