Rev. Linda Simmons
Sex, Faith and the Other
March 15, 2015
Gary and I stayed, as many of you know, at a Trappist Monastery in SC. On one of
these restful, silent, peace-filled days, we decided to go into Charleston and see Fifty
Shades of Grey. It was all the more stunning because of the contrast with the Abby
environment.
But I felt as a minister that I had to go. On our UU minister chat website, ministers
were in great disagreement about what 50 Shades of Grey means and what how we
should respond to it as a liberal religious community. Many folks were very angry
about the film. Christian Grey, the main character, is a stalker and an abuser, some
wrote. We should all protest this film as abuse and contest its stated genre of
romantic.
Romance does not involve manipulation, obsessive control and surveillance, all of
which Christian Grey engages in, some wrote. Some called it the eroticization of
torture and domestic abuse. Others disagreed. Some suggested that 50 Shades of
Grey presented another kind of erotica that though we may not be used to hearing
much about, is just as valid as other types of erotica, as long as it is consensual, and
BDSM, the sexual practice explored in 50 Shades, is a consensual practice.
So why preach about this? Why not preach about the Terminator instead? Though
the terminator also eroticizes violence, it has not stirred up the response that 50
Shades has stirred up and it is this response that seems most salient to me today.
UU Candidates for ministry are expected to be knowledgeable about sexuality in
order to be ordained. We are required to take several sexual education courses that
explore LBGTQI (which stands for lesbian, bi-sexual, gay, transgendered, queer and
intersex) issues and other sexuality concerns of adults and adolescents so that we
can offer appropriate pastoral care and public witness. Candidates are expected to
demonstrate a commitment to sexual justice in our Association and in society.
Conservatives Christian preachers also talk about sex, much more often than we do
as the liberal religious left. They preach about what they find unacceptable about
sex including pre-marital sex, homosexuality and abortion.
The UUA has embraced a Religious Declaration on Sexual Morality, Justice and
Healing that over 3,000 clergy and religious leaders from 50 different
denominations have signed, including me. A part of the letter reads:
“We come from diverse religious communities to recognize sexuality as central to
our humanity and as integral to our spirituality. We are speaking out against the
pain, brokenness, oppression and loss of meaning that many experience about their
sexuality.
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Our faith traditions celebrate the goodness of creation, including our bodies and our
sexuality. We sin when this sacred gift is abused or exploited. However, the great
promise of our traditions is love, healing and restored relationships.
Our culture needs a sexual ethic focused on personal relationships and social justice
rather than particular sexual acts. All persons have the right and responsibility to
lead sexual lives that express love, justice, mutuality, commitment, consent and
pleasure. Grounded in respect for the body and for the vulnerability that intimacy
brings, this ethic fosters physical, emotional and spiritual health. It accepts no
double standards and applies to all persons, without regard to sex, gender, color,
age, bodily condition, marital status or sexual orientation.”
For me and many other ministers, discussions about sexuality, including from the
pulpit, are part of religious responsibility.
50 Shades of Grey is what is happening now and the response from outcry to
fascination, from repulsion to attraction, is worthy of attention
My mom and I have been talking about the sensation. She read the book and I saw
the movie. She asked me, Linda, why are women so outraged about this
movie/book? Look at all of the abuse of women on the TV screen. Why not speak to
that? It’s a good question. I answered, well mom, the movie was released on
Valentine’s Day and called a romance. When women are abused in other films, the
abuse is known as abuse and not romance. Women want this film to be called other
than a romance and have the unequal power dynamics between a culturally defined
beautiful man, a , billionaire, and control freak and a 20 something virgin, middle
class college student be called what it is: an abuse of power.
Mom countered, Honey, it’s not true that abuse of women on the screen is
universally called abuse. Look at James Bond films. I don’t see women protesting the
objectification of women when another one of those films comes out.
That mom of mine. She is good at so sweetly kicking me off my highfalutin horse!
So, why the fuss?
One of the ministers on the UUMA chat site, Rev. Debra Haffner, who was on my
ministerial fellowship panel that reviews all of us in seminary to ascertain our
fitness for ministry, is a sexologist and director of the Religious Institute, Founded in
2001, the Religious Institute is a multifaith organization dedicated to advocacy for
sexual health, education, and justice in faith communities and society. All of us
ministers were anxious to have her chime on the chat site. It is through her Institute
that we take our sexual health classes, and she is the premier voice on sexuality
within the UUA.
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Debra Haffner’s take was not what I expected. Here is some of what she said:
Dear colleagues:
There seems to be a general consensus that the movie does
not reflect responsible or usual BDSM practices, and that parts
border on abusive.
She goes on to say that the Religious Institute does not
comment on specific sexual practices but is rather committed
to a sexual ethic that is based on relationships that are
consensual, safe, non-exploitative, and mutually pleasurable.
Haffner goes on, Most interesting to me is WHY this badly
written, very sex role bound, book and movie have hit such a
chord. Like other books before it over the decades (The Story
of O, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, even Madame Bovary), I think it
plays into people's desire to have a more complex, more
intense sexual life (even if just in fantasy) than their own lives
provide. The biggest sexual problems in long term
relationship are boredom and anger.”
Boredom and anger, which many folks I have spoken to define
rather as boredom and frustration, has many roots including
not feeling heard, not feeling understood sexually, not feeling
that the place of sex in the relationship grows intimacy and
connection in the ways either party hoped.
So why would 50 Shades of Grey touch this cord?
Newsweek published a special edition in March called, Fifty Shades, Exploring the
Sexual Revolution: A Global Conversation Celebrating Love and Romance Today.
The magazine hosted articles like, Fifty Shades of Food touting foods that are
supposedly sexy, and Buns of Steele, spelled with an e at the end like Ana’s, the lead
female character’s, last name, and I’m a Sex Whisperer.
The mag had multiple interviews with women who found Christian Grey sexy
because quote, “He takes what he wants.”
Reading this mag, I understood the outrage on the minsters’ chat site. That a man
who is uber dominant is still sexy to women means that a woman who is uber
submissive is still considered sexy too. That is disappointing after all the work we
have done as women to establish equality and the right to the expression of
strength.
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What I learned primarily from this magazine is that someone did a great job
marketing this film and book and that most of it is sexy hype. But it is more than that
too.
It also brings up the question of consensus. Many who see the film say that Ana had
control at all times. She could say the words yellow or red, her safety words, and all
action stopped. There was a contract between them that Ana had a right to amend
before signing (though she never got to signing it). And in the end, Ana leaves
Christian.
My colleague, Rev. Angela Herrera, discusses the difference between mutual consent
and meaningful consent in her recent sermon entitled, Good Sex.1 Meaningful
consent, she says, can never happen between an 18 year old and a 50 year old, for
instance. Fifty Shades of Grey brings to our attention the question, Was there
meaningful consent between a sexually experienced billionaire and a younger,
middle class virgin?
And why does this matter? Because what we call sexy matters. It matters to our
young children and to all the women out there who still think they can change
someone with their love who has been abused, like Christian Grey, who tells us in
response to the question from Ana, why can’t you let yourself be loved, touched,
understood that his mom was a crack addict and did things to him he is not willing
to recount.
We still need to take a stand for ourselves and our children and youth.
As important to look at I think, is the other chord the movie struck, the one to shake
up our sex lives, to be released from what many call the boredom and frustration of
their sexual lives?
Many of my friends tell me that sex is not about love and should not have to be.
There is also the polyamory group that believes that respectful sex and love is
possible without monogamy. I agree with Debra Haffner that the point is not about
the practices but about meaningful consent, as I would call it, and the mutuality of
pleasure and respect.
What strikes me is that how we see another sexually and in all aspects of life,
matters.
When Gary and I were at Mepkin Abbey, he read aloud to me a book entitled,
Trappist, Living in the Land of Desire, by Michael Downey. I know it seems odd to be
looking to the chaste monks to untangled the complex sexual web of life, but I find
them good teachers.
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Angela Herrera, Good Sex, First Unitarian Church of Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 17, 2015
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Whether we are engaging in monogamous or polyamorous relationships and
whether we are lesbian, bi-sexual, gay, transgendered, queer, intersex or
heterosexual and whether our practice include kink or not, the question that
remains salient for me is this: What do we expect another to offer us as sexual
beings and how do we both take responsibility for those expectations and learn to
express them? And when I ask this question the next one that pops into my mind is:
How have we been trained culturally to see the other, in this case, our sexual
partner or partners and what is the role of sex in our lives?
I think we often see each other, in and outside of the bedroom, as existing to affirm
us, to complete us, as another who might just be able to relieve us from the intense
experience of aloneness that we all know as part of being human and from some of
the monotony of day to day life too.
What if we started there?
What if we approached sex not with the focus of getting our needs for pleasure met,
those these are important, but with learning who another was, on using this time of
great vulnerability and intimacy to discover another, not only how they are made up
physically but how they are made up spiritually? This might be a route to increasing
pleasure and reducing boredom and frustration. For what brings pleasure I find to
be a deeply spiritual question. If our bodies are reflections of the holy which we
define all the way from god to the earth as Unitarian Universalists, then what we do
with them, how we explain them and feel through them, matters to us as spiritual
beings.
From the book, Trappist, Living in the Land of Desire, Downey writes: “The monk
searches for the face of the Other of God precisely as other. God is elusive, always
more, overspilling our concepts. Decentering the self, making room for the Other of
God through humility… means making room in oneself for all who challenge us to
see beyond the narrow confines of self-absorption, self-fixation, self-preoccupation.
Through constant hospitality the monk is able to make room for the other: the other
person, other people, the other who is God…to be a monk is to entertain the
stranger, the exile, the other precisely as other, one’s whole life long. It involves
getting out of the way so the other can live precisely as other than myself.”2
What would happen if we entered our sexual lives with this prayer of the other the
brothers offer us? What if we met in our sexual relationships not only to be to
pleased but to discovery another’s difference, to honor another’s difference,
sanctity, completeness, unique expression of selfhood?
Downey goes on, “Far too often in our relationships with others we perceive them as
mere extensions of ourselves. We relate to them, indeed comply with the demands
2
Michael Downey, Trappist: Living in the Land of Desire (New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1997) 117.
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they make on us, because in doing so there is something for us in it. But it is an
altogether different matter to submit to the claim of another precisely as other.
There is an other whose otherness is radically different from myself…The other is a
person, not just an extension of myself (or my pleasure I would add).
The other has a face…the other has a name, and it is not mine…Is there room enough
in our lives for the other we would rather let remain other- the stranger, the exile?”
How often in our sexual and other relationships do we enter into terrain with one
whose strangeness, whose otherness strikes us as not ourselves with joy, curiosity
and acceptance? If we can imagine this other as uniquely other, as one we can never
truly know and who will never truly know us, and we can communicate, we can tell
the story of our own personhood through our willingness to be present, I imagine
that sex could be not only a way of pleasure but of spiritual joy.
Downey concludes, “The deepest desire of the human heart is for relationship, for
living the fullness of communion. When we taste this communion, we come to
know…that relationship is the deepest and fullest of divine mysteries. Everything is
related to everything else.”
We are all connected, irrevocably. And within this connectedness, the stories that
make up our lives are uniquely written on in our minds and on our bodies. It takes
time, respect, intention to learn another, to see another. How we look, with which
part of who we are we leave room to see, matters. This is a spiritual practice.
What I hope for us all is that we consider what the spirituality of sexuality and of
relating means to us and unwrap these dynamic, ever changing and evolving paths
of being together in ways that feel safe, respectful, meaningfully consensual and
mutually pleasurable.
May we all leave room to open the spiritual door of knowing those who are not us in
all the many ways and places that we find ourselves in relationship.
Amen
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