I have done literally nothing to get ready for Christmas—nothing—except suffer the installation of an enormous tree in my living room during a time when no one had time to put lights on it or anything. So, to celebrate this hideous reality, let’s have a smattering of takes.
One
We got home super late last night to discover that the kids had waited up for us and wanted to tell us all about their week. They were full of gossip and news and Christmas cheer, or Advent enthusiasm or whatever. Gosh, teenagers are the worst—why do they wake up at night? Why aren’t they sullen and uninterested in life? Why don’t they lurk in their rooms, trying to avoid me? I thought I was going to die listening to their boundless amount of news, but I didn’t. After a suitable interval, I staggered upstairs to go to bed only to discover that Lucy, the cat, was seriously angry that we had left her here alone with a household of affectionate cat lovers who were committed to petting her as much as she liked and signaled her wroth by peeing all over our bed in our absence. And then, I KID YOU NOT, she peed on me while I was sleeping, just to make sure I got the point.
Ok, ok, I get it, Lucy, I will never go anywhere ever again. I’m sorry for thinking I could travel or do other things like that. SORRY. Lesson learned.
Two
It did occur to me in the foul dawn as I gathered up my mounds of laundry that it’s been about a year that we’ve had this cat. Last Christmas the person who loved her best had her house burn down, and then she fell terribly ill and spent some time in the hospital. In fact, she never left the hospital. She died after Christmas, quite suddenly. And poor Lucy has been walking up and down ever since, bereft, howling, trying to make us fill up the hole in her heart. We try, but we’ve not succeeded as well as we wanted to.
As I’m typing this my phone is inviting me to buy pet insurance—-Oh My Gosh Just Stop. We can barely afford to get our teeth done. Please don’t everyone start buying pet insurance so that the cost of keeping healthy animals becomes even more prohibitive. Uncool guys, Uncool.
Three
I know I already posted the talk I gave, but here’s the video version:
Four
And my Sheila Wray Gregoire article came out this week. I posted it on the socials, but here it is in case you don’t want to go over to those kinds of places:
In the 1980s, comedian Harry Enfield mercilessly satirized the social conventions of bygone eras, exposing through his often-profane sketches the shifting mores of British culture in that decade. An early adopter of the mockumentary style, Enfield produced short public service announcements, my favorite of which is called “Women, Know Your Limits,” with a close second being his “Conjugal Rights Guide.” On YouTube, the clip is only four minutes long, but Enfield packs it with all the embarrassment and shame the average British comedian is so famous for. Some of the lines from this sketch furnish me with the necessary cutups and jokes I require to get through the many hours of premarital counseling I and my husband offer to young (and sometimes older) people entering the blessed estate of holy matrimony. Whenever the conversation becomes embarrassing — for me chiefly, most people today don’t have any trouble talking about sex — I pull out these old chestnuts:
“Given time, an atmosphere will flourish in which the conditions for conjugal unpleasantness will become possible.”
“The more foreign-minded of you might even consider sharing a bed.”
“Now it’s time to have a stiff drink, and get on with the ugly business in hand.”
“If this is your first attempt at beastliness, you may have some difficulty uniting your unmentionables.”1
It is useful, in other words, to be reminded that two people enjoining themselves in the act of sexual intercourse has always been fraught, sometimes painful — emotionally or otherwise — and always heaped with controversy. That is because, as the Scriptures tell us, when two people join their bodies together, something more is going on — both in their own spirits and in the spiritual realm where God makes His habitation.
It is in this disposition that I sallied forth to investigate the work of Sheila Wray Gregoire, host of the Bare Marriage Podcast and author of many popular books, including The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You’ve Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended,2 She Deserves Better: Raising Girls to Resist Toxic Teachings on Sex, Self and Speaking Up,3 and, most recently, Fixed It for You: Volume 1: Rescuing and Reframing Common Evangelical Messages on Sex and Marriage.4
Healthy, Biblical, Evidence-Based
If evangelicals have learned anything in the last twenty-five years, it is that sex is supposed to be enjoyable — for both parties. The fact that “sex is a gift from God,” Wray Gregoire and her co-authors write in The Great Sex Rescue, is likely “something that your pastor says from the pulpit when he can’t talk about sex too explicitly, but he really, really, really wants everyone to know how great it is” (emphasis in original).5 Wray Gregoire herself has been writing and speaking on the subject since at least 2010. In the early decades of her books and blogs, she articulated the prevailing views of the time. Around 2016, however, when the West was convulsed by political upheaval and the #MeToo movement, Wray Gregoire began both to review her own work and critique some of the most popular books on the subject, a project that culminated in 2021 with The Great Sex Rescue. Evaluating the messaging most commonly preached, she writes:
We used the top-selling secular marriage book to serve as a control group, giving us fourteen books in total. We then created a rubric of twelve elements of healthy sexuality and rated each of these fourteen books on those elements on a scale of 0–4. We divided the twelve questions into three categories — infidelity, pleasure, and mutuality — of four questions each. To receive a healthy rating, a book must not have more than two 0 scores. To receive a neutral rating, a book must pass each category. Each of the following questions is framed with the healthy teaching first and the unhealthy teaching last. On our scoring rubric, we also delineated what messages would constitute different scores. You can find our complete scoring rubric at our website.6
By this measure, Love and Respect7 and Sheet Music8 were deemed “harmful”; Tim Keller’s The Meaning of Marriage9 was “neutral”; and John Gottman’s The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work10 was “helpful.”11 They posed questions like the following of the various books they examined:
“Does the book acknowledge the effect of pornography on men’s self-perception, sex drives, and sexual function, or does it ignore porn’s harm to marriages?”12
“Does the book frame sex as something a woman will anticipate and look forward to, or does it frame sex as something she will tend to dread?”13
“Does the book explain that sex has many purposes, including intimacy, closeness, fun, and physical pleasure for both, or does it portray sex as being primarily about fulfilling his physical need?”14
Both in The Great Sex Rescue and She Deserves Better, the authors take what, at this point, amounts to proverbial wisdom about the differences between men and women, how men and women relate to each other, and what each expects out of their sex lives, and then the authors deconstruct those beliefs by showing how damage is being done. To elucidate the harm, Wray Gregoire and her co-authors, Rebecca Gregoire Lindenbach and Joanna Sawatsky, work through data they collected from 20,000 surveys gathered from their various online platforms. The project was spread by word of mouth, and they evaluated the responses using the measurements they chose for discerning the relative goodness of evangelical women’s sex lives. “Many Christians,” they discovered, “simply aren’t experiencing amazing, mind-blowing, earth-shattering, great sex. We want to change that.”15
Read the whole thing! Oh, and don’t skip the footnotes, because I couldn’t fit in everything I wanted to say into the main article.
Five
I think a lot of the flap about that Christian Nationalism documentary is dying down, but Meg Basham did a nice little piece on it:
Give Rob Reiner this much: he’s always known how to capitalise on a trend. On December 7, the outspoken Democrat announced that “God and Country,” a documentary about the left’s boogeyman du jour, will be hitting theaters in February just in time for election season. “Christian Nationalism is not only a danger to our Country,” Reiner assured his 2.5 million X followers, “it’s a danger to Christianity itself.” This raises the question of what exactly Reiner thinks Christian Nationalism is.
My word for 2024, I think, is going to be “boogeyman.” This year, if you remember, I picked the word “Fatuous” and I used it as often as I could without becoming obnoxious. I think The Fatuous Boogeyman sounds like a cool band. Goodness, I must give this some serious thought as the year runs to its demise.
Six
I did enjoy very much sitting in the airport reading whatever I wanted. I got through this long thing. The writing is beautiful and the subject is pertinent. It was so provocative and curious I’m going to read it again as I have time this week. Here’s a snip:
Lawrence’s ideas, like his style, have always been easy to mock. Yet even individuals with strong grounds for resenting him—Mabel Dodge Luhan, for example, whose hospitality he accepted even as he assassinated her character—admitted, after he died, that he had been right. “Lawrence was always right,” Luhan wrote in a memoir called Lorenzo in Taos. “Although he never ‘adapted’ and never fitted into the environment, though he suffered and made anyone who came near him suffer; though he threw everyone over sooner or later, and not once, but as often as they rejoined his turbulent and intractable spirit . . . Lawrence was right,” the same conclusion reached by Rebecca West in an elegy, and by Catherine Carswell as she protested the posthumous portrayal of Lawrence in the press.
Despite the worst his detractors continue to say about him—sometimes with good motives, sometimes with bad (Luhan, incidentally, had tried and failed to break up his marriage)—the appeal of Lawrence and his books has not abated. In the last few years alone, Geoff Dyer edited a selection of his essays, Rachel Cusk wrote a novel reimagining his relationship with Luhan, Frances Wilson published a biography that maps passages of his life onto the framework of The Divine Comedy, and in a freewheeling historical novel that follows the legal trials of Lady Chatterley in America, Alison MacLeod placed at the center of the action, of all people, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Every half-baked writer acquainted with Lawrence in his lifetime felt compelled to write about him after his death, and even today, anyone searching for an alternative to the zeitgeist may find himself grappling with this most unwoke of writers. In my own case, when I was still decades away from the Catholic Church, some of whose foundational teachings align with Lawrence’s, I was riveted by Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow, The Lost Girl, and, yes, long sections of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a book unfortunate in its title (the author wanted to rechristen it Tenderness). On the frontispiece of her novel about Lady Chatterley and Jackie Kennedy—a book she did call Tenderness—Alison MacLeod quotes Gwyn Thomas speaking to the defense solicitor for Penguin Books: “If they want to renounce Lawrence, then let them, for pity’s sake, renounce life.”
And what was life, for Lawrence? Touch, in a word. Connection, or real intercourse with other human beings and the created world. Nothing could be more unjust than to blame Lawrence for the situation that has overtaken us today, given that he not only saw what was coming but struggled to inoculate us in advance against what he would have bluntly called a machine-driven, life-destroying epidemic of masturbation.
The whole thing is so good—I came away realizing I haven’t thought enough about all of that (in spite of writing and reading about it far more than I’d like) and therefore don’t know what I think.
Seven
Well, I’ve gotta go lift weights and laundry and recover what little sanity I have before whatever else is supposed to happen. Have a nice day!
I suspect that the reason your teenagers are not surly, withdrawn, and disrespectful is that you have spent enough time in their company, teaching them, enjoying them, talking to them with an open heart, and inviting their honest responses that they truly enjoy your company. And of course teaching them to love Jesus my word and example. But of course, you knew that - sarcasm does need something to feed on however.
I had a vindictive cat like that, too, lol. He was so angry with us whenever we went on vacation, despite having lovely people take care of him while we were gone.