Reasons to be an Egalitarian: Better (& more Biblical) Sex

This post is not explicit, but due to it's topic of married sexuality and the Bible, it is probably not for younger folks.  If you are not of age to talk about sex in a mature way, this post is not for you.  Please move on.


Yes, seriously, you read that right.  Not only is this an argument that being an egalitarian can help a married couple's sex life, but also one that it can make for a more Biblical sex life (yes, this argument will assume that is a thing), and for further irony it's written by a supremely unqualified virgin who could list all the romantic relationship's he's been in on one hand without using any fingers or thumbs...but as it happens the Bible makes this argument a very straightforward one to make.  It all starts in 1 Corinthians 7, which, to my knowledge, is the New Testament's only touch on the topic of what married sex ought to look like.

"Now regarding the questions you asked in your letter. Yes, it is good to abstain from sexual relations.  But because there is so much sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman should have her own husband.  The husband should fulfill his wife's sexual needs, and the wife should fulfill her husband's needs.  The wife gives authority over her body to her husband, and the husband gives authority over his body to his wife.  Do not deprive each other of sexual relations, unless you both agree to refrain from sexual intimacy for a limited time so you can give yourselves more completely to prayer. Afterward, you should come together again so that Satan won't be able to tempt you because of your lack of self-control."

—1 Corinthians 7:1-5, NLT

This is basically what a Biblical married sex life looks like.  Add in a bit of Leviticus to taste (purity laws being optional after the inclusion of Gentiles into the Church), and whatever you can make sense of in Song of Solomon, and that's about it.  What's important to note here for our purposes is the use of authority in this verse.  The wife submits her body to her husband's authority, and he submits his to her authority.  It's a picture of mutual submission, mutual decisions, equality, and cooperation.

Why this is more compatible with an egalitarian than complimentarian understanding of gender is fairly obvious.  In the complimentarian understanding, women are fundamentally and divinely unsuited for having authority and are specifically forbidden from ever exercising authority over a man—that she should ever exercise authority over her own husband (whom she has verbally promised to obey) is unthinkable!  And yet this is precisely what the Bible says the wife must be allowed to do in the bedroom, she must have authority over her husband's body in exactly the same way he does over hers.  This sort of shared authority and shared submission simply cannot be squared with the belief that submission and authority are gender-specific roles.

Okay, so why does this make for a better sex life, and how on Earth can a virgin possibly know that it does?  Well don't worry, I'm not about to go into an uninformed rant about how we should blindly accept anything said to come from the Bible as inherently better.  "Your hair is like a flock of goats," is an amorous compliment straight from the pages of scripture, but I've never heard of a guy who could use it successfully today in flirting.  Instead, I want us to consider the outcomes of where each partner places their emphasis in sex.  Let's assume a complimentarian position of total male authority.  Obviously, the wife, out of obedience, must place her emphasis on pleasing her husband.  Where does the husband place his emphasis?  As the one with authority, it would seem he has the freedom to be selfish.  Selfishness isn't compatible with the Bible's insistence that men give self-sacrificial love to their women, but as I discussed in my last post complimentarianism isn't really very good at putting those verses into practice and selfishness is a much more likely outcome.  So with her trying to please him and him trying to please himself, what happens?  Even a virgin can tell, because the question isn't really sexual at this point: it's relational.  The same thing will happen in this situation as happens in any situation where two parties come together, one trying to please the other and the other trying to take whatever it can get.  The dominant party will go away sated and the other party will be less so.  In extreme situations, it may even be used.  In sex this means he gets to orgasm and she doesn't.  In extreme situations (with extreme people) this may even mean that he uses his belief in male leadership to physically dominate and rape her (yes, spousal rape is a thing: no still means no even after marriage).  Obviously this is a sub-par situation for the wife.  The husband seems to be doing alright though...but let's see what happens when we take the model from 1 Corinthians 7 instead.

In that model, the wife still places her emphasis on the husband's pleasure, but now he must also place his emphasis on her pleasure.  Furthermore, both of them have enough authority to rectify the situation if they are not satisfied.  This leads to an overall attitude of cooperation where both parties work together to maximize the benefits to each other.  This again, is not an exclusively sexual concept.  In business, when two parties interact this way, it's called integrative negotiation.  Each is seeking to creatively and cooperatively find strategies and approaches that will help meet each other's needs.  Obviously this means that each party is maximizing the benefits to their opposite, but this also has a curious logical consequence: by working together, the two parties realize a total benefit far greater than the total benefit of parties that approach the interaction in a compromise or distributive (opposite of integrative) manner.  A practical example would be two people coming to the last piece of pumpkin pie.  In a distributive arrangement, they fight it out and one side gets most or all of the piece of pie and the other gets little or none.  In compromise, they each get half a slice.  But in an integrative arrangement, they compare notes and resources—he realizes she has spare money for a new pie, but no way to get to the store; she realizes he has a car and is willing to drive her, but has no money for a pie himself—, they combine these resources, and in the end they both get half of a new pie, plus half a slice of the old one!  What's this look like in sex?  Well, take the idea of two partners coming together, each devoted to giving maximum pleasure to the other, and both of them freely collaborating on creative and resourceful ways to achieve this end, and use your imagination.  One thing's for sure, the man who dominates and takes only what he wants is missing out on something a lot better than half of a pie!  No sexual experience is required to figure that part out!