Grace Driscoll Does Not Masturbate

Strawberry Boy reveals it in his epic chapter on masturbation in the booklet, Porn Again Christian.

Mark Driscoll, a man obsessed by sex, and even more so, by gay sex, and even more passionately, obsessed by proper sexual activity, writes:

First, masturbation can be a form of homosexuality because it is a sexual act that does not involve a woman. If a man were to masturbate while engaged in other forms of sexual intimacy with his wife then he would not be doing so in a homosexual way. However, any man who does so without his wife in the room is bordering on homosexuality activity, particularly if he's watching himself in a mirror and being turned on by his own male body.

What?  If Mark is such an expert on anything that smells sexual, he should really know better.  If a woman is masturbating, well..., a woman is most definitely involved.  Oddly enough, further up in this laughable chapter, Strawberry Boy even acknowledges that women do masturbate but quickly adds that men do it more, subsequently dismissing the notion, at all.

Boy is Mark missing out.  I won't elaborate on what I mean by that.  But try it any way you want and you'll be glad you did.  Just don't do it with Monty Python swimming (pun intended) through your head.

Every sperm is saaaaaacred, every sperm is greeeeeat.  If a sperm is waaaaasted, god gets quite iraaate!

Now that that song is stuck in your head...

Mark goes on to say that the Bible doesn't specifically condemn masturbation and yet, it really does in a roundabout way.  But before he goes on to explain those creative references, he wants to save his guilty pleasure from being "Bobitted" (youch!  that hurt!) by claiming, in record time (yes, I could actually see the smoke trailing off the quickly written ink of these words, into the yonder reaches of the cyberworld), the following:

What I am not counting as masturbation is the manual stimulation between married people whereby a husband and wife enjoy pleasuring one another's genitals, as taught in the Scriptures, either orally (Song 2:3; 4:12) or with their hands (Song 2:6).

He HAS to keep his one tool for masturbation available - his wife's hand!  But, alas, Song of Solomon says nothing about pleasuring genitalia with feet, knees, elbows, nose, maybe a little usage of a few chompers, or even the ever-popular "Rabbit".  Sadly, Solomon had no rechargeable batteries to use, let alone un-rippable rubber (trust me...that rubber on that fine piece of machinery that opens doors to new sexual realms DOES. NOT. TEAR!).  Curse those lousy scriptures that are silent as to various body parts and toys!

Then, as he promised, Strawberry Boy takes us through a list of questions, with added scripture references to guilt us into not wanting to masturbate.  Let me take his test and see how spiritual I am.

1. Can you masturbate without lusting? - Job 31:1 - "I made a covenant with my eyes, how then could I gaze at a virgin?"

Well...yes!  I can masturbate without lusting.  And then....no.  I can't.  But sometimes I can.  And damn....sometimes I do it when my wife is away and all I can think of is her.  Maybe that's okay and all godly and stuff!?  But then, I think of Job's question and I think, "You dumbass!  With your eyes, brotha!"  Then I think of other questions like, can I have sex without lusting, can I walk past a restaurant without lusting, can I lust without lusting, can I lust about lust without lusting.  I get all twirled up in my head and come to, grasping my....oh...let's move on.

2. Can you masturbate in a way that builds oneness with your spouse, pulling you together more intimately through the act? - Genesis 2:24 - "A man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife and they shall be one flesh."

Whoa.  Wait up here, young sir Mark.  That's kind of a creepy reference to use here.  So...what you're saying is, prior to gettin' jiggy wif it with my bride, my mama and papa were supposed to assist me in pleasuring myself?  That scripture reference makes no sense at all.  But, I digress.  I'll answer the question.  Yes.

But I have a small problem with the way the question is formed.  I imagine myself, laying on my large bed, my wife on the far side, both of us pleasuring ourselves.  Then, as you, Sir Driscoll, so eloquently state, she turns to her side, grabs my unit, and pulls me over to her.  Not that I want to be all up in your business, Mark, but....DAMN!  That hurts!

3.  Can you masturbate without experiencing shame? - Genesis 2:24.

I read and reread that scripture reference a billion times and I still can't, for the life of me, figure out how it pertains to the question.  But yes, I can!  I used to experience shame, when it was beaten into my head by religious people that what I was doing was sinful.  But then, so was talking to a girl.  So was tapping a rock beat on the table.  So was interrupting my mother.  So was not tithing.  So many things that, today, as I look back, were stupid little rules to keep you in line, are normal, pleasant, and contribute to everyday happiness.  Why focus so much on anything sexual.  It's a small and yet very large part of life.  But seriously, so insignificant.  It doesn't need so many words to pillory it.

4. Can you masturbate with a clear conscience? - Titus 1:15 - "To the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure; but both their minds and their consciences are defiled."

Um...that reference is talking about EVERYTHING in life.  If you have an impure mind, even sex with your wife is impure.  So, who cares.  I don't want to answer this question because Jim Carrey does it so well.  Start watching at 5:30.  Apparently, Driscoll has never had a mind-blowing orgasm.

I could go on and deal with the fifth question.  But it's really just more of the same.  Mark Driscoll has decided that masturbation is bad and then went through the Bible to prove his point, trying very very hard to inject his ideas into the text where it simply doesn't fit - or rather, makes him look like a fool.  It's called prooftexting.

I won't pretend to be writing off his analysis based on his incorrect reading of the Bible, because I don't really care what the Bible says about sex - or sin, for that matter.  No book that tells me not to murder and then its god tells his people to murder whole nations, right down to the children, kidnap and rape women, and then sets up rules for proper slavery is ever going to to get close to my penis.  I might find a verse that tells me to cut it off and have to follow it.  Oh wait!

If your [penis] causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away.  It is better to lose one member of your body than to have your whole body thrown into hell. - Matthew 5:29

OUCH!

Come join me where sexual activity is free and enjoyable.  You don't need a stone age or bronze age or pro-raping women age book telling you how.  Clearly it has no clue.

Danger! Your Teenage Son is a Rapist!

Libby Anne wrote an excellent piece about how evangelicals view teenage boys in light of whether they allow them to babysit young children or not.

She writes:

[Evangelicals appear] to think that the fact that many (most?) teenage boys would give their right hands for a girlfriend and the chance to have consensual premarital sex means that these same boys would just as readily channel their sexual energies into sexually molesting children.

And that  is the crux of her article, which brings me to a curious thought.

I am convinced that mainstream Christianity, evangelicals, and fundamentalist, et al, have the cause and effect backwards.

They think young boys and men are so sexually driven, they would stop at nothing to rape your child.  Thus, you have to beat into their heads the idea that they are sexual beasts and must be saved from themselves.  They are taught that they have only a desire to do bad things and cannot, of themselves, be good.  Once they firmly believe this, and only then, can they have the tools to NOT rape a child.  But even then, it isn't good enough.  They simply cannot be allowed to get into a situation that puts a child at their fingertips while alone.

Again, this is back-ass-wards.

If you tell a child they are bad, they believe this about themselves.  They do!  I know.  I was called a liar my whole childhood.  I believed it with my whole heart - until a few months ago.  I had flogged myself for decades, constantly looking over my shoulder to see if the person I had just spoken to had really believed me or not.  One day, I had an epiphany of sorts and realized that I was a very truthful person.  So truthful, in fact, that I hurt myself all the time, due to it.  I was so honest, Abe freaking Lincoln would burn in hell for his lies and I would be granted eternal bliss in a Purgatory-less heaven.  Angels had nothing on me.

(Except for that one time, where I lied....oh nevermind.  The CIA reads this)

To my point, if you are constantly barraged with the idea that you are a sexual predator, capped only by rules and carefully prying adults, why would anyone be surprised if you end up believing the lies and becoming the evil they tried so hard to save you from?

In short, it is my non-objective, completely subjective, and entirely biased opinion, that the purity culture breeds deviants.  

Maybe it's time we began to educate people about sex instead of scare the living sperm out of them.

Doug Wilson is in Need of a Good Blowjob

The Gospel Coalition is an organization formed by Calvinist, women-hating heavyweights like John Piper (Piper Boy), Mark Driscoll (Strawberry Boy), and Tim Keller (someone I am just becoming familiar with).  TGC has a Council.  This Council is made up of 52 members.  52 big name Christians.  Not one of them is a woman. 

On July 13, 2012, Jared C. Wilson wrote a small blog post on TGC's website.  In this post, he quoted a passage from a book by the misogynist Doug Wilson.  The passage read like a 1950's depiction of daddy coming home and Beaver joyously, at the age of 16, tugging on his trouser leg, begging for a story of his day at work.  Translation:  The utopia of the 1950's family on television was just that - a utopia.  Reality is and always will be much better.

There is much hoopla around cyberspace about this excerpt being an endorsement of rape from a biblical perspective, but I disagree with that.  In Doug's defense, as well as Jared's, I will take their word at face value.  They insist this isn't the case and I don't see how one can read that into this passage.  However, I think the true meaning of Doug's words give a picture into his own sex life - dry, repetitive (when it comes to sex, repetitive can be a good thing), and boring.

Doug's pet theme in many of his works is the authority of the god of the Bible over all of his creation and, by proxy, mankind created with a built-in authority structure.  Of course, as all pompous men in the fundamentalist, male-dominated world, Doug concludes that women are to be subservient to men.  But, in his writings, Doug doesn't try to mince his words by adding flowers and bunnies to the word "submit", or even attempt to redefine it as something mutual between a husband and wife.  No, he flaunts men's superiority.  In short, Doug Wilson is a prude - a veritable prick.

Get a load of this quote:
"When we quarrel with the way the world is, we find that the world has ways of getting back at us. In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed."

I'll give you a moment to catch your breath.

........................................

Ok.  Moment over.

Ah, the nebulous "world" jargon speak.  This word is used to keep converts in line and has no practical meaning except by those that wish to exert their control over their followers. If anyone questions the leader's principled life or words, they merely have to say "world!" and the layperson has to acquiesce.  In this case, anything that Mys. (short for misogynist) Wilson says about sex in the positive "biblical" sense is good.  Anything else - world!

Sex is only to be enjoyed through the lens of the authority doctrine.  Man conquers, woman is entered.

Mys. Wilson, I despise your kind.  You are the scum of the earth.  You are part of the problem with respect to failed marriages.  You deem yourself to be lifting up a standard for perfect people to be a pleasing aroma to your god and, instead, you end up creating piles of filth - lives destroyed in the wake of the collapse of your exalted, yet unworkable principles.

I know.  I lived it.  For SIX YEARS!

My wife grew up in fundamentalism and from conception to the day she was married, people like Mys. Wilson taught her how disgusting and evil sex was.  Sex was evil up until the magical moment of saying "I do."  Then, you could enjoy sex, but it had to be proper.  Even society, with all its hallowed stereotypes played a role in telling my bride that women weren't supposed to desire sex and men were rabid, insatiable, dogs.

So, for the first six years of marriage, we suffered.  Why?  Because I didn't get enough sex?  I must be an insatiable, selfish, self-centered, pathetic, bastard, right?

Hell no!  I just wanted her to initiate sexual activity.  That's it.

Call it egalitarian.  Call it married.  I don't care.  When two people come together to enjoy sex, rules be damned.  I want to make sweet love to my wife in the way SHE wants it.  She wants to do it exactly the way I want it.  Then, we both want much for ourselves. 

You see, Mys. Wilson, sex isn't about rules, authority, perfection, or anything you dream up to try and spiritualize an awesome act of pure pleasure.  Sex is about the union of two bodies in the perfect, animalistic way that those two people desire to do with each other.  Frankly, it's none of your damned business what we do with it.  And, here's the shocking part, Kristine exhibits all the stereotypes of what society considers "male" and I "female" when it comes to what we desire.  There are no male and female roles in sex. 

Doug Wilson, you need a damn good blowjob.  You need to learn how to be conquered, be planted upon, and smothered by a beautiful woman that wants nothing but to satiate your lustful desires while enjoying the hell out of herself, as well.  Take your perfect world and throw it out the window for one night of pleasure.  Doug, you'll never go back.

Finally, one last consideration.  Where to insert your beard.

Today's Goog Hits on Incongruous Circumspection - 3/16/2012

Every day, without fail, I read through the Goog search terms that bring people to my blog, thanks to Google Analytics.  I'll show a few of them below and try to point my readers in the proper direction:

allegheny wesleyan methodist blog

Ah, yes.  But be very careful.  If you're here to find anything good about the Allegheny Wesleyan Church, you're at the wrong place.  To get you started, you can read the first installment of one of their ex-members here.

easiest position in softball

Second base!  Now that was easy.  Glad to be of service.

full preterest second coming doug phillips

I sincerely apologize.  I fell asleep just..hang on....(sorry, big yawn)...reading that.  Nope.  You'll find nothing of the sort here.  But, if you want to read about Doug Phillips, try here, where I mention the perfectly bearded fellow in passing.  Or, read through Dougy Boy's hilarious take on historic men.  Better yet, try a change of pace and read this collaborative piece by an atheist friend of mine when I used to consider myself a Christian.  Finally, if that doesn't do it, try something a bit more risque where I, again, simply allude to the uber-smiley bloke.

rabbi means "leader of the synagogue"

I have never written about that.  But, you're spot on.  Now you know.

sex is meaningless to me

Excuse me???!!!  The ole' Goog must be throwing some electrons off during packet transfer here and there these days.  That search term should have NEVER EVER, in a million years, led you here.  And to prove my point, read this and this.  Also, can you contact the Goog and have them add "I love sex like the air I breathe" into their algorithm for anything Incongruous Circumspection related?

you are like icing on the cake without you life is meaningless

Wow...  I don't know what to say.  I'm honored.  Gawrsh.  Wow.  Phew!  Heck...read everything here!  Man!  You made me blush.

I.C.