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A new study seems to confirm something tragic: that conservative Christian women are having terrible sex with the conservative Christian men in their lives.
In a new study published in the Sociology of Religion, researchers from multiple Canadian universities found that the conservative religious ideals of sexual purity are connected to both an increase in sexual pain disorders and a decrease in marital satisfaction.
With the decades-long rise of so-called “purity culture,” which centers around the concept that sex before marriage can damage a woman spiritually and that her body and sexuality are “gifts” to only be enjoyed by her husband, the Canadian sexual psychology researchers decided to ask conservative Christian women directly about both their beliefs on sexual purity and their sexual experiences.
In an interview with PsyPost about the new paper, lead author Joanna Sawatsky of the University of Saskatchewan said that after she and her coauthors read best-selling Christian marriage and sex books, they were “appalled” to see the kind of advice they were giving women that “completely erased women’s sexuality, made sex into a power struggle, and presented men as sexually uncontrollable beings.”
“It made us concerned that much of the advice given in these circles makes marriage and sex worse, not better,” Sawatsky said, “and we decided to do a research study to test our hypothesis.”
Using the “snowball sampling” technique, which involves asking participants to refer their friends and associates as a recruiting tactic, the researchers ended up talking to more than 5,000 mostly American Christian women, most of whom were white and evangelical. They asked the subjects about their own perceived relationship between purity and marital and sexual satisfaction, as well as their experience with sexual pain.
Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that the women who ascribed most fully to beliefs in sexual purity experienced higher rates of sexual pain disorders — especially for the subset of the subject population that had begun believing in those mores during adolescence and early adulthood.
For instance, the researchers found that women who had believed in the concept of “soul ties” — the idea that people are forever linked spiritually when they have sex — when they were teens were more likely to experience vaginismus, a disorder that occurs when the vagina involuntarily contracts during intercourse, resulting in very painful sex. Like vulvodynia, which is characterized by irritation and burning on the vulva, the exact cause of vaginismus is unknown, though it’s often theorized to be psychosomatic in nature.
Ultimately, the researchers concluded that viewing sex as sinful and risky could be causing some conservative Christian women who ascribe to purity culture to have trauma-like responses during intercourse.
“Seeing sex as a female obligation and a male entitlement leads to horrible sex, frankly,” Sawasky said. “It’s highly destructive to women’s marital and sexual satisfaction and is even associated with higher rates of sexual pain disorders.”
With conservative Christians having newly ushered abstinence-only advocate Donald Trump back into the White House, it’s unlikely that better sexual education will be available in red states any time soon. That means those who have purity culture ingrained in them during puberty over the next four years are, unfortunately, going to keep this cruel and painful cycle going.
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