Real sex

Lauren F. Winner, Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity . Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2005. 175 pp.

Chastity today has almost exclusively negative connotations. Being chaste is not activity; it is avoiding a certain kind of action. Edmund Spenser saw it differently. In Books 3-4 of Fairie Queene , Spenser gave us characters whose chastity manifested itself as flight, but Spenser considered this pseudo-chastity. His heroine was Britomart, the knight of Chastity, whose quest was not merely to preserve herself inviolate but to pursue her beloved so that she could consummate her love. She protected her virginity so she could have it to give away when Artegal appeared.

Lauren Winner is of Spenser’s tribe. Chastity is not wan and weak; chastity is a spiritual discipline, something you do not something you don’t do. Winner reached a kind of evangelical stardom with her first book, Girl Meets God , a brazenly honest autobiographical non-autobiography, a mold-breaking story of spiritual pilgrimmage. Winner wrote about her own sexual experiences in Girl , and she returns to the topic in a fuller way here. Part I is entitled “Talking about sex.” Instead of do’s and don’t’s, Winner develops a rich theology of the body and of marital sex, and in addition to listing some of the lies that contemporary culture tells about sex, she has a chapter listing the lies that the church tells about sex. There’s “Lie #1,” for instance, namely, that “Premarital Sex Is Guaranteed to Make You Feel Lousy,” to which Winner honestly and sensibly responds: “Sometimes, even after sinful sex, a person will feel fantastic” – which no doubt helps to explain why unmarried couples keep doing it. Part II addresses the practical issues of practicing chastity, involvement in chaste communities, and repentance.

Real Sex is always honest, sometimes profound, hip enough to give to your teenage daughter. This is a very satisfying book – and not just because it’s about sex.