Free Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality by Darrel Ray Page A

are guilty in the context of Christianity and Islam, as well as many other religions.
    Further, religions often teach that women are responsible for children’s moral development. Not taking their children to church is a sign of moral neglect. The guilt messages are so strong that even non-religious mothers have been known to take their children to church or send them. In the church, children are exposed to abstinence-only messages, purity rings, and most of all, messages about female responsibility in most sexual matters.
    Alan Miller and John Hoffman looked at gender differences in religiosity as a function of risk aversion. The more risk averse a person is, the higher his or her religiosity and church attendance. In other words, risk-averse people don’t want to take a chance on getting on the wrong side of god. 44 This would fit well with our guilt hypothesis. Women who are most afraid of divine consequences (as taught in shame and guilt training) are more likely than men to engage in fear- and guilt-reducing activities, like attending church. Men who are less fearful of divine retribution or less risk-averse see less need to be involved in religion.
    Christopher Hitchens articulated a similar argument in a recent speech: 45
    The loss of a child is incredibly traumatic to a woman. No doubt men are traumatized as well, but it is the woman who carries the baby to term and spends much of her waking hours with the child. She has the strongest bond. … If a woman thinks that there is even a tiny advantage in preserving her child through prayer or giving to a priest, she will do so, and I cannot blame her. I can blame the priest for taking advantage of such a deeply held love and devotion for his own gain.
    This is a powerful psychological argument that explains why mothers are often much more concerned with taking children to church and teaching them religious ideas than fathers.
How Guilt Disrupts Sexual Communication
    The guilt cycle also works well to inhibit sexual communication between religious married people and keeps them feeling both guilty and sexually frustrated. Here is how it works. Sexual preferences develop, evolve and change over a lifetime. Some marry before they recognize they are homosexual. Others find their spouse has a frustratingly high or low sex drive. Or they discover that they have a fetish. Without opportunities for sexual exploration and discovery, how is a 19 to 20-year-old to learn what he or she likes and how his or her body reacts?
    The younger a religious person is when she gets married, the less she understands and knows about her sexuality. Add to this the incredible fear of talking about sexual fantasies, masturbation, experimentation and pornography, and a young adult enters marriage with a serious handicap that can inhibit sexual development for life.
    Such people have no template for communication except through their guilt-based training. Interacting and working with hundreds of people, I have found a huge difference in the sexual skill level of religious newly-weds and newly-weds raised in a secular environment. The former are often groping in the dark, sometimes literally. Even if they do have some experience or skill with regard to sex and sexuality, they are often reluctant to display it for fear of giving away previous sexual experience. The abstinence-only programsand reclaimed-virginity movement make men and women ashamed of being sexual creatures before or outside of marriage.
    For a woman, the result is denial even as she is having sex with her husband. If she was successfully abstinent before marriage, she enters into sex with great ignorance. Her husband dares not speak of any partners he has had, since it would quickly betray a double standard. Since it is highly likely that one or both had partners before marriage, they start the relationship on a lie.
    A woman who “reclaims her virginity” is buying into the same guilt. 46 Aside from the ludicrous idea that one can