Free America Unzipped by Brian Alexander

Christians have been blocked. Whom can they turn to if they want to ask if they were sinning when a man stuck his finger in his wife’s anus? Not Dr. Ruth. A lot of Christians, Joe knew, figured Dr. Ruth was just another sick unbeliever. No, there had to be somebody from the evangelical inside, somebody who would say, Heck no, my friend, you are not sinning and as a matter of fact here are a few tricks you can perform with that finger, and then they could enjoy the sweet wicked moment of having that forbidden door open before they drove home to said wife and said anus. That’s what Joe wanted to give. So in 1994 Joe and Alice started Family Dynamics, partly to tell Christians that all the great sex, all the erotic excitement, he had outside his marriage, just about all the nasty, licentious temptation they saw outside their own marriages, can be, should be, and must be available inside theirs. No need to leave the fundamentalist fold and go exploring.
    Â 
    S o there he is launching into a mini-lecture on smooth muscle in the penis, blood flow, and female lubrication. “For men, sex is a reaction,” he says. Then: “How long do you think it takes her to get ready for sex?”
    â€œHour and a half!” a man shouts from the back.
    â€œHour and a half? Well, I can tell you won’t get any sex today!”
    We all laugh.
    â€œSee, this is what I hear from women all the time. They say, ‘How can I get my husband to quit going for the touchdown until’”—Joe’s voice drops dramatically—“‘he’s called a few plays?’”
    More laughing. Deidra nudges Morris.
    Men are blowing it, Joe says, because we don’t fully appreciate the sexual power of women. A woman can come, climb back down onto a plateau of pleasure, then come again. Men take time to recover. We’ve got a single-shot pistol. All this is standard sex counseling, not much different from the stuff I’ve heard at sexology conventions or can read in any popular secular magazine or my own column for that matter. The difference is that Joe tosses in references to God and the Bible.
    â€œWhy can women be multiply orgasmic and men not? Well”—he addresses the women—“I think God just likes you better!”
    See, if men did it right, we could give women one orgasm after another and he can prove it. God said so. It’s right there in the Bible, in the Song of Solomon: “My beloved is mine and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies. Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or young hart upon the mountains of Bether.”
    â€œWhat does that tell you about Solomon if he makes love to her all night long, until the daybreak?” Joe waits a beat. “That he’s the king and doesn’t have to go to work in the morning!”
    General cracking up.
    No, seriously, he asks us, what’s going on here? None of us gets it.
    â€œâ€˜Feedeth among the lilies’? ‘Like a roe or young hart’?”
    â€œOh,” one man says, his face lighting up. “He’s going down where the sun don’t shine!”
    Yes, Joe says. It’s oral sex. Cunnilingus. The mountains of Bether are her pubic mound. Solomon is going down on his wife and making it last a long, long time. “I would cause thee to drink of spiced wine of the juice of my pomegranate”? Holy cow!
    â€œIf you do it right, it takes longer than half an hour,” Joe scolds the men, “unless you go like this:
Slthfpthfslthpf.
” He slurps his tongue like an overheated Dalmatian. Deidra is staring at Morris.
    Not only are oral sex and orgasms biblical, they can be important.
    â€œChristians should be having great sex lives. We should be having better sex than anybody else!”
    A few of us have gone wide-eyed. Others are excited, smiling wide grins that have nothing to do with salvation and the welcoming arms of