Question:
Can a Christian woman read erotica
to help her get in the mood sexually for her spouse?
- Clean
- Romantic
- Erotic
I had unintentionally been introduced to my mother's romance novels at a young age. I had always been drawn to their beautiful covers, and by 9-10 years old I started reading my first romance novel. There were only a few occasions where it dawned on me that there was disapproval by this decision, although no one ever outright said it was wrong or explained why they felt it was wrong for me to read it or to read it at such an impressionable age. These brief encounters of disapproval were when I brought my romance novel to school in the fifth grade during my lunch hour and it was taken away by a cafeteria aid. (Although I will include, my own mother did want me to wait to read them, when she became aware of my interest in them. I was around 9-10 years old and I had discovered a word I did not know and dared to ask her what it meant. The word was virgin, which I had also heard from a group of my friends during afterschool program, because a few of the girls asked every girl in the group if she was a virgin. There were snickers if you said yes and snickers if you said no, and snickers if you didn't know and I really didn't understand what it all meant.) Or in seventh grade and eleventh grade, when we were asked to bring books of our choice for silent sustained reading- a program to encourage the youth to read, and my teachers asked if my parents were aware I was reading romance novels. By this point, 12-16, I had already become an avid reader and my mother was aware I enjoyed reading romance novels. My mother read romance novels herself, starting with the dime novels she would get in the Caribbean in her youth. My mother never had erotica in our home, so it only seemed when I first saw erotica that I would consider it an extension of romance novels, but I discovered how wrong I was with a much shorter read and even more sexually graphic than anything I had read before. I have actually read similar stories from women who became avid romance readers in their youth and how this led to the unknown door of erotica either in their youth or as an adult, and from there some even began watching pornography. It was then as a single, young adult woman, I had decided reading romance novels with sex, any form of erotica or teen and adult magazines that discussed sex and sexuality were not for me and would not help me in keeping my goals to abstain from premarital sex. As a young married woman and new mother who had gone a few years without reading romance novels and teen / adult magazines, I began to hear more about married women and mothers reading them, and some moms even reading erotica or "mommy porn." This led me to wonder, what is acceptable in intimacy from a religious standpoint?
Now back to the topic at hand, can erotica be helpful in a marriage?
I am sharing some Christian perspectives on the topic to help bring some clarity,
click on the links to read about these perspectives.
One thing that I love is that we have agency. We don't just have to take someone's word that something is good or bad, we can use our agency to discern if it's true and if religious, ask God in prayer, if its right for us.
Bibliography
Slattery, Juli, Dannah Gresh, and Pam Wood. "Erotica, Women and Marriage." Focus On The Family. Juli Slattery, Dannah Gresh, Focus on The Family, n.d. Web. 15 Nov. 2015. <http://www.focusonthefamily.com/marriage/sex-and-intimacy/erotica-women-and-marriage/erotica-women-and-marriage>.
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