---

Lauren Winner: Reformed Sinner or Canny Opportunist?
In her new book on sex, the onetime "evangelical whore" morphs into her old nemesis, the Church Lady.

...Lauren’s cavalier alternative? Marry for sex. You may be young and somewhat immature, but hey: if sex outside of marriage isn’t allowed and our desires are important, then order your life around your desires and get married! I’ll even come toast you when you do!

In four years of ministry, I’ve counseled several couples that got advice like this early on—in fact, I am seeing one such couple now. I’ve married young couples whose potential for disaster was about a 9.9 on the marital Richter scale, but, thanks to the likes of Lauren and in spite of my protestations, were determined to wed no matter what. What’s more, I grew up in a conservative Evangelical tradition where pastors and mentors regularly dispensed this kind of platitudinous palaver. Thankfully, I ignored it, but several friends of mine who followed it are now divorced....

...Even though she sets out to challenge lies the church tells about sex, she ends us telling a few whoppers herself. One is the one she told Camille: that marrying for sex at a young age isn’t extremely risky. But her most absurd falsehood—and the one that made it very difficult for me to take this book seriously—is that all sex outside of marriage is distorted and not what she calls “real sex.” For Lauren, careless sexual romps at a fraternity party and sex within committed dating relationships are all the same: “The sex of blind dates and fraternity parties, even of relatively long-standing dating relationships, has, simply, no normal qualities. Based principally on mutual desire, it dispenses with the ordinary rhythms of marital sex, trading them for a seemingly thrilling but ultimately false story.”

Along those lines, Winner claims that sex outside of marriage distorts our picture of sex because it makes us think that sex is “constantly exciting,” and “always thrilling” (hence the section header: “Premarital Sex: It Teaches You that Sex Is Thrilling”). But again, she appeals here to an utterly ridiculous caricature of premarital sex that has no basis in reality. Ask any older couple that has lived through a long marriage whether they think sex is always an ecstatic experience. Even unmarried twenty- and thirtysomethings can tell you that sex isn’t always that mind-blowing. If this picture of premarital sex is based on her own experience, then maybe Lauren should get busy writing sex manuals. ...