I’ve come to the conclusion, even before coming across Perry (and Favele if you haven’t read her) that we need to talk, especially to students, about why sex should be within the covenant of marriage. I grew up in the 90s and there was really no discussion of telos, only moralism. And in that context, many of my peers rejected a seemingly arbitrary reason for abstinence. As I’ve grown older, while I married young and at least by technical definitions, avoided sex outside of marriage, I’ve seen the results in my peer group, now in their mid and late 30s. I feel the same about discussions of porn. We have to start telling teenagers why things are sinful rather than just that they are. And we have to have a telos of the whole person otherwise all of the Christian ethic seems like arbitrary rules that can be discarded on the basis of consent or “it’s not hurting anyone” or the conflict theory inherent in the argument that society constructed these norms in order to protect the oppressor class... in this case men.
Thank you Dr Beck for bringing this book to presumably a lot of people who otherwise might have written off Perry as some sort of handmaids tale protofascist.
I was raised right smack in the middle of it all. Sex was everywhere. I wanted to get married and have five kids. That was my childhood dream. That never happened.
Everyone around me said I needed to be an independent woman. It also didn’t help that all the men I had ever known at that time were abusers, including my father. So, I couldn’t trust.
That led to clubbing, and one night stands.
Luckily, I found my way. Straitened up, and figured out I wasn’t the problem. I just needed to take care of myself, and surround myself with good male and female role models.
I believe the government screwed up my generation.
Abortion had only been legal for six years in 1979 when I got pregnant. My mother, my father, and everyone else demanded an abortion. It was an embarrassment to my dysfunctional family. I ran away.
I often wonder what it would have been like for my family to have embrace my baby rather than demand I kill it. And this happens to so many young girls today. Modern families see babies as a burden, not a blessing. Underage girls get pregnant. Doh! We should protect them and their babies. Young girls, almost all I know, regret their abortions.
I think the young people today will figure it out and rebel against the sexual revolution.
"Well, the alternative would be for men to center and privilege the sexual desires of women. This would mean turning away from casual, meaningless sex toward sex that is connected to emotional intimacy and relational fidelity. In short, sex that is re-connected to marriage."
Ironically, this is precisely why the early church was so attractive to women and so much less so to men: it was the only culture in the ancient world demanding that men adhere to the same sexual standard of behavior as women.
Blair’s title is provocative enough, but your (accidental?) emendation of it will certainly have me reflecting on what it means for me to be ejaculating responsibility.
I’ve come to the conclusion, even before coming across Perry (and Favele if you haven’t read her) that we need to talk, especially to students, about why sex should be within the covenant of marriage. I grew up in the 90s and there was really no discussion of telos, only moralism. And in that context, many of my peers rejected a seemingly arbitrary reason for abstinence. As I’ve grown older, while I married young and at least by technical definitions, avoided sex outside of marriage, I’ve seen the results in my peer group, now in their mid and late 30s. I feel the same about discussions of porn. We have to start telling teenagers why things are sinful rather than just that they are. And we have to have a telos of the whole person otherwise all of the Christian ethic seems like arbitrary rules that can be discarded on the basis of consent or “it’s not hurting anyone” or the conflict theory inherent in the argument that society constructed these norms in order to protect the oppressor class... in this case men.
Thank you Dr Beck for bringing this book to presumably a lot of people who otherwise might have written off Perry as some sort of handmaids tale protofascist.
I was raised right smack in the middle of it all. Sex was everywhere. I wanted to get married and have five kids. That was my childhood dream. That never happened.
Everyone around me said I needed to be an independent woman. It also didn’t help that all the men I had ever known at that time were abusers, including my father. So, I couldn’t trust.
That led to clubbing, and one night stands.
Luckily, I found my way. Straitened up, and figured out I wasn’t the problem. I just needed to take care of myself, and surround myself with good male and female role models.
I believe the government screwed up my generation.
Abortion had only been legal for six years in 1979 when I got pregnant. My mother, my father, and everyone else demanded an abortion. It was an embarrassment to my dysfunctional family. I ran away.
I often wonder what it would have been like for my family to have embrace my baby rather than demand I kill it. And this happens to so many young girls today. Modern families see babies as a burden, not a blessing. Underage girls get pregnant. Doh! We should protect them and their babies. Young girls, almost all I know, regret their abortions.
I think the young people today will figure it out and rebel against the sexual revolution.
"Well, the alternative would be for men to center and privilege the sexual desires of women. This would mean turning away from casual, meaningless sex toward sex that is connected to emotional intimacy and relational fidelity. In short, sex that is re-connected to marriage."
Ironically, this is precisely why the early church was so attractive to women and so much less so to men: it was the only culture in the ancient world demanding that men adhere to the same sexual standard of behavior as women.
Blair’s title is provocative enough, but your (accidental?) emendation of it will certainly have me reflecting on what it means for me to be ejaculating responsibility.