By Matthias Roberts
This is an important book for our times because sexual shame is ripe particularly in religious circles in the Western world. Many of us have been taught to suppress and shame our sexual feelings, sexual attractions and sexuality in general. But to shame our sexuality is to shame our entire personhood, because our sexuality is part of our bodies, our minds, our hearts—it is a part of us. It is not removed or separate from our being and moving and living in this world. So we have learned to shame ourselves and this has had a detrimental affect on our relationships with others and our relationship to our own self.
Matthias tackles this shame from a variety of angles, because ultimately it came from a variety of sources and experiences, thoughts and feelings, and there is no one simply answer as to how we can combat shame. In fact, in the end, Matthias talks about embracing shame as the only really way forward. We have to acknowledge our feelings of shame, see them for what they are, and teach ourselves to believe different stories than those our shame has taught us.
In the first section of his book, Roberts discusses three main ways we cope with shame. “Shamefulness,” basically means living in a cycle of shame in which every minor (or major) indiscretion results in us doubling down on trying to behave ourselves and on simultaneously telling ourselves how disgusting, bad, and wrong etc. we are. “Shamelessness,” is a denial and avoidance of shame that generally includes an overreaction when people or situations try to shame us further and we say something like, “I’m in control now and I’m not going to let shame control me anymore.” “Autopilot” is a third coping mechanism that seems to be somewhere between shamefulness and shamelessness. Shame comes up occasionally for people on sexual autopilot, and they often sense a lack of clarity around what their values and boundaries are.
In the second section, Roberts addresses the lies we tell ourselves about sex. For example, many Christians are taught that various expressions of our sexuality are sinful such as gay-sex, masturbation, and premarital sex. Matthias explains that truth is something that is “witnessed.” It is weighed up over time, by people sharing their feelings and experiences with one another, by debating and discussing, by scientific experiment and analysis. The truth is not black and white. It is not a sentence in the Bible plucked out of context, translated and interpreted with certain biases, expected to simply be swallowed by the masses. Scripture must be grappled with. Truth must be experienced and evolved toward. Truth bears good fruit, not bad fruit. I truly appreciated this understanding of how we decide what is right, healthy, good and true for ourselves and ultimately each other. I also appreciated the individual chapters about the gender hierarchy deception and the lie that “queerness is sinful.”
In the third section, Roberts identifies four paradoxes of sex:
1. Sex is healthy and risky
2. Sex makes us vulnerable and helps us avoid vulnerability
3. Sex requires safety and safety is not guaranteed
4. We will get things wrong and right at the same time
Reading about these four paradoxes is extremely helpful. Again, we realize that the truth is not black and white. It is not simple or straight forward. If you are looking for this book to give you a new list of rules to replace the lies that resulted in unhealthily lavish amounts of shame, you will not find that in this text. Instead, you will be given tools to figure those things out for yourself. You will learn some ways to mitigate risk in order to have a healthier sex life. You will learn to see yourself as either embracing vulnerability, or trying to avoid it, which raises questions about why you might be doing this and whether you might like to try a new way of being. You will learn about creating a trust floor in your relationship, while simultaneously realizing that trust is illusive, it cannot be proven and is absolutely not guaranteed to continue. And you will learn that it is very difficult to determine what your own ethics and values are without making a few blunders, taking a few risks, being vulnerable, and trusting your heart.
I loved this book because it really taught me a lot about the psychology behind human sexuality and how religious indoctrination has often blown shame way out of proportion. Yes, we all experience shame sometimes, especially sexual shame, and some of that might arguably be necessary. Wouldn’t it be terribly if rapists did not experience any shame for sexually violating others, or if people in the act of having sex, did not recognize when their partner stopped consenting. But a lot of our sexual shame hinders us from embracing life to the full which God intended and desires for us. Shame needs to be embraced and analyzed and placed aside is unhealthy. I’m deeply grateful to Matthias for this book and I pray it helps set our world free of a lot of unnecessary sexual shame!