Fake Orgasm Contest

Sex and religion have been in the news a lot lately. There was an article in The Post Standard early last week about a gathering of students at SUNY at Morrisville. The purpose of the meeting was to talk to students about sexual responsibility. In order to drum up attendance, the event featured a Fake Orgasm Contest (I’ll leave the particulars to your imagination). The contest had its intended effect---attendance was great. Some objected that the contest also had an unintended effect in that it seemed to be at cross purposes with the primary message the event was to get across. As for the religion part---a local priest was to be one of the judges of the contest, but his bishop nixed his participation. (They didn’t ask me to take his place even though I would have been at least as qualified as he to judge it).

The other event of the week was the publication of the survey of the sex life of Americans by the University of Chicago. Among its interesting findings was the fact that conservative Protestant women, such as Baptists and Pentecostals, were most likely to report that they always had an orgasm. No reason was offered as to why this was the case. Indeed, it seems to go against popular opinion. In the popular view, conservative religious people perceive sex as dirty and are thus sexually repressed. This view is clearly wrong.

Might it be instead that conservative religious people are most likely to view sex, not as dirty, but as holy? (Holy---because we are sharing in the creative powers of God). It is this high view of sex which causes them to preserve its use only within the confines of a lifelong commitment and increases their enjoyment of it. Could it not be also that objections to the Fake Orgasm Contest were at root an emotional reaction to the trivialization of a holy act. I don’t know, but at least this survey should give us a good marketing slogan for our next “Bring a Friend” Sunday---”Baptists have better sex.”

C. David Hess