The 718-page monograph The Social Organization of Sexuality: sexual practices in the United States has a curious fact buried deep within it. This comprehensive study into the sexual habits of Americans, conducted by secular researchers, discovered that there seems to be a connection between being religious and having an enjoyable sex life.
This book was written in 1992 by social scientists Robert T Michael, John H
Gagnon, and Edward O Laumann, after initiating a comprehensive study
into the sexual habits of Americans. The study involved a staff of 220
interviewers, stationed at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, who interviewed 3,432 respondents about all aspects of their sex lives.
The University of Chicago Chronicle
explained that “The study involved 90-minute, face-to-face interviews
with 3,432 randomly selected Americans ages 18 to 59. Of those selected,
80 percent, an extremely high percentage for response to any survey,
agreed to disclose the facts of their sexual lives.”
Although the researchers only interviewed Americans, it is likely
that their findings are generally applicable to the entire Western
world. Much of what the study
uncovered was predictable, while some things came as a surprise. The
greatest shock of all concerned the relationship between religious
belief and sexual pleasure.
Using objectively verifiable criteria—such as sexual responsiveness
and frequency of orgasm—the study found that the people who have the
most sex, the best sex and are the happiest about their sex lives are
monogamous, married, religious people.
While it may come as no surprise to find a direct correlation between
marriage and sexual pleasure, what did cause a number of raised
eyebrows was the connection between sexual pleasure and religion
(specifically, Christianity). Summarizing their findings on page 115 of
The Social Organization of Sexuality, the researchers wrote:
“women without religious affiliation were the least likely to report always having an orgasm with their primary partner – only one in five…. Protestant women who reported always having an orgasm was the highest, at nearly one-third. In general, having a religious affiliation was associated with higher rates or orgasm for women (27 percent of both Catholic and Type I Protestants reported always having an orgasm with their primary partner.)”
The authors were forced to conclude: “religion may be independently associated with rates of female orgasm.
Just for the record, this was not a study commissioned or financed by
the religious right or by a church. It grew out of a 1987 proposal to
gather reliable data on adult sexuality to help better understand the
spread of AIDS. Conservative members of Congress opposed using tax-payer
money to fund the study, thus forcing it to be financed by private
benefactors. No one expected that among its conclusions would be the
fact that men and women who are religious, and who conform to
traditional sexual ethics, are the most sexually fulfilled.
The same year that The Social Organization of Sexuality was published, Edward Laumann joined with other authors to produce Sex in America: A Definitive Survey.
This was a more popular book explaining the findings of the Chicago
study in terms accessible to a non-specialist audience. Commenting on
the role of religion, the authors reiterated, “The women with no
religious affiliation were somewhat less likely to report that they
always had an orgasm, while the conservative Protestant women had the
highest rates….” The authors went on to comment specifically on how
these findings undermine traditional stereotypes:
“The association for women between religious affiliation and orgasm may seem surprising because conservative religious women are so often portrayed as sexually repressed.…And despite the popular image of the straitlaced conservative Protestants, there is at least circumstantial evidence that the image may be a myth at least as it pertains to sexual intercourse.”
The Chicago study confirms what researchers have found in previous
less methodologically rigorous studies. For example, research conducted
by Redbook Magazine in 1970 also discovered a strong correlation between
religion and sexual pleasure. Redbook gave 18,349 women a
professionally prepared questionnaire about their sexual experiences.
The results were written up by Robert K. Levin and co-authored by
William H Masters and Virginia E Johnson for Redbook 145 in an article
titled ‘Sexual Pleasure: the Surprising Preferences in 100,000 Women.’
The survey discovered that “sexual satisfaction is related significantly
to religious belief. With notable consistency, the greater the
intensity of a woman’s religious convictions, the likelier she is to be
highly satisfied with the sexual pleasures of marriage.”
The Redbook survey found that 75% of women who described themselves
as ‘strongly religious’ were the most likely to regard their sex lives
as ‘good’ or ‘very good’, as opposed to only 68% of those who
identified as ‘moderately religious.’ This same study also discovered
that the least religious women were the least satisfied with the quality
and quantity of their intercourse. Reflecting on this trend, Robert J
Levin commented, “This tendency exists among women of all ages. No
matter what the age group…the pattern remains the same: Strongly
religious women are the most likely to describe their marital sex as
‘very good’.”
While the Redbook study discovered a correlation between religion and
enhanced sexual satisfaction for women of all ages, it found that
“strongly religious women (over 25) seem to be more responsive…[and] she
is more likely than the nonreligious woman to be orgasmic almost every
time she engages in sex.” In other words, it seems that the more
religious a woman is, the greater time she has in bed.
The findings of the Chicago study and Redbook magazine are not alone.
A 1940s Stanford University study and another study from the early 90s
also discovered that women who attend religious services scored higher
when it came to levels of sexual satisfaction.
Why is this? I have suggested four theories for why this is in an article I wrote last year for Salvo Magazine. One of these theories concerns modesty. I suggested that one reason why religious people, on average, are more sexually
fulfilled than others may stem from the connection between religiosity
and modesty. While many religious people dress just as immodestly as
many nonreligious people, religious ones tend at least to be more
conscious of their obligations in this area. But what is the connection
between modesty and sexual fulfillment? I'll answer first from the
female perspective and then the male.
Some women have told me that modesty
is important to them, not only because it helps men not to stumble, but
also because it helps them place a high value on their own sexuality.
They have told me that modest apparel affirms the true importance of a
woman's sexual identity, since it proclaims that her body is not a tame,
benign, and commonplace thing. Modesty affirms that our bodies in
general and our sexuality in particular are special, charged, even
enchanted, and too exciting to be put merely to common use. As Kathleen
van Schaijik suggested in a 1999 article, "If we revere something, we do
not hide it. Neither do we flaunt it in public. We cherish it; we pay
it homage; we approach it with dignity; we adorn it with beauty; we take
care that it is not misused."
In her book A Return to Modesty, Wendy Shalit argues that
modesty is the truly erotic option, since it makes the highest valuation
of a woman's sexual identity, affirming the sacredness of sexuality and
displaying a commitment to setting it apart and cherishing it. C. S.
Lewis put his finger on the same principle in That Hideous Strength: "when
a thing is enclosed, the mind does not willingly regard it as common."
To dress immodestly is ultimately to reduce our sexuality to something
commonplace, trivial, and humdrum.
Precisely for this reason, a modest woman significantly upgrades the
significance of what is happening when she undresses in front of her
husband. As Havelock Ellis observed (stumbling upon the truth for one of
the few times in his life), "without modesty we could not have, nor
rightly value at its true worth, that bold and pure candor which is at
once the final revelation of love and the seal of its sincerity."
Modesty also upgrades sexuality from the
male perspective. The anecdotal evidence clear shows that men whose
environment is saturated with immodest women (either because of the
company they keep or the images they view) are generally not oversexed,
as one might suppose, but just the opposite. In Denmark, where
pornography is unrestricted, men are often quoted as saying that sex has
become boring.
Cristina Odone observed in The Times that advertisers are
finding that sex just does not sell products like it once did. The
reason, she suggested, is that the advertisers have made sex so banal
that it doesn't entice us any longer. As one 16-year-old was quoted as
saying in 2004, "I'm so used to it, it makes me sick."
Frequent exposure to nudity tends to trivialize the human body,
emptying it of its implicit eroticism. As someone said to me last year,
when a man is exposed to too much flesh, it lowers the healthy
excitement he should feel when he looks upon the body of his wife
because (yawn) he sees that all the time. It therefore takes a higher
sexual charge, sometimes to point of extreme perversion, to match the
excitement that might otherwise be available in a normal sexual
encounter. Could it be that the rise of libido-enhancing drugs is
meeting a need created by the libido-squashing effects of pornography?
Further Reading
____________
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