But there are conservative Christians in the world who think that sex should be a mutually satisfying sexual experience every time for both partners. Joy Wilson, of Book22.com [NSFW] is one of those people. She runs a Christian marital aid shop that caters to conservative Christians looking to maximize the sexual pleasure in their marriage without porn or products that advocate "immoral" acts. And, a couple of decades ago, Tim and Beverly LeHaye encouraged Christian couples to see mutual orgasm as mutually beneficial (unlike Dennis Prager, who thinks that women's insistence on having one every time is responsible for the decline of the American family).

Here's the thing. Is it easy to mock from a secular perspective? Sure, as my choice of photo demonstrates. But the pro-sex (even if it is only pro-sex-in-marriage) Christians are doing the, um, Lord's work. They are, in effect, reframing feminist arguments about sex and women's sexuality and women's sexual pleasure in a language and a belief system in which a good part of this country fervently believes. They are encouraging people — within the context of marriage, which, okay, they're not going to talk about it pre-maritally — to view mutual sexual pleasure as not only an okay thing, or a good thing but as an important think and a required thing and even a gift from God.

And, not only are these Sex Crusaders encouraging men to think about sex in those terms, but they are encouraging women to open up about their sexuality to their husbands and with themselves and to be fully engaged, happy and comfortable with their sexuality. Is it so terrible for Christians to run around telling men that female orgasms are a gift from God that they should be helping their wives find? Hell, no. In fact, we need hundreds more of these men and women running around and shouting down Dennis Prager and Tucker Carlson and Ed Young every time they open their yaps and talk about submission and frigidity and male desire and the lack of female desire. If everyone was having more regular orgasms, don't you think the world would be a better place?

The Joy of Christian Sex Toys [NPR]
From the Crap Archives: The Beauty of Sexual Love [Village Voice]

Earlier: Which Flavor Of Ice Cream Would You Swap For Sex?
Tucker Carlson's Guide To Not Getting Divorced
Conservative Dennis Prager Knows It's Not Rape If His Wife "Submits"
Dennis Prager Still Thinks Women Should Just Give It Up Already

Image "David 4" via Zach_ManchesterUK

Your first question, however, as an eagle-eyed reader, is probably something along the lines of, "Why is this post illustrated with a picture of a Dutch Slutty-Tranny-Claus?" And, frankly, that's because we wondered the same thing when reading Prager's new advice column.


Have we finally figured out the source of his malfunction?

But, onto the column, which delves into why women shouldn't be selfish and refuse their husbands sex just because they aren't in the mood when their husbands are in the mood to, um, selfishly demand sex. Wait, no, let's glide over that little cognitive dissonance just like Prager does and stick to attacking what he does bother to say.

1. If most women wait until they are in the mood before making love with their husband, many women will be waiting a month or more until they next have sex.

Yes, ladies, just like you only have sex for procreation, you only want to have sex when it's possible. Or it's possible that you're just fucked up, which really shouldn't stop your husband from slaking his animal lust on your prone form, not that him doing so would, say, tend to fuck you up or anything.

But for most women, for myriad reasons — female nature, childhood trauma, not feeling sexy, being preoccupied with some problem, fatigue after a day with the children and/or other work, just not being interested — there is little comparable to a man’s “out of nowhere,” and seemingly constant, desire for sex.

Yes, and just because you have unresolved feelings about your molestation and/or rape, have body issues, are stressed out or have medical problems (including medication or undiagnosed yet curable disorders) doesn't mean you should see a doctor or a therapist and resolve those issues so that you want to have sex with your husband, you should just have sex with your husband.

Also, the female equivalent to "a man's 'out of nowhere,' and seemingly constant desire for sex" is a woman's 'out of nowhere' and seemingly constant desire for sex. But, like not all women constantly want to be fucking, not all men constantly want to be fucking (as my series of long-term relationships have most certainly taught me). Lots of people have good relationships without perfectly compatible sex drives — and it's by no means always the man jerking off.

2. Why would a loving, wise woman allow mood to determine whether or not she will give her husband one of the most important expressions of love she can show him? What else in life, of such significance, do we allow to be governed by mood?

Really? Sex isn't just "an expression of love," it's also a physical act with physical consequences. Sexual desire isn't just a mood swing, it is intimately related to whether the sex act is not just pleasurable but related to whether it is actually painful. If you aren't "in the mood," your vagina often doesn't lubricate, your tissues don't swell, and the act is — at the VERY best — exceedingly unpleasant even if you do love the person. And if, as Prager barely gives lip service to, you are a survivor or molestation or rape, having someone forcibly penetrate your unwilling and unready body (your not-in-the-mood body) can well bring back bad memories or flashbacks. Not being in the mood is not the same as not wanting ice cream, it's an unwillingness to engage in sex. "In the mood" is a fucking euphemism for a willingness or desire to be aroused to engage in sex.

What if your husband woke up one day and announced that he was not in the mood to go to work? If this happened a few times a year, any wife would have sympathy for her hardworking husband. But what if this happened as often as many wives announce that they are not in the mood to have sex? Most women would gradually stop respecting and therefore eventually stop loving such a man.

Actually, she'd probably tell him to get a job he didn't fucking hate so much that he had to whine about it every morning, which — if she is always not in the mood — is exactly what her friends are telling her about her marriage.

Why do we assume that it is terribly irresponsible for a man to refuse to go to work because he is not in the mood, but a woman can — indeed, ought to — refuse sex because she is not in the mood? Why?

Because a job pays your bills and unwanted sex is something that can hurt, humiliate, shame and ruin your fucking relationship. I have been to enough church weddings of enough religions to know that there is nothing in the damn vows which requires a woman to give up ownership and autonomy of her pussy any more than it forces a man to do the same to his genitals. It's her body. Period. And when sex is your job, that's when you're a sex worker.

3. The baby boom generation elevated feelings to a status higher than codes of behavior. In determining how one ought to act, feelings, not some code higher than one’s feelings, became decisive: “No shoulds, no oughts.” In the case of sex, therefore, the only right time for a wife to have sex with her husband is when she feels like having it. She never “should” have it. But marriage and life are filled with “shoulds.”

Yeah, like you "should" treat your wife with appreciation, thoughtfulness and respect, and she should treat you with the same. And you should respect that there are maybe really good reasons she doesn't want to have sex with you that have nothing to do with being fickle or whatever.

To many women, especially among the best educated, the notion that a woman owes her husband sex seems absurd, if not actually immoral. They have been taught that such a sense of obligation renders her “property.” Of course, the very fact that she can always say “no” — and that this “no” must be honored — renders the “property” argument absurd. A woman is not “property” when she feels she owes her husband conjugal relations.

Oh, right, just because she can say no, even though Prager is arguing she never, ever should means he doesn't think women's vaginas are the property of their husbands, nosireebob. And just because she should feel emotionally blackmailed into it, that's not a problem either. Yeah, no wonder this mythical straw woman doesn't fuck her husband enough for Dennis Prager's liking. I wouldn't want to fuck that guy either.

So, if a husband is in the mood for sex and the wife is not, her feelings are deemed of greater significance — because women’s feelings are of more importance than men’s. One proof is that even if the roles are reversed — she is in the mood for sex and he is not — our sympathies again go to the woman and her feelings.

And, here's the cognitive dissonance part — Prager seeks to reverse this to the exact opposite. A woman should always have sex regardless of her feelings, since her husband is always feeling in the mood. But, obviously, it's different because his desires are supposedly biological and hers are always in her head.

Therefore, many women believe that it would simply be wrong to have sex with their husband when they are not in the mood to.

Not "wrong," just painful, unpleasant, not intimate, not bonding and possibly bad-memory triggering. There's a fucking difference. Also, by the way, constantly putting up with having one's husband treat one as a semi-wet hole into which to stick his dick isn't exactly going to have most women liking sex more or getting "in the mood" more.

7. Many contemporary women have an almost exclusively romantic notion of sex: It should always be mutually desired and equally satisfying or one should not engage in it. Therefore, if a couple engages in sexual relations when he wants it and she does not, the act is “dehumanizing” and “mechanical.” Now, ideally, every time a husband and wife have sex, they would equally desire it and equally enjoy it. But, given the different sexual natures of men and women, this cannot always be the case.

Uh, no. "Romantic" sex is not the same as "sex which provides mutual pleasure." While I would certainly argue that — given the number of women who rarely, if ever, orgasm — more women should be orgasming, plenty of women have satisfying sex (to them) without orgasm. The problem is not that women always have to be screaming their heads off in pleasure riding their husbands in practically orgiastic multi-hour sexual sessions of romantic love. It's that lying down and letting someone stick it in and hump away without regard to you as a person or whether you want to or are even physically prepared to do so is the opposite of something that someone that loves you would ever ask you to do.

8. In the rest of life, not just in marital sex, it is almost always a poor idea to allow feelings or mood to determine one’s behavior. Far wiser is to use behavior to shape one’s feelings. Act happy no matter what your mood and you will feel happier. Act loving and you will feel more loving. Act religious, no matter how deep your religious doubts, and you will feel more religious. Act generous even if you have a selfish nature, and you will end with a more a generous nature.

Or, you know, you'll spend your whole life lying to everyone around you, pretending to be someone you aren't, never form a real emotional connection and probably never be in the mood for anything until you die a bitter and unhappy person. But, hey, you'll have a smile on so other people will think you are happy. That's the same.

*By the way, Dennis Prager and I will be discussing this on his radio program at 1:00 ET on January 7th. You can call in, too.

When A Woman Isn't In the Mood: Part II [Townhall]

Earlier: Conservative Dennis Prager Knows It's Not Rape If His Wife "Submits"

MEGAN: It is very rare that the news is so full of crap as today, which is why I guess they call Fridays "news dumps." That said, I believe Obama's dump of his advisers' Blago contacts is best represented by this doll which portrays him taking a physical dump. I love this doll. I want one so bad that I actually mentally scrolled through everyone I had ever met — including in Spain in 1995 — to think if there was anyone I could get to buy me one.

SPENCER: Can you summarize the Blago stuff for me? I don't want to read it. Like I really don't care.

MEGAN: Rahm Emanuel called him twice pro forma and everyone is as clean as a whistle. The end. Duh.

SPENCER: I see that even this Weekly Standard writer says, "Yep, not raising any flags for me, either. Now, everybody go on vacation." So is this actually the end or will it go on endlessly like Whitewater?

MEGAN: It will go on endlessly like Whitewater, no doubt. I'm just waiting for someone's cats to disappear or Michelle Obama to be accused of faking someone's suicide. I cannot believe you are ignoring the pooping Obama doll. In other crap, Karl Rove thinks Joe Biden is trying to consolidate power too much. I mean, I just mention it because it seemed like you might need a good laugh. We can stop laughing when Joe Biden gets a man safe, a secret bunker from which he can practice his necromancy and begins to age in reverse, but until then...

SPENCER: Maybe it's because it's Christmas but I can't bring myself to care about a pooping Obama doll. Also can we stop using the word "pooping." What happened to respectable slang terms like "shitting"? "Poop" sounds like something you coo to a baby. It's not like you can't curse on this blog

MEGAN: Shit smells. This is plastic. Ergo, in my mind, it is poop. These things are very strictly delineated in my mind. Also, my parents are walking in and out of the room, so I am apparently unconsciously self-censoring like I did in high school.

SPENCER: What's beautiful about that Rove quote, aside from the hypocrisy — which is pro forma at this point — is his bald assertion that he knows what Biden and Obama talk about. Hilarious. I can't wait for this asshole's book.

MEGAN: I believe we can say "Until he shits out his book," because, man, that's going to reek.

SPENCER: Also, did you catch Jason Linkins' Twitter-meltdown last night? WTF

MEGAN: I will admit something right now that likely makes me a bad friend to Jason. I follow him online but no longer get updates to my phone since he started Twittering football.

SPENCER: Oh I took him off my phone long ago. I have a zero-tolerance policy for over-twitterers.

MEGAN: To make up for that embarrassing admission, I will post what he would have said last Friday had circumstances preventing us from doing Crappy Hour:

Since circumstance robbed us of our Friday Crappy Houring, I wasn't able to say something that I wanted, which was what a highlight of the year it was for me to participate in Crappy Hour, and to thank the jezebel community for their many kindnesses. It was a real honor and a privilege.

SPENCER: And in fairness, I think I might have been live-tweeting that particular Redskins game with him and Greg Greene and Amanda Mattos. AWWWWWW I would say the same thing, but I'm not gay. :)

MEGAN: Aw, you guys.

SPENCER: OK so now to discuss Chris Cox?

MEGAN: Oh, fuck yeah.

SPENCER:

Christopher Cox, the embattled chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, is defending his restrained approach to the financial crisis, saying he has provided steady leadership as Wall Street's main regulator at a time when other federal regulators have responded precipitously to upheaval in the markets.

This is a great quote:

"What we have done in this current turmoil is stay calm, which has been our greatest contribution — not being impulsive, not changing the rules willy-nilly, but going through a very professional and orderly process that takes into account unintended consequences and gives ample notice to market participants."

Like watching every investment bank it oversees self-destruct?

MEGAN: But that's not his job!!

"The public might not understand that that wasn't the SEC's job," he said, adding that the agency was not responsible for preventing investment banks from collapsing but rather for sheltering their securities trading units from problems in the broader corporation. "The SEC is not a safety and soundness regulator," he said.

I also like this part:

Cox said the biggest mistake of his tenure was agreeing in September to an extraordinary three-week ban on short selling of financial company stocks. But in publicly acknowledging for the first time that this ban was not productive, Cox said he had been under intense pressure from Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke to take this action and did so reluctantly. They "were of the view that if we did not act and act at that instant, these financial institutions could fail as a result and there would be nothing left to save," Cox said.

Um, hey, asshole? There's a reason why you got a 5-year term instead of a political appointment: so you wouldn't cave to political pressure to do stuff you know if bad.

SPENCER: No one can resist Hank Paulson. That's how you got those hickeys. What would Dennis Prager say?

MEGAN: Dennis Prager would say that Chrissy Cox should just lie down and spread her legs even if she's not in the mood! Which is apparently what Cox did!

It became the agency's responsibility to monitor them for financial and operational weaknesses under a program set up before Cox's tenure, but under his watch they got into such trouble that today they no longer exist as investment banks. Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers failed, Merrill Lynch had to be taken over, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley converted themselves into bank holding companies.

The March collapse of Bear Stearns illustrated an array of agency shortcomings, according to a review by the SEC's inspector general. He concluded that agency officials had been aware of "numerous potential red flags" at Bear Stearns "but did not take actions to limit these risk factors."

"It is undisputable," the inspector general concluded, that the "program failed to carry out its mission in its oversight of Bear Stearns."

SPENCER: That's how Cox thought the country needed to show the markets it loved them

MEGAN: I mean, the problem is that Cox was kind of a slut, he'd just spread 'em for anyone.

Treasury and Fed officials viewed Cox and his staff as nonplayers who had failed to foresee the brewing problems, according to people who were involved in those efforts but spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. They said Cox was often brought in for consultation only after major decisions had been made by Treasury and Fed officials.

Let's just say it: Bush nominated a random conservative Congressman from New Jersey to head the SEC because he didn't want anyone there who was particularly smart, engaged, knowledgeable or into regulating jackshit, and Cox fit the bill because he was a reflexive deregulator. And would get confirmed easily because Congress rarely fails to confirm its own.

SPENCER: Since I am not qualified to talk about what actually happened in the financial crisis I want to remind everyone that Chris Cox has been a conservative darling forever. Here's the American Spectator on who should be McCain's running mate:

Chris Cox: The best choice, bar none. This thoughtful and reform-minded chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission made his name for 16 years as the brainiest and perhaps most principled Reaganite conservative in Congress, as well as one of the best on TV.

MEGAN: I needed a good laugh, thanks. "Reform-minded," meaning, "let's get government out of the way of the markets so they can run the universe and make everything sunshine and rainbows!!"

SPENCER: Here's another such column. And here's Lisa Schiffren of NRO who needs no Prageresque advice when it comes to Cox:

Chris Cox is fabulous. He should be president. The only negative — alas, a big one — is that he has never managed to generate real excitement, even when running what should have been sexy hearings on big issues. He is obviously very smart, and a true policy wonk — the sort of guy who usually runs big, serious, difficult government institutions or departments. Is he a vote getter?

So at least that's fairminded!

MEGAN: "Sexy hearings on big issues?" Because the American public loves a wonk, and particularly the Republican American public. The last eight years have completely proved that. Speaking of, the red states are about to get more Congress members in 2011. California, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Florida and Pennsylvania are gonna lose. Which means: vote in your state elections next year and in 2010!!

SPENCER: Oh beautiful. This will bolster the arguments of all conservatives who don't see themselves leading the GOP into regional-party marginality to push the party rightward. And here I was thinking Afghanistan will doom the Obama administration.

MEGAN: And I was all excited that a judge ordered the release of 4 Gitmo detainees and The Europeans might be willing to accept some Gitmo detainees in resettlements deals. But we should end on a high note. Of the people Bush pardoned for Christmas, one was Charlie Winters, posthumously.

Mr. Winters was among a group of several hundred Americans and Canadians referred to by the Israelis by the Hebrew acronym of “machal,” or “volunteers from outside Israel.” They secretly helped in Israel’s war of independence in 1948, a year after its creation as a Jewish state.

He was an Irish-Catholic from Boston, and never said a word about it to his son. He was also the only one who did any prison time for it.

SPENCER: Yeah I have to give Bush credit for that. Dayenu. What a merry Jewish Christmas.

A very heartfelt thanks to Esquire's James Folta for the news (and picture) of the squatting Obama doll