Beautiful Union Part 3: The "Generosity/Hospitality" Language Game

Turning the screws and flipping the script on women

Content warning: sexual violence, also there’s a lot of semen in this one

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

1. Introduction

So far in this review series we have discussed two core problems with this text. The first is that the thesis of the book is poorly framed and unsustained throughout the text. The second is that the argument style lacks interpretive restrictions but attempts to ground its claims in the Bible using appeals to biblical languages. These associations, however, are weak, and the grasp of Greek and Hebrew is bad.

However, the trouble with language in Beautiful Union is not limited to Greek and Hebrew. As we will discover, the use of English concepts is also problematic. I argue that the model introduced for sexuality in chapter one — specifically, giving and receiving — is based on a slippery definition of both these words in English. This leads Beautiful Union into further trouble wherever these concepts are used to advance the theology.

In this section, we’ll be looking at these two concepts, “giving/generosity” and “receiving/hospitality” as they are deployed in Beautiful Union. I want to be clear up front that this conversation is going to require much discussion of body parts and fluids. My critique here is not centered on the inappropriateness of discussing sex or sex organs in theological contexts. The problem is not frankness in the face of prudishness. The problem is the way in which body parts are coded and attached to values like “generosity” and “hospitality.”

The way “generosity” and “hospitality” are defined in terms of gender and sex acts in Beautiful Union is deceptive and manipulative. At first glance, the language appears to be egalitarian – both partners give and receive pleasure and service in sex.¹ However, as we will discover, male “generosity” in this text is counterintuitively defined as “self-gratifying” - the personal pleasure and enjoyment of a man during sex is reframed as a gift to his wife. What the man “gives” during sex is not her pleasure, but his pleasure. The female orgasm is thus completely erased, and she simply enjoys the experience of him enjoying himself.

If this reading seems extremely dark, it is. However, there is a second possible reading of these texts that we’ll explore later. Put a pin in that.

2. The Manipulative Language Game of “Generosity” and “Hospitality”

In ch. 1 of Beautiful Union, the role of a man in sex is defined as generosity. The role of a woman is described as hospitality. Concerning generosity, the text amends this to remind us that generosity is mutual.

So far so good! In sex, men and women both give and receive. This all looks, at first glance, completely reasonable.

But what exactly does a man “give?” What is he “giving” during sex? The intuitive reading would be pleasure, right?

NOPE. That is not what Beautiful Union means. This is what Beautiful Union means.

Generosity at its highest point is here described as giving your penis to a woman by putting it in her vagina.

It is also defined as giving your semen to a woman by ejaculating it into her vagina.

The role of a woman is not defined as generosity. It is described as hospitality. It is joyful and happy reception of the gift, which is semen.

This is analogous to Christ sending the Holy Spirit, which the church receives, and the Spirit of God filling the Temple to be with his people.

The obvious thing to point out here is that male ejaculation is completely divinized in this, as it was in the examples we looked at in part 2. Women are treated as buildings or communities, but men are treated as divine. This inflates the importance of men, male bodies, and male pleasure, subtly insists on hierarchy, and erases a role for women during sex beyond receiving the sacralized penis and semen. This is all utterly bizarre and probably disturbing for most readers.

But what I primarily want to focus on here is the absence of female pleasure, and the way the text uses generosity/hospitality and give/receive language to evade its absence. So let’s continue.

What makes this book so frustrating is that Beautiful Union often says something that sounds right, but then reveals that this is not right when you read more carefully. So to continue:

Okay! So here we have the statement that men shouldn’t be selfish during sex. Women need foreplay to enjoy sex. Sounds good, right?

No. When we look at the fuller context, this looks stranger. As Sheila herself has noted, this passage appears to confuse foreplay/clitoral stimulation with “romancing” someone “towards the bedroom.” The point is not that women need manual or oral stimulation to climax, which men can offer as a way to “serve” their wives. It’s that men need to create a general context of desire through being romantic.

When taking on the question of pleasuring women, Beautiful Union doesn’t invoke external stimulation at all. It encourages men to “go slow” during penetration.

So we have a context where men are told not to be “selfish” by going “too fast” in the bedroom. But why is this more selfish or more service-oriented than “going slow,” without any discussion of clitoral stimulation, not just penetration? Either way the man has an orgasm, and as we will discuss more in the next section, the woman likely will not.

The primarily problem here is that generosity - at least for men - has been cleverly redefined to be not-generosity.

This image of “giving,” wherein a man gives in the bedroom by quite literally giving his penis to a woman, is pervasive in the text.

By associating penises and semen with gifts, divine inspiration, the presence of God, and sacrifices, this has the effect of making “inhospitality” — i.e., women not wanting sex, seem more or less irrational.

Though the footnote says consent does matter, there’s no interrogation of why a woman might not want to have sex with her husband. There’s no discussion of an orgasm gap, beyond the cursory engagement where men are encouraged to go “slow.” There’s certainly no discussion of vaginal pain. It’s simply a refusal to receive the gift of the husband. Which is semen.

3. Effects of the Language Game: Why Is this Wrong?

The primarily problem in these passages is that generosity - at least for men - has been cleverly redefined to be not-generosity. Generosity in sex is having your own orgasm. Sacrifice is the act of doing something extremely fun. Giving is stimulating all your own nerves that feel terrific when you stimulate them. Hospitality, for women, is willingness to receive a gift, which is their husbands having fun.

Likewise, by framing semen as a gift or a sacrifice, women’s agency in sex - to say nothing of pregnancy and birth - is eliminated. Women are the spaces where sex happens. They are not framed as participants in sex. They are the temples where sacrifice happens. They are the place where a baby is placed by a magical life-giving fluid.

This is all bad, but there are two other significant problems. The second is that this is simply not a coherent account of giving. You cannot (or should not) give someone your penis the way you can give someone a cup of coffee. For comparison, let’s say a husband is painting his wife’s toenails. Let’s also say that he enjoys this process very much, finding it intimate and meditative. This is a lovely interaction. However, even though everyone is enjoying this, the wife is not giving the husband her feet. She will still have her feet at the end of the interaction. Likewise, as much as the husband may enjoy painting his wife’s toenails, the action is still largely directed towards her. She gets a pedicure. In the same way, a man having an orgasm inside a woman may be an experience the woman enjoys very much, but the action is still directed towards him (he gets to have an orgasm) and nothing is received that the man does not also get to keep (it is still his penis, though I suppose that he will not get the semen back. However, this is still not a gift in any but the most technical terms). This makes the language of generosity even more disingenuous.

The third problem is that this label creates a very bizarre context from which to understand sex work and rape.

So the analogy here is that, while sex workers often are pressured into work by external forces, sex work distorts the hospitality of sex by charging money. A wife is supposed to receive a gift of a penis into herself, but a sex worker charges to receive a penis into herself.

This entire analogy is bizarre because it identifies charging money as the primary problem in sex work, not paying, creating demand, or managing human bodies. The power dynamics of sex work are not improved if a pimp does not charge a john for sex. The image created here is that the problem of sex work is that wives are like houses, but sex workers are like hotels. There is nothing wrong with hotels. Hotels are not exploitative. They are just a different kind of building. It’s not hard to argue that this work sidelines sexual exploitation (though I do wish to acknowledge that there’s a note of it early in this section), but I think it’s even more important to simply note that the analogy between hospitality and sex work doesn’t function, and should have been a hint that “hospitality” is not a good description of what women do during sex.

This brings us to rape. If sex work is an inversion of hospitality, rape is an inversion of generosity. To its credit, Beautiful Union insists on Christ’s solidarity with the victim of assault and unequivocally denounces sexual assault.

However: sexual assault is still framed as a distortion of generosity:

This is probably not intentional, but it is hard to overstate what a trivialization of rape it is to frame rape as inverted generosity. Once again, the analogy fails in execution: though men having sex are framed as “giving” and men who rape are framed as “taking,” the central act of putting your penis in a vagina remains the same. This creates the bizarre impression that rape is essentially importunate generosity. It is inserting a penis into a woman who did not want it. It’s like when you have dinner with your grandmother and she sends you home with leftovers you’re not going to eat but she won’t listen.

Some of the mistakes in this section, particularly the two above, seem to owe more to obliviousness and a lack of caution on the part of the author and editors than to actual malice. I don’t have any evidence that anyone behind Beautiful Union thinks that rape actually is like being given an ugly sweater you don’t want. However, the fact that this is a very plausible reading of the analogy should have been a hint that the generosity/hospitality model in this section was flawed from the start. And the reason why is because of the manipulative, twisty way “generosity” has been redefined - giving your wife your orgasm.

4. Another reading?

I think the most natural way to read this chapter, and the way in which most women read this when it was released, is the way that I read this above. The book manipulatively frames male enjoyment as a gift, a sacrifice, a service done on behalf of the wife. It also manipulatively frames women not wanting to receive penetrative sex as refusing a gift. There isn’t interrogation of what being “sacrificial” in the bedroom would actually mean for a husband, what a wife might be particularly aroused by, or why a wife might refuse penetrative sex.

This is cruel.

However. As I said above: there is a second way to read this. 

I had been under the impression that the framing of generosity/giving was a manipulative model that was meant to reframe male pleasure as done for women, to define sex as exclusively the acts by which men are most likely to orgasm, and to erase responsibility for women’s pleasure (and pain) in bed. After all, if a penis in marriage is a gift, then rejecting it — because of pain, discomfort, a pervasive lack of orgasms, feeling used — is invalid. It’s a gift! Who doesn’t like gifts?

And then I read these paragraph in chapter 5.

We’re going to break things down into smaller pieces in the next edition: but we’ll do a short version for now: the moment of orgasm here for the man is figured, accurately, as the moment where he ejaculates.

The moment (and it is said to be a moment) of orgasm for the woman is figured as the moment where…the man ejaculates. 

And this was the moment while reading that I started to realize something had gone seriously, seriously wrong. 

There’s no decorous way to say this, so I’m going to try to say this as delicately, politely, charitably, and impersonally as I know how. Here goes:

I propose that this book, without naming any individual culprit or suggesting that any particular person behind the text is uninformed about female bodies, makes more sense if we assume that a plurality of voices behind Beautiful Union — including writers, editors, readers, marketers, and hearers — do not know what a female orgasm is.

The text of Beautiful Union does not demonstrate knowledge of how women orgasm, and in fact betrays a distinct lack of awareness and misunderstanding about how women orgasm. This hypothesis explains a surprising number of mistakes in the text.

This is an argument I want to pursue in the next section. In the next section I want to demonstrate why, generally speaking, this hypothesis is plausible. I will then draw attention to evidence in Beautiful Union that the book (remember, “book” is a catch-all term for “everyone involved”) doesn’t understand what a female orgasm actually is. I will then show how the apparent misconceptions offer an alternative explanation for some of the more bizarre sections of this book. Our goal is not to accuse any one person behind this book of being a bad lover. The goal is to simply explore an alternative explanation for how this text came to be — one that does not depend on the chauvinism, obliviousness, and arrogance of the people behind the text, but rather on more mundane ignorance of women’s anatomy and the science of sexuality.

This series is continued in Part 4.

1. I will be reproducing the heteronormativity of the text in my critique. The text assumes that the definition of “sex” is “a man having an orgasm while his penis is inside a woman’s vagina.”