Shell Game with Vulvas: Beautiful Union, Part 5

Is this book too interested in reproduction to talk about female orgasms? Let's investigate.

Photo by Angshu Purkait on Unsplash

In the last section, we noted that  the book Beautiful Union makes no mention of the clitoris. The book seems to portray the female orgasm as a momentary response that happens at the exact same time that her male partner has an orgasm, because of penetration. This is an image that is popular in the public imagination, but it is also biologically and anatomically wrong. Less than a third of women are able to have an orgasm through penetration only, and simultaneous orgasms are exceedingly rare. 

This might lead you to conclude that Beautiful Union is sheepish about women’s bodies in a manner that is highly out of keeping with its frankness about semen. But that’s actually not quite true. There’s actually an extremely fun and pleasant passage that discusses yonic imagery in church, that ends in an enthusiastic statement about the female body.

So here I’m going to say – I actually kind of love this passage. I sincerely wish it had been tied in more as an answer to misogyny in the church as well as misogyny in the broader culture. However – birth in church! What a cool piece of history! I just think it’s neat. 

That said, there’ still some issues with the presentation of women’s bodies in this text.

In Beautiful Union, the vulva is associated with two things: it’s the location of male pleasure (as in ch. 1 where it is primarily figured as a place where men have orgasms), and it’s where birth happens (as in the above passage where the vulva is a symbol of birth and new life). 

These aren’t bad things to associate vulvas with, but it’s also not the whole story. What vulvas are not associated with in this book is female pleasure. As we pointed out, there’s no mention of the clitoris at any point in this book. The central event of sex is the male orgasm, which (as we’ve seen) is assumed to include the female orgasm, even though it doesn’t. However, when orgasms are depicted in this book, the attention is always on the male orgasm — specifically, ejaculation into a vagina.

Now, the defense of this from the more insufferable circles is that Beautiful Union has successfully redrawn the broken line between sex and reproduction. While selfish, small-minded feminists actually want to have orgasms during sex…

No, seriously, this is a thing Denny Burk, King of Gender, actually said about mutual orgasms.

high-minded traditionalists, who reasonably care about men’s productive orgasms and not women’s selfish orgasms, want to reassert the fact that sex is primarily about children and making babies. Because men, as we all know, have always invested much more in babies than women have, and are duly concerned about making sure that children get their due while the nation’s mothers are tragically asleep at the switch.

All right, then. Let’s say this book’s insistence on male ejaculation in a vagina is all about bringing sex back to being all about reproduction and reaffirming the importance of children. This book is doing more than simply fixating on sexual pleasure, in the gauche way that we female hedonists think about sex. This book is actually interested in sex with all it entails – from the bedroom to pregnancy to babies.

Is this a good reading of this book? No. I think what’s actually happening here is a lot more chauvinistic. What isn’t actually happening in this book is that the sacrifices of pregnancy, birth, nursing, and parenting are proudly brought in as essential elements in a conversation about sex. Instead, when parenting and reproduction are in play, the role of the woman is continuously downplayed, while the role of the man is inflated. 

Men Make Babies, Women Help A Little

This is a line written by a man who calls male ejaculation a sacrifice. 

Chapter five walks us through the stages of reproduction.

The text agrees that conception requires both sperm and egg, but the “theological” meaning of conception only includes semen. 

Semen also is presented in this text as like a seed with the water that it requires to grow; it both nourishes and generates life. Where’s the egg cell? Where’s the uterine lining? It’s not clear; they are absent from this passage and their functions are assigned to semen.

So what do women actually do during conception? It seems like in this narrative, the semen mostly has it covered. 

Okay, that brings us to pregnancy. 

This is the entire section on pregnancy. Pregnancy is waiting. It’s also nesting. There is no discussion of how women’s bodies contribute and give themselves over to the development of the fetus or whether this might have theological significance. Later in the book, there is a chapter on abortion, but it makes only incidental mentions of pregnancy. The next section on labor praises the strength of women for being able to deliver a baby, which is good.The text also notes the link between new creation and labor in the Bible, and treats this as a prophetic sign of the age to come. 

I’m not saying the theological connections here, and the invocation of Romans 8, is wrong. But it does seem that - if there are so many ways in which the male orgasm can be linked with atonement, sacrifice, creation, and God the Father – is there really this little to be said about the theology of pregnancy and birth? Why is there so little engagement with Mary in a book that is ostensibly a theology of sex and reproduction? 

The depictions of male orgasm in ch. 1 and 3 both treat male orgasm as roughly commensurate with the woman’s contribution to conception, pregnancy, and birth. We have already seen in ch. 3 that conception is treated (inaccurately) as the moment of mutual orgasm during sex – that is, both men and women add the necessary ingredients to create a baby, and produce it through equal efforts. 

In chapter 1 it actually seems that men do most of the work to create babies. Women don’t actually contribute to reproduction in this image as much as they allow it to happen. They host the reproducing work of men inside of them.

Finally, in ch 13, semen is used as a synecdoche for children, family, and descent. In this narrative, family lineage is depicted as a river, in that it moves forward, coming from an origin. However, we’re told back in ch. 5 that this “river” is analogous to semen. In this image, the way in which new generations and families are produced can be successfully summed up with the image of semen. Men, and their orgasms, are the primary agents of reproduction.  

However, later in ch. 13 we’re reminded that semen is only one of the liquids present in the creation of new life.The other liquid is… the lubrication a woman’s vagina produces to make it easier for men to release semen inside them.

So when we look at this image, reproduction is possible because a man adds the necessary ingredients to a woman’s uterus to create a baby. The woman produces material that makes it easier for these necessary ingredients to arrive. She contributes to reproduction by making reproduction, which is a man’s job, easier to perform.

Okay, everyone go take a shower and let’s talk about this.

Here is what I’m seeing. It seems that this book has a few primary models for how to engage what women contribution to reproduction 

1. Take something women’s bodies do and say men do it

2. Ignore it 

3. Equate it to something men do to make reproductive participation look equal 

4. Talk about it briefly 

This is not even remotely how this book engages what men contribute to reproduction. 

Let’s be honest here: reproduction is not work that men and women share evenly. Pregnancy, birth, and nursing are done by women. Most early parenting is done by women. Why is this massive component of reproduction treated so lightly? Why does this book struggle to describe reproduction as anything but at most a 50/50 job? Why do so many passages describe reproduction as mostly conception? Why in these passages is the lion’s share of the contribution of conception assigned to men?

Naysayers will tell me that I am being unfair, because a reasonable person will not see fetal development and breastfeeding as, strictly speaking, “part of sex.”

To this I can only say: Okay, breastfeeding isn’t part of sex.

But clitoral orgasms are.

Why aren’t they in this book?

The Shell Game and the Incredible Disappearing Woman in Beautiful Union

So to go back to this question of why female orgasms are sidelined while men’s are highlighted in this book: I don’t think it can be true that this is because Beautiful Union insists on a link between sex and reproduction that female orgasms would distract from. As we have seen, Beautiful Union is just not that interested in most of reproduction. When the book does discuss some siloed aspect of reproduction, the text is vulnerable to misconceptions and careless writing that highlights men as the architects of reproduction. 

What reproduction serves as in this text is as a Trojan horse. It is a way to insist on the primacy and centrality of the male orgasm because the male orgasm is reproductive when the focus of the book is on the sex act. However, when the time comes to talk about reproduction itself, the book still centers men. The working definition of sex has been bounded enough by reproductive concerns that the text cannot trouble itself to speak frankly and accurately about women’s pleasure – the focus remains on male orgasms, because his are reproductive. But the time to talk openly and frankly and deeply about women and their bodies still does not arrive when the text discusses reproduction. Instead, the book consistently ascribes agency and creativity to male organs that those organs don’t possess, and it refrains from finding any theological significance in the massive physical effort of conception, pregnancy, and birth carried out by the female body. 

In other words, in this theology, reproduction circumscribes discussion of sex, but sex still circumscribes discussion of reproduction. It’s a shell game that keeps men in the middle and women in the wings. Women’s bodies briefly and frankly appear to discuss birth, but on the whole, the book plays keep-away with women’s bodies. They are constantly being pushed aside and ignored: misrepresented or erased in the bedroom, sidelined and minimized in reproduction, all to keep the focus on where the book wants it. 

The focus remains on the male orgasm. This is not a book about sex, broadly and accurately conceived. It is not a book about reproduction, broadly and accurately conceived. It is a book about men and their orgasms. It is a book that asks that this tiny slice of the human experience be treated as representative of sexuality and reproduction, and expects women to see themselves represented in this narration. 

But we’re not. We’re just not.

This series continues in Part 6.