“Good Sex” and Religion: A Feminist Overview

Abstract

This article presents an overview of both the processes and the results of an international, interdisciplinary, and interreligious feminist study of “good sex” that resulted in a volume by the same name. We argue that religion (including its secular equivalent, i.e., global capitalism) remains a powerfully influential cultural force that shapes people's lives, in general, and sanctifies their beliefs, in particular, about what makes for good sex. This review seeks to expand conversations about sex in the bedroom and other private arenas (like the confessional) into more public venues and to demonstrate the connections between power, pleasure, and justice. The need to deconstruct religious traditions so as to critically analyze their structures and components is recognized. Several examples of how feminist scholars and activists are retrieving female-friendly religious insights from both their traditions and more transgressive communities of resistance are provided. This article also points to several ways that religious sexual scripts and norms might be reconstructed. Topics addressed include discussions of how to understand footbinding, the tendency of “forbidden” fruit to prove most erotic, whether sexual entanglements are spiritually dangerous distractions, and ways in which religion can make motherhood “compulsory.” We examine both the ways in which equating sexual activity with reproductive activity have obscured the value of women's sexual delight and the risks to many women and children of an unqualified validation of sexual pleasure. Both the ambivalence of religious teachings about sexuality and the difficulties posed by monolithic portrayals of religious traditions are identified.