How Curious Do You Think the Married Girls Are?

[Sscape]

Re: The Marriage Bed Forum

I read a few people giving medical/ biological advice to young men and women who were marrying virgins. WOW- :pink-shock: They could all use a good sex-ed course. The ignorance of some of the 'experienced' members on the board was astounding! When you constantly rail against 'dirty' thoughts your create a psychological barrier that can keep some people in ignorance for their life.

One guy was contemplating getting married. He was 55 and from his description probably asexual. He was going to marry a 45 yo woman. She likes sex infrequently. He wanted to know if he should still get married. At least 2 responses were that people over 50 don't care for sex that much. No one contradicted it. WOW! I guess I should have been put out to pasture. It's really bad advice and not at all accurate. :wink-kitty:

[Mama Mia]

Well, everything I've ever read from ANY sexually repressed culture has commented extensively on the issues related to actually enjoying "the marriage bed." It seems to be a pervasive problem in these communities which value a woman's hymen over the rest of her person; no number of words, even from an encouraging mother, seems to overcome the shame and guilt associated with sexuality from an early age.

Even Elizabeth Smart has spoken out about how purity culture values led her to think that she was no longer worth rescuing after her kidnapping, since she'd been sexually violated. She specifically blamed those horrific values for prolonging her psychological and physical torment. I've read extensively on the subject, but I honestly can't recall anyone who stated that purity culture values led to a fantastic married sex life. :geek:

Someone else commented on this thread that Jessa and Bin seem well-matched, as do Jill and Derick, but Josh and Anna's attraction level still felt odd. It's entirely possible that for some people, moving from chaste singleness to married intimacy is an easy and natural process...but I've never really seen evidence for this.

Out of curiosity, and because I'm not especially interested in :dead-horse: do you have any evidence that women raised with purity culture values easily adapt to married life and sexual expectations? I would be very interested in reading about the perspective of a woman who was raised to think her body was both holy and sinful, and easily able to adapt to sexual relations within a marriage.

Well, again, and obviously beating a dead horse here --- my point isn't about purity culture in particular. It's that you can't, logically, take ANY aspect of life and make a statement of " the vast majority" of people who experience that aspect have issues with it -- if you are only reading about the people who self identify as having problems. It's just a pet peeve because I worked in social services and, frankly, people do this all the time if they are trying to show things are problems for funding. But it's NOT statistically, or logically valid. To prove its an actual problem for " most" people you'd have to have at least a sampling of random people - not just those with identified issues. It's extremely misleading otherwise.

Hell, you could even go the other way on this issue by doing a quick google looking for stories of positive experiences with staying a virgin until marriage. You can't put in " purity culture" because that's generally considered a negative term.

Or, I could say, just putting in " experiences virgins marriage sex" -- that the majority of people have good sex if they wait until their wedding night. Just based on this random reddit thread, where more often then not it seems people were glad they waited and had generally enjoyable experiences from the start: But that would also be incorrect : reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1dhucx/virgins_until_marriage_what_was_it_like_on_your/

[Ave Maria]

Well, again, and obviously beating a dead horse here --- my point isn't about purity culture in particular. It's that you can't, logically, take ANY aspect of life and make a statement of " the vast majority" of people who experience that aspect have issues with it -- if you are only reading about the people who self identify as having problems. It's just a pet peeve because I worked in social services and, frankly, people do this all the time if they are trying to show things are problems for funding. But it's NOT statistically, or logically valid. To prove its an actual problem for " most" people you'd have to have at least a sampling of random people - not just those with identified issues. It's extremely misleading otherwise.

Hell, you could even go the other way on this issue by doing a quick google looking for stories of positive experiences with staying a virgin until marriage. You can't put in " purity culture" because that's generally considered a negative term.

Or, I could say, just putting in " experiences virgins marriage sex" -- that the majority of people have good sex if they wait until their wedding night. Just based on this random reddit thread, where more often then not it seems people were glad they waited and had generally enjoyable experiences from the start: But that would also be incorrect : reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1dhucx/virgins_until_marriage_what_was_it_like_on_your/

This! This is something that has always bothered me in all kinds of aspects of life, especially when dealing with the medical field, etc.

For Amandaaries:

Would it help if I made up a non-sexual example?

Let's say the question is if horror films cause debilitating nightmares. So you do a search for horror films and nightmares and you find a website for people with nightmares/night terrors. They have a thread about horror movies and most people say it bothers them. That doesn't mean that most people out "in the wild," so to speak, have a nightmare if they watch a horror film. *I* certainly don't, but I'm not prone to nightmares. And people don't tend to go around talking about how they *don't* have a problem, so I wouldn't be posting at the nightmare sufferers forum. To truly answer your question, you would have to ask random people in the population at large about their experiences with bad dreams and scary movies. Maybe this is an issue for most (or at least a significant portion) of the population, but you would never know based on the forums.

[apandaaries]

This! This is something that has always bothered me in all kinds of aspects of life, especially when dealing with the medical field, etc.

For Amandaaries:

Would it help if I made up a non-sexual example?

Let's say the question is if horror films cause debilitating nightmares. So you do a search for horror films and nightmares and you find a website for people with nightmares/night terrors. They have a thread about horror movies and most people say it bothers them. That doesn't mean that most people out "in the wild," so to speak, have a nightmare if they watch a horror film. *I* certainly don't, but I'm not prone to nightmares. And people don't tend to go around talking about how they *don't* have a problem, so I wouldn't be posting at the nightmare sufferers forum. To truly answer your question, you would have to ask random people in the population at large about their experiences with bad dreams and scary movies. Maybe this is an issue for most (or at least a significant portion) of the population, but you would never know based on the forums.

I completely understand how stats work, thanks. My comprehension of statistics and self-reported data isn't the problem.

The problem is, who would ever fund such a study? And how else are we going to learn about the experiences of people in these cult-like, hyper-controlled, bodily-shamed situations, unless we listen to those who actually experienced that precise situation? Most people still involved with the cult will refuse to speak up, obviously. So we have the words of the survivors and those who broke out.

Incidentally, such a study would also have other issues related to bias, as what brainwashed cult member would complain about their life? Zsu doesn't complain about sex and encourages women to "submit" and whatnot, but she also has another line in passing about it only taking 5 minutes or so. Does that sound like a sexually satisfied woman? But would she complain about it, given her circumstances? Michelle says she loves JB and sex with him, but she seems annoyed with a lot of those PDAs. Obviously enough still works between them, but still. If JB lasted 5 minutes each time, would we hear her complain? The brainwashing is deep.

Again, based on a lot of reading through various sexually repressed cultures where female chastity is highly valued and male sexuality is encouraged and venerated, many women seem to have more issues with sex. Those same writers will report similar issues with many other married women, if they are close enough to know about them. Women who've escaped from polygamous Mormon sects, for example, generally make sex sound pretty awful, from what their mothers told them to what they experienced in their marriages.

There was another thread on QFoS asking those who'd grown up in such environments to share their experiences. That's awesome, and a few folks did some interesting things, but a lot of it was gossip about what other people did. Raising children to police their sexuality from within seems to be somewhat effective. People seem to need lots of time and space to become familiar with and not ashamed of their sexuality.

The Reddit thread was fascinating, but it also seemed like a lot of those had horrible experiences, also. It was actually quite strange, if not impossible, to see that as material which supported the idea that staying "pure" until marriage left no negative consequences. There were some bad situations there (the guy who never really had sex with his wife in almost 3 years, but then she left him and got together with his friend...and he was still made about the blow job she gave the boyfriend before she married the new guy really stood out). The Reddit thread was open, as well, so a lot of those contributors had not experienced the same kind of serious body shaming/modesty instructions that the girls endured throughout their lives.

So, yeah, while it's a story-based assumption rather than data-driven knowledge, it still seems to me like those who are brought up in excessively religious, hyper modest, stiflingly controlling societies have difficulties adjusting to marital sexual relations.

[Mama Mia]

The problem isn't in thinking that a particular mindset might cause negative repercussions, , and sharing stories about how some people with that mind set have had issues. The problem is in stating that the " vast majority" of people with that mind set have those issues. When you can't possibly know that. Seriously, you can't possibly say you understand how statistics work and make that kind of sweeping generalization. Well I guess you can, because people can say whatever they want. :roll: It seems like a minor thing, but with everyone's immediate access to anecdotal stories about every single topic under the sun -- it is way too easy to just assume that you know what " most people" think based on the experiences of the few who are having problems.