What Women Wish Men Knew about Women’s Sexuality
Dr. Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen are joined by guests Cathy Loerzel, Executive VP of The Allender Center and Christy Bauman, author of Theology of the Womb, to have a vulnerable discussion about what women wish men knew about women’s sexuality.
Christy, an expert on theology of the body and women’s bodies, explains that women are often not allowed to think about what they want men to know due to the loudness of what a man wants.
Christy: There’s this sense of jealousy … we don’t share the importance of female pleasure. Women are in a bind when we think about what do we tell men … we don’t have the luxury of exploring our sexuality without becoming objects.
Rachael, Christy, and Cathy discuss the impact of the purity movement and the confusion of not allowing yourself room to explore what your body is telling you and is made for. Specifically, Cathy dives into the difficulty of “flipping a switch” after marriage and the impact of abuse and sexual harm on women’s sexuality.
Rachael: “I would want men to know also as women it’s not just the sexual part of our bodies that hold stories so many parts of our bodies hold stories. What does it mean to be tended to, to be curious about each other, to want to understand the history of touch or lack of touch.
Cathy: To tend to a woman’s heart can be really sweet and sometimes very simple. It doesn’t have to be something that shuts you down, it can be an invitation to truer, better intimacy, better sex, better places of relating if there’s a sense of being able to enter into a place that feels more complex to you.
To close the conversation, Rachael, Christy, and Cathy share personal stories as they relate to feeling obligated to have sex, the need to be tended to, and the power of care.
“In order for the Kingdom of God to unfold in the way it’s meant to unfold and for the work we’re meant to do in this world, we’ve got to bring our embodied selves to the table.” Rachael Clinton Chen