Real Marriage_ The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together - Mark Driscoll [101]
In summary, oral sex is permissible within the context of marriage. It is certainly not required, but it is permitted.
Question 2: Is it helpful?
Yes. Many husbands and wives enjoy oral sex.
For the husband, it is enjoyable foreplay, and most will find this to be a much-appreciated act of love by their wives.
For the wife, if the husband is patient and takes her counsel during the act on how to please her best, he can bring her to a heightened state of passion.
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Question 3: Is it enslaving?
If oral sex becomes a frequent substitute for normal intercourse, then it is becoming a problem. So long as it is part of a couple’s sexual life and not the primary sexual act, then it is a gift being stewarded well.
Anal Sex34
Likely due to the increase in pornography and sexualized nature of our culture, anal sex is increasingly more commonly discussed, accepted, and practiced by both men and women, single and married. This explains why most grandmothers and grandfathers rarely, if ever, consider this act, which many of their granddaughters and grandsons are participating in.
More than 40 percent of all men ages twenty-five to fifty-nine have had anal sex with a woman at least once in their lifetime.35 Among women, 10.3 percent to 14.4 percent of women ages eighteen to thirty-nine, both married and single, had anal sex in the past ninety days.36 Among women eighteen to twenty-four years old, roughly one-fourth of those who were cohabitating and about one-fifth who were married reported having engaged in anal sex in the past ninety days.37 Also women between eighteen and forty-nine years of age in a marital or cohabitating relationship were “significantly more likely to report having anal sex in the past ninety days.”38 Among both men and women of all ages, including both married and single, anal intercourse was significantly less frequent than vaginal intercourse.39
Younger people are far more likely to engage in anal sex, as those ages twenty-five to forty-nine are more than twice as likely to do so than those fifty and older.40 Also, for men ages twenty-five to fifty-nine, those most likely to engage in anal sex were single or in a dating relationship; conversely, the least likely to engage in anal sex were married men.41
Question 1: Is it lawful?
Yes, legally and biblically anal sex is permissible for a married couple, as Scripture does not forbid it. This may surprise some people because they have heard anal sex referred to as sodomy. Sodomy is not a word that appears in the Bible, but is taken from an account in Genesis 19 about the city of Sodom. The two angels, appearing as men, whom the Lord had sent to investigate the sexual sin of Sodom and Gomorrah, were welcomed into Lot’s home. As they rested there, the perverted men of the city surrounded the home, demanding that Lot’s guests be sent out for homosexual sex and possibly even to be gang-raped by the crowd of men. God intervened and blinded the mob.
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The two “men” then told Lot to get his family out of town before God reduced the hellish town to ashes. Lot and his family barely made it out of town in time as God rained down burning sulfur (burning asphalt) on Sodom and Gomorrah and killed all the people. The sin of Sodom was not anal sex between husband and wives, but rather homosexual sex between men, which the Bible repeatedly forbids.a Genesis 19:5 is also clear that the sin of Sodom was homosexual sex, saying, “They [the men of Sodom] called to Lot and said to him, ‘Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us that we may know them carnally [have sex with them].’” Therefore,