I have this recurring nightmare. I’ve ended up at school, or work, or church, without any clothes on. I’ve apparently assumed a little casual public nudity is no big deal, only to realize far from my locker, office, or closet that this was a terrible idea. I am naked, and I am embarrassed.
I am ashamed, too—because my dream self is convinced that there is something crazy, something presumptive, something wrong with being naked, with showing oneself to others, with sharing oneself. This is a common enough nightmare, I know, which perhaps suggests that the need to come to terms with our nakedness, our vulnerability, in a variety of forms is universal. The Book of Genesis is not great for a lot of things (history, geography, gender relations), but its first chapters reveal some important commitments about these universal questions. What does it mean to be naked? Take Genesis 2:25:
And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.
That’s the second Creation story in the book of Genesis: in this version, a human is created first, and then, realizing that it shouldn’t be alone, God puts it to sleep and makes a second one out of the rib of the first. They awaken, and the first declares his delight in the second. In becoming two, they become male and female: differentiated only in that there are now two instead of one. Not primary and secondary, not hunter and gatherer, not leader and subordinate; that is, not opposites. Just two selves, differentiated.
They’re naked—having only recently been made of dust and bones, after all—and they’re not embarrassed. Theologically, that point, made in the last verse of the second chapter of Genesis, has been pretty important throughout history. Christians have asked that verse to carry our sense of humanity’s innocence before the Fall (when Adam and Eve, prompted by the devilish serpent, eat what God has forbidden them to eat and subsequently get kicked out of Eden). They were innocent, without sin, one with God and one with each other and comfortable with themselves. Then, they ate, and they knew that they were naked, and they were ashamed.
Whether their shame comes from the realization of their nakedness, or their creaturely status (as is suggested in chapter one), or from the regret of disobedience, the story goes that Adam and Eve ate that forbidden fruit, and then up and made themselves some clothes.
I wonder if part of their realization was that their nakedness is fraught. Sometimes nudity is glorious—like sleeping naked on a summer night, like sleeping naked on a summer night next to someone you love—and sometimes it’s mundane. Sometimes it renders undeniable our vulnerability. Sometimes nakedness is dangerous.
Nakedness has been considered a vulnerability throughout history, from the time Adam and Eve first noticed it in themselves. But physical nakedness is just one aspect of our vulnerability; we are vulnerable creatures, able to be harmed emotionally, spiritually, and sexually. Would that we were so lucky as Achilles—whose tragic weakness was easily located (and, you’d think, might have been easily protected!).
We’ll spend this chapter exploring the topic of vulnerability, and why appropriate vulnerability is necessary for experiencing just sex. Most of us have to spend a little more time reflecting on the ways in which we are individually vulnerable and where we have pockets of confidence, resilience, and ease. Knowing ourselves can help us then to establish relationships of mutual vulnerability and sharing. Letting our guard down, letting others see and know us, is a necessary first step in experiencing the grace of intimacy, but we want to do what we can to protect ourselves from undue harm as well. For a long time, marriage has been imagined to provide all the safety we need, but that is not always the case. Long before the intimacies of marriage, however, our understanding of bodies and nakedness is formed, usually first in our family of origin. So let’s start there.
I GREW UP in a house of girls: two sisters, and a mother who owned the second edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Over the years, my sisters and I bathed together, we shared clothes, we shared a bathroom. We were all swimmers. We grew accustomed, from a young age, to being naked around certain people. I was infinitely more comfortable around my sisters, much younger than me, than around the other girls in gym class. I had a four-year lead time on my middle sister, and so even though I was a late bloomer, I wasn’t embarrassed by the slight differences in our figures. In my sisters, I could see what my body had been; in my mother, I could see where my body would go. There were bodies at different stages, bodies that needed to be cleaned and dressed and cared for, and sometimes expedience necessitated nudity.
The varsity swimmers—among whom some of my closest friends were numbered—were totally in command of their nudity. After practice, they stripped off their suits, and washed their hair and stood around topless, talking and singing “Wonderwall” by Oasis. They dressed quickly but casually, motivated by the ever-approaching first-period warning bell, but not by shame. They inhabited their bodies with confidence.
I, flat-chested, hid behind a towel, but in an inattentive, sisterly environment, I grew in comfort. A body is a body. Mine was different in some ways, and I longed for a rack of any substance, but I was not ashamed.
Adam and Eve, our metaphorical parents, were not initially ashamed. In a marriage (though I’ve always been sort of bothered by the fact that she goes from “woman” to “wife” in the span of four verses), one hopes that there can be nakedness without shame or embarrassment. But they are not even embarrassed in front of God—and not simply “the [abstract] spirit of God in all things,” but the Lord who walks in the garden with them and talks to them.
When you’re a kid, you don’t mind being naked in front of your parents, or, often, anyone else. At age four both my kid sister and my middle daughter believed one’s birthday suit to be the perfect ensemble for running around the block, or reclining on the patio paging through a few picture books, or riding one’s scooter around the living room. Kids only slowly begin to realize that their bodies are their own, and moreover, that others’ bodies are separate from their own. They only slowly begin to desire or appreciate privacy, and learn to respect it even more gradually. (My kid, for example, wants privacy while she uses the bathroom, but doesn’t mind barging in to talk to me while I’m going.)
Adam and Eve, innocent and blissfully unaware of the existence of Good and Evil, are like children. They aren’t embarrassed, because they have nothing to hide. They aren’t, as far as they can tell, separate from God in any meaningful way. They don’t even know that’s a possibility. So, in many ways, being naked is not a good or a bad thing, but just a thing we happen to be underneath our clothes. They are innocent, in those early days, but I’m not sure I’d describe their relationship as intimate, despite the fact that they are husband and wife, despite the fact that they are naked.
In fact, their relationship can’t be “intimate,” as we tend to think of it, because intimacy is defined not as the collapsing of two selves, but as the relationship between two who are distinct from each other. Until she eats before him, there’s not a sense that they’re ever not totally in sync, with each other and with God.
In the days of our own, actual, innocence, there’s an easy camaraderie in everybody, boys and girls, getting stripped down and hosed off after an afternoon playing in the sand. Still, I wouldn’t trade the delights of intimate adult relationships for it, even if the potential for intimacy also brings the potential for pain or embarrassment. Innocence is nice, but it’s not somewhere I’d want to live.
The existence of sin—of everyone’s capacity and inclination to do ill—renders us afraid of showing ourselves to one another. The context of our nudity, of our vulnerability, makes a difference. Some contexts, some relationships, some people, are safer than others; some reflect the joy of being “free and easy” (as my daughter and I describe nudity), while some are terrifying, and fail to affirm our integrity or the image of God in us.
How do we know which is which?
THE JEWISH AND Christian traditions writ large can be read generously (and why not?) as exploring and prescribing the circumstances in which our nakedness and vulnerability can be respected, appreciated, and honored. In the Bible, we see a good deal of division of the sexes: around menstruation, and worship. In Orthodox Judaism and Christianity, that continues to this day, though in some instances, it is argued that that segregation was a doubling-down response to external pressures that came with modernity. Still, the creation and maintenance of what Naomi Seidman calls “homosocial” spaces, basically single-sex social arenas like the Korean spa or the church women’s retreat, sustains the possibility of that gracious (even erotic) same-sex awareness of bodies that happens in some swim locker rooms. Seidman, a Jewish academic raised Orthodox in Brooklyn, suggests that
eroticism is produced, or permitted, by the absence of members of the opposite sex, allowing for physical, emotional, and religious intimacies and connections forbidden in mixed groups—the shared ecstatic song and dance, common meals, and worship that is the peculiar genius of religious or traditional societies.1
The half-naked singing of Oasis.
There’s something special about those homosocial settings. But many of us also long for sexual relationships as well, whether we’re straight, gay, or otherwise. And we rightly want those relationships to be safe places for the vulnerability of sexual companionship and (sometimes) for the caring of children. If we’re going to share our bodies with someone, and/or make new bodies, we should feel safe to share ourselves freely and without shame. The promise of commitment and permanence in marriage helps to render that relationship safe.
That’s why many Christian churches and communities place such a high importance on marriage, and on sex happening within the confines of marriage. Many adopt in theory a slogan used by the United Methodist Church: “Celibacy in singleness, fidelity in marriage.” Those are the prescribed modes of appropriate sexuality for the two possible contexts in which faithful people might find themselves—single or married. It is believed, in theory anyway, that if we experience sex only within the safe, respectful boundaries of marriage, that we will be able to have a healthy, loving sex life with our partner. And, indeed, the implicit promise is that if we reserve sex for marriage alone, the sex will necessarily be effortlessly and immediately mind-blowing. That the sharing of oneself will come easily and painlessly.
No small number of evangelical Christians have been blogging against this mythical reward for celibacy or “purity.” Mindy Spradlin joins the throngs listing the “lies I learned about sex growing up in church culture”:
Our wedding night and honeymoon were sweet and special and awkward and frustrating. We were in no way prepared for the fact that true sexual intimacy would take work and education. . . . Where was our reward? Where were the fireworks? Awkwardness turned into frustration which turned into shame which turned into bitterness which turned into a great divide.2
Raised to believe that not only sex but also desire and arousal were not supposed to be part of unmarried life, Spradlin learned to deny her sexuality and “turn it off.” On marrying, what was wrong would be made right, and she would be able to embrace her sexual side with passion, power, and excitement. But the reality, she laments, is that shame and guilt and inhibition do not, cannot, simply melt away.
Even in a marriage, nakedness and vulnerability are not necessarily without complication, just as sexual relationships outside the constraints of marriage—before it, or before it’s on the table, or among widows and widowers unable to jeopardize their economic well-being for a walk down the aisle—are not necessarily dangerous or shame-filled.
The book Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together is hugely problematic but provides a good example of how marriage does not guarantee a healthy vulnerability or uninhibited physical intimacy. Written by controversial pastor Mark Driscoll and his wife, Grace, it pushes every single one of my theological buttons. Still, despite Driscoll’s failings as a pastoral leader, the opening chapter is revealing, and even helpful.
In Real Marriage, husband and wife chronicle the earliest years of their dating and then marital relationship. They meet in high school, both sexually experienced. She’s a pastor’s daughter living out some stereotypes; he’s a bit of a ladies’ man. At some point in college, he becomes a Christian, and shortly thereafter, God tells Mark to marry Grace. Simple as that.
They get married, and despite intentional and Christ-centered premarital counseling, things are pretty terrible. They had been “fornicating” before marriage, and though they’d stopped before their engagement and marriage, Mark had looked forward to “pick[ing] up where [they’d] left off sexually.”3
But God’s way was a total bummer. My previously free and fun girlfriend was suddenly my frigid and fearful wife. She did not undress in front of me, required the lights to be off on the rare occasions we were intimate, checked out during sex, and experienced a lot of physical discomfort because she was tense.
Eventually, he has a vision in which he sees her cheating on him shortly after they began dating in high school. He confronts her with this, she confesses, and things go to hell. He wouldn’t have married her if he’d known. She is so full of shame and self-loathing she can barely stand herself. But she’s also bitter. He’s bitter. They’re married, they’re monogamous. She’s pregnant! But they’re lonely and miserable, and clearly hard up.
After being married for more than a decade, and having four more children, she reveals an experience of sexual assault, and something changes. His heart breaks,4 and he realizes that he was “so overbearing and boorish, so angry and harsh, that I had not been the kind of husband whom she could trust and confide in with the most painful and shameful parts of her past.”5 Grace, for her part, experiences God’s grace urging her to let go of her fear and bitterness.
All this is not to say that marriage is terrible and marital sex is worse. But I offer their story because it serves as an example of how “commitment” or “monogamy” or even “marriage” is not the sole condition, or guarantee, of a healthy vulnerability or uninhibited physical intimacy in relationships. There’s something additional going on, something worth exploring for those who want to know what might constitute “appropriate vulnerability” for singles. Karen Lebacqz, a theological ethicist, takes up the question in helpful ways, accepting the traditional notion that sex is “a gift from God to be used within the confines of God’s purposes,”6 but expands those purposes beyond procreation and union. She writes:
Sexuality has to do with vulnerability. Eros, the desire for another, the passion that accompanies the wish for sexual expression, makes one vulnerable. It creates possibilities for great joy but also for great suffering. To desire another, to feel passion, is to be vulnerable, capable of being wounded.7
Without vulnerability, she continues, without openness, there’s no possibility of union. But it’s not just the threat of missing out on procreation and union that makes vulnerability so important. “Sex, passion and eros are antidotes to the human sin of wanting to be in control or to have power over another. ‘Appropriate vulnerability’ may describe the basic intention for human life.”8
Looking back to Adam and Eve, Lebacqz suggests that the Fall is a sign of humanity’s attempt to eschew our vulnerability; instead of union or intimacy, we see the hardening of hearts. Jesus, in turn, “shows us the way to redemption by choosing not power but vulnerability and relationship.”9
“Whoever tries to preserve their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life will preserve it.” That’s the version from Luke 17:33 (CEB), but the Gospel writers have Jesus sharing similar sentiments elsewhere.
WE’RE CALLED TO take a risk. Part of being human is putting ourselves “out there,” engaging in life and love and the world of other people. Being intimate, being naked, are big risks, and ones that are worth taking with people we trust to “play fair.”
Not all risk-taking is good and holy, however. Jesus may go to the cross, but we are also called to love ourselves, to see ourselves as the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit and worthy of love and care as God’s own beloved creation. Not all vulnerability is “appropriate.”
There are the clear circumstances, like rape, which “violates the vulnerability of the one raped, but also . . . the rapist guards his own power and refuses to be vulnerable.”10 The norm here is a mutual vulnerability, a norm that can be missed in seduction, promiscuity, prostitution, or even in suggesting that sex is nothing more than a physical act.
Our culture has a hard enough time knowing when rape is rape, unfortunately, so knowing how to navigate relationships and encounters that actually fall into some blurry gray areas is an even more daunting task. Most human stories are more complicated than they first appear, and vulnerability can’t always be seen. In the locker room, some of the girls I thought were so confident I later learned struggled with bulimia.
Other complicating factors include the way we conflate a desire for privacy in certain situations with feeling shame. Or imagine that nudity is the same as immodesty. Or even that various stages of undress are directly related to similar levels of vulnerability. Just because we’d prefer to limit those who see every crack and crevice, every fold and bulge and line, doesn’t necessarily mean we’re ashamed of our bodies, though it may indicate that we understand that being seen and known opens us up to others. It’s right and good that we should want to pick the people and contexts in which we’re physically vulnerable.
Similarly, showering after gym, or wearing a bathing suit at the beach, or leaving the bathroom wrapped in a towel, is not necessarily immodest. In many religious cultures, including Christianity, people associate modesty exclusively with women, and their need to be forever covered so as not to excite the lusts of the men around them (who are, the argument goes, totally in the thrall of their vision and its ties to their basest instincts). Modesty is about protecting women from men, and men from unintentional seduction.
That definition irks me to no end. Moderation is good; protection of the vulnerable is good. But fundamentalists of many stripes use modesty as a means of social control, it seems to me, and apply it in ways that are far from egalitarian. Seidman tells of the Orthodox school she attended in her youth, and the thrill of same-sex celebrations of Shabbat. It was so appealing because, for one, the young women could sing the prayers aloud: “To sing aloud was not something we took for granted: a woman’s voice was immodest, not to be displayed before men to whom we were not related . . .”11
Synagogue architecture traditionally separates women and men, ostensibly for this reason:
. . . to separate the spiritual from the sexual realm. Women, in this justification, represent sexual temptation to men—the sexual temptation men present for women is deemed irrelevant, as witnessed by the fact that men may not look at women but women are encouraged to look at men during synagogue services.12
Here, as elsewhere, women’s bodies are less than men’s. Here, women are literally silenced for their inherent immodesty. That’s bothersome enough, but it also raises theological problems for our doctrine of the body. Is the human body inherently indecent?
Certainly not, but it can be inappropriately vulnerable, or misused, or debased, just as easily as it can be appropriately vulnerable, or limited in its vulnerability. When I was a teenager, our church youth group took two trips most summers: we took mission work trips to serve poor communities in Appalachia, and we went canoeing in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota. Coed groups of teenagers with our lovely bodies swam, sweated, and slept in close proximity to one another. We wore bathing suits and tank tops and the boys were often without shirts. We applied sunscreen and bug spray, and frequently smeared dirt across our arms, feet, and faces, and scratched ourselves silly when even the professional-grade DDT failed us and we inevitably got chomped by mosquitoes.
On those trips, sometimes kids paired off. There were certainly individuals who would have inspired shudders of anxious delight if they’d offered to rub in my SPF 30 . . . but they were also the individuals who helped you when the pack you’d picked up was too heavy, who handed you the hammer to complete the gutter repair you were working on, with whom you played cards deep into the night. The various physical intimacies were periodically fraught if there was someone you “liked,” but what made them appropriate between nice, Christian-ish youth was that they were intimacies born of a common life and relationship. Sometimes there was a charge, but more often our interactions were simply part of life together.
As we get older, as our relationships turn from latent hormonal pining to actually romantic and sexual, this mundane and holy comfort in our physical vulnerability can be a real gift as we begin the difficult work of navigating the great unknowns: unknown power dynamics, unnamed assumptions, unspoken desires. We are vulnerable, always—human—but all the time I spent either naked or sweating around other people helped me build resilience. That resilience, which different folks come by in different ways, buoys us in the tricky work of knowing how to take risks, how to be vulnerable, while being aware about how much potential for hurt we’re willing to take on.
WE ARE MISTAKEN, though, if we think vulnerability, especially of the sexual variety, is only about bodies, about being literally naked. We’re human: which means we have myriad means of sharing ourselves. We have minds and souls and words, too.
One night in grad school, a group of friends was hanging out in someone’s room drinking wine and talking about music and poetry. Sitting on the floor in a corner by a bookshelf, I turned to peruse the shelves and pulled off a copy of the Billy Collins collection Picnic, Lightning. Billy Collins was big with me in grad school.
“I love him!” I said to our host, showing him the cover. I grabbed my bag, fished out my journal, and read the poem I’d copied down there recently, “Man in Space.”
All you have to do is listen to the way a man
sometimes talks to his wife at a table of people
and notice how intent he is on making his point
even though her lower lip is beginning to quiver,
and you will know why the women in science
fiction movies who inhabit a planet of their own
are not pictured making a salad or reading a magazine
when the men from earth arrive in their rocket,
why they are always standing in a semicircle
with their arms folded, their bare legs set apart,
their breasts protected by hard metal disks.13
I finished, and there was a moment of silence. The women all knew that feeling; we had all experienced “mansplaining,”14 we had all been hurt. We had, after all, each been in love, and each worked in churches. The poem reminded the young men sitting there of what sort of preexisting vulnerabilities a lot of women bring into relationships and vocations.
I love that poem, but I needed to lighten the mood. Hell, we’d been talking about Shakira, she whose hips don’t lie, before I started speaking of uncomfortable truths. So I cracked open Picnic, Lightning and read another of my favorite poems. “Victoria’s Secret” describes a narrator’s perusal of a recent lingerie catalog. He describes the various ensembles—the camisoles and teddies; the materials and the colors. He is both comic and ambivalently aroused, imagining what the models are supposed to be conveying with their expressions and postures.
The one in the upper-left-hand corner
is giving me a look
that says I know you are here
and I have nothing better to do
for the remainder of human time
than return your persistent but engaging stare.
She is wearing a deeply scalloped
flame-stitch halter top
with padded push-up styling
and easy side-zip tap pants.15
The poem goes on for stanza after stanza; I read it all aloud, sitting on the floor of my friend’s room. I can tell you, more than a decade later, what I was wearing: my hair in two messy buns at the nape of my neck, my black, fitted, scoop-neck sweater. It’s entirely possible that a modicum of cleavage was visible from the vantage point of others in the room, given my spot on the floor, and the fact that I almost always lean forward when I read aloud. At some point, I started to blush, but I also read with feeling and confidence.
The room grew warm. We laughed. We shifted in our seats.
That impromptu poetry reading surprised me; I felt like I was performing, but I also felt like I’d revealed something about myself. In reading and responding to Collins’s words, I’d acknowledged myself as a sexual being. I felt vulnerable—did I really just read a sexy poem aloud to a bunch of seminarians?—but also really, really good. I felt seen, and it felt a little dangerous, but also kind of thrilling.
All that with words. Someone else’s words, no less.
A few months later, still in my Billy Collins period, I started dating someone. A fellow student, he would write comments in the margins of my class notes as we listened to lectures on theological anthropology. We decided to go to a blues club, and I e-mailed him Collins’s poem “The Blues.” As poor grad students, we had a lot of study dates: we’d sit at his dining room table until we made enough progress on our course reading to go make out. He was older than me, and I was totally enamored. He thought I was “guarded,” a bit of a “closed book,” which I thought was absurd because I am totally incapable of keeping a secret about myself. Despite the fact that he had clearly misread me, and that he was a complete mystery to me, our physical relationship managed to advance, as these things sometimes do. (He was cute! We were grown-ups.) He did not think it was wise to sleep together. So we did not. But though that particular line was never crossed, I experienced the only shame I ever had in a romantic relationship. I felt too forward, misunderstood and unappreciated. I felt as though I had offered myself, and he had tried me on for size, and found me lacking.
Words are powerful, but the interplay of words and bodies—of literally and figuratively baring ourselves—is perhaps most powerful, and potentially dangerous, of all.
I, along with much of the rest of America, recently read the young adult novel The Fault in Our Stars. I loved it, obviously. But the thing I loved most was when toward the end of the book (spoiler alert) the main characters, Hazel and Augustus, are about to go to bed together. She’s suggested it, and they ride the elevator up to his hotel room, and then he stops in the hallway. She feels the anxiety rise in her chest; has she come on too strong? Does he think she’s slutty or something? He takes a deep breath and describes the sight of his amputated leg. He is not ashamed of it, exactly, but it is his wound, his vulnerability made visible, and he wants to gauge her response while he can still bear it. If she recoils at the sight, it will be too much for him. She is relieved beyond measure. “Oh, get over yourself.”16
They have a connection, one built over conversation and mutual affection. They trust and love each other. And so while they take a risk (and, truly, only an emotional one, as the use of a condom is specifically mentioned), they are mutually vulnerable.
It’s a lovely scene.
Just as in locating a Christian sexual ethic that works, articulating what “appropriate vulnerability” looks like depends hugely on context and the individuals involved. For some, who value highly reserving the most intimate sexual acts for marriage or the period immediately “pre-ceremony,” any activities outside of that context might feel inappropriate; a risk not worth taking, regardless of how deeply in love the partners are. For others, who simply need a reasonable guarantee that they’ll be treated well by a respectful and engaged partner, appropriate vulnerability might include quite a bit more activity.
Josh and I were together for less time than I had dated the Billy Collins boy when we started a sexual relationship. The leap felt less than perfectly responsible (though not by public health standards! We both live by the rule that hearts heal faster than HIV or herpes), but like a controlled fall nonetheless. I’d known him for over a year when we got together, and in every interaction with him, communication was simple: there were no crossed wires, we got each other’s jokes, we appreciated each other’s innuendos and advances. Our physical intimacy was a logical extension of the initial stages of our relationship, a continuing conversation carried out with hands and mouths and bodies instead of words.
Falling in love, opening myself, felt like stepping out in faith. It was faster than I previously would have thought could possibly be faithful, but I trusted him—and he trusted me. We had faith in us. We were both rendered vulnerable, and we received the gift of the other with thanksgiving.
I recently discovered a new poem by Mary Oliver that I just love—I read it to Josh, because it seemed to tell our story. It’s funny, because it’s kind of naughty. But I think it’s a holy story, too.
I did think, let’s go about this slowly.
This is important. This should take
some really deep thought. We should take
small, thoughtful steps.
But, bless us, we didn’t.17
We’re all raised with different understandings of the multiple meanings of nakedness and human vulnerability. Our comfort levels and ability to balance protecting ourselves from undue harm and willingness to open ourselves also vary individually: my sisters, my mother, and I have different experiences, different ways of inhabiting our bodies and navigating our relationships. Learning to be naked and unashamed in our sexual relationships is possible, even though that freedom and courage will look different than in the relative innocence of childhood. It is my dear hope that marriages can be safe spaces to do this work—but the institution is no guarantee, any more than being unmarried is a guarantee of danger and pain. Married, partnered, or single, carrying with us a sexual ethic that takes our vulnerability into account can help us to breathe deeply of the charged air of sexual connection, while maintaining our integrity and self-care, so that we can all know the joy and assurance of self-revelation, union, and love.