Welcome And Listener Advisory

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Husband Material podcast, where we help Christian men outgrow porn. Why? So you can change your brain, heal your heart, and save your relationship. My name is Drew Boa, and I'm here to show you how. Let's go. Hey, thank you so much for listening to my interview with Russell Zonizer, author at The Land of Wholeness. He is an incredibly insightful thinker, writer, and integrator of insights on sexuality, especially the Song of Songs, which is a unique book of the Bible specifically focused on sexuality. And Russell has some really interesting thoughts on it. In this episode, you will hear Russell's story of how his sexual development unfolded and how educating his three boys ultimately led him to learn more about the Song of Songs and how this mysterious book of the Bible challenges the contemporary Christian world with a view of what sex and sexuality could be and should be. Please be aware that our conversation does become graphic and specific at times, although perhaps less graphic than the Bible itself. And the views expressed by guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of husband material ministries. Featuring a guest is not an endorsement of their beliefs, methods, products, services, or their content. We believe in discernment. So, as with any resource, listen thoughtfully, test everything, take what's helpful, and leave the rest behind. Enjoy the episode.

Russell’s Shutdown Sexuality Story

SPEAKER_01 1:40

Today we get to hang out with Russell Zonizer. Welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 1:44

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

You have been writing, studying, researching the Song of Songs, and I am really fascinated by what you've learned. Why did you start writing about this?

SPEAKER_00 1:57

The story of me and sex kind of starts when I was a young person. And the one thing I knew about sex as a young person was that there was a huge amount of harm that male sexuality was doing in the world. And I was absolutely determined not to be part of that. I wanted more than anything else to not be a sleaze ball. Okay, goal, right? Yeah. But that meant that when I hit puberty and I suddenly started having sexual feelings, it was just terrifying. When I discovered masturbation, and when I discovered very shortly thereafter that I couldn't stop masturbating, I was like, oh no, my sex life is already out of control. I'm going to be a sleaze ball for sure. So I was determined as a young person, I've got to control this thing. I've got to be in control of my sex life. And somehow I managed to do that. I stopped masturbating. I never even dared to look at porn. And I sort of cruised through my college years feeling very smugly self-controlled, sexually speaking. I figured I was basically a sexual saint. And I got married as a 24-year-old virgin with basically no knowledge about sex other than what I had gleaned from public school sex ed and a few raunchy scenes in books. So if the goal of sexual development was to control your behavior, I did that. I won that one.

SPEAKER_01 3:13

It's interesting that you learned very early to shut down your sexuality. And although that solved some problems, it created other problems.

SPEAKER_00 3:23

Yes. Definitely created problems once I got married. Because then I opened up that box again and still didn't know what to do with it. As soon as I got married, I just wanted sex all the time. Could not stop thinking about sex. And my wife was like, what is wrong with you? And of course, what was wrong with me was I was behaving like a hormonal teenager, even though I was 24. There's a lot of mess involved in learning to be a sexual person. And I had not escaped that mess. I had just postponed it until I could drag her into it with me.

SPEAKER_01 3:59

You had inadvertently delayed your sexual development.

SPEAKER_00 4:03

Exactly. I was really, really sexually immature. And I thought I was a sexual saint and in control of my sexuality. Exactly. To be clear, my wife has a very clear sense of her own boundaries. So sex was not going to happen if she didn't want it to. This was tremendously lucky. If she had said, I guess Russell just needs sex and I just need to give it to him, this could have been a lot worse. Right? I know that now. But it did not feel lucky at the time. It felt like I was trapped in this little tiny cage with this wild animal that was my own sexuality, and I had no good answer what to do with it. And I would have sworn up and down at the time that I just needed sex. That just, you know, if I went without orgasms for a few days, the pressure would just build and build and build until it was just constant, unremitting frustration and just suffering. And I just couldn't think of anything else. I was sure that biologically men just needed sex on a schedule. This went

Marriage Pressure And The Breakthrough

SPEAKER_00 5:00

on for many years. We've been married 20 years at this point. At some point, about 10 years ago, I was griping at God about this. And I was saying, How come I'm always the one asking? And she always says, No, this doesn't seem fair. And I don't know if this was God answering me or if this was me finally figuring it out, but this thought popped into my head that I suddenly noticed that in the Song of Songs, the woman is always the one who initiates sex. And when she does, she uses language of invitation that makes her the host and him the guest. And this thought went on to say there's something ridiculous about showing up on your neighbor's porch with a bag of chips and saying, Hey, let's have a party at your house. Yeah. And all of a sudden I was like, oh, that's actually true. That's the actual situation I'm in. Right? I can't make sex happen. The host has authority over the party because it's his house. My wife has authority over sex because it's her body. I can't decide what happens with her body. So I was utterly convicted, and I went to talk to my wife that very night and said, listen, I'm going to stop asking for sex, period. I'm just going to stop asking. I'm going to let you decide when you're interested. But I did this with great fear and trembling because I thought already I'm feeling sexually frustrated all the time when I can at least ask and put the idea in her head. And now for sure the rest of my life is just going to be totally out of control frustration all the time. Now, I wonder if you've heard this story from other guys before. Because what happened instead, I woke up the next morning and all that just gnawing, awful sexual frustration I'd been feeling for years and years. What do you think had happened to it? I've met some other guys who've had the same experience. It was gone. It had vanished completely. And I was like, what in the world just happened? I thought something was medically wrong with me. I was like Googling, what kind of cancer tanks your libido? Right? I could not explain how suddenly I was like the day before, I was just like, had this pressure I could not release, and now I'm fine. And this went on for weeks, wasn't having any orgasms, and wasn't feeling desperate about it. Like I would see my wife getting undressed to get in the shower, and I'd feel aroused. And it was just this pleasant warm feeling. It wasn't this desperate emergency that I had to do something about. What's going on? I didn't think that's how my biology worked. And that wasn't even the best part. Escaping that box meant that all of a sudden that little cage just broke open. And there were all these ways that we could be together intimately, closely, in a relaxed way that didn't have to be sexual. Like before this, we could not even like snuggle in bed without me going crazy with desire by the end. We couldn't take a shower together. We basically couldn't play a board game without me being like, okay, and now how do I angle this towards sex? Right. And all of a sudden, this kind of relaxed togetherness that we could have was so much sweeter than sex had ever been. Like I would have given up sex forever if I could just keep this nugget. It just baffled me because it just didn't match any of my model of how male sexuality was supposed to work, or any of anything that the culture around me had told me about how male sexuality worked.

Arousal Desire And Porn Reflexes

SPEAKER_00 8:35

So I started to read about this, and I found out there are actually three theories of how men's sex drive works. Theory number one is men need sex. Theory number two is men don't need sex, and they just say they do to pressure women into getting it. I really hope that one wasn't true. But theory number three, and Emily Nagoski is the one who has explained this, I think, the most clearly, is men don't need sex. Men can survive indefinitely without orgasms and not actually feel any distress about it, but it feels like we need sex. That sexual desire feels like a life and death situation. Because it is. Most animals get to have sex once a year if they're lucky animals. So if sex is available, there darn well better be an instinct in our heads that says, you've got to drop everything else and make that happen right now. Scrap your other plans for the day, make the sex happen. And that hits us with all the force of a survival instinct. The problem is, human beings can decide that sex is available all the time. We can be like, theoretically, I can make it happen right now. And when we do that, that instinct is running all the time. And the only way we can stop it from running is to have orgasms so frequently that we're numbing our own sexual desire response. And that was basically what I was trying to do.

SPEAKER_01 10:10

To understand what you're saying requires making a distinction between arousal and desire. Fueling the arousal all the time numbs the deeper desire.

SPEAKER_00 10:19

Yeah, exactly. I think there's even a difference between there's arousal like you're interested. And then there's this feeling that like takes you over and it's like you've got to make that happen. The Bible, I think, calls that lust. This feeling of like make that happen right now. I like to call it hotness rather than lust. Because lust has a lot of emotional baggage attached to it. It's a it's a deadly sin, right? And this is really a reflex. Like if you see a sexually available body, you react this way. This matters in terms of how we think about how we react to porn. Because porn is sexually available bodies. That's the whole product. It's designed to engage this instinct that we have that says make sex happen if it's available. And so you can look at something important and be like, I find that morally repugnant. And my body is saying that's so hot and you need to get it. And we get confused and we think I must be a pervert. But all it means is you've identified a sexually available body. You've correctly identified, yep, that that body is available.

SPEAKER_01 11:23

That's great because so often arousal can be extremely confusing. I feel super strong attraction or a seemingly irresistible urge, and I think, oh no, what does this say about me? And it becomes an identity question.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

Yes. And we think it says something about us and it doesn't. It's just a reflex. Yeah. Oh, and the other part of it is one of the other reasons that sex seems so urgent is we don't need sex, but we do need connection. We need attachment, right? We're made for human contact. And that often gets starved in human beings, in men, I mean, because all we know how to get it from is sex, and it somehow doesn't fulfill us. Because we aren't really connecting through sex. It's just this urge that we're releasing. That part really, really made me happy to learn that what I really wanted was connection. Because there was so long, when I thought sex was a drive, there was so long that I would I would say to God, Why did you make us like this? What were you thinking? Why did you make us just having this stupid urge? And the answer is that God didn't make us like that. God made us to have this need for connection with each other. And that what is why that sort of relaxed togetherness that we could have once I wasn't driven by sex was just so much sweeter than sex had ever been. That's where my story started. And at that point, I would have said I had male sexuality figured out. I would have said, now I know everything about what healthy male sexuality is. The answer to male sexuality is men don't need sex. Men do need bonding. That's the whole story. This was like eight years ago what I would have said.

SPEAKER_01 13:04

And you're on to something. Like there's truth in that. It's true. Yeah. And that's not the whole picture.

SPEAKER_00 13:11

Exactly. So then what happened is about three years ago, my oldest son was turning eight.

Sex As Attachment Not A Need

SPEAKER_00 13:17

And I thought, oh, it's time to start talking to him about sex. And I was looking forward to this conversation because I knew everything there was to know about male sexuality, right? I could tell him men need bonding. We don't need sex. But then, of course, he was going to say, Well, tell me more about sex. Why is it so great? And I'd be like, oh, yes, the great thing about sex is you can learn not to need it. And I was like, that doesn't right sound. That's not quite what I what I wanted to say. I wanted to say it's this delightful experience of human connection. Maybe I don't really understand everything here. Maybe just like being able to do without sex isn't the whole picture. So I thought, okay, I've got to learn more about this. And after looking a lot of places, I decided to go back and look at the Song of Songs again. Because the Song of Songs does have that picture of sex as a just source of delight and connection. And this time going back to the Song of Songs, I got myself a Jewish commentary because I really wanted to dig into the meaning of the Hebrew words. And as soon as I picked up this commentary, I discovered something that should totally change how we read the Song of Songs and that none of the Christian commentaries had talked about. And that is the Song of Songs isn't a poem that somebody just came up with out of the blue. The Song of Songs actually belongs to a tradition of erotic poetry that was already 2,500 years old when it was written. A tradition that comes from a totally different culture, that comes from the Sumerian culture. And I think Christian authors are sort of afraid to talk

Teaching Sons Forces New Questions

SPEAKER_00 14:55

about this because there's this assumption in Christianity that the Bible should have just been handed to us by God as it is, with no reference to anything that existed before in the culture. Right? Like you hear stories of Christians losing their faith over having found out that there are flood narratives before Genesis. And that's totally a shame that people are losing faith over this because that's one of the coolest things about those narratives, is that God is taking this myth that was already out there and sort of transforming it and in many ways subverting it to say, this is what you thought gods were like. This is what the real God is like. This is how I'm different than that. In the Babylonian flood narrative, the humans outsmart the cruel and capricious gods by building an ark. In the Bible, God goes to Noah and says, This is how to build the ark. And when it starts raining, God shuts the door and sends him on his way. That God is there to be in relationship with people. God is there to bring salvation to people. It's not human smart in God. It's a different sort of God, and that's the cool thing. Beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 16:10

So in a similar way, Song of Songs is taking this genre people would have already been familiar with and flipping it on his head.

SPEAKER_00 16:19

Yes, it should be. It probably is. And I couldn't find anyone who had done that analysis.

SPEAKER_01 16:25

What did you find out?

SPEAKER_00 16:28

All right. So first of all, in ancient Sumeria, how do they think about male sexuality? We know a lot about this culture, and this is really cool. This is the oldest culture with a written language in the world, and yet we know more about it than most other cultures because of the happy coincidence that they wrote on clay, not on paper. Clay lasts a really long time. And that means not only do we have like the ethical treatises they wrote about sex, we have the notes that somebody scribbled down when they were in the library reading the ethical treatises on sex. Because it's clay, it doesn't degrade. So we've dug up all this stuff, and as soon as scholars started learning to read what the Sumerians had written about sex, they discovered a rather strange puzzle, which is the Sumerians had two completely incompatible pictures of what male sexuality

Sumerian Sex Models And Erotic Poetry

SPEAKER_00 17:20

looked like. The first one, the archetype of this is the wild man in Kidu, in the Epic of Gilgamesh. And Kidu has this kind of sexuality that is kind of all of our worst stereotypes of what men are like. He's totally driven by sex. He's this guy who was literally raised by animals. When he sees a hot woman, he's on top of her in an instant and he just goes at it until he can't stand up. There's nothing tender about this. There's no human contact at all. It's just need and taking and using. And this is the same sexuality you see in pornography from that whole Mesopotamian culture. We've duck up like 3,000 years of worth of pornography. It's incredibly monotonous. All but like one or two pieces we've found have exactly the same scene. There's a prostitute who's leaning over to drink beer through a straw out of a jug, and a man is having intercourse with her from behind. It's just totally depersonalized. There's no suggestion at all that she enjoys this or wants this. I think this is really interesting because our modern pornography tries really hard to pretend that the woman is actually enjoying or at least welcoming what's going on. In ancient Mesopotamian culture, they had no such illusions. If you were a man who was taking refuge in prostitution or pornography, you knew full well that this wasn't really what you wanted. It was just what you were doing to cope. So that's the one side of the picture. That's in Kidu. And then there's Demuzi. Demusi the shepherd king. And Demuzi is totally different. He's the hero of Sumerian erotic poetry. Sumerian erotic poetry is really weird, has baffled people. So just let you know. The first thing that's weird about it is there is no intercourse at all in Sumerian erotic poetry. The word intercourse does not appear. It's basically taboo. Intercourse between a loving couple for the sake of procreation was called doing pregnancy. And in this culture, the only nice thing about doing pregnancy was that you only had to do it every few years. It was considered basically an animal function that nobody was really interested in, nobody wrote songs about. I know. This is really strange, right? And not only was there no intercourse, there was nothing that even looked like intercourse in this poetry. There's no one partner thrusting or rubbing against the other partner's body for their own pleasure. And this is baffling to me, right? Because we think that just the basic content of sexual desire is this feeling of, man, it would feel good to put my body in contact with that body and move around a bit. And they excluded that entire category from their sexual expression. Now you're probably asking, what did they actually do? What does that even leave? Right? So what they do is they lie side by side and they take turns. So first the woman lies on her back and he spoons around her and embraces her, and then caresses her with his hands, stimulates her with his mouth, whatever it is she wants, until she's totally satisfied. And then when she's done, he relaxes back on his back and she does the same thing for him. So you have basically instead of one partner taking or using pleasure, using the other person's body for their pleasure, you have one partner who is completely just receptively directing what's going on, but passive about it. And the other partner is very attentively giving to them. And the attentive is key here. Like in some of these poems, it presents it such that the when the woman is done, the man is so absorbed in what's going on with her that he just wants to hold her and just savor the moment. And it takes a long time before she says, Oh, wait a minute, it's your turn. This kind of boggles my mind, right? Because how in the world does he last that long?

unknown 21:23

Right?

SPEAKER_00 21:24

In our culture, we think it's hard enough for men to rein ourselves in long enough to get to simultaneous orgasms. And we tend to tell men the way to hold yourself back while you're having sex is to check out, is to think about work, think about baseball, think about something boring so that you're in your head and not in your body. In this culture, what we see depicted in these poems is he's getting himself out of his own body by being so deeply attuned in her that he's not even paying attention to himself. How does that even work, right? You would think that paying so deep attention to her body would be even more arousing. And yet somehow it isn't. All right, so what happened when people dug these things up? The scholars who dug these things up basically took one look at them and were like, yeah, that's not sex. That's not how sex works. So the prevailing theory has been this must be just fantasy literature for women. Somebody made up this fantasy picture of sex that abstracts out all the stuff women might find icky and just and just wrote these things that women would like hearing. And keto is what sex is really like. Men taking what they need. Dumuzi is this silly fantasy that only women would believe in. But I don't think that's true. Number one, I don't think that's true because the Song of Songs very deliberately sets these up as two alternatives that a couple has to choose from. And number two, I don't think it's true because as I was reading other things from this culture, it turns out that whenever sex between a married couple is described or depicted, it's shown in this side-by-side way. So either they whole, they as a culture just had this whole, you know, thing going on that they were all pretending that they did it like in these erotic poems, or they really did. So I was like, okay, if this is real, I didn't really want this to be the answer because this was just so weird. I was like, I wanted a simpler answer from the Song of Songs. But I I took

Sex Without Hotness And Nagoski

SPEAKER_00 23:20

this to a sexologist and I said, What is going on here? And she said, Oh ho, you have got to read Emily Nagoski. Have you read Come As You Are?

SPEAKER_01 23:32

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 23:32

Yes. Probably one of the most famous, popular books about sex. And in Come As You Are, there's this chapter on orgasm. And she says, This is how you could have mind-blowingly great sex if you really wanted your mind to be totally blown. And then she goes on to describe exactly what the Sumerians were doing. Taking turns and focusing on being receptive rather than focusing on driving up forward to get it. Right? And what are they doing here? When I realized this, it just blew my mind. What they're doing here is trying to have sex without hotness. Sex that's not driven by lust. Right? If you can't use your partner's body for your own pleasure, there's no available body. You're not triggering that instinct. And why would you try to avoid lust? Well, because lust is not designed to give us great sex. Lust is designed to make sex fast. It's designed to get us to ejaculate as fast as possible because the point is to make babies. And in fact, in the Sumerian culture, if you had to do pregnancy, there were scripts that the woman could read to get the man into lust mode, because men were not used to this. And you read these scripts and they totally sound like we're animals, let's do it like animals, and they totally sound like exactly the lines you'd see in a porn film. You can get into that mode if what if what you need to do is have a strong erection and hold it long enough to ejaculate and make a baby, fine, but that's not the way to have great sex. And the Sumerians apparently knew this. It's like in our culture, hot sex is the is like what we want. It's what we, you know, like in our movies and everything, right? It's like the more desperate and exciting and breathless it is, the better. It's like we want sex to be this crazy noisy party where everybody's having so much fun that you can't even hear each other talk. And the Sumerians went straight the other direction. They said, How can we keep the noise down as low as possible? What can we do to make sex as unhot as possible? Just relaxed and unhurried and tender, so that our reproductive instincts aren't taking over, and there's actually space for our bonding instincts. I just love this. Because if that's what sex is meant to be, then that's the answer. Then sex can be something good that God made for connection and not just something that is this animal drive that has to happen.

SPEAKER_01 26:11

So for you, the idea that sex is good went from theoretical to very practical and technical.

SPEAKER_00 26:17

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 26:17

This is how it can be good.

SPEAKER_00 26:19

Yeah. Because a lot of the Christian men who say sex is this beautiful connection and spiritual thing are the same ones who say men need sex and women need to give it to them all the time. So I wasn't sure if that was really true or if that was just another one of these lies that we tell to make it more palatable for women. But I read this. I was like, okay, if that's what sex could be, then yes, that could really be true.

SPEAKER_01 26:41

These two ancient models of sexuality are not so ancient. They're still right here, right now.

SPEAKER_00 26:48

Yeah. And that brings

Song Of Songs As A Consent Protest

SPEAKER_00 26:50

me to the Song of Songs. So then I started looking at the Song of Songs once I understood that. To understand what's going on in the Song of Songs, there's one more piece of the cultural context to note, which is at the time the Song of Songs was being written, you start to see in that whole culture a movement against this bonding sort of sexuality. A movement that says, real men like it hot. Real men like to be in control, they like to take and use. That this Dumuzi style sex is weak and effeminate. And I bet you've had men react this way. Like, if you tell men what they really want is attachment, have you ever had men be like, that sounds so appealing, but I would have to check my manhood outside the door.

SPEAKER_01 27:32

It does seem counterintuitive and oftentimes against the grain of our biology.

SPEAKER_00 27:42

Aaron Powell I would say it's against the grain of our culture. Yes. It's against the grain of everything we've been taught about what men are. But I think God made us for connection.

SPEAKER_01 27:51

I fully agree. And as you've noted, it can feel like sex is this biological need and drive. I think at the deeper soul level, many men are just not aware that attachment, connection, bonding type of sex is possible. Or maybe they know it's possible in theory, but could it really be possible with my wife?

SPEAKER_00 28:16

Yeah. And by the way, there's one other thing that's happening in this time period. That's the Mesopotamian culture as a whole. If you look specifically at Jewish culture, what rabbis are writing at this time period, this whole picture of sex is a male need and women need to give sex to their husbands, that's what's starting to be encoded into rabbinical writings at this time. So sex all of a sudden, this side-by-side sex, the rabbis are now describing as a perversion. Real sex is intercourse with the man on top. And not only that, a righteous man does it as fast as possible, as if driven by a demon, so that he will avoid committing any sin, not have enough time to commit any sin, like, for example, looking at or touching or kissing his wife's genitals. So that's what you got the rabbi is saying. And then the song of songs shows up. So if we look in the song of songs, knowing that's what's going on, and knowing we have these two pictures of sex, some things immediately jump out at us. Now, the first one is one of the most emphatic statements in the Song of Songs, there's three times in the Song of Songs when the woman stands up and addresses the audience. And she says, Oh, that his left hand were under my head and his right hand caressing me. And that is actually a formulaic description from the Sumerian of Demusi-style sex, this side-by-side caressing sex. So she's saying, What I want is Demusi-style sex. Three times to the audience. And then she says, Women of Jerusalem, I charge you by the does and the gazelles of the field, never awaken, never arouse love unless it desires. And this is a passage that confuses a lot of people. In in my Bible that I got when I was in confirmation class as a teenager, there's one of those little helpful notes that helps you explain what a confusing passage says. And it says, this means not to have sex until you're married. And even back then, I looked at that, I was like, that's what it means. I'm confused because I thought she was talking about, you know, saying she wanted to have sex with her husband. And then she says, never awaken or arouse love until it desires. Right? But it's it's confusing because it's really emphatic. She's like, never ever, ever have sex. Unless you want to, in which case, sure, go ahead.

unknown 30:43

Right?

SPEAKER_00 30:43

It seems to sabotage itself. The only way that passage could possibly make sense is if you had women having sex that they did not want to have. And of course, that was exactly what was happening. So she's opposing that. But that's not even the wildest one in the Song of Songs. Thing number two. If you look at the Song of Songs as a whole, it's centered around these two sex narratives. The first one is turn-taking sex, exactly what we should have in Sumerian erotic poetry. The second one is this scene that is actually so disturbing that a lot of commentators just sort of dismiss it as a nightmare. And it goes like this the woman is in bed, and suddenly in the middle of the night, the man comes knocking on the door. And he says, Open to me, my sister, my darling, my dove, my flawless one. My head is wet with dew, my hair with the dampness of the night. Which is pretty clearly some kind of innuendo. I think if we had to guess, we'd like he's saying he's so aroused he's gripping. And the audience hearing this would have expected a humorous scene. Because this lover knocking on the door is a common scenario in Sumerian erotic poetry. And it always plays out the same way. She says, Oh, I'm getting up, I'm taking a bath, I'm putting on my perfume, I'm putting on my makeup. She might send him on some errands. And then after a good long time, when she's ready, she says, Come in, my man, come in. So it emphasizes her authority. She's making the decision to let him in. Right? So now we have this scene that should be even funnier, right? Because not only does he have to wait, he is already describing himself as desperately aroused outside the door. But in this one, she basically says no in the Song of Songs. She says, I've taken off my robe. Must I put it on again? I've washed my feet. Must I soil them again? So she's saying, I'm tired, I'm in bed, I'm done, I'm going to sleep. And how does he respond to the no? The next line says, My beloved thrust his hand through the latch hole. And the audience here would have said, Oh no, he didn't. This this scene just stopped being funny really fast. And to understand why, you need to understand that the latch hole is where the key goes. If you have a key, if it's your door to open. If he's putting his hand through the latch hole, he's trying to force the lock. And then she says, I arose to open for my beloved, and my hands dripped with myrrh, my fingers with flowing myrrh on the handles of the bolts. I opened for my beloved, but my beloved had left. He was gone. My spirit left my body at his departure. I looked for him but didn't find him. I called him, but he didn't answer. So picture this. She gets out of bed, she grabs the door handle, which he's just been fumbling with, she flings the door open. And where'd he go? And why's my hand all slimy? Why is there goo all over the door? To get the picture here. Wow. But he's lost control and ejaculated all over the door, right? Of course, that's gross enough if it's a door, but it isn't a door, right? This is the latch hole, isn't a latch hole. We're talking about her body, right? What's really happening here, I think, with him fumbling around with his hand is he's trying to have intercourse with her while she's half asleep. And as soon as you see that, you're like, what in the world is this doing in the Song of Songs? Like, no way, no how did someone write this intricately beautiful poem that's just full of delight and wonder and relationship? And then they're like, ah, but what would really push it over the top is if I inserted a marital rape scene right here in the middle. The only way that someone would have put that in there is if they knew what was at stake. If they could see around them that sex was being redefined as a male need and an expression of male power and control, and they knew what the future was going to look like for women and really for all of us, if we forgot that sex was supposed to be about bonding. She's saying if your sex life is driven by male desire and lust, this is what it's going to look like. And that means the Song of Songs is not a nice, sexy poem like these other ones that it was based on. It's just a desperate plea by someone who knew what was about to be lost. The Song of Songs, in the Bible, it's grouped with the wisdom literature. But in a way, it really belongs with the prophets. This is a prophetic work. And specifically, the woman in the Song of Songs is a prophet. How do

Shalom Prophetic Vision And Today’s Church

SPEAKER_00 35:40

we know that? We know that because she identifies herself as one. So let me explain where this comes from. This is something you do find in the commentary. In the Bible, you've got the law, and the law is really big on the proper way to do things, especially in the temple, the proper way to worship God. And then you've got the prophets, and the prophets kind of say none of that matters. What God cares about is how we treat each other. Like I desire mercy, not sacrifice. And that picture of how God wants us to treat each other is called in the Bible shalom. It's probably the most important word in the Bible. It basically means peace, wholeness, healthy relationships, how human beings are supposed to be together. Flourishing. Flourishing, human flourishing, right? In the Song of Songs, the woman calls herself the woman from Shalom, the Shulamite. So she's basically saying, I'm an emissary from that land of wholeness. Like Shalom is God's perfect world of human flourishing. And I come from there. This is audacious. Like until Jesus went around calling himself God, this was probably the craziest title any prophet had claimed in the Bible. To say, I come from Shalom. That's my homeland. That's my hometown. And that means the Song of Songs is aligning itself with God's whole project to heal our world. It's not just about this is how to have good sex. It's not even just about this is how to make your relationship good. It's saying that if men can learn how to not be run by our reproductive instincts, if men can learn how to embrace our bonding instincts instead, that's going to be the antidote to all that harm that men are doing in the world that I was trying to escape at the start of my story. Amazing. That I think is why this matters so much. Like some of my friends don't get why I get so excited when I see people doing work like what you're doing. And if it were just about like controlling porn use, honestly, that would be one sad little sin that really, in the big scale of things, doesn't matter, right? But if you're teaching men to transform their own sex sexuality and embrace that need for attachment, then that's the kingdom of God breaking into our world.

SPEAKER_01 38:01

Amen. We're not just avoiding what's bad. We are learning to welcome and receive what is truly good and beautiful. Exactly. How does Song of Songs challenge the contemporary Christian world?

SPEAKER_00 38:22

As you know full well, there's a fight going on about this in the Christian world right now. You have a lot of writers like Sheila Ray Gwegwar, who are saying women deserve to be treated as human beings in marriage. And you have a lot of men who've been teaching men are these animals who need sex all the time, who are really doubling down on that teaching and protecting it. It's really exactly the same scenario that was going on in the Song of Songs when you had this woman saying, Women, swear to me that you won't have sex unless you want it. It's exactly the same problem she was facing. It's exactly the same thing that people are now saying to women, and you still have the male political leaders and the male religious leaders being like, no, men just need sex. We just have to set it up so that men can have sex. I think this is very, very relevant to contemporary Christian conversation.

SPEAKER_01 39:21

And with your new understanding and perspective, how will you teach your sons about sex?

SPEAKER_00 39:29

Oh,

How He Plans To Teach His Boys

SPEAKER_00 39:30

that's another one that I could go on for a long time. But just one thing. When I discovered this alternative picture of what sex can be in the Song of Songs, I was like, yes, that's what I want to teach my kids. Because when the first conversation about what sex is is this is how you make babies, it really misses the point. I wanted their first picture of sex to be, it feels really good to snuggle naked with your wife. First of all, that's something they can understand, right? They know about snuggling. They can be like, yeah, I can imagine that would feel really good if you were both naked. And then from there, I was like, and by the way, when you're having sex, some changes happen in your body. It causes erection and lubrication. And that makes it possible to do this totally different thing, this other thing called intercourse, which is how you make babies. And God designed it that way so that making babies would come out of bonding and love. Doing pregnancy. Doing pregnancy.

SPEAKER_01 40:36

So in the original Dumuzi Sumerian erotic poetry with the shepherd king. That was seen as an unfortunate necessity.

SPEAKER_00 40:48

Doing pregnancy. Yes. It doesn't show up in the poems. Intercourse does not happen in the poems. If you look in their culture, the way they talked about sex, they have they have pornography and they have sex with a prostitute, which is this animal thing, and it's explicitly described as an animal function. The man is always behind her. It's like what we would call doggy style sex. They also saw it as this is animal sex. Yeah. What you do when you just have that urge you need to get through.

SPEAKER_01 41:16

In the Song of Songs or in a Christian view of sex, does that change?

SPEAKER_00 41:22

That's a good question. I haven't thought that through. When I explained this to my kids, I wanted it to be, I didn't want to say this is an animal function. I didn't. I wanted to contextualize it within if you're in this bonding sort of situation, this can happen. And I think that's the right way to approach it. The only reason intercourse is normal sex is that we're used to sex that is driven by our reproductive instincts and driven by this like do something to that body, urge. We don't need that.

SPEAKER_01 41:53

It's a mind-blowing paradigm shift to separate out sex and intercourse instead of just seeing them as the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 42:01

Exactly. Yeah. I could tell you one thing about this

Vulnerability Slower Arousal And Closing

SPEAKER_00 42:05

form of sexuality that will be interesting. It's totally terrifying. I did not expect that when I read the description in the Sumerian Erotic Poetry. It's exactly how arousal is supposed to work. It is supposed to take a long time for arousal to ramp up. But men have always had this shortcut that gets us, you know, we can get there in two minutes. And we think that's normal. And so when that doesn't show up, we panic. And so just just a just a warning and a and an invitation to men don't be scared. If you try this and that happens, nothing's wrong. It's vulnerable in a way that we don't like to be vulnerable. We like saying that sex is vulnerable because we're naked and we're and we're we have strong desires, but not knowing how to get to the finish line, not knowing how to make an orgasm happen on your own terms, have having to like listen to your body and being like, oh, this is the part of my body that wants to be touched right now, that's kind of terrifying. Emily Nagoski describes this as she says, it's like being out in the middle of the ocean when you're used to playing in the waves on the shore. Right? It's deeper, it's richer, but it's also there's no map. You have to you have to actually be present and listen.

SPEAKER_01 43:26

It sounds much more relational.

SPEAKER_00 43:29

I mean, actually, this feels stupendously better. The first time that I managed to make this work, I was like, now I question whether I ever actually had a real orgasm before. That's the other reason the Sumerians were probably perfectly willing to do things this way and thought the other thing was not worth writing poems about.

SPEAKER_01 43:46

So they were getting more pleasure by being more mutually attuned to each other and themselves, by going slower, by focusing on their relationship instead of just what's hot.

SPEAKER_00 43:58

Yeah. When I was in college 20 years ago, 25 years ago, we had this sex educator give this talk to all the incoming freshmen. And I remember him showing a picture of the arousal of what the arousal cycle looks like. And it had this blue line that climbs up and goes for a long plateau and then spikes up to orgasm. And then it had this red line that goes whoop all the way up and crashes back down. And he told us this blue line is women, and this red line is men. Women shouldn't be envious of men being able to get there so fast. Men should be envious of women getting up so much higher and staying up so much longer. Now, 25 years later, we know that wasn't women and men. That was just this is what arousal is supposed to look like for human beings. And this is what happens if you short circuit it by letting lust drive the show. So we don't have to be envious of women. We can actually experience the same thing.

SPEAKER_01 44:51

We could find the blue line.

SPEAKER_00 44:53

Exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:54

That's awesome. Russell, what is your favorite thing about good sex?

SPEAKER_00 44:59

Honestly, the thing that makes me happiest is feeling like God made us for connection. Of all this process that I've been through, like the thing that I came out of it that just makes me that brings me the biggest joy is being like, I can see God's hand in sex now. I can see God having made us for connection with each other. That just inspires me. I just think that's wonderful. It's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 45:25

Thank you so much for being with us. Thank you. Everyone, you can find Russell at the links in the description. You can subscribe to his sub stack. He's got lots more where this came from. And I would highly recommend it. It's called The Land of Wholeness. Check it out. And always remember you are God's beloved son, and you, he is well pleased.