America Unzipped by Brian Alexander Page A

the seminarians—all the seminarians being men—needed help with the very problem Joe Beam has told us he sees all the time: If you think sex is bad all your life, how can you switch to thinking it’s good on the day you marry?
    Realizing he was going to speak to a group of women, Clifford asked his wife, Joyce, a trained nurse and an educator, to help. After their talk, a number of the seminarians’ wives had their first orgasms. The Penners become popular speakers.
    Just a year later, the
Los Angeles Times
ran a story on the Penners, headlined “Sex Revolution in Church Seen: Right to Pleasure Being Taught.” That same year, Beverly and Tim LaHaye published
The Act of Marriage.
(LaHaye would go on to fame as one of the authors of a series of apocalyptic novels called Left Behind whose animating idea was that people who did not think like Tim LaHaye would miss the Rapture and be, well, left behind when everybody else ascends bodily into heaven.)
The Act of Marriage
was essentially a sex manual for Christians, which didn’t just stress the duties but also talked about the fun.
    A small wave of Christian sex books with titles like
A Celebration of Sex
by Douglas Rosenau,
Intended for Pleasure: Sex Technique and Sexual Fulfillment in Christian Marriage
by Ed Wheat, and perhaps the most famous,
The Total Woman
by Marabel Morgan, now best remembered for her suggestion that wives gift-wrap themselves in Saran Wrap to greet their husbands at the door, broke on the shore of evangelical America.
    The Penners, however, were recognized within the fundamentalist world as the reigning experts because of their formal training. At first they were uncomfortable in the role, so they eventually took sexology courses at the Masters and Johnson Institute, just as Joe is earning a graduate degree in sexology from the University of Sydney. They consulted for 1970s TV shows like
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,
and with producer Norman Lear. They conducted seminars in churches. They appeared on James Dobson’s radio program.
    They wrote books, too. In
The Gift of Sex,
the Penners include suggestions for how marrieds can have fun in bed.
    The man needs to be as active as the woman in creating new ways to tease and in preparing enjoyable surprises. One man came running out of his bathroom without any clothes on. He leaped over the bed on which his wife was lying, and then asked her to guess what Bible verse he was acting out. The verse was “Listen! My lover! Look! Here he comes, leaping across the mountains, bounding over the hills. My lover is like a gazelle.” (Song of Solomon 2:8–9). They’ve had fun with that ever since.
    They even include pencil drawings of sex positions featuring a couple that looks disturbingly like Rob and Laurie Petrie from the old
Dick Van Dyke Show,
drawings that led some to accuse the Penners of being pornographers.
    Today, if you spend enough time on the Internet, you might conclude Christians think of little else but sex. Websites are devoted to sex techniques for Christians (“The male G-spot—how to find and utilize this little-known pleasure trigger to create mind-blowing pleasure for yourself”), sex toys for Christians, sexual counseling for Christians.
    There are even sex therapy organizations for Christians, including one, the Institute for Sexual Wholeness, that boasts Douglas Rosenau and the Penners as staff members.
    As Joe is doing, the Penners and the other Christian sex writers and advisers use philosophical and biblical justification. Like Joe, for example, the Penners say oral sex in marriage is fine. Everybody always asks them about it, they write, and in response, they cite the Song of Solomon again, arguing that it “speaks of total body involvement.” “For some of us this freedom seems strange, unusual, and not part of the natural order, but the biblical model in the Song of Solomon seems to embrace such freedom.”
    A key