Literature Review: Sex & Love in the Home (McCarthy) and See Me Naked (Frykholm)
CEFR Level C1-C2
I originally wrote this for my Human Sexuality class in seminary. The professor’s feedback is that I produced “scholarly work.” That’s high praise since I struggled for every word and felt like I submitted a bunch of twaddle because I ran out of time to figure out anything worth the words it takes to say.
Literature Review
Sex and Love in the Home: A Theology of the Household by David Matzko McCarthy lives up to the word “theology.” It is a dense book that covers topics more complexly than the chapter titles suggest. See Me Naked: Stories of Sexual Exile In American Christianity by Amy Frykholm lives up to the word “stories” in its title. It is an accessible collection of true stories accompanied by Frykholm’s commentary. Read together, the books give the in vitro conversation and the in situ application.
Sexuality: Separate From or Integrated With Spirituality?
In her introduction, Frykholm writes, “Spirituality and sexuality…especially [for] Christians, are kept rigidly separate” (xi). This could be read as an experiential statement that readers may or may not relate to. There are ways to observe evidence for the statement and determine its truth, but it is not something that most readers would need explained. They either have experienced the condition or they have not.
Near the end of his book, McCarthy states, ““Sexual practices cultivate a deep sense of belonging and identity because they are part of day-to-day connections that carry our lives” (238). This can be read as an observational statement that may need to be explained for some audiences. Read in the context of the rest of the book, this statement suggests that sexuality is so entwined with existence that it cannot be separated from anything else. McCarthy has observed evidence that led him to this conclusion. But how do we know his conclusion is correct? Readers are likely to need to think deeply and in ways that may be unfamiliar before they are able to decide if the statement applies to their experiences.
Reading See Me Naked under Frykholm’s statement creates a yes/no binary for the stories. Can the reader relate? Yes or no. Reading the same stories under McCarthy’s proposal allows readers to consider whether or not the stories have evidence to support his claim. Their own experience is less relevant because they can approach the story with a more objective question than wondering if they have had a similar experience.
The reverse is harder. McCarthy writes about ideas with only the occasional story to demonstrate. When the discussion is about where an idea came from and why an author thinks it has merit, it is harder to evaluate the argument based on personal experience because the argument is less about whether or not the idea demonstrates something people have experienced and more about what the idea is and how academics think it probably affects lived experience.
Read together, these books may challenge the reader to evaluate their own ideas around sexuality and spirituality. They may ask, “Does my spirituality stay separate from my sexuality? How do I know? Does my sexuality affect my spirituality, even if I don’t directly recognize it? How do I know? How, exactly, do my sexuality and spiritually combine into what makes me, me and how does that influence what I think and do?”
Rules: What Are They and How Many Can You Make?
In Part 1 of See Me Naked, Frykholm tells three stories of people trying to figure out the rules around sexuality. “Many Christians…imagine that Christian sex is not like secular sex, and that it is set apart by rules” (6). This concept is demonstrated by the story of teenaged Frykohm, a child who desperately wanted to know The Rules for physical contact with her boyfriend. In her words, she was “trained to police the boundaries of pleasure so as not to be drawn too deeply into the wilderness” (4). In other words, living a Christian life meant having rules about sexuality that non-Christians did not have.
In contrast, McCarthy looks more at theologies than at specific rules, although ways of thinking easily lead to the creation of rules. For example, on page 26, McCarthy explains that John Chrysostom thinks about the family as a “domestic church,” showing virtue and duty as a contrast to secular excess and self-indulgence. It is easy to see how such a view would lead to rules and, over centuries, lead to the idea expressed by Frykholm. If the Christian family is supposed to be a contrast to the secular family, then it makes sense that people now believe Christian sex is supposed to be different from secular sex because of how sexual actions and the existence of a family are intertwined.
The easiest way to tell that private actions are different between people is when public rules govern public and private actions. The public actions, governed by rules, are easy to see. For example, dating couples do not hold hands because of the belief that holding hands necessarily leads to sexual intercourse. The private actions governed by rules create a different way of being in public. Or at least, that is the idea. For example, the rule that all sexual energy goes towards a person’s spouse, combined with the rule that all touching of another gender is sexual, could lead a person to choose not to touch someone of another gender, even when it would be culturally appropriate and culturally devoid of sexual meaning.
The application of the idea that a Christian family should be different from secular families is demonstrated in Frykholm’s story about Mark, a young man who was raised in a reasonably healthy church (35), yet even there he was taught to view women as “objects whose primary purpose was to provide physical gratification” (38). The rules from church may have been different, but the outcome was similar to the secular world without those rules. At the end of the story, Mark’s rule-based religious training on sexuality was that he struggled to know his own mind once he had to live with people who held opposite views. His Christianity did make him different from the secular world, but it is doubtful that this difference was a life of virtue as envisioned by Chrysostom, or even that there is a net benefit to a rules-based sexual ethic.
Read together See Me Naked and Sex and Love give readers the chance to consider how theological ideas are demonstrated in actual life and how life can be described by theological theories. Theology on its own can be hard to understand. A story can be easy to understand. Together, they help the other have more meaning.
Bodies: A Source of Delight or an Evil to Control?
“Instead of learning from the sensory world, we aim to control it” (68), Frykholm proposes before a brief explanation of different views of the body, ending with the story of a priest who at one time wanted to be as thin as possible so that her body would make as little impact on the world as possible (70). If bodies are evil, or at least something to be controlled in order to live a life pleasing to God, then the less of a body a person has, the more spiritual they must be. Frykholm includes other stories that show this priest is not the only person to become anorexic out of a belief that denying bodily needs, expressed through desire, is the way to avoid sinning.
McCarthy also tackles embodiment, but specifically from the perspective of sexual desire. Chapter 2 describes the secular “economy of desire” as always wanting something new (34), which stands in contrast to a sexuality that values long-term relationships that are full of the mundane (43). For McCarthy, an “everyday bodily presence” is the better form of sex because “what we do today gains its meaning in relation to yesterday and what we will do tomorrow” (44). Even if McCarthy does not say it in so many words, his conclusions circle a belief that the body is good and does not need to be diminished or completely denied. His discussions suggest that time, place, and relationships are more important than strict rule-following.
Frykholm also thinks about bodies from a perspective separate from sexuality. If McCarthy explores this perspective, it is in incidental comments or tangential to his main point. One direct comment on physical bodies can be summarized that thinking of intercourse/sex as a symbol of total self-giving removes the importance of the daily embodiment of ourselves and our commitment to our spouse (47). Frykholm more directly looks at bodies as something good in and of themselves.
Monica’s story is one example. Monica was uncomfortable around nudity and also assumed that the only reason a female would be naked for others to see is because she is beautiful. An art class challenged that assumption (76). In time, she came to understand where her initial views came from and her opinion changed to the point that she hung nude drawings in an art show (83). Through this story, Frykholm demonstrates how art can inform views of bodies.
From movies where the only reason a woman would be naked was for sexual consumption (76) to art viewers unable to distinguish between art and pornography (84) to the declaration that paintings of a naked Jesus emphasize that Jesus had a body (84), Frykholm gives readers plenty to think about. The last point supports Frykholm’s position that bodies are good because they are the Imago Dei (86).
McCarthy certainly offers plenty for readers to consider about how the body is used, but considerations of the body as a thing itself are more spread out, hidden in dense arguments that flit around the edges of a direct discussion. McCarthy’s considerations of embodiment are more because they are connected to his considerations of sex, marriage, and family than because he takes a direct look at bodies as a thing themselves. Reading the two books together give different perspectives on similar topics, but in this case, Frykholm spends more time on the body as an entity worthy of its own theology, or in her own words “[bodies] are…a means to know and love God” (74).
Attraction: Who Is Allowed to Be Attracted to Whom?
For most of his book, McCarthy writes from the perspective of heterosexual relationships, giving just nine pages (212-221) to discuss homosexuality. This perhaps is reasonable given that his book is devoted to Christian theology through the centuries and that he is trying to avoid supporting one side or the other of any debates. Rather than discussing the biblical and historical support for or against different positions, McCarthy tries to focus his discussion on “the institutional character of sex and love” (212). Briefly, McCarthy argues that “homosexuality is not a decisive issue that will determine the viability of marriage as an institution” because [Western] society has already decided that marriage is a private contract (214). He goes on to propose that since marriage is a private contract, then heterosexual co-habitation before marriage is a stronger threat to how society conceives of marriage than is who is marrying whom.
Even though McCarthy does not directly address arguments from varying views on who is allowed to be legally married, the discussion in Chapter 9 on gender and role is worth reading with different sexualities in mind. For example, he says “being male or female is not equivalent to identity or function” (176). He is speaking of assigned gender roles, such as delegating housework to women and out-of-house work to men, but this discussion may be useful to readers who wonder how a society’s understanding of gender influences its understanding of people who do not identify as cisgender heterosexuals.
True to the nature of her book, Frykholm puts stories and names to the theory. In Megan’s story, she is always playing a part, trying to fit into what she is told God made women to be. In college, she flipped through a popular Christian book for women. The authors ask rhetorical questions designed to show exactly what “godly” women want. Megan could not relate and wondered if she was “defective” (61). Despite all the chatter among her companions, it seems no one else admitted to not relating to the description of womanhood. Frykholm never says this, but the implied question is, “If God made women innately have certain desires and preferences, then why is it necessary to tell them that they have those desires?” Megan’s story is about her journey to accepting her homosexuality, but the questions her story poses are relevant to anyone.
Frykholm humanizes what can be a sensitive, contentious topic. McCarthy asks a question that ignores the common dichotomy, removing the usefulness of each side’s talking points. Each, in different ways, offers readers the chance to leave behind fear - McCarthy through logic and Frykholm through relatability.
Abuse: What Happens When It All Goes Wrong?
Frykholm has three stories about people who were sexually abused. These stories are in the section on resurrection, which she treats as a here-and-now event that is in process. All of the stories have an upward arc. They could be called redemptive or hopeful. They also reflect the complexities of real life. There are no tidy happy endings. As Becca Stevens puts it “the scars do not go away, there is something deeper than scars. That is the story I have to tell” (165). That is hopeful, healing, and encouraging even if it is not perfect.
McCarthy has neither a chapter nor an index entry for abuse. He may occasionally talk about the downsides to living out certain philosophies and theologies, but the focus is more about exploring ways of understanding a topic than in observable outcomes. His perspective has a heavy focus on relationships between adults whose behavior is on the spectrum of normal rather than exploring what happens when someone steps off of that spectrum. Even though he talks about romantic love, which may be expressed through sex outside of a formal commitment (Ch. 2, p. 231), he continually brings the topic back to conventional marriage and procreation. Given the purpose of his book, it is possible that a discussion on abuse would either be tacked on or would change the focus of the book, so its lack is not a criticism so much as an observation.
Considering the two books together, McCarthy introduces complex topics of family life and the purpose of sex which could feel removed from the average reader’s application. Frykholm’s stories are more directly relatable, demonstrating how abuse is not a person’s fault, regardless of which decisions they make leading up to the event and how what happens when someone does report is rarely what most people would hope would happen. The stories Frykholm tells challenge comforting binaries and rules by humanizing the moment when someone made a decision that changed another’s life. McCarthy’s work asks the reader to think about what assumptions lead to actions. Together, they insist that a reader avoid thinking anything is as simple as it seems.
Family: Who and What Is It?
In contrast to their respective treatments of abuse, Frykholm’s book centers on sexuality, but mentions of family are incidental. McCarthy’s book interweaves family into nearly every section. In Frykholm’s stories, family shows up as the mother who tries to keep the home-country culture alive (13), the father whose work as a minister was a nearly inevitable on-ramp for the son’s involvement in ministry (32), the emotionally distant step-father (127), and the mother who sold her daughter to a pimp (148). These are characters who create the background, and sometimes the inciting incident, but the fact of family is not the main point of the story. In contrast, family is central to McCarthy’s discussion, but his descriptions, except when he speaks of his own family, appear more like stock photos. They are a family, but no family in particular. This difference in the authors’ approaches is suitable for the books’ different styles and purposes.
McCarthy’s family shows up especially in two dedicated chapters, “Family Values” and “The Social Role of the Family,” with an honorable mention in “Family Miscellany.” He begins with the observation that political liberals and conservatives place families as a connector between individual and state (70). Despite the praise all parties heap on the institution of family, McCarthy points out that “family values, oddly, are a means of regulating family because the household represents a network of relations which undermines political and economic life” (72). These may sound like contradictions, but he spends at least six pages explaining the relationship.
On the social role of the family, after commenting on various views, including giving considerable space to Roman Catholic thought, McCarthy says that it is unreasonable to expect the spouse to complete a person because friends and others can pull out different aspects of someone’s personality and character (123). This suggests that despite placing a strong value on family, McCarthy recognizes that family is not all a person needs.
Throughout his book, McCarthy assumes a mother-father-children family structure but careful readers will see that openings are left for other configurations. One possible configuration, found family, is described in “Family Miscellany” (197-198). Additionally, who and what “family” is, which necessarily means variations, as well as the role of family in society, is part of nearly every chapter, even if indirectly.
Two Books: Which Is Better?
The answer to which book is better depends on the needs of the reader. Amy Frykholm’s See Me Naked is easier to read and teaches through emotional connection. David McCarthy’s Sex and Love is more challenging to understand and teaches through examining ways of thinking. Both have a place. For the reader who wonders what value there is in studying sexuality, See Me Naked demonstrates through real stories how what we believe, even if we do not realize we believe it, affects ourselves and others. For the reader who wants to dig deep into philosophy and theology in order to learn about the ideas behind the ideas, Sex and Love is the better fit. Read together, McCarthy shows what may be happening behind the scenes and what the results of actions may be. Frykholm gives the theoretical scenes names and emotions. McCarthy is the data; Frykholm is the human interest. As anyone who has ever presented a proposal to a committee knows, both are needed.