One of the most influential essays I’ve ever read, in terms of how it changed my perspective on religion and sex, is the “Two Boxes” essay by Libby Anne at her blog “Love, Joy, Feminism.”
In the religious tradition I grew up in (Roman Catholicism), we did talk about consent some (in the sense that all sex should be both Unitive and Procreative, and non-consensual sex is not Unitive), but we still very much used the “Sex God approves of” and “Sex God does not approve of” set of boxes.
Being able to put this idea into words – the idea that Catholic sexual mores were lacking, and didn’t match up with how I felt about morality – was a liberating experience, and I credit it with being the beginning of my own sexual awakening. For a long time, I think I had held on to the ideas I learned as a teen steeped in Catholic youth culture — that sex was wasteful and unhealthy if done in a “wrong” context, and that only a very small number of sex acts were even plausibly “right.” Even when I verbally disavowed that attitude, it hung on in my subconscious for much longer than it ought to have.
In my mind, the thing that makes a given sexual act moral is whether it is Consensual and whether it is Honest. Not whether a given religious doctrine says it is appropriate.
Emilybook 