The Pleasure Placebo: The Roles of Religion and Gender in Sexual Enjoyment

Abstract

This project focuses on how religious factors relate to heterosexual, cisgender people’s attitudes about gender dynamics and their experiences of sexual enjoyment and well-being. I conduct three related analyses, and each is structured around the premise that religious identities, attitudes, and participation may shape a person’s sexuality in powerful ways. First, I examine how a person’s religious affiliation and level of religiosity predict their level of agreement with male-centric attitudes about sex using the Public Discourse and Ethics Survey (2021). Second, I examine how Christian women’s attitudes about religious gender hierarchies predict their sexual experiences (including orgasm frequency and perceived closeness and communication with their husbands during sex) using the Sexual Satisfaction and Function Survey (2020). Third, I examine how religious affiliation and attendance frequency predict sexual experiences (including orgasm, pleasure, emotional intimacy, and satisfaction) using the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior (2014). Woven throughout and alongside these three analyses, I discuss the importance of sexual well-being, theories about gender inequalities in sex, the power of religious dynamics to shape sexual expectations, and the implications of my findings. Taken together, my results show that religious factors are related to sexual attitudes and experiences in important but nuanced ways. Religious participation and affiliation, and Protestantism in particular, are related to larger gender gaps in orgasm and sexual pleasure, and even Christian women who have internalized and embraced a religious gender hierarchy report lower orgasm rates than their more egalitarian counterparts. However, religious engagement with Christianity predicts subjective sexual assessments that are comparable to, or even higher than, non-affiliated women or those who engage with their religious community less often. This suggests that there is a disconnect somewhere between the objective and subjective sexual experiences of Christian women, a phenomenon I call the “pleasure placebo.”