"Sexual pleasure, rather than being suspect, is bounteously filled with good human news. Christian ethicist Mary Pellauer, in her essay 'The Moral Significance of Female Orgasm,' in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (1993), says that 'flesh has the capacity to burst me open to existence' so that our 'connections to the rest of the universe are felt . . . as pleasurable.' Patricia Beattie Jung says, 'Our sexuality draws us into one another's arms — and consequently into an awareness of and concern about the needs of that other.' Audre Lorde, in her essay 'Uses of the Erotic,' says that the experience of sexual pleasure can stir up in women a sense of their self-worth. Once women taste such delights, they can begin to demand 'what is in accord with joy in other areas' of their lives. Women will 'begin to give up . . . being satisfied with suffering, and self-negation, and with the numbness' that the macho culture demands of them. Mary Pellauer agrees, saying that 'to touch and be touched in ways that produce sweet delight affirms, magnifies, intensifies and redoubles the deep value of our existence.' Sa'diyya Shaik writes that in Islam it is recognized that 'sexual union has the possibilities for unparalleled mystical unveilings and experiences of the Divine.' To call sex 'dirty' is a calumny.

"Notice that this talk of sex covers all the bases of a healthy spirituality. Respect for self and others, joyful affirmation of our hopes for justice and for life. It's all there. That's good sex, and that's good spirituality.

"Our sense of what is normal sex is socially constructed, and much of that social construction is poisonous, sitting on our sexuality like a noxious miasma. Healthier winds are blowing this damnable gas out to sea and we are beginning to see that in moments of truthful sexual joy a sacred beauty is born."