Rhetoric Race and Religion
It was sexy. It felt a little voyeuristic, like we should all look away. But no one could tear their eyes off the hot display of marital lust happening onstage at Sunday’s Grammy Awards.
Beyoncé sat with her back to the audience, straddling a chair when the beat to “Drunk in Love” — the first single off her unpromoted, unexpected albumBeyoncé — began to pulse. She purred her way through the beginning of the song, singing lyrics like, “You got me faded, faded-faded, baby, I want you, na-na / Can’t keep your eyes off my fatty, daddy, I want you, na-na / Drunk in love, I want you.”
Subtle the song is not. After the first few verses, Jay Z joined his wife onstage to continue the ode to connubial sex. And then, when the song was over, they hugged and walked hand in hand offstage, disappearing back into their regular lives. (As regular, at least, as a life of extreme wealth, fame, and superstardom can be.)
But their performance did more than just entertain millions of viewers; it argued for something as old fashioned as marriage being sexy. And that, as Alyssa Rosenberg wrote at ThinkProgress yesterday, might be just what conservatives need to make their case for marriage:
It’s a song about flirting, about going out and partying, about having fantastic, adventuresome, totally enthralling sex–with your spouse. That’s a far, far better argument for marriage than the pseudo-scientific case for holding onto your oxytocin by not having sex before you say your vows on the grounds that such conservation efforts will make your first time better.
Many branches of Christianity have long said people should wait until marriage to have sex. Some of this has been done in damaging ways, encouraging fear of one’s body and draconian punishments for having lusted. But one thing we as Christians often fail to communicate in the conversation about marriage is how important it is to have a robust understanding of desire and sex in their right places.
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