One time I was in a Facebook group called Hooters for Husbands. I did not pick the name. It was an offshoot of a mom’s group I was in called Night Hooters. It’d been started by a group of moms who were up feeding their babies in the night and wanted some comradery. I liked it. It was a place of support for mothers with young children.

People will ask almost anything in Facebook groups. Several times the topic had turned to post-partum sex or related things having to do with marriage. So just as they had started a fitness group, a fashion group, a small business group, and surely a few others, they started a group for marital sex questions. It was me and two other women who become the moderators. I didn’t volunteer, the founder asked me if I’d do it.

One of the first posts there quickly became problematic. It turned into the women more or less bragging about where the craziest place they had ever had sex was. What made this group occasionally awkward at times was that you knew some of the people. These were people who sort of became your friends and were people in the circle of people you got to know online.

So then we had to course correct. One of the other moderators made a post about how this isn’t a comparison game. Some of the women were feeling self-conscious that they had never had sex on the hood of a car or on their dining room tables or wherever. I found the stories entertaining and I remember being taken aback by the sexual natures of women in general. It can be an interesting topic but also an incredibly sensitive and painful one.

I recently started reading Shannon Bonne’s new memoir The Woman They Wanted. So far I have found it pretty fascinating. This last chapter I read she is talking about the process of what felt like an audition to be the official girlfriend of Josh Harris, who at that time was becoming the poster child for the increasingly popular way of Christian (non) dating and courtship.

She wasn’t a virgin. Her parents were divorced. She wasn’t raised in a Christian home. It’s painful to hear her write all of this. I can remember when Josh’s second book came out, Boy Meets Girl. I was surprised that she was the one he picked. He told a little bit about her story. She says she didn’t feel shame about sex at first. She had thought sex was just a regular part of growing up.

I was thinking earlier today about Jesus when he talks about a man looking at a woman lustfully. Like, he doesn’t say anything about women there, that is, it made me wonder, do women in the same way ever look at a man lustfully? The Christian women’s books likened lusting after a man more in the way of wanting a man who wasn’t yours and comparing your husband’s perceived faults with another man’s perceived strengths.

I don’t know why I’m saying this.

People have lived such different lives.