Religious authority is an institutionalized system that regulates human behavior, including sexual conduct, through codified rules, practices, belief systems, and social norms. Sexuality is a personal aspect of life involving physical attraction, emotional attachment, erotic experience, and intimate relationship. Religious authorities employ various tools to control, prohibit, and punish deviant sexual behaviors considered unacceptable in their doctrines, such as premarital intercourse, homosexual acts, adultery, incest, bestiality, and rape. They also regulate acceptable speech about these topics, but not always in the same ways.
Sexual speech is communication that includes physical descriptions, feelings, fantasies, desires, intentions, activities, positions, roles, locations, sounds, sensations, and emotions related to sex. It can take place in private or public settings, among individuals or groups, verbally, nonverbally, electronically, visually, physically, symbolically, or metaphorically. Some religious leaders claim that sexual speech is forbidden because it promotes lustfulness, immorality, sinfulness, impurity, and worldliness. Others allow it under certain conditions, such as within marriage for procreation purposes or as part of teaching and pastoral care. Religious communities may accept some forms of sexual speech while rejecting others, depending on cultural contexts, interpretations, and power dynamics.
Sexual speech can be divided into five categories: erotica, pornography, obscenity, indecency, and profanity. Erotic speech refers to artistic expressions that depict or describe sexual encounters between consenting adults with positive values and norms, without explicit violence, abuse, fetishes, perversion, or exploitation. Pornographic speech describes or shows graphic images of sexual acts, often involving violence, degradation, humiliation, or domination. Obscene speech uses vulgar language or gestures to arouse excitement, offend morals, shock audiences, or provoke reactions. Indecent speech refers to words, phrases, or symbols that are not explicitly sexual but imply themes of sexual desire or activity. Profane speech uses swearwords or blasphemous statements against religion, God, or divinity.
Religious authorities have different attitudes towards these forms of sexual speech.
Some Christian denominations consider any form of nonmarital sex a sin, including erotic and pornographic speech. Other religions encourage married couples to engage in healthy erotic activities and promote marital fidelity, while condemning extramarital affairs, divorce, and remarriage. Some Islamic communities allow polygamy as long as the husband treats his wives equally, while others prohibit it completely. Hinduism permits sexual pleasure within marriage but discourages promiscuity, homosexuality, adultery, masturbation, and birth control. Judaism encourages procreation through heterosexual intercourse and forbids bestiality, incest, and rape. Buddhism is neutral on human-animal relationships and does not favor monogamous or polygamous marriages.
Religious authority regulates sexual speech by controlling its content, contexts, expressions, and purposes. It also differentiates between acceptable and unacceptable types of sexual conduct and communication according to cultural norms, doctrinal beliefs, and power dynamics.
In what ways does religious authority regulate the boundaries of acceptable sexual speech?
The religious authorities have been known to regulate sexual speech by promoting chastity and abstinence from premarital sex as well as extramarital affairs. They also emphasize that there should be no sexual behavior outside of marriage between husband and wife. In addition, they may prohibit certain types of sexual language, imagery, and content in media and artwork.