What is Sexual Integrity?

People have a general idea of integrity.

A popular answer is, “When a person’s words and actions align.” You can even go a layer deeper and say, “When a person’s thoughts and actions align.”

If you add sex to it, you could say that sexual integrity is to live out your sexuality in alignment with your sexual values.

Striving to live in alignment with your sexual values. That’s a worthy pursuit. There are many noble activities that could fall under this–staying faithful in marriage, abstaining from pornography and masturbation. No reason to argue with a person committed to honoring their values.

That’s one level of sexual integrity, but we believe it goes deeper. Because values are relative. They’re shaped by people’s experiences, environment, and many other factors. We want to talk about something concrete, something absolute.

Let’s start by looking at the word integrity. Our favorite understanding of integrity is, “a state of being whole.” When you say an object has integrity, you imply that it’s whole. A chair with only three legs would be lacking integrity.

Now let’s start going deep.

What qualifies a chair with three legs as out of integrity? It comes down to purpose. The purpose of a chair is to be sat on, and that becomes unworkable when it only has three legs. Glue a chair to the wall and call it art; then it wouldn’t matter how many legs it had.

Purpose. That’s what it boils down to. A thing has integrity when it’s able to fulfill its intended purpose.

Sex, my friend, has a rockin’ purpose.

The purpose of sex among animals is easy, reproduction and the prolongation of genes. Those instincts are strong in people too, but we believe the purpose of sex runs much deeper for human beings.

Human beings are created as manifestations of God. The catch is that individuals are only one half of the equation. The sexual act allows for masculine and feminine to be brought together to embody the oneness of God, on top of generating love, creating life, and perpetuating lineage.

Sex is meant to be the culmination of all of existence, where a man and women come together and become God.

And it happens to be a lot of fun.

Given all that, we’ve come to understand sexual integrity as, “Living out one’s sexuality in a way that is consistent with God’s intention for sex.”

Inside that understanding of sex, there are a lot of things that make sense – why pornography isn’t so helpful, why fidelity is important, and even why masturbation may not be a good idea. However, it also implies that there’s more to it than abstaining from negative behaviors. There’s a creative side to it that calls us to be majestic lovers of our spouses.

Hopefully, this gives you a glimpse into how deep the topic of sexual integrity can go. We touched on some topics that warrant their own articles, such as God’s intention for sex, the relationship between purpose and happiness, and how to be a majestic lover. Look forward to those in the future.

That all being said, we feel we’re also just scratching the surface on our understanding of sexual integrity. As we mature, hopefully our understanding does as well. Maybe our definition evolves, or we’ll have something entirely different to say on the topic.

What about you, what do you think it means to have sexual integrity?