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(RNS) — For years, Deesha Philyaw, a Pittsburgh writer, editor and writing coach, has gradually crafted stories about church ladies — but these are not the stories you’d likely hear sitting in the pew of a Black church.
Now, her new book, “ The Secret Lives of Church Ladies ,” has been named a fiction finalist for the National Book Award. In it are nine stories that cross generations and families, tales of Black women whose lives are a mixture of religion, sex, love and grief.
There’s the single woman and the married man who first meet in the hospice facility housing their elderly Christian mothers and who later end up in the back seat of a car outside.
And the longtime best girlfriends who as teens dreamed of a double wedding with male mates but now have their own sexual rendezvous together once a year. One still hopes for a man; the other questions God.
And the girl whose mother regularly shares peach cobbler and herself with their married male pastor. The girl, now a teen, begins tutoring lessons and a liaison with the same pastor’s son.
Though the details may be invented, Philyaw, 49, said her book reflects the real-life “dissatisfaction and struggle” of some Black women raised in the church, but also the comfort and guidance many of them find in God.
Author Deesha Philyaw. Photo by Vanessa German
“I see the book as centering Black women in their own stories of the tug of war they experience between their desires and what they may have learned at church,” said Philyaw, a Black woman who no longer considers herself to be religious. “I want to be sure it’s the women who are centered and the church is sort of in their orbit as opposed to the other way around.”
Hours after learning her book was an award finalist , she spoke to Religion News Service about growing up in the church, writing about affairs and what she thinks her late mother and grandmother would think of a book that she would definitely give an R rating.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Oh, the scream that I let out, let me tell you. I am so honored and thankful and just excited that people have connected with it the way they have. And I’m going to try not to start crying again.
They live in my imagination, because I was a church girl. I grew up in the church. I grew up in the South. How do you navigate the really tight space that church can often bind us in when it comes to many things, but our sexuality in particular? I was raised by my mother and my grandmother. And it was just their stories, their voices, their contradictions and all of my curiosity about them that has stayed with me.
Jacksonville, Florida, is where I was born and raised. And it was many churches. We talk about “the church” and we know the Black church isn’t a monolith, but in my collection, it’s sort of the traditional evangelical Black church. But for me growing up, it was numerous churches, numerous denominations: AME (African Methodist Episcopal); Baptist; Pentecostal; COGIC, which stands for Church of God in Christ; Missionary Baptist Church.
“The Secret Lives of Church Ladies” by Deesha Philyaw. Image courtesy of West Virginia University Press
I’ll defer to the Black women who have said to me, “I know these women,” or “I am these women,” or “I used to be that woman,” or “I knew exactly who you were talking about in this story.” So I think it’s very true to life.
It’s one, but I really want to put it in context. Because there’s often these conversations that somehow Black people or the Black church are more homophobic than other folks. And so I don’t want to really put a fine point on that particular area. I think it’s part of a larger continuum of the binaries of who we can be. We can be the Madonna or the whore. We’re in God’s will or we’re outside of God’s will. It’s really a larger question of the church giving us so few options about who we can be and how we can be in the world and what it means to be good, what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman. And certainly part of that is in terms of how you identify as queer or not queer. So that would be one factor.
What’s revealed to us in dreams, those things we typically call superstition or old wives’ tales, they are drawn from our African roots. They get all tangled up when enslaved and formerly enslaved people adapted to Christianity and folded those practices in. So sometimes we can’t tell where one starts and one (ends). But as Black people, we own all of it. But too often, what we point to as superstition is presented as antithetical to Christianity or to godliness and many of us know that’s simply not true.
I hope people see those things as the ways in which I am not bashing the church, that I still have fond memories of those kinds of traditions and that the church in and of itself isn’t the problem and so there’s a lot of good. There are reasons people cling to the church, very good reasons. There are reasons I have these memories and it’s not because I had bad experiences at church. It’s because I looked forward to Mother’s Day and knowing what those flowers meant and seeing who had the red flowers and who had the white flowers.
On Mother’s Day, you would wear a flower on your collar or your lapel, or you pin it to your dress. And you wear a red flower if your mother is still living and a white flower if your mother has passed away. Mother’s Day is a day where a lot of people come to church, usually or perhaps at the request of their mother. Maybe they don’t come any other time, but you know, mama or grandmama wants you to be there so you go and you wear your flower.
I liked the concept of this serial mistress. But in the triad, if there’s a husband and there’s a wife and there’s this woman, she’s the one we hear from the least. She’s the most vilified. So I thought, what if I kind of subverted that and what if instead of her being the person on the margins, what if she controlled the narrative? I’m a big fan of what is called hermit crab essays in nonfiction, where you write an essay, but it takes the form of something ordinary. So I thought what if I did that with fiction and she wrote a little instruction manual for these guys? Now I can be creative and a little clever. But still tackle something that’s pretty serious.
I think they would be proud of me because they were just always proud of me. I don’t think there would be any exception about this book. Now, it gives me pause ’cause there is a lot of sex in the book. But, even with some of the more provocative content, I think they’d still be very proud and very happy about it.
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Published April 14, 2014 12:00AM (EDT)

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This article originally appeared on AlterNet .
The never-ending debate about women and pornography has led to many assumptions about female sexual desire. A common perception depicted by the media is that women are turned off by porn that is made for men, by men. Advocates for so-called female-friendly pornography—that is, porn founded on mutual respect where the female subject demonstrates true agency in her sexuality—believe that if there were more emotive-driven, personality-based storylines in porn, more women would watch it. However, surprising research on porn patterns suggests otherwise.
Neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, co-authors of the book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts , conducted research on visual pornography in relation to female sexual desire in an attempt to unlock the secret of our sexual habits. The results of their study found that while most women don’t watch porn, those who do are not watching female-friendly porn but rather the same mainstream, male-targeted, hardcore sites that men view.
“There is a real interesting phenomenon in women’s sexuality—not seen in men’s—and that is this divide between what erotica should be and what actually turns women on,” Ogas told AlterNet. “Studies show that what turns women on is different to what they wish turned them on or how they politically feel about it. There is a paradox in the brain that women have to wrestle with. Men like what they like sexually. But with women, we see political manifestos embedded in their sexuality, with just as much emphasis on whether or not we’re discriminating on any particular gender or race. Whereas, for a man that just doesn’t occur.”
An interesting correlation is found between women who like hardcore porn and certain personality traits, Ogar explains.
“Women who like hardcore porn tend to be more aggressive, more socially assertive and more comfortable taking risks. They are comfortable playing both roles sexually, they like being dominated and being submissive. They possess a constellation of personality traits that you would normally associate with men. It is reasonable to imagine then that for a minority of women, their sexual brain develops in a masculine way,” he said.
Angie Rowntree, the founder of Sssh.com, offers a different explanation for the trafficking trends.
“If the vast majority of porn on the market is made by and for men—and it is—is it any wonder that a relatively small portion of women wants to watch it? To me, that number just speaks to the opportunity on the market for porn made with a female viewership in mind. It’s just a function of the numbers and what has been available on the market, historically speaking,” she told AlterNet.
Indeed, while the rise of "female-friendly" porn has shown that women’s individual preferences are as varied and diverse as men, some common trends have emerged with regard to female sexual tastes. A 2008 study found that women showed signs of arousal watching pretty much anything: masturbation, straight sex, girl-on-girl, guy-on-guy, bonobo chimps, everything — except pictures of naked men, which did not float a woman’s boat.
So is there a place online for female-friendly porn sites? Ogas weighs in on the big picture.
“There is definitely an audience for feminist-friendly porn, just a small audience and a small fraction of women overall. What is fascinating is that women commonly promote the idea of feminist porn and socially want to believe in it. Activists argue that there needs to be more of it, women support it in public and I see women start erotic websites all the time. But when it comes down to it, that is just not what they are interested in looking at,” he said.
In contrast, Rowntree says female-friendly porn is important in contemporary society regardless of one's views on pornography because it is an extension of the way that women have explored and expressed their sexuality throughout history.
“To me, it’s important that there’s porn made by and for women, to ensure that at least some of the porn on the market emphasizes a woman’s pleasure and the feminine perspective. It’s important that there are depictions available that show people having real sex, experiencing real, mutual pleasure, and not just something that satisfies male-dominant fantasies….Whenever women have been open about their sexuality, or god forbid, assertive with our sexuality, you can count on a certain number of people freaking out about it, and looking for ways to shame and silence us,” she said.
While social constructs, stereotypes and pressures have certainly played a role in keeping women from being comfortable with porn in the past, Rowntree says the impact of those factors are diminishing over time. This is consistent with a recent poll of 300 women, which showed millennials watched the most porn: 57 percent of respondents who enjoyed porn solo were aged 18-24.
Rowntree says, "Among younger women, there’s less and less concern for such constructs, and more openness to erotic material and more comfort with their own sexuality. To me, 'female-friendly porn' just means porn that doesn’t make a second-class citizen out of the women performing in it, or the women watching it. It depicts two people truly enjoying themselves.”
Copyright © 2022 Salon.com, LLC. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. SALON ® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon.com, LLC. Associated Press articles: Copyright © 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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