The former wife of an Alabama pastor is on a mission to help Christian couples save their marriages by spicing up their sex lives.
DiShan Washington, who was married at the age of 16 to a 20-year-old minister, claims to have created a fiction genre she calls "Christian erotica". All her characters are married and she says she does not promote premarital sex.
In a NPR interview, she said: "Christian erotica is basically my way of taking what the secular world has perverted and made us feel ashamed of [and make] people focus more on the seduction and not just necessarily the body parts and the language that you sometimes hear when you are watching pornography or you are reading a book." She explained: "My goal is to help save marriages."
Washington was divorced at the age of 30 and says that one of the reasons was that for at least 10 years she did not cater to her husband's sexual needs, or he to hers. "I was raised by a generation of women who taught me that sex was for the man," she said.
She has written The Preacher's Wifey, Diary of a Mad First Lady – a title given to pastors' wives – and Diary of a Mad First Lady 2. She has also written the screenplay for a 2013 film, Let's Get It On.
She said in the interview that after her divorce she asked herself: "How do I get Christian women to remove the stigma that being erotic is sinful or somehow shameful and embarrassing?
"I decided I was going to write a more tasteful version of what I had read in other books."
She is now unmarried but had a daughter from a relationship after her marriage ended. Asked whether she had "unlocked" her own desires, she said: "I have not allowed myself to tap into it fully. People ask, 'Have you had sex since you have been divorced?' Yes, I had a daughter about a year ago. But there's a part of me that's reserving the fullness of the Christian erotica concept that I teach other people and other married couples to do – I am reserving that for my husband if I should ever get married again.
"Now, I won't lie to you and say I don't get the urges to go and find somebody to unleash all of this stuff on. I do, but I am able to maintain it because I'm getting a joy and satisfaction out of helping people."
