This is the first of a series of guest posts on learning about sex within different religious contexts. Here’s a link to our guest post invitation.
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I apologize after sex. Yes, I literally say, “I’m sorry.” Actually I have come a long way in recent years about uttering the actual phrase, but the urge is still pressing every time.
I apologize because the message to young women of virtue above all else, modesty to the extreme, that a licked cupcake is a ruined sacred soul is a message that was heard loud and clear by young men as well.
I apologize because the loving act that was just experienced with my dear wife was not long ago the object of dire warnings and a thing of eternally negative consequences.
I apologize because I momentarily failed to be the ascetic saint, tempering passions and appetites and instead giving into desire to be close to my spouse. I apologize because I let that which makes me human, the most base of our desires, have its way.
I apologize because I ignored the disparate, inconsistent rules governing sexual relations as inconsistently defined by old men and folk doctrine. I apologize for having attempted to find excitement and connection and passion with my wife but because of such confusion on the rules of engagement, playing it safe is the best bet. . . and yet I still gamble.
I apologize because sex was never defined or described as fun, pleasurable, fulfilling or even as important for a healthy relationship, but I decided to have fun with it anyway.
I apologize because sex was taboo until it wasn’t (kiss over the altar – it’s all good!). In fact it was worse than taboo; it was second only to murder in the power-rankings of sin. How can we talk of sex in the same breath as we speak of murder, and then expect that negative connotations won’t follow us into our adult married lives, haunting our bedrooms and poisoning what could be so much sweeter?
I apologize because the good girl doesn’t do what this bad boy would like, and when she does, the good boy shames himself into a state of regret. I apologize because the good girl has been conditionally defined as being a slut should she even want to participate. Women with sexual needs–certainly not!–and so we both apologize for giving in to the wants of the self and the wants of the other. We feel embarrassed for thinking we might just want more.
I apologize and I am not even a believing member anymore! I can’t imagine the apologies cried out silently and otherwise from those still devout and wishing to be obedient yet as confused as I once was. I sympathize for the homosexual Mormon being crushed by guilt at every turn. I know they want to scream. I apologize for singling out LDS culture and doctrine in this post. I know they don’t have a monopoly on retarding intimacy, but from where I sit they certainly seem very ‘efficient’ in the task.
I apologize for speaking for my wife on this issue, but for her to speak out would be a sign of dissent and that just can’t happen, so she internalizes and the self-inflicted penitence continues. I suppose they cannot warn us enough with regards to pornography as it destroys marriages and families, but strictly verboten eroticism is destroying mine.
At least I won’t apologize for trying to teach my children differently.
[This post was originally published here]
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This post made me sad. I get it. I lived it. I don’t live it any more and my husband and I thank God we have been able to dismantle the beliefs this author states in such a poignant way. I am also teaching my children different. I teach my kids that sex is fun, sex is pleasurable, sex builds marriage relationships and sex isn’t dirty, next to murder or only for making babies. I hope that my children’s future in-laws are teaching their kids the same thing!!
My gosh, my heart just aches reading this. I don’t know why I’m different. I don’t know how many people feel the way you do, but I imagine it is many, many, many. I do know that my anxiety at being good (i.e. sexless and virginal) while being engaged (how on earth does one anticipate and prepare for sex if any thought of it is BAD?) landed me in therapy, and my goodness am I glad I went, but how bizarre that I, an intelligent women with quite a healthy sex drive, ended up there.
And here’s where my liberated and morbid curiosity takes me: all those women and men saying all those repressive things about modesty and thoughts and sexual sin next to murder and on and on, did any of them get it? Did they ever get to the glorious part, the part where exclaiming hallelujah feels messy and real and glorious and dirty and unified and incredible all at once? Did they get to that point where sex wasn’t just for procreation but for beautiful fantastic connection and soulful wanting in every way and union in every possibility? Did they feel the goofy pleasure and beauty of discovery and clumsiness? Did they ever get there??? Do my spiritual leaders really believe the things they say about sexuality bringing together the eternal, spiritual, emotional, and physical all into one? Or did they get so caught up on the same and fear and rigid rules like the rest of us?
I think I must have learned about sex the same way in the Church that you did, although it sounds like you got a heavier dose of it. Reading this part in particular,
I apologize because I momentarily failed to be the ascetic saint, tempering passions and appetites and instead giving into desire to be close to my spouse. I apologize because I let that which makes me human, the most base of our desires, have its way.
it strikes me that it’s ironic that as Mormons we in theory reject the creeds that say God is “without body, parts, or passions” but at least my experience of learning about sex in the Church was that teachers wished for nothing so much as that we troublesome teens would have no bodies or passions. All passions were evil–mostly sexual desire, but also stuff like anger. I felt like the goal was to exhort us to be coldly rational, which is why the paragraph of your post I quoted above was so striking to me.
Sarah
I think it goes way back to the strong fear of a parent who, above all else does not want their young daughter to get pregnant, or their son to get someone pregnant too young, or to the wrong person, etc. The fear is for the parent, the son or daughter and the child. The consequences can be so difficult and life altering that the parent wants to control it. So with the help of folklore, the church, the community and fear tactics — this has been passed down from one generation to the next. Even with birth control the teachings haven’t changed much because teaching about birth control is risky — it is like giving consent. . . And can we really expect young people to be consistently responsible about birth control? So we continue to tell stories about sin and shame. Even if we feel that one should wait until marriage for spiritual reasons — only speaking about it in positive terms does not feel sufficient without the condemnation and the warnings. The devastation that can come can feel close to murder. It can feel like many lives have been ruined. Sometimes there is an abortion, sometimes the child is given up for adoption ( can feel devastating for a life time), sometimes the child is raised by a poor single mom whose dreams of college are postponed for 15 years or so while at the same time limiting her options to find a decent guy who wants to help raise someone elses child, or even if the real father marries her they are often too young with no job prospects, and a shaky marital foundation. Sometimes grandparents who were ready to retire and enjoy their golden years end up becoming full-time babysitters. All these can be a lifetime of heartache. So what can we do but continue to persuade with propaganda? Show the Sunday school class the clear cup of water and then put the dirt of sin/sex in it and ask who would want to drink it now? Sex makes you the dirty cup of water. Once you have sex that is who you are and you will never be clear and pure again.
Sarah, I really liked your comment. I think you get at some of the individual-level motivations that perpetuate things. I really liked this question: “So what can we do but continue to persuade with propaganda?” That’s a really tough question. I suspect that many people stick with the standard fear/propaganda approach precisely because that question is so difficult. . .
I really am sorry that so many of you learned sex in and of itself was so bad… that essentially your Mormon experience was, for lack of a better description, so Catholic. If that was my experience I’d run screaming from religion like all of you. But I have to say that mine was not. The mechanics were taught at an early age… the wonder and joy of it came in the early teens. The counsel to build only that deepest level of sexual commitment with the person you marry because sex is so, well, divine in EVERY sense of the word came from parents, the seminary teacher, and my home teaching companion. And trust me, when I have sex, as far as I’m concerned, it is probably the most Mormon thing I do all day… I build a relationship with my wife.
This is a very interesting post. It cuts right to the heart of two issues: (1) why the LDS church has stayed together and grown over the last 180 years while other churches have floundered (like the FourSquare Church), or shrank (Catholic Church), (2) why Mormonism gets so deep in the blood in a way that (perhaps) other religions do not.
Mormon teachings affect the way active and inactive members dress, eat, act, and think about themselves. I feel bad that I want things that are not sinful but which my church has taught me are sinful since the time that I was learning how to read, write, add, and subtract.
When people leave the Catholic or Lutheran Church it seems like this experience involves a lot less shaming and shunning than when people leave the LDS Church. One of the reasons that I still go is that I don’t want my wife or my parents to tell my kids that I’m a bad person.
I just don’t believe in the stuff that is taught from the pulpit. I believe that the church controls our sex lives in a way that Joseph Smith himself was never controlled. The church still teaches that forgiveness for having pre-marital or extra-marital sex can be granted only through confession to a priesthood leader. You would think that an issue this importance, one of forgiveness for sin and eternal salvation, would have been taught expressly by Jesus himself, or his apostles.
I try to explain to the other members of my ward that our ward and our church make up the rules as they go. It is an intricate fiction but it is fiction. I believe that the only woman who will ever understand me is one who understands first-hand what it was like to grow up in a very religious household but who also understands that religion is a tool used by some people to control other people. It has no basis in fact and it cannot be proven the way scientific laws (and constructs) like gravity and propositional calculus can.
I always heard “sex is bad now but will be great later” in the chastity lessons. I credit a progressive Beehive leader whom I very vividly remember using very frank language to hammer home the point that sex is wonderful with your husband and in order to experience it to the maximum awesomness, one must abstain before marriage. Thankfully, this was the lens through which I viewed every other lesson in chastity during my formative years. I also credit my mother who told me once that the reason she didn’t divorce my father sooner was that the sex was great… I was probably 16 at the time. That cemented the sex=fun-inside-marriage idea. I never had the crushed-flower or the licked-cupcake talk, but if I ever hear of my kids having any such lesson, whatever teacher gives it will receive a talking-to from me.