In my next class, “Sexual Purity,” they were bound to take attendance, so I couldn’t very well just not show up. I thought a bit about what the consequences might be if I were to skip one of my classes, but in the end, since I knew that some of my friends would in there with me, I decided to just bite the bullet and attend. Read the rest of the story »
One of the big stereotypes about people who leave the church is that anyone who would do such a terrible thing must have done so because they were too lazy to follow God’s commandments or because they just wanted to sin. We’ve probably been accused (either explicitly or implicitly) of…
Sam was pretty lucky that his cousin Joe had come to live with him. The three of us were all in the same math class together, which meant that Sam got free help with his math homework every night while I only got help when they invited me over. I…
David Pace’s American Trinity is a striking collection of twelve short stories tied together by the common thread of Mormonism. The stories were written over the past several decades, and draw from his lifelong experiences with the church. These experiences are not insignificant, and I found myself somewhat dismayed to hear some…
It’s striking that they would target boys for sexual repression while women are relegated to second class citizen status. It seems that sex is primarily a lever for domination.
I absolutely think that repressing sexuality is a means of control. Although I think they repress the girls’ sexuality as well (while denying its existence).
This is my favorite part:
LOL, absurd as that sounds, like almost every detail in the book, that’s based on reality.
Back in my BYU daze, my boyfriend recounted to me exactly that — fantasizing about a temple wedding first so that the sex part wouldn’t be a fantasy of fornication. I thought that was the most hilarious thing ever, but then when I thought about it a bit more, I remembered that as a teen I’d tried a variant of the same strategy: trying to substitute a fantasy involving a happily married couple instead of imagining fornication (to diminish the sin quotient of the whole business). But it didn’t work well — I guess it just wasn’t erotic enough for my perverted teenage brain 😉 — so I abandoned that tactic pretty quickly, which is why I’d nearly forgotten about it until my boyfriend reminded me.
That part made me laugh as well because I used to do the same thing. It didn’t work all that well for me either, sadly… 🙂