Sunday in Outer Blogness: Sex Edition!!

This past week was pretty steamy! And wouldn’t be complete without drugs and rock’n’roll!

Sex + books: The overeducated housewife has taken up writing porn, and Diana recounted her experience of discovering erotica in Grandma’s basement! In other books, this book on religion by Ryan Cragun looks pretty interesting! Heaven up Here got a new review and inspired some other thoughts (plus this mishie site earned an entertaining critique from FAIR). And Donna Banta shared some tales of writing The Girls from Fourth Ward.

Sex + same sex: The big news was that Exodus International not only closed up shop, but the president actually admitted reparative therapy is wrong and apologized.

Sex + gender: The Mormon theology of gender is problematic, at best. April of the Exponent explored the problems with “It’s not that women shouldn’t supervise men, it’s that women shouldn’t supervise priesthood holders.” And how do you deal with the effects on young Mormon women? (Despite these interesting pieces, Molly had some harsh criticisms for the Mormon feminists, and answered her own critics as well.)

Sex + ratio: A problem for single Mormon ladies, yes, but a surprise…?

Sex + harassment: (Ironically?) a “modesty” culture directly contributes to the harassment problem at BYU. (Related warning: As funny as the honor code can be, getting kicked out of BYU is no joke.) The new scientific reasoning behind the Mormon modest one-piece has some major problems, for example ONLY men who already held “hostile sexist” attitudes toward women demonstrated higher neural or behavior proclivities to treat sexualized (read: bikini-wearing) women as objects compared to others.

Sex + ism: How to tell if your sexism is of the hostile variety? Take the quiz Kuri took! And — while the Mormons have gotten some criticism today — let’s not give the skeptics a pass when there’s some serious introspection needed. Plus, as funny as it is to pick on Miss Utah’s gaffe, maybe it’s also a bit sexist….

Sex + ed: How the Mormons do it! Remember the church’s priorities when dating, and too bad for those too-young siblings who wanted to attend your wedding!

Those who did not write about sex mostly wrote interesting scholarly pieces about scripture and church history, especially concerning Nauvoo’s “Nuisance Laws” and how they applied (or didn’t) to Joseph Smith’s destruction of a printing press. Also about the problems with claiming that the Book of Mormon tells the story of a small, isolated group: the text doesn’t support it and even then one would expect to find evidence of their existence, and maybe there are some other imperfections in the Book of Mormon as well. Plus some Biblical analysis of how to get saved and an embroiderable quote from the Book of Mormon!

(OK, well some were more funny than scholarly — but still making interesting points.)

In life journeys, there’s a new exit story and that fateful step of tossing your quad!! And just doing new stuff.

In the grab-bag — interesting posts that simply defied my every effort to reasonably group them!! — there are demons around every corner, getting sandwiched between generations, parallels with Scientology, group solar energy in Provo, everything you’ve ever wanted to know about getting your temple sealing cancelled, and random silliness including a new Hymn parody!!

This has been a super-fun sexy week, and I hope you have as much fun reading these as I did!!! Have a great week!