On Chastity and Closed Doors

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I have a fondness for cheesy Christian romance novels.   Their plots feature all of the emotional turmoil and external drama of harlequin romance novels – but they add faith crises and subtract sex.

One trope in these novels is to set up a wicked foil to the wholesome protagonist.  In-need-of-repentance characters lurk in the subplots, steeped in dark allusions and transgressed boundaries.  Think of Mr. Wickham in Pride and Prejudice.  Jane Austen evinces plenty of scandal, yet there are zero explicit mentions of sex.

In order to stay “clean,” Christian novelists have learned to invoke religiously-tinged shame by writing proxies for sex.  All “sin” happens off-screen.  A common scene is the chance encounter after dark.  A woman stands in the shadows, heart pounding, face lit by candlelight.  A man with a half-unbuttoned shirt leans against a doorframe.  After two pages of banter, he steps across the threshold.  The door shuts.  The chapter ends.  At that moment, the reader is cued to assume the characters had sex. [Read more…]

Omit the Sexual Details

The first time I heard the word “masturbation,”  I was 12 years old and sitting in my bishop’s office.

I believe we were discussing a limited use recommend for an upcoming temple trip.  I remember the bishop walking through the 1990 version of For the Strength of Youth, which used a lot of large, sexual words I did not know — like “petting” and “perversion” and “pornography.”

My bishop defined them for me.  When he realized I had no idea what he was talking about, he apologized.  He explained how due to the evils of the world, children were getting exposed to sex and having their innocence corrupted by Satan younger and younger.  As much as he hated the topic, he felt like it was his pastoral duty to make sure the youth knew what constituted sin.

[Read more…]

When Worthiness is Weaponized: The Problem with Ecclesiastical Endorsements

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Richelle Wilson is a PhD student in Scandinavian studies and comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she works as a Swedish language instructor. She is also a talk producer at the community radio station WORT 89.9 FM and a member of Dialogue’s editorial staff.

The universities owned and operated by the LDS Church have recently come under scrutiny for the ways in which the schools’ honor code can compromise Title IX investigations into allegations of sexual assault on campus. In 2016, the Salt Lake Tribune broke the story wide open with a Pulitzer Prize–winning series of articles revealing the punitive measures taken against sexual assault victims at Brigham Young University in Provo. The issue was that students—most of them women—coming forward to report sexual assaults were often probed and then disciplined for additional information pertaining to their assault that could be deemed honor code violations. This might include dress and grooming standards, alcohol or drug use, curfew violations, etc. It was a Church-school version of “What was she wearing?”   [Read more…]

Elder Bednar Talks About S-E-X

Elder Bednar’s Saturday morning talk was about chastity.  Let me start by saying I’m a believer in chastity.  I believe that premarital sex creates a lot of hassle, at minimum, and generally speaking I’m against hassle.  It can result in much worse than hassle in its worst cases – eroded self esteem, teen pregnancy (that I oppose even in married form), STDs, and bad patterns for future relationships.  I believe that extramarital sex (infidelity) destroys families, irreparably harms children, and is very human and very selfish. [Read more…]