This really is a rant. It started as part of a letter to Marie, and it built up a head of steam until it was altogether out of control. What's more, I think it sounds like a sermon, and Heaven knows nobody ever asked me to preach a sermon on this, nor ever will. But what the hell, right? Nobody still reads this blog either, so it's a fine place to try out stuff like this. Don't tell me I didn't warn you.
[Begin in the middle of the letter. Marie had mentioned something about Purity Culture, and I took the bit in my teeth.]
... Because of course what I want to say is that training a girl to be afraid of sex is like owning a Lamborghini and only driving it to the corner market once a month for sprouts and tofu. The female sexual response is one of the most sublime creations on God's earth, proof for anyone who thinks in these terms that the Creator is not only beneficent but powerful and energetic and deeply creative beyond the wildest imagination of men. (Yes, in that context I mean "men".) The other exhibitions of Demiurgic power that are equally awe-inspiring are dangerous and deadly, like volcanoes and tornadoes and earthquakes. But the female sexual response is our size, it is healthy and life-giving, it enriches and fructifies our lives on every level you can imagine, while being as stultifyingly awesome as any volcano. To repress it, to fear it, to bottle it up, to deny it, and to teach others to do the same, is to spit in God's face. It is as treacherous as Judas selling Christ to the Sanhedrin, and as cowardly as Peter denying him thrice before cock-crow. If ever any human act were villainous and wrong, that is.
Of course, that doesn't mean you have to peddle it cheaply, or squander it carelessly. That doesn't mean you have to get drunk and pass out at a frat party so the boys can do you from all angles while you're unconscious and then post streaming videos on YouTube. It doesn't mean you have to pick up strange men in bars and then do them on the living room floor in front of your children. It doesn't mean you have to be callous or manipulative or uncaring, that you have to compete for the most notches on your bedpost or otherwise exploit yourself or others. It doesn't mean any of that; and so far as Christian teachers are saying you don't have to do squalid things that you will hate even as you are doing them, things that will cheapen and coarsen yourself in your own eyes ... so far as they are teaching that they are absolutely right.
But when they say that anything can cheapen you irreversibly, they have abandoned Christianity. At that point they have turned their backs on Jesus after spitting in his face and telling him they know better than he does; they have become Manichaeans, heretics, and heresiarchs. Because innocence is always an option. Forgiveness is always available, both from God and — what is often far more difficult — from yourself.
There is more. God chooses different paths for different people. And God lets us choose for ourselves; then if we paint ourselves into a corner he can help us learn from it and move on. So if some girl does go hog-wild with her sexuality, if she does go crazy and do things that her family and church can't understand or approve, and that make them shake their heads in wonder ... that's not the end of the story! What happens next? Does she stay there for the rest of her days? (Theoretically possible but really unlikely.) Or does she get out of her system something she had to get rid of, and does she then learn from it how to lead a more mature life after? Does she maybe learn things that will let her help others who also find themselves careening towards dangerous and risky behaviors? Because if she can help people, even if she's outside the circle of her home church's morality pamphlets ... that too is the work of God. Rescuing people who are at risk in the sketchy margins of life — savingthem, redeeming them — that too is the work of God. And if she was strengthened and enabled to do that work by her own checkered and unconventional sexual history ... well, God works in mysterious ways, his ways are not our ways, and no human understanding is broad or deep enough to encompass his own. So our job in that situation, as bystanders and as her family and church community [supposing for the moment that those are the people I'm talking to], is to love her, to offer our supportif she wants it, and then to shut the fuck upand let God do the work that needs to be done by whatever means necessary....
See what I mean?
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