Topics you never hear at Church

[jay santos]

Originally Posted by Sleeping in EQ

Sure.

Many North American Mormons are suffering from a case of hyper-Victorianism. The Victorians attacked us over our sexual deviance (polygamy) and in our defeat we compulsively serve the ideologies of those who defeated us. Victorianism has influenced the larger American culture (the 1950s stereotypes are rife with it and so is the Mars/Venus material), but it is more acute with Mormons because we have been bludgeoned. This is what I mean by Uncle Tom-ism.

Therein we go back to Victorian sex norms like a person going to an astrology book to find himself. We take what we find there and obsessively try to mold ourselves into it. Stereotypes about maleness and femaleness are considered to be universally and objectively true and their cultural constructedness is ignored. The angel-whore dichotomy (which keeps women as objects), the true cult of womanhood thinking, the hyper-enforced sex divisions, the myth of the rugged Western male, the idea that the body is dirty and something to be encaged (Victorian dresses literally put women in a kind of iron cage)--these are all part of it. Sure, biology plays a role in some of these things, but many of them are culturally specific and are not demanded by scipture or a Godly sense of right and wrong.

The Victorians dressed modestly and new how to host in the parlor, but there was a whore house being run out back.

As a father, I see reversing this Victorian/taboo stuff about sex as one of my most important duties in teaching my children, but it's not that easy.

[MikeWaters]

Originally Posted by jay santos

As a father, I see reversing this Victorian/taboo stuff about sex as one of my most important duties in teaching my children, but it's not that easy.

It's not so hard. I just buy the Christina Aguilera concert DVDs for them.

[Sleeping in EQ]

Originally Posted by MikeWaters

so Mormons get the parlor hosting skills and no whorehouse.

I knew something was wrong.

Some Mormons are getting the whorehouse, or rather, a convenient, mediated form of it. Victorianism kept women as objects. Objects that belonged either on a pedastal (where only men could place and remove them) or in the whorehouse (because they were sexual and therefore dirty). Victorianism objectified women and in that sense it dovetails easily with both pornography and the mutually reinforcing tendencies of prudishness and perversion.

[Sleeping in EQ]

Originally Posted by jay santos

As a father, I see reversing this Victorian/taboo stuff about sex as one of my most important duties in teaching my children, but it's not that easy.

You aren't kidding. It is difficult. The thing that has helped me alot has been art. Not all art, of course, but healthy art can cultivate a deep appreciation for beauty and beauty in nakedness. As I think Toolblue said sometime back, there's a difference between naked and nude. There's a difference between sexual and pornographic and I have a good sense of those differences (for myself, anyway). The Greek's seperation of agape, eros, and pornea was a good idea.

[Archaea]

SEIQ is wise beyond his years on this issue. You should be required to post your "lesson" prepared here, so that others might benefit.

It is interesting to point out the "objectivization" of women through the Victorian era. Do you believe any aspect of this resulted from the lack of process philosophy or meaningful phenomenology?

Victorian seemed almost Cartesian in the manner in which you describe it.

[marsupial]

Originally Posted by jay santos

As a father, I see reversing this Victorian/taboo stuff about sex as one of my most important duties in teaching my children, but it's not that easy.

Frank, matter-of-fact answers to their sincere questions is a great start. Youth leaders should be doing the same. However, in my experience they are not. Two examples: I sat through a lesson on chastity with the Beehives given by an obviously uncomfortable leader in her 50s. She spent the whole lesson talking about The Lord of the Rings and the special "ring" (a girl's virtue) that she must keep sacred. It was comical, for sure. The only thing the girls probably got out of it was a lost desire to read or watch The Lord of the Rings.

A young woman was sitting in on a stake YW meeting. We were going over calendar items and got into stake dances, morality, etc. The YW rose her hand and asked one of the leaders quite sincerely, "I hear the term heavy petting a lot but I don't know what it means." The leader was quite ruffled by this question and very indignantly replied, "You can look that up in your 'For the Strength of Youth pamphlet.'"

C'mon, how hard would it have been for her to simply say, "touching private parts" and then move on?

[jay santos]

Originally Posted by marsupial

Frank, matter-of-fact answers to their sincere questions is a great start. Youth leaders should be doing the same. However, in my experience they are not. Two examples: I sat through a lesson on chastity with the Beehives given by an obviously uncomfortable leader in her 50s. She spent the whole lesson talking about The Lord of the Rings and the special "ring" (a girl's virtue) that she must keep sacred. It was comical, for sure. The only thing the girls probably got out of it was a lost desire to read or watch The Lord of the Rings.

A young woman was sitting in on a stake YW meeting. We were going over calendar items and got into stake dances, morality, etc. The YW rose her hand and asked one of the leaders quite sincerely, "I hear the term heavy petting a lot but I don't know what it means." The leader was quite ruffled by this question and very indignantly replied, "You can look that up in your 'For the Strength of Youth pamphlet.'"

C'mon, how hard would it have been for her to simply say, "touching private parts" and then move on?

All I got was a "To the One" pamphlet from my Dad. No wonder I'm not big on Packer to this day...

[Sleeping in EQ]

Originally Posted by Archaea

SEIQ is wise beyond his years on this issue. You should be required to post your "lesson" prepared here, so that others might benefit.

It is interesting to point out the "objectivization" of women through the Victorian era. Do you believe any aspect of this resulted from the lack of process philosophy or meaningful phenomenology?

Victorian seemed almost Cartesian in the manner in which you describe it.

Yes I do.

[Indy Coug]

Originally Posted by non sequitur

That's just plain silly. Pornography is just the boogey-man of the moment in the Church, just like masturbation was the boogey-man when we were all missionaries. Church leaders should be more concerned with the way materialism has infected the Church or with the way that right-wing conservatism has poisoned their congregations. If I had to choose whether my son viewed pornography or whether he became like Johnny Lingo, I'd choose pornography every time.

The Quorum of the Twelve disagree with you, but that's probably just an added testimony that they're right.

[Jeff Lebowski]

Originally Posted by marsupial

Frank, matter-of-fact answers to their sincere questions is a great start. Youth leaders should be doing the same. However, in my experience they are not. Two examples: I sat through a lesson on chastity with the Beehives given by an obviously uncomfortable leader in her 50s. She spent the whole lesson talking about The Lord of the Rings and the special "ring" (a girl's virtue) that she must keep sacred. It was comical, for sure. The only thing the girls probably got out of it was a lost desire to read or watch The Lord of the Rings.

A young woman was sitting in on a stake YW meeting. We were going over calendar items and got into stake dances, morality, etc. The YW rose her hand and asked one of the leaders quite sincerely, "I hear the term heavy petting a lot but I don't know what it means." The leader was quite ruffled by this question and very indignantly replied, "You can look that up in your 'For the Strength of Youth pamphlet.'"

C'mon, how hard would it have been for her to simply say, "touching private parts" and then move on?

Yes, indeed.

In my entire childhood prior to leaving home, the one and only time the topic of sex was ever discussed by my parents was when my mother forced my brothers and me to sit at the kitchen table and listen to a cassette tape of a talk given by Boyd K. Packer on the evils of masturbation. That was it.

My wife's experience was similar. Needless to say, we are trying to do a little better with our kids.