Comments | bellatrys: ZOMG! Don't be like those godless Europeans: Abstinence-only in 1915

bellatrys

ZOMG! Don't be like those godless Europeans: Abstinence-only in 1915

Sep 07, 2008 19:43

What's the opposite of nostalgia? When you go digging into a past you've run far and hard from, with the wary caution of post-apocalyptic scavengers looking through the ruins in a Stephen Vincent Benet story? (Aside: goodness gracious, By The Waters of Babylon is from the Thirties?! Well, so was The Black Flame. Sigh. We were given to understand in ( Read more... )

sex, history, sexism, religion, ideology

Comments 21

fledgist September 8 2008, 00:21:25 UTC

Why do I get the feeling that the people who write this crap don't believe it?

Too much protestation? bellatrys September 8 2008, 01:16:03 UTC

Too much effort spent into proving why it logically *must* be so, too much insistence that despite all appearances to the contrary, this *is* EXACTLY how the universe is and works? Too much of a Timecube vibe, perhaps?

I coined the terms "Fearing Believers" (and also "mirantists") to describe what I saw around me in the movement, the endless relentless sophistry of apologetics, the backpatting claims of signs and wonders that PROVED beyond a SHADOW OF A DOUBT that we were RIGHT, dammit! which I came to eventually believe were intended not, actually, as we stated, to convert *others*, but to convince ourselves mostly and above all.

Re: Too much protestation? fledgist September 8 2008, 10:07:41 UTC

There's that, and the hectoring tone if you dare to question a single assertion.

randwolf September 8 2008, 01:25:11 UTC

[revised, because I realized that sexual orientation really mattered less than inappropriate celibacy]

A lot of them were celibate priests and nuns--they hoped it was true. Even worse, had been pressured into a celibacy they weren't suited to, and probably were writing it out of spite: if they weren't allowed a decent sex life they were going to mess with someone else's. Since the Church told them they were damned by their sexuality, it didn't matter that it was a sin, they were damned anyway.

Damn!

Thread 8

shininghalf September 8 2008, 01:03:59 UTC

The specific tracts not so much, but your description of your childhood messaging sounds very familiar. Somehow I think it was mostly crammed between the lines in my case, but it's *my* childhood, *I* know it was there...

that's...kind of horrifyingly fascinating bellatrys September 8 2008, 01:20:41 UTC

Someday if you feel up to it, you should try to nail down just *how* it was piped in to you and your group, because I *know* how I got infected with these memes (what I'm not entirely sure of still is *why* but I think I've figured out as much as I ever will how come my folks chose to get suckered into it) - but of course I was told that The Secular World Rejected These Our Truths, and of course the reality was something much messier and overlapping Venn sets of culture-subculture memeage sloshing around...you see it in the assumptions that underly so much popular fic, frex - the fans being outraged when Heroine dumps Hero, has Ownlife, but not when Hero ditches Heroine and runs around, are just validating this patriarchal purity double-standardy...

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It's the sin of Envy-- bellatrys September 8 2008, 11:19:48 UTC

"If I'm not getting any, then nobody else shall have any either."

One of these days I should write a post on the sin of pride sajia September 8 2008, 13:56:50 UTC

Pride that "oh, I'm a happy closeted queer, I'm close to God" (Am I reading Eve Tushnet correctly?), or on the opposite end, the pride of atheists who think, "Oh, I don't belong to any patriarchal religion, I am Automatically pure" and then go off and do sexist bullshit (I'm looking at you, Spider Robinson and evolutionary psychologists).

Re: One of these days I should write a post on the sin of pride jenny_islander September 8 2008, 19:27:23 UTC

Spider Robinson?

Thread 5

jenny_islander September 10 2008, 04:09:04 UTC

I wish I could remember the title of a little paperback on sex education that was in my church library. (FTR, I was raised Lutheran.) It was intended for preteens. The chapters of the book ran somewhat like this ( ... )

sajia September 11 2008, 01:38:03 UTC

Most of it actually sounds like pretty good advice to me.

jenny_islander September 16 2008, 17:17:19 UTC

The thing is, I can't remember the title or the author and Google availeth not. So I find myself wondering: Was there actually a peck of good advice to a bushel of bad? Was I just so dizzily relieved by the absence of the usual "Ladies, if he harasses you, it's your fault" garbage that I put the best possible spin on everything else in the book? I haven't found anything like it since--not in a Christian bookstore, not in the library, not at my new church. There was an analogous book for adults that focused on reclaiming sexuality from the Scylla and Charybdis of the Good Old Holy Double Standard and our present cultural obsession with reducing everything to sex. But nothing to prepare preadolescents for the oncoming hormonal storm.

There's also a certain disingenuousness inherent bellatrys September 16 2008, 18:33:55 UTC

since I assume that they're not going "BE VERRRRRY VERRRRRY CAREFULL!!!!1" about all the other kinds of daily life decisions that can equally or more so screw up your life - getting married and having children within holy wedlock, going to church, going to school, applying for a job, going out to dinner at a restaurant, joining a sports team, joining the military, chipping ice on your driveway, getting a pet, becoming a doctor, taking your first job working for your family business, playing poker - I assume they didn't have the same DIRE WARNINGS about, say, smoking a cigarette or eating shellfish (in or out of summer) because it doesn't sound like they were Wild Hardcore Puritans, and only wild hardcore puritans take the "We never eat cookies because they have yeast" stuff seriously ( ... )

Thread 7