All this ebullience about sex makes me suspicious of the church and even a little suspicious of Joe. I like his message and I like him, but I can’t help wondering if loosening the sexual rules isn’t a way to sell religion the way PHE sells products.
“I think our church has been trying to be more open about sex, to be real about it,” one of the seminar organizers, Mary Wadstrom, told me earlier today. Now I am questioning the motivation.
One of the things I could always count on from the Catholic Church was that it was, and still is (officially, anyway), stubbornly unreal about sex. My own feelings about the Catholic Church are complicated, but at least its teachings are consistent. Sex is a necessary evil. Masturbation is wrong, oral sex is wrong, birth control is wrong, lust is weakness. This made us different from, say, the air-conditioned, cocktailing Episcopalians. But Joe is telling us we get to have all the fun of sex—as long as we are married and hetero—with nary a worry, and Joe, like other Protestants, approves of birth control. He doesn’t spend much time discussing it because his audiences have the same view and birth control simply isn’t a point of controversy. He approves of birth control and oral sex and masturbation.
Joe tells lots of stories about Alice, his daughters, his friends, and often they begin with some version of “Now, my son-in-law, a fantastic wonderful Christian man…” or a friend, “a good Christian man.” I sit in my chair and wonder what this makes me in Joe Beam’s eyes. Joe seems like a decent guy. I don’t believe everything he believes, but I like him. I wish he still drank, because I think I’d like to go out afterward, sit down, and have a scotch and talk. But I’m pretty sure I am not a good Christian man, according to Joe’s definition, because I don’t go to church and I grew up Catholic, which I know doesn’t really count despite Joe’s past ecumenicalism, and I don’t think you have to be married to have sex or even be heterosexual either. As he speaks, he talks a lot about “us” and “them” and “they,” and I can’t help thinking he is feeding his audience the dangerous notion that fundamentalist Christians are a persecuted minority in a sea of sexual depravity. But how is Joe’s advice different from advice you would receive in the secular, non-fundamentalist, nonevangelical world? Sure, masturbation can get pretty complicated with Joe’s caveat about lust. And there’s the gay thing and the premarital sex thing, but otherwise there doesn’t seem to be much difference between “them” and “us.”
Later, Joe will tell me this is true. The us/them distinction is for the audience’s comfort, not his. “We might have different values, but I think a great deal of commonality can be found between the secular world and the Christian world on sexuality. Because I am a fundamentalist Christian, I am going to believe that sex outside marriage is wrong. You say, ‘But do you condemn those people?’ I will teach them what I believe, but they are adults, and they make their own decisions. And I am not about to be in God’s place and decide how God is going to handle things.”
I wonder what Sister Huberta, my fourth-grade teacher, a woman who had taught some of our grandparents and who told us the most gruesome of the stories about saintly suffering in the face of temptation, would say about Joe.
When we return from lunch, Joe makes a show of standing at the front of the space, leafing through a stack of index cards on which we have written questions. He leafs and leafs, waiting for silence to fall as we take our seats, then waits a few moments before sighing heavily and saying, “I am looking at your questions, and let me say, you are a sick group of people!”
For just a quick beat, our faces go blank and then we look concerned. Hadn’t Joe given us license to be frank? Have we overstepped? Has he lulled us into allowing our dark thoughts to rise through the surface so he can better aim the hammer of righteousness? The moment lasts no more than a second, but the uncertainty and communal fear of being found out is easily the most delicious moment of the day. And then we laugh. Joe is standing up there looking back at us, grinning, and we laugh like we mean it.
The questions aren’t surprising. We want to know what to do about premature ejaculation, so Joe launches into a mini-lecture on the parts of the penis, and how a woman can pinch the tip and how a man—a man willing to work at it like an Olympic athlete in training—can use a muscle to stop his own ejaculation. If he masters it, such a man might even become multiply orgasmic himself.
“Can you give us techniques for oral sex?” Joe reads. And then he does, covering details like how a woman can place her tongue on the penis, why we men like it, why it’s a bad idea to use lubricated condoms if our wives are going down on us.
He even endorses swallowing. We men can help, he says, by making our semen taste better. Load up on fruit juices or sugary foods. “You can say, ‘I’m eating this cake for you, baby!’”
Morris Gregg, who looks like he has had a few pieces of cake in his life, opens his mouth in surprise, looks at me, sees my mouth is also wide open, and we mutely mime, Did he just say that?
“Now, if you put the penis into your mouth, the best angle is if you are in front of the male facing him,” because this puts your tongue right under his frenulum, which is, Joe tells us, the penis sweet spot.
“Have you heard of the proverbial sixty-nine?” Some, but not most, stare back at Joe with empty faces, which gives him the opportunity to mimic the blank stare, go slack-jawed, and say, “Huh? Is that in Acts?
“It’s two people lying beside each other facing the genitalia…Now, I’m trying not to be too graphic here.” Joe uses his arm as a not very accurate model and proceeds to demonstrate how to “create suction and warmth with your mouth and tongue here, and here.” He points to parts of his arm, but I’m lost. Which is the elbow supposed to be? Wait, uh…Joe has moved on, using his hand as a vulva to explain how a man can lick a woman to orgasm.
Somebody has asked how we can create time for sex in a busy life. Joe launches into a scenario out of Playboy circa 1968, a piquant tableau featuring makeup and lingerie and high heels and a sexy greeting when we men come home.
“How do you think he’s going to react to that?” Joe asks the women.
“Thank you, Lord!” shouts a man.
What about sex toys?
“Well, I usually get the question like this,” he begins. “What does the Bible say about vibrators?”
Some of us laugh uncomfortably and I notice about half the couples hugging each other a little closer.
There is a long history of sex toys, he says. Why, around the turn of the last century doctors, the new psychologists and gynecologists, would masturbate women to relieve what they called “hysteria.” Not surprisingly, a lot of women suffered from hysteria with some regularity and the doctors grew tired of using their hands. So they turned to mechanical and then electrical devices. “Can we use a vibrator? Sure you can, if you want to.” Joe even endorses one, the Hitachi Magic Wand, partly because it’s powerful and partly because it doesn’t look like a penis.
Joe knows many sex toys are illegal in his home state of Alabama, as they are in several other states. Section 13A-12-200.2 of the Alabama Criminal Code makes it “unlawful for any person to knowingly distribute, possess with intent to distribute, or offer or agree to distribute any…device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs for any thing of pecuniary value…Any person who violates this subsection shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and, upon conviction, shall be punished by a fine of not more than ten thousand dollars ($10,000) and may also be imprisoned in the county jail or sentenced to hard labor for the county for not more than one year.” You can’t make such devices either. The ban, passed in 1998, was taken all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in the spring of 2007, but the justices refused to hear the case, thus upholding existing law.
(This annoys Joe. He thinks they’re “ridiculous laws. Stupid. Like oral sex laws were a way to cut back on homosexuality. ‘If we do this, we can arrest homosexuals.’ But it’s difficult to legislate morality. I was born in the great state o
f Alabama and respect the great state of Alabama, but that law is ridiculous.” When Joe says all this to me later, he pauses a moment. “I hope my career is not over now. I just do not wanna fight Dobson or the Falwells.”)
Can we fantasize? About other people? somebody asks. “I am saying that is not good because now you’ve violated your relationship. Rather than fantasies, you should concentrate on giving your partner as much stimulation as possible. Concentrate on making love to your spouse. Look, if I were the devil, I would make sure she wound up fantasizing about other church couples.”
This sparks a shouted question. “How about swinging?”
Swinging? This guy is asking about swinging? The very fact he thinks it’s a question makes me wonder.
“I am telling you from a marital expert standpoint, it destroys your marriage,” Joe says. “It destroys your sex life. But it is rampant in America. We are beginning to see those couples now in our New Beginnings seminars because one of them has fallen in love with somebody else. You know, I used to subscribe to Playboy. I got one every month. I remember I read an article, in the Playboy Advisor column, ‘What do you think about us having other lovers?’ and the Playboy writer said, ‘It will destroy the relationship.’ Even the heathens know that! Well, I shouldn’t call them heathens. I don’t know if he’s a heathen or not. Let’s say people who do not have our values.”
Now that Joe has brought up Playboy, we want to ask him about porn. There’s no mention of porn in the ten biblical prohibitions, somebody points out, to which Joe answers that yes, porn is not on the list, but you can’t blame him because it’s just not in the Bible and if you are going to be a book, chapter, and verse guy like he is, if you are going to take the Bible literally, well, you can’t just go around making stuff up. Porn is bad, though. Very bad.
Hands shoot up. Joe has hit a rich vein. “Is all porn bad?” somebody asks, a little hopefully.
“See how many questions there are about porn? This is always among the top-five things I am asked by Christian audiences. Are we just wrong when we say porn is bad? It seems like we in the Christian community are the ones hung up on this.”
This is a surprising admission because, yeah, it does seem like “the Christian community,” by which Joe means fundamentalist evangelicals and Roman Catholics, mainly, are hung up on porn. On other areas of sexuality, he has used the word abiblical to say, Hey, it’s not forbidden by the Bible, the Bible never mentions it, so, say, butt sex could be okay if it does no damage to the body. He’s just said, though, that porn is also abiblical.
But Joe isn’t only a Bible scholar. “So I wanna talk to you as a marriage expert. Let me tell you what it does to your marriage.” He sighs in a great heave of sadness. “Yes, it will stimulate you. Looking at an aroused person is arousing. When I was drinkin’ and druggin’ those three years Alice and I were divorced, I went to strip clubs. Yes, I had no money, but I was hanging out in strip clubs. I’d get drinks by telling jokes. Now, Saturday afternoons are the very slow period and strippers would come by to talk to the sad guy. They called me the sad guy. And they told me stories. Well, I have watched them take in $300, $400 in an hour, but almost all of them were drug addicts or alcoholics and the reason why was that they felt so degraded. They generally think men are scum.
“My wife is fifty-seven. She does not look like she did at twenty-seven and never will again. If I get turned on by hard bodies, I am losing the ability to be turned on by Alice. But who suckled my children? Inevitably, it is a matter of time until the wife’s self-esteem is destroyed. Get that stuff out of the house! Get the Showtimes and the Cinemax and all that stuff out of your house!”
“Umm…can we use instructional videos?” another man asks, a little quietly, perhaps thinking that Joe’s arm, as nice an arm as it is, doesn’t quite communicate the way a Sinclair video communicates.
“Get books. Get the books with line drawings. And play games with each other. Like ‘First one who orgasms loses.’ Really, you can do whatever you wanna do. Drop your inhibitions at the door of your own house.”
The day is wearing on. Joe finally segues into the marriage portion of his seminar, a presentation mainly about communication skills and personality types. This lasts about an hour and feels a little perfunctory, or maybe it’s just that the air of excitement has escaped the room.
Then Joe, who has spent much of his time striding back and forth across the floor in front of his audience, steps up onto the stage and grabs a stool. He walks it downstage and sits, with a deep exhale into his cordless microphone. If this were Vegas at two in the morning, there’d be a spotlight and a loosened bow tie and a drink in his hand.
Joe Beam was a broken man, he tells us. He worked as a pastor and hit his crisis, then tried building houses for a living and nearly went bankrupt. After he took that job with a relative’s paving business, he nearly killed somebody while driving a paving machine across a new parking lot. The booze and the drugs grew out of that soil like weeds. Joe’s voice is more deliberate, becoming quieter with each woeful step of his descent.
One night he found himself in an Atlanta strip club, he says, the sad guy, surrounded by disgusted women. He drank six beers that night. Took twenty Valium. There was a man he remembered back in Alabama, an attorney Joe himself had led to Jesus. Joe decided he had to see this man and so Joe left the strip club and started to drive. He made it all the way near to Birmingham before he crashed. In the hospital they said he overdosed; did he want to kill himself? And there he was with nobody to hold his hand.
“I never felt so alone.”
Joe Beam’s story fills the room. His audience is transfixed. Some are nodding along with his testimony.
He betrayed his wife. He betrayed his daughters, especially his angel, Joanna, who’s mentally disabled, but Alice took him back. “We got married a second time. It was just the right thing to do. We did not love each other, but we learned how to be in love with each other and now she is my best friend. I pray every day, Lord, let me die first. I wanna get old with her and sit on the front porch. No matter how bad a marriage is, you do not wanna die alone.
“So if there is something in the way, the Xbox, a job, pornography, get rid of it. Make each other your focus. Please, please. You can do that.
“That’s my time.”
Joe Beam walks offstage and out the door.
CHAPTER 3
The Gonzo, Vibrating, Futurotic Pleasure Dome
I GO TO WORK IN A SEX XANADU
We are, after all, in the business of fantasy fulfillment.
—Fascinations Sales and Guest Care Manual, 2006
I have been accused of endangering small children. Not me personally, I suppose, me as the smallest of drones in the giant hive of the American sex industry. According to several concerned citizens quoted in the Arizona Republic, a Fascinations “romance superstore”—part of a chain of thirteen adult stores in Arizona, Colorado, and Oregon for which I am temporarily working—puts “kids in grave danger.” Specifically, Edward de Santiago, one of the people quoted, was referring to a proposed Fascinations branch in Tolleson, Arizona, about two miles from where his daughters attend elementary school. He seemed pretty sure two miles were not enough miles to protect his girls from the danger of porn, sex toys, gag gifts, and cheap lingerie. So even though I am working in Tempe, much farther away from his daughters and their school, I have been branded.
Yet as far as I can tell, the only danger I present to society is rank incompetence at retail sales. I am sitting, a little panicked, in my new employee training session trying to avoid looking like an imbecile and failing. My five fellow newbies are not betraying the slightest hint of confusion, but I’m completely lost. I have a college degree my colleagues lack, about twenty more years of life experience, and I can read Chaucer in Middle English, none of which qualifies me in any way for my new job as a “romance consultant.” (Or any other job, for that matter.) So I am writing notes furiously as Trista Windels rattles off store po
lices, procedures, and statistics, all of which I am supposed to remember and begin using tomorrow.
Trista is a pretty, waifish nineteen-year-old with long, straight blond hair and eyes of such a deep emerald green that people unconsciously find themselves staring at them. Trista survives mainly on Red Bull and cigarettes, apparently absorbing from the air whatever nutrients her body requires, which she knows isn’t exactly the most healthful strategy “but, whatever.” She isn’t into makeup, though she does wear coverup for the occasional blemishes that still pop out of her teenage skin.
She grew up in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, not far from the South Dakota border. About seventy-five hundred people live in Detroit Lakes, but the town seems bigger because in summer the place swells with tourists who stay at a few lodges and resorts along the shore of Lake Detroit. Besides servicing visitors, people around there farm, mostly. Corn. Soybeans. Cows. Trista spent part of her childhood growing up on a dairy farm but didn’t like it much. She worked at a tanning salon for a while, then gave manicures, then worked as an aid in the Alzheimer’s ward of a nursing home. She used to wash dead bodies. When she graduated from high school, she planned to go to a community college to earn a degree as a licensed practical nurse, but when her boyfriend moved to Phoenix, Trista figured that even though he was the only person she knew in the entire state of Arizona, and she had no idea of what she would do for a living, moving there wasn’t going to be any worse than changing soiled sheets and preparing dead bodies.
It is about seven thirty at night and Jennifer, Marlena, Kyle, Kira, and Ashley—the other members of my training class—and I are gathered with Trista in the back storeroom surrounded by porn DVDs, leather body harnesses, and penis-shaped dildos proportioned to satisfy the fifty-foot woman from Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. This is distracting enough, but Trista’s Red Bull and nicotine–propelled stream of instructional language keeps me at least three bullet points behind on our corporate handouts.
America Unzipped Page 8