Sex, Mom, and God

by Frank Schaeffer

  After I grew up, I discovered that I hadn’t been the only person grappling with my Sinful Body and what to “do” about it. Bible-believing Christians aren’t alone in struggling with their Sinful Bodies. Jews and Muslims who follow their holy books as absolute sources of moral authority are vigilant about the many, many scriptural laws pertaining to women. There are Jewish women who keep the Levitical laws concerning menstruation. And according to Islam, menstrual blood is impure. The Islamic “perspective” on menstruation gets quite detailed when updated to answer modern “moral questions”: for example, “what type of ‘female sanitary protection’ should a woman use?” According to some Islamic scholars, tampons are against the rules. In his commentary on Imam al-Barkawi’s “Treatise on Menstruation,” the Hanafi jurist Allama Ibn Abidin says that it is offensive (makruh) to have cotton inserted in the “internal part” of the vagina because doing so “resembles masturbation.”10

  There are some secondary unintended very strange results in the lives of people living in cultures shaped by these sorts of “teachings.” And the results speak for themselves, as illustrated by this quote from a San Francisco Chronicle article:Western forces fighting in southern Afghanistan had a problem. Too often, soldiers on patrol passed an older man walking handin-hand with a pretty young boy. . . . For centuries, Afghan men have taken boys, roughly 9 to 15 years old, as lovers. Some research suggests that half the Pashtun tribal members in Kandahar and other southern towns are bacha baz, the term for an older man with a boy lover. Literally it means “boy player.” The men like to boast about it....

  Sociologists and anthropologists say the problem results from perverse interpretation of Islamic law. Women are simply unapproachable. Afghan men cannot talk to an unrelated woman until after proposing marriage. Before then, they can’t even look at a woman, except perhaps her feet. Otherwise she is covered, head to ankle. “How can you fall in love if you can’t see her face,” 29-year-old Mohammed Daud told reporters. “We can see the boys, so we can tell which are beautiful.” . . .

  A favored Afghan expression goes: “Women are for children, boys are for pleasure.” Fundamentalist imams, exaggerating a biblical passage on menstruation, teach that women are “unclean” and therefore distasteful. One married man [interviewed by the reporter on this subject] even asked . . . “how his wife could become pregnant.... ” When that was explained, he “reacted with disgust” and asked, “How could one feel desire to be with a woman, who God has made unclean?” That helps explain why women are hidden away—and stoned to death if they are perceived to have misbehaved. Islamic law also forbids homosexuality. But the pedophiles explain that away. It’s not homosexuality, they aver, because they aren’t in love with their boys.11

  This report was made all the more poignant for me in light of my son John’s deployment (twice) to Afghanistan while he was a marine.12 And thus when, a few years later, I read this Chronicle article, my thought was (and not for the first or last time), what was John defending? I’m not just talking about “defending democracy” (let alone a loopy bogus colonial “nation-building” mantra). I was thinking about my son supposedly trying to bring “civilization” to a country with a particular form of “backwardness” that is embarrassingly close in kind to our own backwardness and rooted in the same horrible religious ideas.

  The words “Women are simply unapproachable. Afghan men cannot talk to an unrelated woman until after proposing marriage” express an attitude so very like my own childhood ideas about women, Sex, and marriage. How very similar our Schaeffer/ Evangelical-style sexual dysfunction was to the root cause of the Afghan abuse of boys and women, both of which follow from prejudices about women and Sex cultivated by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike, that is, by “people of the book.”

  Since the 1970s the American culture wars have revolved around a fear of Sex and women no less insane and destructive than any horror story to come out of Afghanistan. The issues of gay rights, abortion, premarital sex, virginity, abstinence, and the “God-given role” of women (make babies, love Jesus, and shut up) have dominated our political/social debates. Why? Because sexual politics (American style) illustrates how deranged societies become when ideas about Sex are based on literal interpretations of the biblical “account” of the “facts” of existence.

  Extremism, even extreme prudery, begets extremism. Dysfunction begets dysfunction. Wait-until-marriage and women-areunclean beliefs have generated an insane counterreaction that takes the form of an off-the-wall sexual license, a bizarre mirror image of our prudish North American version of the antiwoman biblical extreme.

  In reaction to the fear and loathing of Sex, women, and intimacy that resulted from the biblical teachings against premarital Sex, let alone against women’s vile uncleanness, a rebellion took place. This rebellion against fear and antisexual prejudice was ushered in by the “free love” prophets-for-profit like Hugh Hefner. But what started in the 1950s and 1960s as an attempt to balance sexual fear with sanity tumbled into yet another example of dysfunctional American extremism. This happened because the practitioners of three American belief systems (that are so intense they might as well be religions) unwittingly colluded: Progressives (absolutist believers in unregulated Free Speech), conservatives (absolutist believers in unregulated Free Enterprise), and conservative Christians (absolutist believers in the uncleanness of Sex between anyone not married in a heterosexual “traditional” marriage) created a sordid monster—Porn-Gone-Nuts.

  The pleasant Greco-Roman/Pagan sexual aesthetic offered in the first generation of 1960s centerfold-type erotica (much of which was lovely) became—in the context of our extremist unregulated capitalist culture in which if something sells, it must be good—a brutal lowest-common-denominator version of Sex. This “sexuality”—once again—leaves women out in the cold as American society slides into an uncharted lowest-common-denominator porn universe gone viral. Add in the invasive Internet, and we have, as they say, a whole new day.

  In an Alternet interview with author Gail Dines (a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Boston’s Wheelock College, where she researches the “hypersexualization” of our culture),13 she notes that the extremes of today’s mainstream pornography have, in her words, “greatly undermined our ability to have meaningful sexual partnerships.” In Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality,14 Dines traces the history of the porn industry from Playboy and Penthouse to today’s “entertainment,” which resembles the sexual assault of women and is closer in spirit to an Afghan stoning of a hapless female by ignorant peasants (or the rape of little boys by Afghan men forbidden relationships with off-limits women or other men) than to anything resembling Love or Sex as most people understand either word.

  Offering an example of what has to be called brutal sexual extremism, Dines quotes sell-copy text of a type that’s all too common on porn Web sites these days: “Do you know what we say to things like romance and foreplay? We say fuck off! This is not another site with half-erect weenies trying to impress bold sluts. We take gorgeous young bitches and do what every man would REALLY like to do. We make them gag till their makeup starts running, and then they get all other holes sore—vaginal, anal, double penetrations, anything brutal involving a cock and an orifice. And then we give them the sticky bath.” This quote and the video images it’s selling are typical of “mainstream” porn available online and are viewed by boys and girls the same age I was—ten or eleven—when the discovery of Sex was something secret, feared, and off limits but hardly brutal.

  As multiple studies confirm, about 65 percent of young boys are exposed to Internet porn beginning at the average age of eleven.15 The problem isn’t Sex—it is unconstrained capitalism combined with the “Free Speech”–enabled reaction to nutty religion that is appealing to the lowest common denominator in a society where “The Market Rules!” is the eleventh commandment.

  What sort of culture stands back and does no more than wring its hands over the fact that many children�
��s first “experience” of Sex is swilling deeply at a trough of violent and demeaning viral infection? Answer: a biblically rooted capitalist society filled with a large group of people raised somewhat as I was who are reeling from the aftershock of Judeo-Christian prudery and want to somehow open the door to forbidden mystery while at the same time having inherited (if unconsciously) the women-are-scaryand-unclean biblical bigotry. Today’s misogynist porn does not have its biggest markets in the (relatively progressive) cultures of our big cities. No, it makes its big sales with churchgoing “family men” in the Midwest and South.16

  All porn is not as brutal as Dines paints it. There is still a lot of pleasantly titillating erotica created by women and men for couples that is closer in spirit to Renaissance art than to lynch-mob brutality. There is also a lot of amateur porn produced by people because they enjoy it. That said, to care about a child today is also to mourn the loss of an incremental sexual awakening that should be that child’s rite of passage, just as it should be a civil right of every young man or woman to be free of brutal, mindnumbing (and possibly mind-altering) sludge.

  About thirty years after I stood, quivering with curiosity, peering into that wastepaper basket full of sanitary pads, my grown-up (and terrified) self crouched next to my wife, Genie, at three in the morning. She was hemorrhaging.

  I’d watched my three children being born. I’d seen a doctor cut her to make the passage wider when Jessica—our firstborn—was tearing her mother’s flesh as she made her way into the world. Now on this night, after a year when Genie’s increasingly long periods became one long trial, it was as if something inside of her had broken loose. Even bath towels couldn’t soak up all the blood. I’d been squatting on the bathroom floor at her feet, watching her bleed dreadful clots that looked like slices of raw liver. I was zeroing in on them because one possibility we considered was that, long periods or not, Genie was somehow having a miscarriage. So (illogically) I studied those clots looking for little hands or feet, wildly imagining a small face staring back at me. Was this how Mom’s miscarriage had started: with a river of blood?

  Was that a tiny foot?

  This was nuts, but it was three in the morning, and MY WIFE might be dying!

  Then we were in the hospital.

  Then the bleeding slowed.

  Genie was waxy pale, waiting to be examined by a gynecologist. There was a smear of blood on her cheek that I washed off with a paper towel. I was gingerly perching on a stainless steel stool close to a short table with stirrups. I was holding her hand while our first meeting replayed in my brain like a loop of film.

  Fall of 1969, a frosty night of bright stars. I hear the door open, and I poke my head around the corner. Regina Ann Walsh is standing tall and lovely under our old Venetian wrought-iron and glass lantern. High cheekbones, full lips, and almond-shaped, almost Asian hazel eyes, slightly slanted at the corners, some sort of apparition of unattainable perfection. Genie’s eyes are framed by her long auburn hair falling to her waist, points of pelvic bone defining her hips, belly tight under those second-skin slacks, high glossy boots up to her knees, generous breasts, and that gorgeous face defining a moment that remains, for me, holy. With a smile Genie acknowledges me. I hastily set an extra place at my table.... Genie mentions that she wants to hear the just-released new Beatles album, Abbey Road. I happen to have the album downstairs in my studio. ... “Here comes the sun, here comes the sun . . . And I say it’s alright . . . Little darling it’s been a long cold lonely winter.”

  Next to me was a plastic bag hand-labeled “Rape Kit.” We’d been stowed in a gynecology examination cubicle reserved for female emergencies like ours—and, apparently, for gathering evidence from rape victims. I surreptitiously studied that clear plastic bag without mentioning it to Genie. There was a fine-tooth comb for combing through a woman’s pubic hair to snag a rapist’s pubic hairs. There was a test tube with a Q-tip-type swab in it to absorb fluids from the next rape victim. There was a sharp plastic stick, something like an overgrown toothpick, used to scrape under the victim’s fingernails to retrieve blood or tissue from the rapist, if the victim had put up a fight and scratched her attacker. Next to the rape kit was a Polaroid camera with a handwritten label taped to it that read “Evidence Camera. Do NOT Remove from Rape Room.”

  The night duty nurses kept us waiting for the doctor, a blearyeyed gynecologist (and a stranger to us since Genie’s doctor was several towns away and we’d made a beeline to the nearest emergency room) who smelled faintly of liquor. We’d waited for over two hours—plenty of time to study everything in the room twenty times over while Genie grew colder and colder. I asked for another blanket and eventually was given one that was as thin and useless as tissue paper. Genie was lying in a dingy cubbyhole dedicated to collecting evidence that proved that Vaginas make women targets.

  I’d been Genie’s lover since we were teens, and by that night her menstrual blood was merely another drop in the ocean of bodily fluids we’d exchanged. What had once been a very big and titillating event—evidence of women bleeding—was, after twenty years of marriage, a mundane reality to me. Life was no longer all about Forbidden Lust. Moreover, by then my loyalty was to Genie and through her to all women. Whenever I encountered Bible verses that belittled and brutalized women, I took it personally.

  CHAPTER 3

  Sex with the Ice Sculpture

  PHOTO: Mom—the well-dressed young pastor’s wife, 1937

  I laboriously carved my Ice Woman out of the deep, wet snow that lay thick in the woods above our chalet. I worked with as much dedicated concentration as a ten-year-old artist can muster, hunched over my creation, only glancing at the pine trees above me from time to time. Their branches were weighed down so heavily that the snow formed an almost straight white sheath that made the trees appear strangely narrow. Through the trees I could glimpse the high peaks of the Dents du Midi, mighty, dazzling white, and towering over my small frozen world. The snowing stopped and the sky cleared just as I completed my attempt to reenact God-Of-The-Bible’s whittling of Eve from Adam’s rib.

  My act of creation soon taught me never, ever again to attempt sex with an ice sculpture. I was not the first Germanic artist with theological/sexual preoccupations to make my art the object of personal Lust. I carved my ice lover inspired by Gustav Klimt’s erotic drawings of his lovely models sketched in sexually fraught positions. I’d seen these women in one of Dad’s art books back in the days when art books and/or grainy black-and-white surreptitiously collected newspaper underwear advertisements were my treasured porn.

  Klimt would have understood my need for a lover. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Klimt’s models graced his studio/harem and found their way into his beautifully explicit erotic drawings. Klimt fathered fourteen children with his subjects and didn’t suffer frostbite since his method of combining art with pleasure was more practical than mine.

  In addition to Klimt’s drawings, there were Lucas Cranach nudes, including Adam and Eve, in one of Dad’s art books. Cranach was a “Reformation painter,” as Dad called him. Cranach was also a close friend of Martin Luther, and his nudes are proof that whatever else Luther was, he was no prude and would have been excoriated by American-style Evangelicals for encouraging his friend to produce the soft-core porn of that day.

  Dad liked Cranach and kept books of his art handy. And I did my best to bestow my ice lover with a guileless sexuality that the horny leaders of the Reformation, not to mention the later Romantic Movement painter Klimt, would have admired. Speaking of horny Protestants, I think that Cranach and his sexually avid mentor, Luther, would have liked my ice lover and maybe even would have approved of my actions or, in Luther’s case, given “intercourse” with her a try. Luther was enthusiastically sexual. He and his lover had long been “associated” (openly sleeping together) before they married. Luther was a regular visitor to Cranach’s home, where Katharine, Luther’s future wife (who was a renegade nun under Luther’s “supe
rvision”), lived. Whatever some of the Church Fathers had once said about even married couples ideally living like “brother and sister,” the restoration of the place of Sex as something wholesome in Luther’s vision of correct biblical interpretation was one of his triumphs.

  Anyway, my Cranach-derived/Lutheran/Klimtian art had a downside: It was an installation/sculpture and therefore required me to participate in an artistic “happening” in a way that compromised both this artist’s dignity and physical well-being. (I’ve had a bias against art installations ever since and have stuck to painting.)

  My Ice Woman was large-breasted and wide-hipped. Her mitten-print-mottled icy thighs lay like fallen marble columns leading to the main event nestled between her legs, that place—The Place—on, and mysteriously in, all women’s bodies and upon which my mind and (if the Bible is any guide) The-God-Of-The-Bible’s Mind was focused. My ice lover’s legs were spread wide, and her breasts were crowned with pebble nipples. She had a thatch of moss for pubic hair.

  I revealed my creation to someone I’ll call Seth, the eleven-year-old son of a fellow missionary family (whose parents later quit L’Abri over a difference of opinion concerning predictions about the exact timing of the Return of Christ). Seth had watched me carve my ice lover, with a borrowed serving spoon and Mom’s good, never-to-be-taken-out-of-the-house bread knife. He declared my woman “real-looking, except she should be pink like a girl.” After offering this critique, Seth said, “I’m not gonna do it,” then added, “but I won’t tell if you do.”