Law of Chastity Redux Again Part XXICDLLV…

I’ve been thinking about this Law of Chastity issue a lot, not just because of my art and how that fits into the church paradigm, but because, well, I was 34 when I got married (in the temple)—and I was a virgin.

You have to do a lot of thinking about it to get yourself in that sorry and sad state.

Prenuptially, I was ever so proud of my accomplishment (though really, all it took for Mr. Right to find me was one well-placed ultimatum to the Deity expressing my somewhat miffed state), but postnuptially…not so much.

Why?

Because I feel like I missed out on a whole lot that my husband didn’t. And I kind of resent that. Obviously, I don’t know what I missed out on, so I could’ve just missed out on a surprise! pregnancy (as a single mother) or a lovely case of crabs or even something less desirable than that, but my imagination fills in the blanks of what mind-blowing sex I could have had had I let my Inner Slut loose.

What really got me thinking about this in particular was yesterday’s post about adultery here and the Exponent’s post about teaching chastity. I started to wonder what chastity means to me, why it means that, and does it make any difference in the long run (spiritually)?

When I was “saving myself” for marriage, I had a curious paradox going on inside me. I was hot to trot. I knew, somewhere deep down, that I would be indiscriminate in my choices of lovers if I were to cross that boundary because I was (am?) the kind of girl who’d do pretty much anything if it got my rocks off.

On the other hand, I’m also the kind of girl who thinks that a kiss is a promise; one or two a-little-more-than-makeout sessions that failed to yield nothing but an expression of disgust directed toward me in the broad daylight and I was emotional toast.

Put those two issues together and you can see I had a bit of a tussle on my hands. My OCD reared its rescuing head and said, “Simplify, simplify, simplify.” So really, my staying pure-ish didn’t have much at all to do with church standards. It had to do with the war between my romantic, needy soul and my libidinous body.

Yet that didn’t stop me from trying to justify it because I was ashamed of both. I came up with all sorts of intellectual reasons to stay chaste, which include the litany of standard sociologic reasons that economist and social scientist types come up with. It was an intellectual balm to the two warring factions that both embarrassed me.

It wasn’t until after I got married and did the deed for a while that I realized that yes, hey, it’s possible to have sex purely for sex’s sake and not feel a connection at all. Sometimes that’s great; sometimes that’s not good at all, but it can be done. It may have taken me a long time and a lot of lovers before I got to that point outside of marriage and it’s nice to be able to say that from inside the shelter of a committed, eternal marriage (which, yes, that has made me think twice about saying “screw it,” though I don’t presume to think that’d be the same for everyone who got married in the temple).

But now I’m looking at it from where I’m at and not from where I think I might have liked to have been. This is what I’ve been sorting through the last couple of days with the two posts I linked. I have a five-year-old daughter whom the fashion industry wants to sexualize by leaving me no choice as to the cut of the clothes that are for sale (meaning I’m going to have to go back to sewing, which is more expensive in time AND money nowadays, but I digress).

She’s going to learn about sex earlier and from someone else if I don’t step in, but how do I do this? I teach her the correct body part names (to an extent…it’s more difficult to tell a girl what all her parts are called when there are just so many and they do so many different things—The Boy’s parts are not so fraught with etymological traps). When she asks where babies come from I try to be as straightforward as possible without completely confusing her. I refuse to allow either of my children to nickname the boy’s body parts (again with the terminology problem on female genitalia—she can’t get past “ure—” for urethra). No “wee-wee,” “pee-pee,” etc., and that goes for dad, too, who gets a dirty look if he doesn’t comply. So what I’ve run into first is a language problem and a perception problem. That is, she can’t see what’s in all those nooks and crannies and she can’t even pronounce their names anyway.

Now, onto the teaching of the chastity part.

I don’t have a clue.

The Exponent did a good job of pointing out that the other side of the chastity coin is the atonement, but how do you commingle the messages? “No, you shouldn’t, but if you do, don’t worry, you can repent” or “Yeah, you can repent, but it won’t mitigate the fact in your soul if something goes wrong.”

Because in my somewhat, rather, okay, really limited experience, remorse for sex (and then not for the sex) happens if something goes wrong: Pregnancy. Disease. Emotional/social fallout.

I’m torn. I want my kid to be chaste until she gets married. But I’d like to know my kid had something better than I did going into marriage and if she does pop up with a healthy libido, I certainly don’t want her to feel like “chewed gum,” “licked cupcakes” (oh, so many joke opportunities there), “smashed bananas,” the one bullet in a revolver**, or a rose with its head torn off.

Intellectually, I get that the Law of Chastity is an artificial construct that, nevertheless, has more redeeming social value than wholesale promiscuity.

Before the Victorian/Edwardian era, the upper classes had its standard of morality based on inheritance: The heir and the spare. Once that was accomplished, the woman took a lover or six and the man had a mistress if he could afford one. In this societal construct, the unmarried girl who was not a virgin was, therefore, not marriageable on the grounds of a financial contract between father and suitor. In other words, a virgin was desirable for her virginity not on a basis of moral purity but on the basis of her status as a brood mare.

Then came the industrial revolution, Queen Victoria, and the middle class. In a scene in My Fair Lady, Alfred P. Doolittle tells Professor Higgins that he’s too poor to be able to afford “middle-class morality,” and it makes perfect sense as he defines it. When he comes into money unexpectedly, his common law wife of double-digit years then demands he marry her and make her ‘respeckable’ and he laments that now his money has shackled him to the middle-class morality he never wanted in the first place. (Why is it morality always comes down to money in the end? But that’s another post.)

Now, in the wake of virgin-as-property, middle-class Victorian mores, and the ’60s sexual revolution, what we’re left with is a mishmash of…something I don’t think anybody really understands. So, the LDS Law of Chastity, artificial construct or not, is at least some standard to hold onto and it’s not a bad one.

Yet…

I keep wondering what I missed.

So my desires for my daughter’s future, and what she learns and how, are at cross purposes with each other. I feel like a bloody idiot for even putting it on paper. How do I explain this to her? Or do I? When do I start? How do I start? What tack do I use? I have no answers and I’m only really asking rhetorically (though feel free to answer!).

I don’t resent the Law of Chastity as a cornerstone of our cultural tradition (and I do believe it’s more cultural than doctrinal) and I even agree with it as a sound economic/sociologic principle. What I do resent are the ways it’s taught; the dire warnings of eternal damnation for thinking about it, touching oneself, having sex before marriage (I’m looking at you, Miracle of Forgiveness and the intellectual bullcrap you spawned); the long-term damage it does to fragile psyches who may have actually weathered any of the other bad consequences of promiscuity better than those sparked by its teaching.

But you never know that until the damage has been done.

**By the way, I’m a committed gun owner and concealed carrier (in my state, that’s kosher), and I’d have gone to war over bringing a gun (loaded or not) to church to use as an object lesson, particularly as an allegory to sexual sin. I have never seen this particular demonstration (thank heavens), but–as a gun owner and carrier–I was completely appalled.