This was originally posted to the Ideaschema NSFW list on May 24th, 2011. It encompasses a feeling I experience fairly often these days.
What’s your take?
I read this on Boing Boing, and they found it on The Awl: Atheists have ‘better sex lives than followers of religion who are plagued with guilt’.
A study carried out at the University of Kansas found that Christians are more likely than the irreligious to feel guilty after sex. On some kind of scale of feeling dirty, Mormons came the hardest, scoring on average 8.19 out of 10, “followed closely” by Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostals, and Baptists. Catholics and Lutherans were clustered around 6/10, while atheists and agnostics came in under 5/10.
Informing the numbers: almost a quarter of people raised in very religious homes reported being ‘shamed or ridiculed’ for masturbating as a youngster. They are also more likely to learn about sex from pornography.
I read this, and I thought, well, of course.
It made perfect sense to me. I was raised Catholic. Sex information was offered to me, but I was never put in a position where really good, really complete sex information was provided (whether I felt weird about accepting it or not). I always regretted that I turned my dad down when he offered me a “birds and bees” discussion. At the time, my certainty that I knew how all that stuff worked was probably based on the very limited information we were getting in school — Catholic school, I ought to mention — and the occasional dirty fanfiction story.
Yeah.
My Catholic education left of a lot of things out. It treated sex as an extremely biological process, and then tagged onto the end: When a man and woman really, really love each other…
What my Catholic education didn’t explain was that sex is a fundamentally creative act (even if it’s not, at that moment, a procreative one). In all the biology and physiology and overbearing risk awareness campaigns, no one ever said to me that sex could have a profound positive effect on my emotional well-being, psychology and genius. They didn’t say, This is a healthy, wonderful act. It will increase your appreciation for yourself and other human beings and the intricacy of life and the complexity of living in ways that you won’t understand when you’re 30 (and probably won’t understand when you’re 90, either).
Why on earth didn’t they say that?
I don’t actually understand religion all that well. I don’t know why so many religious institutions restrict their understanding and experience — and their members’ understanding and experience. We can talk about faith and belief and control and corruption all day, and I don’t know that I’ll have a better grasp of it then than I ever did. I know that this happens in many religious environments. I know that when I finally learned what sex really was (and could be, and should be), it was at the digital hearthstones of Betty Dodson and Carol Queen, Easton & Liszt, Tristan Taormino, Violet Blue. From them, I sometimes got a sense of self-discovered, organic spirituality — but never a sense of religiousness. I may not know why, but that does tell us something interesting.
When I think about my high school forays into Internet porn — followed immediately by some pretty intense, badass waves of guilt — I feel a little sorry for that kid who was me. It was only my school environment that was religious, but when I think about my first experiences with sex, I can’t help but be a little annoyed at that childhood environment. That environment let me take my first steps into my sexuality entirely blind to the possibilities: What could one day be such a stable, positive, uplifting experience of human intimacy and creativity, the power of all levels of relationships to lift us up and let us expand rather than restrict us or confuse us or status quo us — no one gave me any clue.
Many other kids out there, nobody’s given them a clue, either.
Many adults are in the same place, with “moral” guidelines and suspiciously similar mainstream norms that restrict intellectual and experiential inquiry.
They are all driven by instinct, and if they’re extremely lucky, they’ll find out on their own like I did.
If they’re not, God help them, right?
Megan Elizabeth Morris (aka MEM, Megan the M.) is a bonafide professional catalyst and adventurer. She's the Ideaschema instigator, orchestrator and autodidact, and you can find out more about her by clicking here.Got an idea? Something we haven't thought of? Whatever you're thinking, we want to hear it. Please feel free to leave comments or email us by clicking here.
