Teen sex

For Friday posts on the main blog, I generally focus on a group of books or songs or movies. Often they are part of my learning more about something, so the post is a reflection on what I have learned. 

Two recent books are going up here instead.

I have a hard time resisting challenged or banned books, and recently read about sex.

The books that came up were Blankets by Craig Thompson and Forever by Judy Blume.

I have read a lot of books by Judy Blume, but somehow Forever never came up. Maybe it wasn't in the school library. I heard about it later, when I was no longer a teen -- it's kind of notorious -- but I swear I don't remember hearing about it when I was reading all of the other books. 

I wasn't familiar with Blankets, a graphic novel, at all.

In both books, there are teens who fall hard for each other. It feels like epic, undying love, even though neither relationship outlasts the story.

Also, they have sex.

The kids in Blankets have been raised in very religious families, so there is more hesitation and concern, but they still do it.

The kids in Forever were not raised religiously. They feel great about the sex, though they still prefer there to be love involved (at least the girls). 

I do understand why the books get challenged, but I disagree with it.

First of all, if the concern is that such books will give teens ideas, in most cases their hormones will do that. 

(And if they don't and you get some asexual kids, well people challenge Alice Oseman's Loveless too.)

If the objection is that the teens don't regret their sex and get horribly punished, that can be realistic too.

I have thought about writing on chastity for a long time, but I have felt that I would not be the best source. Someone who has been married and experienced a satisfying sex life should have more to say about the blessings of it. 

Except, I do still believe in it. I am blessed for living it. 

I know other people who don't live it, and who are wonderful people.

One thing that I appreciate about Forever is that while the couple doesn't really run into any of the dangers associated with teen sex (other than emotional entanglement, which is important), one member had contracted an STD in the past, and another knows someone who gets pregnant. Those issues are not ignored, but they also don't happen to everyone.

If we try and scare people out of having sex, and then they have a good time and do not get sick or pregnant, we just make ourselves liars. 

If we try and convey that people who have sex outside of marriage are nothing more than horrible sinners, we make ourselves liars.

There is a truth that could be shared, but we have to know it ourselves. Do we?

So much of dominator culture focuses on judgment and fear that it should not surprise us that often some of the loudest voices turn out to be enormous hypocrites.

We need to be coming from a point of love and joy and goodness, which may be hard if we do not feel those ourselves.

Not good for anyone

I do not want to spend a lot of time going over the manosphere. I am not an expert on it, and it is a very unpleasant topic. There is a reasonable introduction on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manosphere 

A lot of my examples of that come from Ask Aubrey, whom I have referenced before:

https://x.com/ask_aubry 

Aubrey will post examples from Reddit or other sites, but also they come from messages others forward to her, or messages she gets herself. 

They can be very discouraging.

Regardless, if you want to know more about some of the movements specifically directed toward men and see what kind of behavior they lead to, those are two good starting links. 

I'm not even sure how important the knowledge would be, but sometimes it can be helpful to recognize sources and know that it is spreading. 

Some of the messages I see have been from women whose partners are becoming worse. 

In most heterosexual relationships, the woman does most of the housework and most of the emotional labor. That is based on long tradition. Even with couples that try and break those traditions there tends to be some disparity that favors the man.

So sometimes you will have a woman who had been doing more, and also earning more, and mostly been okay with it, but gradually he is starting to complain more about her not respecting his contributions enough and not respecting him enough, though what is actually changing is his level of respect.

There can be some indications this is happening. That may include frequent references to "alphas and betas", or possibly "chads" (that one probably skews a little younger) and "high quality/high value". Also, look out for the word "submissive".  

(More vulgarly, they may mention "cuks" or become obsessed with "body count" but if you are already married and in the church, those phrases are less likely to come up.)  

That is coming from outside sources. He may not be directly listening to Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate (the more notorious names), but influences from that arena are diffusing through to him. They are appealing not only because they fit well against the traditions of our society, but also because they make him the victim and the one who deserves more, without him having to do more.

(Inordinate time playing video games comes up a lot.)

I am more sensitive to the problems this creates for wives and girlfriends, who are generally going to start out trying to be understanding, wondering if it is something that they did, and ending up in a worse and worse situation that can even become a dangerous situation.

I had been thinking about how what young girls really need to be taught to look for is whether they are respected, but there are cases where the respect is waning. We can debate over whether someone was truly respectful and changed, or was just acting decently respectful and then lost the veneer. People do change, but the result is the same. 

(Though I believe that teaching young women to not settle for less than being respected would have definite value.)

The other point that it seems important to make, though, is that this trend is terrible for men. 

Yes, all of the complaints that they make put the blame on women, but they are still complaining because they are not happy. They are lonely, they feel unappreciated, they feel disrespected, and the comforts they use in deflecting the blame are not really comforting.

Because they believe their worth comes from just being men, they lose touch with what could actually be unique and wonderful about them. They are not motivated to change, which would be a huge part of repentance, which we all need.

They don't see any uniqueness in women, so while they want one and feel they should have one, they won't really be delighted with her. Even if you start loving someone, treating them badly diminishes that really quickly. 

And yes, you will see these patterns playing out in other areas of dominator culture, but this aspect relates specifically to patriarchy, and it is not good for anyone.

Humorous?

I did post about this a little on Facebook, but I want to get into it more.

https://www.facebook.com/sporktastic/posts/pfbid0EUVnB7CYMy2xbV6v7pD7yMaSjhMpCxyNJJJHMRYU8eBHNzirvwib2hzXmt1C2egFl

It's not just about the lies, but the reactions to the lies. There will certainly be more.  

You probably know that there were claims of Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, and that Trump referenced it during the recent debate.

You may also know that it was a lie. 

https://www.newsweek.com/springfield-woman-erika-lee-haitians-eating-pets-rumor-speaks-out-1953851 

The Newsweek article details that. It follows the traditional path of urban legends. Someone says it happened to their friend, but when you track that down, no, the friend says it was someone they knew, and descending levels produce no credible source.

What may be less known is that economically depressed Springfield has started recovering. This includes manufacturing jobs, many of which are staffed by Haitian immigrants. Immigration does tend to improve the economy, but increased population also increases rent.

It is not unusual for people to blame immigrants for taking their jobs, but an unlicensed immigrant hit a school bus, killing an 11-year old boy. From that time, there has been more bad feelings about and organization against the immigrants. That was the seedbed for the lies about the pets. The boy's father recently spoke against this:

https://www.whio.com/news/local/family-boy-killed-bus-crash-speak-out-against-incessant-hate-springfield-meeting/RIZB57TA3RGFBGCWZIXCMO6JYQ/ 

Then, of course, you get bomb threats and parents keeping their children home from school, and apparently the KKK recruiting in Springfield and calling for mass deportation. 

https://dayton247now.com/news/local/kkk-flyers-distributed-in-springfield-ohio-police-and-naacp-working-on-path-forward-clark-county-racism-hate-group 

Well, I should clarify the timeline there. The Klan recruiting is older, but appears to coincide with the beginnings of the anti-immigrant furor. The bomb threats are new, associated with the debate and the push back. 

I have seen church members swearing that the stories are true, but JD Vance -- who spread the stories -- now admits that they are false. He justifies it as a way to draw attention to human suffering. 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/15/jd-vance-lies-haitian-immigrants 

Speaking honestly about true suffering might do something good; these lies are actually creating suffering. To that I can only add that I doubt that Vance has any interest in doing good, based on his past record and associates.

(I feel such a strong impulse to use the word "douchebag" here. Weird.)

That is all just prelude anyway. What I really want to write about is this phase in between, when people who knew the lies were lies had fun with the ridiculousness of the lies. They marked their pets safe and shared pictures of Santa's Little Helper from The Simpsons, and showed photos of pets escaping or being hugged.

I kept getting gradually more irritated with it. I understand no harm was meant, but it is on the path to the bomb threats, not that I knew that was specifically what would happen.

People have been referencing all of the anti-Mexican speech during Trump's first run, and the El Paso shooting. 

https://x.com/dk_stephan/status/1835063146710503566

No, not everyone lashes out with a gun, but it happens on a regular basis, and it tends to happen against marginalized groups. 

Other names may be coming to mind. You may be thinking of Uvalde, or the Tree of Life synagogue or Mother Emanuel AME or Buffalo. If it were getting more publicity, you might be thinking about the Black men who are ending up hung from trees and being ruled suicides, which doesn't seem right.

Is the intent of the jokes to make fun of Trump being stupid? Definitely. 

There are also a lot of angry people out there. Some of them might get angrier the more people make it a joke.

Now I am going to give an example of my humor:

https://www.facebook.com/sporktastic/posts/pfbid02TSByRKRLaRqSHfSY66jpxzHda4oDxedgcfYwHUVcR573zT22nJ1ND66qf2UNwwevl 

Our very exclusive group is Cat Ladies Named Harris for Harris.

That is riffing on something stupid said by Vance. 

It relates to marginalization, in that in many ways we are still subject to patriarchy, meaning not only that women earn less, are more objectified, and have their right violated more frequently, but also that there is a stigma against unmarried women left not chosen by a man.

It also comes from a place of privilege. I am a woman, but I am white, we own a home, and we have a larger community that rejects the stigma on being unmarried. (That is not our church community, but there is some crossover.)

I see examples of men hurting and disrespecting women daily, so I am aware of that, but I am largely shielded from it. 

Mostly, I applied that label to myself, subverting it. If someone else who truly thought less of me applied it, that could feel different.

There are definitely people out there who don't think I should be able to vote (though more for being a woman than for being unmarried; I just deserve to be unmarried because I am fat). 

I may be thinking about this more because I am doing some reading on internet usage by George Takei. While he understood what was harmful about making tsunami jokes in 2011, he will often defend other jokes as just being good fun, focusing on the necessity of free speech and humor.

Things can be important that are not directly connected to you. Perhaps that is because we truly are all connected. 

I guess the main thing I want to encourage is viewing the bigger picture. 

If people are spreading hate against Haitian people, it doesn't matter whether it is ridiculous, it is still hate and hate still has a hungry audience. 

It would be nice if humor could dilute that hate, but I have no reason to believe that it works. 

Therefore, the most important thing is to refute it.

Traditional reactions to perceived threats

Without mentioning it as much, I assure you this is still about dominator culture.

For many reasons -- including the upcoming election -- there have been a lot of Venn diagrams popping up showing various combinations of dystopian novels and movies, labeled, "You are here."

It showed me that one of the gaps in my dystopian reading was Fahrenheit 451. I decided to rectify that.

I noticed a lot of things wrong with it along the way, but this might be the paragraph that sums it up.

“Now let’s take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex-magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.”  

Nothing makes literature bland like diversity, am I right?

I do understand that Bradbury was getting requests to rewrite things. He rarely wrote characters other than white men, and when he did they were stereotypes. Also, he had editors and anthologies wanting and making changes.

I will add, however, that the questions he was getting seemed to be about including Black people and women. Somehow that does not reflect the list of minorities he mentioned, perhaps because then it wouldn't sound so ridiculous.

It is easy to feel sensitive about your words and work being questioned. It still is worth asking if there is a point.

Really, he has two things going on here. There are fans who like his work, but find his view of the world narrow and are inviting him to do something better. Not only are there personal feelings of exclusion, but there are other ramifications that affect how you are viewed by others and how able you are to access your civil rights. Having any sense of decency should make you willing to at least consider it. 

On the other side, you have economic forces where they want you to make changes to be more commercial. Often, it is very reasonable to turn those down. It is not unusual to read of other artists having to draw lines there.

I suppose the charitable interpretation of Bradbury's response is that with the criticism coming in from both directions it felt like the threat of censorship. That could be a reasonable concern. 

However, I believe the real issue was more of a hissy fit; everyone else was stupid and shallow! He was an outlier who was right! There was no point in considering the fact that as a white man he started out with a fair amount of privilege, that fame as a writer had given him more, and that he had an opportunity to wield a real influence for good, at the expense of some personal discomfort and effort.

In fact, in this book, the solution to a society bullied by "minorities" is blowing it up. The future will depend on a few smart survivors that seem to be following Montag naturally, despite his newness to the efforts and the repeated affirmations that he is nothing (which I don't think Bradbury believed for one minute).

It's an old pattern. Ralph Nader blamed social conflict on no longer being able to tell ethnic jokes, a crucial stress relief, at least for the ones making the jokes (which he said was everyone but am not sure that would stand up to scrutiny).

Kurt Vonnegut followed different accommodation of minorities to a similarly ridiculous extreme in Harrison Bergeron, and then found another solution to changing attitudes around sex in therapeutic, humble rape in Welcome to the Monkey House.

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2016/10/privilege-and-harrison-bergeron.html

Based on Bradbury's premise, though, isn't it weird that the people most interested in banning books are also those most interested in maintaining the status quo of white men in charge?

Conservatives are the ones most interested in removing regulations that might protect you and forbidding laws that might protect you from, say, being shot with an assault weapon (lots of destructive violence in Fahrenheit 451). If the great loss in Fahrenheit 451 is of intellect and compassion, it's not the party that tries to include minorities that is fighting that.

How does that get missed?

The more privilege you have, the more any questioning feels like a grave insult. That defensiveness ends up standing in the way of reason. 

They are so used to their right to be heroes that they don't think about how a hero would not prioritize his discomfort over the actual safety and well-being of others. 

Somehow, it happens again and again.

We may have to spend some time exploring the manosphere.

Women's prayers

Back in May I devoted some of my personal study time to the Essays:

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/essays?lang=eng

That is a collection of writings from around 2013 that gave more information -- perhaps clarification -- on various Gospel topics.

I had glanced at them when they were newer, but I saw things that I already knew or was pretty sure about. Sometimes they were from things Seminary class, so part of normal church instruction, while some were more from secular study. I thought they were kind of weak, honestly.

Some people were very disturbed by them, especially if it tied into existing doubts. People are imperfect, and that includes early church members. It may be more obvious when looking at the early church, because they are still learning how to do things. Sacrament starts with wine, and then switches to water before the Word of Wisdom, so that's not a big disruption. There are still people from my parents' generation who remember spiked punch for the adults at church functions, which would not happen now. 

That is perhaps a digression, but one that can come up a lot. We need to hold grace for each other and ourselves. That is worth many reminders.

The reason I mention the Essays now, though, is because of one thing that did surprise me in May:

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/joseph-smiths-teachings-about-priesthood-temple-and-women?lang=eng

During the 19th century, women frequently blessed the sick by the prayer of faith, and many women received priesthood blessings promising that they would have the gift of healing.

That sent my thoughts in two directions.

I was reminded of a talk by Elder Matthew Cowley, "Miracles":

https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/matthew-cowley/miracles/ 

The talk is from 1953, but on my mission I came across a cassette tape of that and "Earning the right to brag". They stuck with me.

Part of what stuck with me is that when we administer to the sick, we often don't really do it with much faith. I worry that we are selling ourselves and others short.

It was interesting to me that people used to call for the sisters. Was that a time of more faith? It would be interesting to know more stories about that.

When I have written about women not holding the priesthood in our church, I pointed out the usual things: priesthood is for service, not for self-glorification, so there are ways in which it shouldn't matter, except that in the way people perceive its meaning, it can matter a lot.

In my youth, the common thing you would hear is that women don't need the priesthood. Hearing about women being called to pray for the sick seems to reinforce that.

I also recall some "jokes" about it that -- though I did not realize it at the time -- indicated some discomfort with it. 

We are not great at dealing with discomfort. I think the Essays were an attempt to be better at that.

Here's a bit more on that topic:

Women’s participation in healing blessings gradually declined in the early 20th century as Church leaders taught that it was preferable to follow the New Testament directive to “call for the elders.” By 1926, Church President Heber J. Grant affirmed that the First Presidency “do not encourage calling in the sisters to administer to the sick, as the scriptures tell us to call in the Elders, who hold the priesthood of God and have the power and authority to administer to the sick in the name of Jesus Christ.” Currently, the Church’s Handbook 2: Administering the Church directs that “only Melchizedek Priesthood holders may administer to the sick or afflicted.”

Of course, women are still responsible for any cooking and cleaning and child care to help the sick.

I can't help but notice that change would have happened around the lead-in to women getting the right to vote. There had been a world war and sickness and changing fashions and things... that will often lead people to be more conservative.

I can also see one good potential reason for preferring calling the elders, that relates very much to the possible interpretation of men having the responsibility to lead because they are less likely to do it on their own. Maybe men needed the experiences, but they were busy or unmotivated so the women kept doing it. 

That is just speculation, but if we are facing situations like that, where women keep doing the majority of the preparation, with men technically in the lead but not rising to the occasion (yet perhaps still taking the credit)... that could be the kind of situation where we do not exercise enough faith and sell ourselves short.

Related posts:

https://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2014/03/women-and-priesthood.html