Chastity Night !

Something was sick about a society which fulsomely extolled motherhood but wouldn’t even tell young women what aperture of their bodies babies issued from, as if we had no right to understand our own various orifices. It was as somehow our bodies, and especially our sexual organs, didn’t ultimately belong to us at all, and that if we thought about them or touched them, we were trespassing upon someone else’s property. Which, of course, is patriarchy’s clear message to women. From the moment we’re born female, our bodies belong to that faceless male who will one day marry us. Men’s bodies belong to themselves from the moment they are born male.

The fact that I was female was supposed to define me utterly, to explain everything about me. Biology was destiny, which helps me understand now my overriding concern with sex in my youth. The message from society, doubly underlined by the church – that since I was female I was only suited for wife and motherhood and that that would be enough for me if I were a ‘real woman’ - made everything about my present and future sex-related, sex-based.

No wonder that as I grew older, I grew more troubled. How could I become reconciled to having only one aspect of my multifaceted nature allowed me? How could I give up, how could I repudiate all in me that had nothing to do with sex, with wifehood and motherhood? But I couldn’t even ask that question then. I could only pray, and pray, and plead with heaven to lead me aright and to forgive my evil nature that struggled so against God’s will.

The reality of course, which I surely know in the depths of my soul, was that I was only incidentally female, that it should not be the overriding fact of my existence, and if it was, then it was perversion. That I was a human being was and should have seemed the central defining fact of my life. After all, my eyes saw what human – not just female – eyes see; my brain registered the ideas human – not only female- brains register; my heart felt the longings of all human hearts, not just female hearts. And my physical systems – circulatory, digestive, regulatory, nervous; all but my reproductive system – were simply Homo sapiens. I was being methodically reduced by my society to mere ovaries, womb, and vagina. Even taken all together, those parts make a very small, very limited, very stunted, and very partial woman. No wonder I was miserable.

Sex is a topic so fraught with anxiety in the Mormon church that it is no surprise that countless distortions have arisen around it. My first overtly rebellious act in the church came about because of a lecture on chastity given the young women in the Logan First Ward (parish) in the early 1950s when I was about fifteen. Chastity night was held once a year and, as I recall, was invariably dreadful.

About twenty girls, some with their mothers, were gathered to listen to a woman we had heard marvelous things about for the preceding few weeks. In front of her on the table, in a white bud vase, stood a single white rose, a pure virgin rose. As she spoke about the evils of necking and petting and referred vaguely to other acts of physical intimacy between males and females, she tore off the rose petals one by one, crushing them between her thumb and forefinger and dropping them, bruised and wrinkled, onto the table. Hypnotized, I watched those ruined petals fall, one by one, each striking shame to my soul as I remembered the kisses and embraces and occasional hot fumblings at bodices and crotches I had indulged in at one time or another (and felt a certain many of the other girls in the room had as well).

Then, by way of finale, she staged a major performance by trying to pick up the brown petals and fit them back onto the stem. Impossible, of course. Triumphantly she announced, “You are just like this rose. If you sully your body by allowing boys to touch it in forbidden ways, you can never be pure and white again. No good man will ever want to marry you.”

This declaration shocked me out of my trance of self-hatred and self-condemnation. She might be the wife of a local dignitary of the church, she might be a temple worker, I might be only fifteen years old, but I knew the gospel of Jesus Christ and I knew she was dead wrong. I was always surprised to find that adults, especially adults whom everyone looked up to, were often wrong.

Another incident happened at about this time in my life that completed my evolution into a lifelong foe of the double standard. I remember hearing Elder Mark E. Peterson, one of the most revered of the church’s twelve apostles, speak about chastity in the venerable and lovely old Logan Tabernacle where all state conferences were held when I was young. One example he gave has not lost its putrescent lustre over the thirty intervening years: “Girls, every time you let a boy kiss you, it’s like someone licking butter off a piece of bread. What man is going to want a piece of bread with all the butter licked off?”

The implications behind this are legion and obvious, and I must get on with my story. But briefly, I felt, though I could not understand it clearly then, that this denied female sexuality entirely. It denied that girls kiss boys too. It said that they were sexually passive – objects that males act upon. The buttered bread theory also implied that boys never had their butter licked off, no matter how many females they kissed. They can kiss and neck and pet their heads off and still have their butter intact, and are well within their self-righteous rights to go around checking suspiciously for girls’ butter. But most of all, what this said to me was that men are not roses, they are not pieces of buttered bread. They are not objects, they are human beings. Only women are things - roses and bread. Never in the church do we hear men referred to by analogies that make them objects or anything less than fully human. Women, like objects, are presumed to have been created for men’s use. We don’t use people; we use things. Men are the consumers of women.

The double standard is the basis of the patriarchal order: men have privileges that women do not have, only one of which is that they never lose their chastity – never get their butter licked off. Chastity is not a concept that relates to men. No woman would refuse to marry a man who was no longer a virgin. It is a concept men impose upon women, not upon each other.

Several years ago, in a sacrament meeting in the Sterling Park Ward in Virginia, a young woman who attended Brigham Young University and was home for the summer was speaking. (Mormons do not have a paid clergy; members do all speaking and administration at a local level.) She told about going out with a young man at BYU whom she came to like very much, and apparently the feeling was mutual. One night after he had taken her to visit his family which seemed a hopeful sign, he drove to the local parking spot and parked. She was dismayed and panicky, because she knew she had only two options. On the one hand, she could allow some lovemaking, which might make him think she was “easy” and therefore not a nice girl, not the sort of girl he would want to marry. On the other hand, she could insist that they leave, and risk humiliating him and, therefore, losing him. The classic double bind. I believe she said an urgent silent prayer at this point – I certainly would have if I’d been of her mind – and then said to him, quietly and oh so gently so as not offend, “Do you think Jesus Christ would approve of this?”

Silently he started up the car and took her home. For the next few days she lived in a state of agonized apprehension. Then, thank God, he called, and as they drove around town he told her how much he respected her for doing what she had done, and confided that if she had “let” him, he never would have gone out with her again.

She ended her speech in church by saying how thankful she was that the church had made her the kind of girl who could keep the affections of this kind of boy.

In the audience, not yet fully a feminist but a foe of the double standard in its most obvious forms since my rose-and-butter days, I was appalled at her recital. And even more appalled at her blindness to what she was actually saying. How could she still think highly of a boy who would park and neck with her but despise her for necking with him? If she had not totally accepted the double standard entrenched in the church, she would have sent that clod scampering for his life, instead of being humbly grateful that he still liked her. Humble, nonsense! Grateful, fiddlesticks! She is worth a dozen of him! I hope she never settles for any man who does not take equal responsibility for the decency and goodness of their relationship. Because any man who is willing to let the woman he claims to love bear the terrible weight of responsibility and guilt for any sexual misdemeanors loves a suspiciously unloving love.

Soon after I was excommunicated, I received a letter from a Mormon woman that said: “My awakening occurred twenty years ago at the end of a pristine (in my view) date with a young Mormon man who brought me to my door, called me a Jezebel, and castigated  me for the lustful thoughts I had aroused in him. He ordered me in his best patriarchal voice to enter my home, fall on my knees, and pray for forgiveness for the sins I had made him long to commit. A few days later when the shock wore off, I began a long process of analyzing the church’s attitude toward women….”

* This is an excerpt from Sonia Johnson’s book “From Housewife to Heretic” published in 1989 by Wildfire Books. Sonia, an American woman, was excommunicated from the Mormon church in 1979 for speaking out for women’s rights and for campaigning for the ratification of the ERA - equal rights amendment (equal rights for women). The ERA was defeated in 1982, mainly due to a massive opposition from religious fundamentalists.

ALSO SEE: WOMEN IN THE BIBLE

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