“As the village heathen, I am so interested in Catholic guilt!”
In this two-part episode, we dive into a touchy (heh) topic: CHRISTIANITY. Did it mess us up? Did it change the way we think about sex? Probably. But let’s discuss…
Sex & Christianity Show Notes
We Have a Guest!
On this very special two-part episode of the podcast we are welcoming a special guest, Evelyn! Evelyn’s joining us for this episode to offer her unique viewpoint as a former Jehovah’s Witness while we discuss the intersections between sex and religion (well mostly its just the intersections between Christianity and sex).
We start by offering up our baggage. As it happens, most of us (Kelly, Gina, Sissel, Maisie, and Lucy) were raised Catholic and stopped going to church at some point. Hannah, meanwhile, grew up in a GODLESS environment. Must be nice…
Evelyn is so excited to talk about how Christianity really made discovering her sexuality an upstream battle! She’s really enjoyed listening to our podcast. (Aw, shucks.)
She begins by recalling her childhood misconception that kissing at the wedding leads to INSTANT pregnancy. Likely a common misconception, which reminds Kelly…
You may want to listen to our whole episode about sexual misconceptions: Lamprey Bucket!
So, Evelyn, tell us your tale…
Us Throbbers get right into interrogating Evelyn: What exactly was your relationship with sex while part of the church? As it turns out, it was fairly nonexistent.
Evelyn didn’t masturbate until she was 19, and didn’t see porn until she was 20 and her very concerned friends forced her to watch porn. She mostly remembers laughing and vague confusion about the whole sex concept.
Maisie then divulges that she really has never watched porn and we are all appalled. We will be locking Maisie in a room when this pandemic is over and watching porn. (Just kidding, we probably won’t do that.) Gina is reminded that our town has played host to indie porn festivals in the past, which included films too artsy to be hot, which reminds Sissel of…
It is apparently no longer on Netflix, but you can still rent in from various platforms. This being one of them.
Which in turn reminds Kelly about Girls, notorious for its awkward sex scenes. Hannah really wants to see more authentic sex on screen, because it’s a rare thing.
Evelyn is disappointed in (free) porn offerings in general, which feature very vanilla sex OR extreme fetishes and little in between. Also, so much male gaze. Sigh.
The porn provided by Evelyn’s friends, by the way, was a VINTAGE 80s VHS about a construction worker. Which would be appealing to Gina, who kinda lived the handyman-just-coming-to-fix-your-sink porn IRL.
Hannah would be extremely interested in vintage black and white porn. Bette Davis, we know you’ve got a sex tape out there, someone please release it.
Tangent, but watching silver screen movie stars swearing is fun.
Back to Christianity
Hannah is fascinated about Catholic guilt, as the village heathen. Which Maisie explains as not being allowed to ever experience moments of joy fully because you feel as though you’re supposed to be suffering. Kelly and Sissel both believe they were poorly indoctrinated into the Catholic guilt and moral stipulations, so they don’t have nearly as much as Maisie, if any at all.
Gina’s Dominican Catholic upbringing was severely tinged by the Rape Scandals in the Catholic church, and her parents were maybe less stringent than they would have been without that knowledge. Also Dominican mass is way more fun than the kneel stand kneel stand kneel stand of white Midwestern Catholicsm. The American masses gave Gina and Lucy panic attacks.
Sissel just thought about sex during church… as did Gina because of what she claims was a very hot Jesus statue. What church was she going to is what Maisie wants to know. Fleabag season 2 really captures the hotness and guilt of Catholic Church.
PLEASE WATCH
Meanwhile, while in church, Evelyn pondered her future husbands by scrawling them in the corners of her Bible.
So what’s Jehovah’s Witness guilt like?
Evelyn says that after the age of seven, she had already stopped fully believing in the very literal interpretation of the Bible presented to her. She says that her religion came with its own brand of guilt: An extreme lack of celebration. Jehovah’s Witnesses only celebrate weddings and anniversaries, as they are the only things that Jesus himself (allegedly) celebrated. Unlike other sects of Christianity, no birthdays, no Christmas, no Halloween. When she went to college, she submitted herself to a worldly education, distancing herself from her childhood faith, which was apparently a big no-no.
The threat of disfellowshipping, aka shunning a person from the community after a breach of faith (accepting a blood transfusion, disputing doctrines, or generally being “wicked”) was a constant worry. And apparently it was common enough to merit a shortened version: Evelyn and her friends referred to it as being “DF’d.”
Evelyn remembered being part of her best friend’s Catholic marriage prep and the general “you are just a baby machine” vibe was present there as well. Are you a Christian woman? Apparently you’ve gotta get ready to make a lot of babies, otherwise what is the point of you?
All that Matters is Marriage
Gina was depressed to have recently read a story by a woman who had turned down her own celebration of her success to go to a wedding. Which reminds everyone of the iconic Sex & the City episode where Carrie registers for shoes that were stolen from her married mommy friend’s baby shower.
Hannah didn’t entirely relate to the predicament of celebrating weddings and nothing else because because she knows we would throw parties for atypical things like promotions and things! Our friend group also isn’t likely going to get married any time soon.
Lucy points out that even though we might be willing to celebrate those moments, the wider world isn’t necessarily prepared to celebrate our promotions. Not in the way in which, of course, you’d celebrate a wedding. Gina thinks it’s so sad that you can’t really ask people to come visit you and spend money on you for other accomplishments. Lucy says that she has people who will just send her a text, which is fine, but a totally different celebratory experience.
When Sissel bought her condo, and had a housewarming, she invited some people who didn’t live in town. Some of them asked why they would come to this party? BECAUSE she worked hard and did something impressive, and to be honest…is getting married always an accomplishment?
Only in it for the Sex?
Maisie has some family members who got married almost exclusively because they couldn’t have sex before marriage. And another cousin is really only getting married to have someone to take care of her. So, is marriage the ultimate goal? It’s the last sacrament before the pre-death sacrament… So basically your life is complete when you’ve gotten married, and there’s nothing else left until you die! Whee!
Evelyn has seen it too many times in Christianity: You’ve been raised to only have sex in marriage, so you get married very young. And it doesn’t last. (Sex and marriage are two very different things!!! We all say, annoyed.)
Just to take a short break from Christianity…
A lot of us had recently watched a show about rich Indian couples using a matchmaker to find marriage.
It’s a very different perspective than the one the white ladies who made this podcast have experienced. The people on the show, as opposed to being desperately horny and repressed Christians looking to just please Lord get laid, are looking for people who have similar views and values as them, and have the possibility of a long term growth.
They do not really talk about sex on the show, but Maisie and Sissel both disagree if one of the moms was actively asking for a physically flexible wife for his sons… We’ll never know! Feel free message us and settle this debate.
Sexual Debut
Evelyn always felt like she was a sexual being, and she had urges and needs she was suppressing because she thought that she should be saving herself for one marriage and one man. However, fate (or God if you’re so inclined) intervened and she was diagnosed with cancer. And it may have been the best thing that happened to her.
Ordinarily sex out of wedlock would mean a solid DF’ing (heh) in the Jehovah’s Witness community. But if you get diagnosed with cancer… and decide to never get baptized… your family might just get you a free pass.
Cancer, graduation, and sex with her older long term boyfriend! What a couple of days! Sex was something that really helped her cope with the cancer diagnosis, it was a bright light in a horrible situation. He did get mono and ruin her ability to see him afterwards, sadly. Thankfully, this boyfriend was a sweetheart who saw her through chemo treatments and tried his darndest to give her a great First Time.
Evelyn, because of all this never did get baptized (side note for confused Catholics like us: baptism is a choice you enter into when you’re older and fully sentient for Jehovah’s Witnesses, instead of when you’re a baby, which is something that Evelyn actually still very much appreciates), and the cancer diagnosis seemed to prevent her family from no longer speaking to her. It also gave her even more freedom from what Christianity had been asking from her. She isn’t sure where she’d be if she hadn’t had cancer to really pull her away from the strict guidelines of faith.
Breaking Free of Christianity
So, about DF’ing. We kinda think it’s not great, taking away your whole community to punish you for doing something bad. Pretty manipulative and cult-y. It’s no wonder people stay with their religion whether they like it or not, when the alternative is never seeing their family again.
Kelly points out how religions that catastrophize everything are really doomed to fail as soon as you participate in the bad thing and isn’t the end of the world. Why would you believe all the other things they say are bad??
So, was having sex the BIG moment of autonomy? Sort of. Evelyn muses on how even though she had sex she didn’t really focus on her own pleasure or anatomy, it was actually this boyfriend who helped her lose her virginity that bought her her first vibrator. Such a good boyfriend.
Evelyn really thought she was broken, which many women do, because she couldn’t have an orgasm, and really struggled to get to a place where she could have an orgasm. One of her close female friends offered to manually help her reach orgasm, not successfully, but it’s truly the thought that counts. (It’s why she got locked in a room to watch porn, because they thought maybe it would help get her in the mood.)
Sexual Awakenings
For more knowledge about his please listen to our first episode… Harry Hotter and the Cursed Podcast
Evelyn is reminded of her sexual awakening involving The Princess Bride and Westley in the pit of despair. Why? Childhood sexuality is mysterious, but we attempt to break it down:
We all understand the sexiness of this scene, because of the exposed-ness, the loss of power, the hubris, the six fingered man, and the obvious fact that the scene is filmed from the view point of torturers who were obviously into Wesley’s pain.
Kelly can’t totally pinpoint her sexual awakening, but Magic School bus and way too much fan fiction is definitely part of it.
Lucy was reminded of a poem from fiction press about an ice cube going down someone’s body and she read it over and over again, not masturbating but being fascinated.
Gina’s sexual awakening was Tres Caballeros, and a production of Camelot with a hot Mordred, and a version of Peter Pan.
Evelyn was also into Peter Pan. The idea of an island of Lost Boys following you around and worshiping you a little bit is hot though. I mean Peter Pan is also, often, gorgeous. (He’s often played by pretty women.)
More Sexual Awakenings, Christianity be damned!
Hannah thinks it was probably the anime and manga she was getting into. Surprisingly not Sailor Moon, she just wasn’t into the boys in that show. Though the Sailor Scouts were hella hot…
Kelly remembers playing on her jungle gym as a prostitute (she should use the term sex worker, but tiny Kelly playing pretend did not know what that was) going to men’s houses.
As a kid, Hannah would always get naked every time the son of a family friend came over. It was a requirement. Evelyn remembers playing doctor with older boys, which is such a cliche, but who hasn’t, you know? Maisie also remembers playing doctor, it is all vague memories of some odd touching and lying on beds.
When Sissel was little everything was sexual; movies, tv shows, books. She was always so creepy about it. Lurking outside the room to watch vaguely sexual things, or stealing her mom’s books that had very sexual scenes. There was this one book with a prostitute (god damnit we did it again, SEX WORKER!) who is taking care of this sad depressed man and just puts his flaccid penis in her mouth until he gets hard so she can suck it. She would re-read that scene a lot.
Lucy might need to leave after that description.
What Else Turned Us On As Kids?
You know what turned Gina on as a kid? Gloria Estephan’s cleaveage on one of her Dad’s CDs.
Lucy had very tame sexual fantasies to try and fall asleep. Which is also what Sissel used to stay awake during church (suck on that one, Christianity!) Lucy’s were all about Jareth from Labyrinth, just touching her boobs.
Sissel remembers vaguely thinking about her breasts as a sexual thing before they had even arrived. Beverly Cleary really set us all up to obsess about boobs and periods from an early age, so who can blame us.
Breasts were always so present and sexualized. Kelly, Lucy, and Sissel always drew big boobed ladies in elementary school, and we now regret our internalized misogyny.
Maisie doesn’t really remember a sexual awakening, she just remembers wanting to have a boyfriend, get married, and have kids. She really would have made Christianity proud. She doesn’t really remember having sexual feelings about some of the activities she did as a kid. Not playing doctor or staring at her friends naked bodies. It was all an experiment more than anything else.
Christianity and the Bible
Evelyn asks us Catholics about our experiences reading the Bible. Well, yeah, about that…
Catholics don’t really read the Bible. Jehovah’s Witnesses do, apparently. We all had multiple copies we never read.
Sissel remembers reading the psalm about Samson and Delilah, is that right? is that a song title? Anyways it’s when she was being forced to be Confirmed by her mother for her soul — #NormalCatholicShit — and was shocked by the sexuality in it.
Lucy and Sissel were actually in Confirmation classes together! Lucy walked out in protest, Sissel wore fishnet tights like the wannabe slut she always wanted to be. We all had our small acts of sullen rebellion before the eventual falling out with the Catholic church.
And here’s the end…OR IS IT? Stay tuned for part 2, in which we delve deeper into the tangled mire that is Christianity and sexuality…
Thank You For Listening!
We are all able-bodied, cisgendered white women. We know our background and experiences only cover a percentage of those around us which is why we want to supplement this with guest speakers, research, and you. If you have opinions and experiences you’d like to share we would love to hear it! If, however, you just want to spew hate at us then we can’t stop you but instead we invite you to suck our collective clitorises. Hater. This podcast also contains mature sexual themes and swearing. No, clitoris isn’t a swear word.
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