More than 10 years ago, prior to moving to Europe, I participated in an off-off-off-Broadway (try Salt Lake City) mormon takeoff on The Vagina Monologues. My monologue from that time is posted below the fleur-de-kos (slightly modified to preserve a semblance of privacy and slightly annotated for a non-mormon audience). I was recently asked to compose a sequel, which I will post in the next day or two.
Had such a thing existed, I would have been a leading candidate for Miss Pharisee when I was in my teens and early 20s. Yes, I "made out" with various boyfriends, but lust was confined to French kissing at most, and the two guys who tried to go further received—and I am not kidding, here—letters larded with scripture-laden moralistic exhortations about purity from yours truly. (It may come as no surprise that those two relationships pretty well ended coincident to the receipt of those letters…!)
After [serving as full-time missionary in France], I was one of many women who fell in with Chris, an emotional vampire — a guy who got lots of women to fall in love with him and who would dump the dames after he’d get them to reveal their feelings. Part of his strategy was to limit physical activity to “one kiss per date,” thereby minimizing the risk of his actually falling in love with the women he dated. This turd went so far as to talk marriage before he dumped me; up to that point each kiss was “special,” as was he for being so “sensibly chaste.”
Although I nearly lost my virginity to an alumnus of my mission, I also dated a mission alumnus who was completely, and I mean completely, inexperienced. We had an off-again, on-again relationship that culminated in our being officially engaged for something like 55 minutes—and this despite the fact that the apex of our physical intimacy was holding hands. I confess that I still regret never having kissed him, but then again, such an act might have changed history altogether. We ended up marrying people who were better for us than we would have been for each other, and we are all of us—including his wife and my husband—still friends.
Also after my mission, I had the completely unexpected and out-of-the-blue experience of falling in love with a woman. After several months of fighting our attraction to one another, we kissed, and then felt so incredibly guilty that we went immediately to the bishop [lay pastor] of our Brigham Young University congregation, who advised us not to live together and told us not to go to the temple for a month. (We were lucky, given that these days kissing someone of the same sex is grounds for expulsion from BYU.) My friend is still single, still active in the church, and, I suspect, still afraid of her feelings. I fared better: I fall much more on the heterosexual end of the continuum, and went on to get married, which I have been for nearly 20 years.
I don’t know how typical I really was, but I felt Mr Mo and I were typical of most active LDS couples: my husband and I were both virgins when we married; we didn’t seem to have any sexual hangups for having been virgins into our mid-20s; we knew that we didn’t have to mess with temple garments [sacred underwear] when having sex. Stories of other LDS people’s newlywed hangups and misconceptions (no pun intended) astonished us.
As with so many other women, I didn’t discover masturbation until after I was married. Interestingly enough, the only time a mormon bishop ever came close to asking me if I masturbated was just before I got married… but all he asked was if I “touched my breasts” when I showered. Ohh, baby, talk about the blind leading the blind! I have to say that I do not miss temple recommend interviews in the slightest. [Note: Mormons have to present a special card as proof of "worthiness" in order to participate in mormon temple rituals; local leaders — such as Mitt Romney back in the day — conduct worthiness interviews prior to issuing such cards.]
All of this history is simply preliminary to my main topic. Mr Mo and I have been inactive [non-participating members] for a few years now. I briefly dabbled with the kinds of adolescent behaviors I had eschewed in my teens, and discovered that the word of wisdom [mormon health law] was totally ingrained: for one thing, it is well-nigh impossible to acquire a taste for alcohol at 40, and as for smoking, forget it! But we both have made a few forays into what the French call la vie naturiste: perhaps as a token of our rebellious spirits, we’ve experimented with nudism a little bit. (When I say “we,” I mean just Mr Mo and I, not our kids.)
Bless the world wide web, which makes it easy to find out where those who extoll the buff hang out: we found a little camp in the NW corner of Massachusetts, but when we arrived, it seemed clear to us that (for however snobby this will sound) we just weren’t blue-collar trailer park nudist-types. So we wended our way to our “Plan B” site, a secluded stretch of riverbank in western Massachusetts. It was a lovely and liberating feeling to stretch out on sun-warmed rocks and watch a flock of bluejays dart about. (I didn’t even know that bluejays came in flocks.)
We went to a more exposed and populated location in Vermont several weeks later, enduring the stares of speedboat owners and occupants, and running into several naked hikers. Our final foray that first summer was to an established naturist camp NW Connecticut with lovely facilities on a private lake. This is a family camp with very strict rules about behavior and decorum; interestingly enough, the muppeteer who plays Oscar the Grouch and Big Bird is supposedly a member of this colony. Let me just say that one has never truly lived, nor truly played volleyball, if one has not played it nude—with a bunch of other nude people.
From volleyball to our other excursions, I have discovered that (1) we are not among “the beautiful people,” but that (2) hardly anyone else is, either. While I’m still a member of The Clan of Flat-Chested Women (with apologies to Terry Tempest Williams), believe me, freely choosing to undress and mingle with similarly imperfect others represented gigantic progress in the way I felt about my body in, say, junior high. (Who here doesn’t recall with loathing being forced to take a shower after gym class? The daily mortification of comparing my undeveloped self with the enviable bodies of my peers was hard to bare—er, bear.)
We stayed clothed until a lengthy trip to southern France, Spain, and Italy in the late summer/early fall of 1999, when Mr Mo and I spent an afternoon at the enclosed “quartier naturiste” in the Mediterranean city of Agde, France. At its peak, this nudist colony hosts more than 30,000 nudists. After passing through an admissions center, one can strip down and then live life quite normally as a nudist—there is a post office, cinema, grocery store, and so forth patronized by people in various states of mostly undress. Mr Mo and I were considerably paler than most of the caucasians around.
I think we stayed clothed all last year. Just a few weeks ago, however, Mr Mo and I spent a few days in Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod. Let me say that for most of my adult life I was quite thin, so to suddenly find myself roughly 50% heavier than my typical adult weight over the past 18 months or so has been most disconcerting. I totally hate the “apron”—the fold of flesh that sags below my navel, a product of a torn muscles during my last pregnancy and a slowing thyroid. (Until the tests came back negative, I was very willing to blame Hashimoto’s thyroiditis for my weight gain, rather than bad eating habits.) So this was the first time I was going to expose my larger self—mostly to myself and Mr Mo, given that the locations where people “go natural” include long stretches of mostly deserted sand dunes and beach.
How did I feel about myself and this body? Well, I still would like to drop a good 30 pounds, that’s for sure. But I realized, too, that I wasn’t — that Mr Mo and I were no longer going naked as a means of showing our freedom from the constraints of Mormonism (if that had ever been our motive), but rather, we were going naked because it felt good and right to feel the sun and the wind and the water on our bare flesh. “Naturism” isn’t something I’d do to shock my conservative parents and siblings and friends, nor am I inclined toward exhibitionism. But in private or among the like-minded, going naked is a way to remember the physical creatures that we are, and a way to combat society’s loud insistence that the totality of our bodies is simply a framework for our genitalia; and it’s a way to come to terms with the images we have our ourselves. But mostly, going naked just feels good.