I knew I was supposed to be celibate, but Jeeeze-Louise... do I have to stop wanking too?
From an article in The Rolling Stone entiled The Young and the Sexless
...Every Man operates a hot line, 800-NEW-LIFE, for men who've "threatened" their relationships through their use of pornography. When I called to confess that reading about tight nylon shorts in Every Young Man's Battle had aroused me, a professional masturbation counselor named Jason told me that pornography is "probably the number-one cause of divorce." Then he suggested I sign up for a five-day, $1,800 Every Man's Battle workshop (held monthly in hotels around the country) in which I would take classes on shame, "false intimacy" and "temptation cycles" and work with other men in small groups toward "recovery."
...
Hey, I've got my masturbation counselor on speed dial.
but wait, there's more...
I remember when I was a teenager in the 80s, a youth pastor called all of the guys in the youth group to come in the back room and recieve a
"word of knowledge". I should have ran for the door instead...
Once in the room he asked us all to hold hands (which was not so weird for Christian guys to do). Then our spiritual leader told us that God had given him a word of knowledge that there were many boys in the group who were in bondage to the sin of masturbation.
My first thought was that I was now holding the hands of possible wankers. If that were true, I wanted to say to the youth pastor, then why had he asked us to hold hands. Had they wanked recently?
He asked for people to confess and of course nobody did... I certainly wasn't going to. But in that moment, something changed in me. I was down with celibacy, it was good cover for a fifteen year old who probably wasn't going to get laid anyway. I wanted to be pure. But masturbation..??
A little cog of rebellion clicked one notch in my mind. Was this god's devine plan, to rid people of any and all forms of sexual release? I wondered.
After church one day, Dunbar, Power and I sit on a bench and lean back in the sun and watch Sunday morning stroll by. "Cleavage everywhere," notes Dunbar, not disapprovingly. Power holds up his right hand. Wrapped around his wrist, in a figure eight, is a black plastic bracelet. "This," he says, "is a 'masturband.' " One of their friends at college -- Pepperdine University -- came up with the idea.
Now I remember that Silver Ring Thing.
You know. The federally funded travelling Christian abstinance show.
But the masturband...?? Teenage rebellion in reverse?
"Screw you, liberal dad! No more porn under my matress! And mom can stop hiding her hand lotion because I'm never jerking off again!"
As long as you stay pure -- resist jerking off -- you can wear your masturband. Give in, and off it goes, a scarlet letter in reverse. No masturband? No one wants to shake your hand. "It started with just four of us," says Dunbar. "Then there were, like, twenty guys wearing them. And girls too. The more people that wore them, the more people knew, the more reason you had to refrain." Dunbar even told his mother. He lasted the longest. "Eight and a half months," he says. I notice he's not wearing one now. He's not embarrassed. Sexuality, he believes, is not a private matter.
A masturband. Great, so where can we go with this...
If religion is to be kept out of the schools, she says, "shame and conscience" are important tools in its place. But romance, more than anything else, guides her understanding of sexuality. This is what she finds romantic: a father who gives his teenage daughter a "purity" ring, which will be returned on her wedding day and handed to his daughter's new husband, her virginity passed from man to man like a baton.
A purity ring. It's passed like a baton. I like the sound of that. I wonder if it's been on her finger the whole time?
But why stop there?
"Your goal is sexual purity," write Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker. "You are sexually pure when no sexual gratification comes from anyone or anything but your wife." To achieve this, they argue, men must go to a kind of war.
So I'm in a war to get gratification from my wife only. Man I hope she doesn't put on fifty pounds or slip into a coma. What will the warrior do?
Citing Dobson,
ahh, Dobson, the Yoda of Evangelical Jedi jerking...
Citing Dobson, they note the "fact" that men experience a buildup of sperm demanding "release" approximately every seventy-two hours. For single men, wet dreams, if purged of sexual imagery, can act as "God's natural release valve." (Arterburn and Stoeker believe you can actually train yourself to remove the lust from such dreams.)
"Arousal... heh! Orgsam... heh! A Jesus Jedi craves not these things!"
They encourage making lists of "areas of weakness." They seem particularly concerned with shorts: "nubile sweat-soaked girls in tight nylon shorts"; "female joggers in tight nylon shorts"; "young mothers in shorts, leaning over to pull children out of car seats." To avoid these temptations, men must train themselves to "bounce" their eyes off female curves.
"Many such lists have I, young padawan. Bounce your eyes off female curves, you must."
They recommend memorizing the locations of sexy billboards so that you can look away and switching your TV to ESPN or Fox News if a tempting commercial comes on the screen.
"If sexual thoughts enter your mind, watch Fox news you must!"
And there's always Scripture. The authors hold up the books of Joshua and Ezekiel as armor against non-Christian women. "Mixture," they write, "can destroy a people."
Avoid the unsaved woman, a raging whore she is...
Yeah, I remember first encounter with a "worldly girl" from new York City. I had traveled abroad for some week long seminar. She said she had to go back to her hotel room to get her purse or something. I thought it was a clever ruse to get me to take a shower with her.
It wasn't. She just picked up her purse and we went back to join the others... or maybe I was just too geeked out to pick up on the subtle signals that seculars use to get sex. God thing I was too busy bouncing my eyes off her curves.
But can we be safe once we're in marriage?
They also offer a two-day "outpatient program" for women, Every Heart Restored, to help wives deal with their husbands' depravity...
Ahh the depravity... what's a godly man to do?
Husband and wife must play carefully scripted roles. "True manhood," promises one Christian manhood guide, gets "polished by the hand of God."
Say again? Did he say my manhood gets polished by the hand of God??
"Yea... yea...
"heh heh... polished...
"heh.
"By the ... heh... hand of God"
"That ROCKS!"
Dunbar tells me on the phone one day, "that men who have sex before marriage are something like 600 percent more likely to experience a drop-off of sexual passion once they are married."
600 percent! Wow, that's like every man on earth plus the next 6 earths!
We must protect our spiritual warrior men from the temptations of the flesh. There is but one solution. Pure men are the backbone of our society. To save our males, we must impose strict guidlines for our females...
hey, the burka is the new bikini, dude!
