So you might wonder why a sex and relationships blogger would spend so much time thinking about the origins and stipulations of celibacy and abstinence in western and middle-eastern civilization. The short answer, of course, is no further away than your nearest “just say no” poster.

To find the long answer, however, we have to first start asking what leads to those posters in the first place. Which is just one reason why I’m interested.

You probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn it all goes back to ancient and near-universal beliefs that when it comes to sex men are weak while women are strong. You probably would be surprised to learn that men’s sex drives were believed to be weaker than womens — that while sexual self-restraint was believed to be difficult for men it was considered impossible for women!

Elizabeth Abbott, in A History of Celibacy posits why early Christians encouraged women to cloister themselves:

When early Christianity urged its women to pledge perpetual virginity, it had a more compelling motive than their spiritual righteousness. What was also at stake was the shaky spiritual righteousness of Christian males, who would otherwise succumb to mortal temptation in the face of the burning female eroticism that had so fatally tempted males ever since Adam. The solution, obviously, was female chastity, though it required enormous personal sacrifices from all women, including childlessness.

...

Except for St. Augustine, whose heavy personal baggage included his decades-long indulgence in sexual liaisons, the Church Fathers believed women were lustier than men. From this premise (shared by most cultures from the Aztec to the Chinese), it followed that a woman who successfully repressed her innately lascivious nature was holy indeed. Furthermore, her steadfast celibacy protected men from temptation, making female virgins literally God-sent.

pg. 92. (Emphasis mine)

As Abbott dryly puts it, the contemporaries of early nuns who cloistered themselves (or as in the case of one Alexandra actually buried herself in a tomb where she was fed by friends and family) were encouraged to do so because…

[their] contemporaries considered men to be the victims of women’s wiles and so applauded Alexandra’s solution as admirably correct rather than — as we might consider it today — neurotically self-effacing.

...

Alexandra went further, sacrificing her life to a religiously inspired, altruistic zeal to save lustful young men by removing the object of temptation — herself.

Yes, yes, of course it’s all blaming the victims but look at how completely reversed the blame has become! Way back then? Folks blamed ordinary women for not only cheerfully having sex with anyone they could get their hands on but for actively seducing them — a blind animal enthusiasm role modern stereotype assigns to men. Today? Folks no longer blame women for active enticement but for failing to tame the animal enthuisams of modern men.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, sure, but definitely worth thinking. Next time someone uses claims about “traditional religious values” to upbraid you about your animal enthuisasms ask them to tell you exactly which values they have in mind.

AlwaysArousedGirl illustrates each of her posts with a photo she takes in her garden.

I was out the other night as it was snowing, looking for an HNT photo opportunity. This was before I got the brainstorm that led to this week’s HNT photo proper.

Anyway it was so beautiful out under our big Douglas fir with the snow laying lightly on the understory plants. If I’d had more time, and better light, and if the kids hadn’t been running wild in the street with their snow saucers I’d given them the photographic attention they deserved.

All the more reason to appreciate AAG’s photos.

Oh, and about the bare feet. Growing up in the foothills of the Great Smokey Mountains I often delivered my paper route barefoot through November. I think old habits just die hard.

So I know, I know, everyone up to and including the New York Times has been going on and on about how soggy the Northwest has been this year. Yeah, yeah, we get a lot of rain.

What’s less known is that the Northwest also hold the record for snowfall — 1,140 inches at Mt. Baker in 1998-99, 1,122 inches at Mt. Ranier in 1971-72.

Well, we don’t usually get snow down here in the lowlands (see rain, above) but it’s been an unusual month. I’m just eyeballing and here in town I’m seeing… maybe… two inches. Max! (But then, as you can probably tell if you look closely, it’s bloody cold!)

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

So! The other day I asked a question about abstinence before and after marriage. The general consensus both here in comments and elsewhere boiled down to “figleaf, are you mental?” (Short answer: if I’m going to go around reading about Augustine then probably yes.)

Well, via Amanda Marcotte and Self-portrait as… the question comes up again, this time in the context of polygamy.

Maggi, who belongs to a Mississippi-based group of practicing polygamists, wrote this account in an internet chatroom of her life as a “sisterwife” in one of the more extreme polygamist groups

We all live in the same house. We have a bunk-bed double on the bottom and single on the top. Husband, first wife and the “ON” wife sleep on the bottom and the other two “OFF” wives sleep above. We find this very intimate as we all are sleeping in the same bed though on different levels and we can still feel and hear what is happening when sex happens in our bed.

...

Sex, now that is the big one. In our household we have one week (but only on six days we can have sex with him) sleeping with our husband and three weeks off. Our first wife has the Saturdays with our husband in addition to her week so she gets four extra days with him in each cycle. That’s why she sleeps on the lower bunk every night with the “ON” wife. In reality we have sex in an average week about two to three times in the six days we can have sex with our husband. Though it’s not totally satisfying (two or three times a month) for us we do find that having a week with our husband is the better method then the one-night method used by others.

...

As for sex, no we don’t get very much actual sex, ie, our husband entering us, but he does work very hard and sometimes quite late so a wife cannot expect him to perform every night.

From the UK’s The Guardian but allegedly based on a polygamy chatroom post. See the Guardian’s version here.

So there you have it! Polygamy not only leaves the male polygamist worn out it seriously deprives his partners.

Mark Twain discussed this a century and a half ago

Solomon, who was one of the Deity’s favorites, had a copulation cabinet composed of seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. To save his life he could not have kept two of these young creatures satisfactorily refreshed, even if he had fifteen experts to help him. Necessarily almost the entire thousand had to go hungry for years and years on a stretch. Conceive of a man hardhearted enough to look daily upon all that suffering and not be moved to mitigate it.

...

Now if you or any other really intelligent person were arranging the fairnesses and justices between man and woman, you give the man a one-fiftieth interest in one woman, and the woman a harem.

Letters from the Earth

Note: lest you think the “sister-wives” could always take matters into their own or each other’s hands…

No, we don’t have physical relationships between sisterwives because its not permitted in our religion. We sleep with our arms on top of our bed covers so it doesn’t happen. And in any case if any wife was foolish enough to try all would feel it in our bed; a simple rule – no touching or kissing in bed or at any other time between one woman and another sisterwife and another.

Anyway I think it’s the first discussion of polygamy I’ve ever seen that acknowledges the possibility of women’s libidos, let alone the sexual dissatisfaction that’s going to be inherent in almost any polygamous relationship.

Ok, so early last summer, during the big radical-feminist/blowjob kerfuffle, one thread of the argument said that, basically, radicals should be celibate or, if they just can’t give up sex, lesbians not because they’re not interested in men but in hopes that if all women would just go on strike like that then men would surrender and do… um… whatever it was they wanted. Like, um, stop trying to trade things for pussy, I guess… in exchange for pussy. Anyway, call that a Lysistrata-based use of women’s sexuality to advance a political agenda.

Then consider Lysistrata’s opposite, the “Quiverfull” fertility cult wherein (mainly) evangelical women attempt to stay as pregnant as possible in order to fulfill a Bible verse that goes “The fruit of the womb is a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, So are the children of one’s youth. Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them.”

“Our bodies are meant to be a living sacrifice,” write [Quiverfull authors Rick and Jan] Hess. Or, as Mary Pride, in another of the movement’s founding texts, The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality, puts it, “My body is not my own.” This rebuttal of the feminist health text Our Bodies, Ourselves is deliberate. Quiverfull women are more than mothers. They’re domestic warriors in the battle against what they see as forty years of destruction wrought by women’s liberation: contraception, women’s careers, abortion, divorce, homosexuality and child abuse, in that order.

Here too people are using either their own or other people’s sexuality as instruments. Have I ever mentioned that the only long-term-viable reason to have sex is because you want to have sex? Or that the only reason not to have sex is because you don’t want to? Having sex (or not having it) in order to get something else is, um, perverted.

Some time back in the 1970s I was told a no-doubt apocryphal story about how one of Stalin’s (or it might have been Lenin’s) spies returned from an expedition to the U.S. and warned the Soviet leader not to mess with Americans because we were so tough we ate desserts made from frozen cream and that we ate it in January!!!!

If only Stalin (or maybe Lenin) had listened to that spy we wouldn’t have had that messy cold war or anything.

Assuming the story is even true, of course.

Around the same time I heard a very similar story about one of Hitler’s spies, or maybe just one of his generals, making a similar determination about American toughness after watching a football game.

Again, assuming its even true.

Fast forward fifty to seventy years to something a bit better documented that reveals something else about national character.

Involving women’s underwear used as implements of torture used by American interrogators against prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. (A sentence in the English language that I wouldn’t have imagined could have been used outside a Monty Python skit prior to the election of our current Administration.)

Twisty Faster of I blame the patriarchy raises the question and puts it in, well, the best possible light possible when she says

While is true that most of the prison photos show women’s underwear used in conjunction with one or more of the other more sadistic tactics, few media reports fail to accord the undies at least equal billing. A military CID caption of [an] Abu Ghraib photo reads “Detainees [sic] is handcuffed in the nude to a bed and has a pair of panties covering his face.” Here the syntax reveals that “handcuffed in the nude” is deemed the equivalent of “panties covering his face.” Now consider, if you will, the caption I found accompanying [a] picture at notinourname.net: “A naked prisoner, chained to his matress-less [sic] bunk, is forced to wear women’s underwear on his head.” Not “a naked prisoner, women’s underwear on his head, is shackled spread-eagle to a bare bunk.” By virtue of its position as the sentence’s predicate, the brutality of the panties is clearly the statement the caption’s author wishes to make about subject, revealing, I contend, the aspect of the photograph to which the writer has experienced the greater emotional response.

Read Twisty’s quotes in context here.

By the way, Twisty’s post isn’t about prisoner’s reactions to women’s underwear, and neither is mine. Instead it’s about our reactions.

I am not arguing that forcing prisoners of war to wear women’s underwear on their heads is not an act of torture. Clearly it is torture. What interests me is the reason it is torture. How is it that nobody has anything but the utmost sympathy for a fellow shown with a pair of girly skivvies on his head? By what demented code does a swatch of soft pink cotton become an instrument of torment? What makes this particular cruelty stand out from a field of persecutions so squalid they can only have proceeded from massively deranged minds crammed with snuff films and bongwater?

It’s a pretty good point. One needn’t be a panty fetishist to wonder exactly what the big deal might be. A couple of possibilities come to mind:

- Everybody but Twisty and I know something that makes it make total sense to emphasize underwear over, say, accidentally murdering a prisoner and then keeping their body packed in ice till you figure out how to dispose of them in a non-incriminating fashion? (Another photo on the NotInOurName page referenced above.)

- We’ve make up so many stories about the “otherness” of Afghan or Iraqi men that we imagine they have superstitious aversions about contact with women that go beyond the simple annoyance of having anything stuffed over your head while you’re being tortured?

- Even six years into the new century journalists, even progressive ones at Salon.com, are still all tee-hee about women’s undies?

- Even six years into the new century journalists imagine their readers are still all tee-hee about women’s undies?

- Everybody but Twisty and I know that panty fetishism is so prevalent around the world that they just get off on talking about it?

- Or are even progressives just so baked about gender stereotypes that putting women’s panties on men… even on their heads… is such an affront that, given a choice, real men would rather have their lower bodies ripped into by police dogs? (Yet another photo from the same NotInOurName page)

Character, meet character.

Imagine lying together
Restless
Legs achy from being out and on your feet all day
Sleepless
Horny

Familiar seduction has a pattern
We’re all told so
“Snuggle close, spooning your front to their back”
“Move on to caressess”
“Make your partner feel special”
“Make sure your partner’s in the mood”

All true, of course
Which is why
Mixing it up works wonders
And so

Imagine lying together
Restless
Legs achy from being out and on your feet all day
Sleepless
Horny

Familiar seduction has a pattern
We’re all told so
Snuggle up close, spooning your back to their front
Move on to caressing… yourself
Make your self feel special
Make sure your partner knows you’re in the mood
Through tiny wriggles and shakes transmitted through your body
Let your partner wonder what you’re up to

Let your partner’s hand touch your shoulder
And feel its motion
Let your partner’s hand travel down your arm
And feel forearm muscles flexing
Let your partner’s hand travel to your wrist
And hand
To cover your fingers
Let your partner’s hand follow your hand’s movements

Let your partner’s hand replace your own as you withdraw it
To begin your own discovery
Of their own readiness

Just so you know, some enterprising spammer has started plugging random news clippings into comments here on RAS. Since the spam isn’t really following any kind of predictable pattern the only way to detect it is by hand. That’s forced me to turn comment moderation back on, at least temporarily. Please accept my apologies.

So here’s what that means for commenters: your comments will be stored but unpublished until I can unblock them. I’ll unblock them, though, as quickly and as often as I can. And of course I’ll reply to each comment as best I can.

I’ll go back to normal comments when (or if) the spam-fest dies down.

William Saletan of Slate Magazine just wrote an article identifying parallels between contraception and obesity control.

The point of birth control is fun without consequences. You still want sex, and you still get it, but we tinker with the process so you don’t get pregnant. Last week, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops complained that separating sex from procreation violates nature. Of course it does. Nature put the fun and the consequences together, but for reasons that no longer apply. Nature has produced a creature clever enough to take nature apart. We get the orgasms without the organisms.

Why not try the same with food? Keep the fun and lose the consequences. We invented birth control; why not girth control?

See the quotes in context here.

While the tone of article is in very poor taste. (Saletan sees both pregnancy and obesity as consequences of having too much “fun” whereas sex can be anything but fun) but the parallels are sound.

I’m particularly curious why contemporary moralists, especially religious moralists, have so little to say on the subject of eating when they’ve had so very much to say about sex.

Any conceivable claim you could make about natural vs. unnatural interventions into sex, any talk of cheapenings, or alienations, or reductionisms, or degradations, or violations of natural orders, or, responsibilities or, especially, any conversations about dignity must hold equally for food. And yet the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (for instance) is mum.

As Saletan says, whereas tradition provided only for abstinence, modern science has provided barrier methods, pharmaceutical blocks, and even surgical interventions to remove offending tissue or to prevent its formation to begin with. If one’s bad the other ought to be equally so. And yet…

[Note: Please don’t construe anything in this post as an acceptance or rejection of the controversial issue of weight or weight management. The closest it comes is a abstract-level question about the way we discuss that acceptance or rejection. —fl]

Just to put things in perspective, while sex is wonderful, going skiing with your seven- and ten-year-old children on a beautifully clear, cold afternoon just as the sun is beginning to set and a front is beginning to move in is an indescribable delight.