America Unzipped (8 page)

Posted: Sat., Jan. 13, 2007, 5:08 a.m. Post subject: 40+ day first attempt!

Ok, well..here i go..its 12:06 AM and i just gave in..i'm tired of letting satan bully me around like that.. i wouldn't let any one at school do that! haha! so i'll post at the end of today which is..Saturday January 13th..this weekend will be pretty hard for me cuz i have nothing today plus an extra two days off on monday and tuesday! Pray for me!

But alas…

Posted: Sat., Jan. 13, 2007, 9:26 p.m. Post subject:

what the heck is rong with me..am i an addict? i couldn't last 13 hours!!…i want something i can just (mentally/spiritually) yell in satan's face, and put on little notecards and tape those all over the place, etc.

Joe doesn't waste time on the great masturbation debate or any other apparent paradox. He trims the scriptures down to fit his idea that better sex and more intimacy (as well as better communication and understanding) will make for stronger marriages. Lookit, he says, men have needs. Of the average married couple having sex, 35 percent are having sex twenty-four times per year or less. Every three days men get heavily eroticized and ready to mate, he tells us, because we're making scads of eager sperm during our three-day cycles.

“Why does the male body make millions of new sperm every three days?” Joe's voice drops to a low confessional. “Because not one of them will stop and ask for directions.”

We're all laughing again. Complicating details forgotten. Time for lunch.

T
hough I never actually spoke to masturbation as if it were a person, I sympathize with the tormented boys writing into XXXchurch, and now feel a weird sense of relief. Despite my suspicions that Joe is molding Christian teaching, despite the fact I'm not even a fundamentalist Christian at all, that I do not think masturbation is a sin, or wrong, or even especially important, it is as if Joe Beam has lifted a weight I have been carting around since I was ten years old. So I find myself ignoring my doubts, and the fact that I never followed Joe's rules for self-pleasure. I am clinging to his benediction and hearing what I want to hear.

Like every other Catholic boy, I was tormented by masturbation. During one of St. Mary of the Assumption grade school's periodic outings to group penance, I found myself in a confessional with Father Schultz. Despite the square handkerchief that hung down behind the screen separating his face from mine, I knew he knew who I was. You just don't serve as an altar boy without the priests recognizing your voice. This was why I had previously failed, after several agonized internal debates, to confess to playing with my penis, but now I was determined to let it fly. Nobody had yet told me masturbation was a sin—I had only recently learned the word—but I had a feeling it was because it felt good and I felt naughty doing it and that was a pretty sure sign you were breaking a rule. I didn't figure whacking off was a mortal sin with a no-refund ticket to hell, but it had to be a pretty serious venial sin, and I reckoned you could rack up serious Purgatory time doing it, and so I wanted to make my soul right with God.

I said the word. Blurted it out, really, then held my breath. I thought Father Schultz might gasp or demand extra time to think over the gravity of my transgression and the appropriate punishment. Instead, he assigned five Hail Marys and three Our Fathers and elicited a promise from me to try to avoid my penis in the future.

Whoa! That's it? I thought. I had spent the past several months trying to gin up my courage to confess this horrible thing and Schultzy handed down five Hail Marys and three Our Fathers? I knew standard confessional prescriptions when I heard them; the other boys in my class and I always compared punishments. I must not be the only kid who'd done it. Maybe lots of people lead secret lives. Maybe a sexy parallel universe existed somewhere, like in California, or France.

Still, there was pleasure and there was denial of pleasure, and all you had to do was look at the lives of the saints to know which was better in the eyes of God, and so I continued to wrestle with my demon. Now Joe says forget it, or at least that is what I am hearing him say; I am choosing to ignore the caveats and enjoying a very real sense of relief that, as a nonbeliever, I cannot entirely explain.

I gather this is a common reaction. The rest of the audience, people who do believe in Joe's overall philosophy, are laughing and smiling as they mill around the tent during the break. They weren't unhappy before, and Joe's comedy has certainly contributed to the mood, but I also see a lot of relief. Some of them seem to be experiencing the giddiness you feel emerging safely on the other side after surviving some dangerous close call.

“My whole life I thought it was bad, or wrong, or not Christian,” Maria Ochoa, fifty-two, tells me as her husband, Jose, nods his head vigorously.

“She understands it is not a sin like she thought,” he chimes in. By that he means, not just having sex, but using new positions, “not just in bed” but having sex, well, elsewhere.

“I am very happy,” Maria says, smiling as if she really is very happy. She is in menopause, she thinks, and after all these years “new doors are opening because of what I am learning today.”

At least as much as Joe's lifting their burden of guilt or doubt, couples seem to be appreciating the sexology. “I am not accustomed to hearing a Christian speaker say the words
sex toy
or
vibrator
,” Kym Blackburn, a newlywed here with her husband, Matt, tells me. “I am learning things, like how the female can have orgasms and how it is possible to achieve a second one twenty seconds after the first. We will experiment with that!”

Morris Gregg says Deidra made him attend Joe's seminar. He didn't think he needed the instruction. He's been in the navy for a long time, and in the navy you see a lot of the world and get to know what's what when it comes to sex. He approved of her coming, though.

I get the impression from Morris that his wife has been much more sexually inhibited than he has been, that sin and sex, or at least the variations Morris has suggested, were intertwined in her mind. So Morris approves even if he has to spend a Saturday under a tent at a Sheraton. “It's normal and human,” he says. Besides, if you don't get it from each other, you'll get it someplace else.

It's not that Deidra didn't want to have great sex, she did. But religion held her back until she found the United Church of Christ congregation, where she worships now, while Morris was off on a deployment. “I was raised Lutheran and some of these things were not mentioned. When I joined this church, I was ‘Wow! These Christian ladies do these things? Wow, this is a great church!'”

All this ebullience about sex makes me suspicious of the church and even a little suspicious of Joe. I like his message and I like him, but I can't help wondering if loosening the sexual rules isn't a way to sell religion the way PHE sells products.

“I think our church has been trying to be more open about sex, to be real about it,” one of the seminar organizers, Mary Wadstrom, told me earlier today. Now I am questioning the motivation.

One of the things I could always count on from the Catholic Church was that it was, and still is (officially, anyway), stubbornly unreal about sex. My own feelings about the Catholic Church are complicated, but at least its teachings are consistent. Sex is a necessary evil. Masturbation is wrong, oral sex is wrong, birth control is wrong, lust is weakness. This made us different from, say, the air-conditioned, cocktailing Episcopalians. But Joe is telling us we get to have all the fun of sex—as long as we are married and hetero—with nary a worry, and Joe, like other Protestants, approves of birth control. He doesn't spend much time discussing it because his audiences have the same view and birth control simply isn't a point of controversy. He approves of birth control and oral sex and masturbation.

Joe tells lots of stories about Alice, his daughters, his friends, and often they begin with some version of “Now, my son-in-law, a fantastic wonderful Christian man…” or a friend, “a good Christian man.” I sit in my chair and wonder what this makes me in Joe Beam's eyes. Joe seems like a decent guy. I don't believe everything he believes, but I like him. I wish he still drank, because I think I'd like to go out afterward, sit down, and have a scotch and talk. But I'm pretty sure I am not a good Christian man, according to Joe's definition, because I don't go to church and I grew up Catholic, which I know doesn't really count despite Joe's past ecumenicalism, and I don't think you have to be married to have sex or even be heterosexual either. As he speaks, he talks a lot about “us” and “them” and “they,” and I can't help thinking he is feeding his audience the dangerous notion that fundamentalist Christians are a persecuted minority in a sea of sexual depravity. But how is Joe's advice different from advice you would receive in the secular, non-fundamentalist, nonevangelical world? Sure, masturbation can get pretty complicated with Joe's caveat about lust. And there's the gay thing and the premarital sex thing, but otherwise there doesn't seem to be much difference between “them” and “us.”

Later, Joe will tell me this is true. The us/them distinction is for the audience's comfort, not his. “We might have different values, but I think a great deal of commonality can be found between the secular world and the Christian world on sexuality. Because I am a fundamentalist Christian, I am going to believe that sex outside marriage is wrong. You say, ‘But do you condemn those people?' I will teach them what I believe, but they are adults, and they make their own decisions. And I am not about to be in God's place and decide how God is going to handle things.”

I wonder what Sister Huberta, my fourth-grade teacher, a woman who had taught some of our grandparents and who told us the most gruesome of the stories about saintly suffering in the face of temptation, would say about Joe.

 

W
hen we return from lunch, Joe makes a show of standing at the front of the space, leafing through a stack of index cards on which we have written questions. He leafs and leafs, waiting for silence to fall as we take our seats, then waits a few moments before sighing heavily and saying, “I am looking at your questions, and let me say, you are a sick group of people!”

For just a quick beat, our faces go blank and then we look concerned. Hadn't Joe given us license to be frank? Have we overstepped? Has he lulled us into allowing our dark thoughts to rise through the surface so he can better aim the hammer of righteousness? The moment lasts no more than a second, but the uncertainty and communal fear of being found out is easily the most delicious moment of the day. And then we laugh. Joe is standing up there looking back at us, grinning, and we laugh like we mean it.

The questions aren't surprising. We want to know what to do about premature ejaculation, so Joe launches into a mini-lecture on the parts of the penis, and how a woman can pinch the tip and how a man—a man willing to work at it like an Olympic athlete in training—can use a muscle to stop his own ejaculation. If he masters it, such a man might even become multiply orgasmic himself.

“Can you give us techniques for oral sex?” Joe reads. And then he does, covering details like how a woman can place her tongue on the penis, why we men like it, why it's a bad idea to use lubricated condoms if our wives are going down on us.

He even endorses swallowing. We men can help, he says, by making our semen taste better. Load up on fruit juices or sugary foods. “You can say, ‘I'm eating this cake for you, baby!'”

Morris Gregg, who looks like he has had a few pieces of cake in his life, opens his mouth in surprise, looks at me, sees my mouth is also wide open, and we mutely mime, Did he just say that?

“Now, if you put the penis into your mouth, the best angle is if you are in front of the male facing him,” because this puts your tongue right under his frenulum, which is, Joe tells us, the penis sweet spot.

“Have you heard of the proverbial sixty-nine?” Some, but not most, stare back at Joe with empty faces, which gives him the opportunity to mimic the blank stare, go slack-jawed, and say, “Huh? Is that in Acts?

“It's two people lying beside each other facing the genitalia…Now, I'm trying not to be too graphic here.” Joe uses his arm as a not very accurate model and proceeds to demonstrate how to “create suction and warmth with your mouth and tongue here, and here.” He points to parts of his arm, but I'm lost. Which is the elbow supposed to be? Wait, uh…Joe has moved on, using his hand as a vulva to explain how a man can lick a woman to orgasm.

Somebody has asked how we can create time for sex in a busy life. Joe launches into a scenario out of
Playboy
circa 1968, a piquant tableau featuring makeup and lingerie and high heels and a sexy greeting when we men come home.

“How do you think he's going to react to that?” Joe asks the women.