Imagine you have a jar for jellybeans. I want you to imagine this jar, and it starts out empty. Now, what happens, when you get married, right, is that the first time you have sex, you put a jellybean in that jar. Then, the next time, you put another jellybean in. Another, and another, and another. You keep this up for the first full year of marriage. And then, in the second year, whenever you have sex, you take a jellybean out. You do that for every single time you have sex after that first year.
By the time you die, you won’t have emptied that jar.
Content Warning: I’m going to talk about things I was taught about sex as a Christian fundamentalist.
The above story was told to me by a teacher, in school. It was a geography lesson.
A little history for my childhood, I suppose. At the age of four I started going to school in the Christian Evangelical cult we were in. This was a deeply fundamentalist cult that built its faith statements on text extraction from the Bible that worked a bit like using a sudoku to find phone numbers. I continued in this schooling system from kindergarten through to year 9. In year 8, the church-school’s pastor and principal both left, and in the ensuing fracas, we committed to leave. My family left this church and moved a hundred kilometers away, where we could reconnect with family, and older support networks that my parents had.
I had nothing, no friends, not really, but y’know, I hadn’t been a kid with friends beforehand.
I started on a new school at this point, for the last three years of school. I’ve talked about how difficult it was to be part of this school with no groundings, and no experience having or making friends. It was extremely hard, which is by no means meant to complain about or fix anything, but it’s still part of the context. I was still, at this point, a fundamentalist, and the school was still a Christian, religious school, with a statement of faith and religious staff. We had Bible lessons in the morning and devotions, and we had prayer before events. It wasn’t a fundamentalist school — it taught evolution! — but it was still compatible with those concerns, and if a parent wanted their student pulled out of a topic, they could pull out.
And somewhere along the line, for some reason, in a geography class, a teacher — who I will note took a swing at me on my last day of school! — shared this Pithy Wisdom about what we could look forward to about our future vision of marriage.
Sex is super important to fundamentalist teaching. It needs controlling and suppressing. Sexuality is patrolled aggressively, as is gender. Behaviour that isn’t adequately straight seeming is for correcting, and interests that are perceived as too driven by sex are a problem too. You can probably guess how these controls happen – women are shamed for engaging in sex, especially if they get pregnant. I’m sure I’ve written about this before. But the point is, sex and its control is important.
Yet, sex comes up a lot. Sex usually comes up with teenagers in a sort of gracious, guess-we’ll-talk-about-it-now-way that also wants to avoid any specific terms. There’s all sorts of euphemism and metaphor used for it, and it’s funny hearing people trying to describe the idea of fucking without ever wanting to invoke the word or even that they could be someone who uses the word. Everything is cloaked under stories and metaphor and that meant that even in the post-fundamentalist space, I was hearing stories about how sex was itself, fundamentally, a sin.
But.
But but but.
There was a promise that once you got married, sex would happen. And it’d happen a lot. And it’d be amazing, and also, because you waited, because you held back, you’d be really good at it. You and your partner, both virgins, would work out sex from first principles together, and because you were both just bursting to get into it, you would have a lot of sex. But the n there was this weird follow-on idea that after you had sex, after you finally got to have sex, you’d just… get bored with it and move on. You wouldn’t have sex any more, because you’d had enough sex. Literally your entire sex life was probably going to last for basically one year, and after that point it would just peter out and you wouldn’t care.
This affected me, of course. Especially these days I see in discourse around incel culture the idea that it is reasonable to want to have sex, that whether or not sex is something you can or can’t have is going to affect your mental health and your ability to actualise. That seems good? that seems healthy. Like, maybe your needs and wants change over time and your sperm aren’t a pack of mayflies waiting to burn out in one short year.
I planned at first to spend this article talking about the things I learned and how it related to me. So far I have deleted the paragraph talking about my own sexuality, what it means and how my life experiences have affected it, over, and over, and over again. Some of it is shame, some of it is fear. Some of it is this weird horror at being told, reassuringly, by strangers that hey, it’s okay, it’s okay for things to be this way, or that way. Don’t feel bad. Like just the idea of being reassured makes me feel bad. There’s a depth to this, something wrong that means even talking about the problem is itself a problem. A terminating experience that keeps coming back to that thought about the jellybean jar.
About how I was taught my sexuality should probably have ended when I was twenty two.
And how part of my brain wonders if that’s right.
Like that’s all screwed up right?
And like, it hasn’t gotten better?
I dunno, it hurts.