Virgin, Ho!

Toe,
When I went to church as a young child, I would regularly become light headed and need to go outside. My mother would go and sit with me. I am not sure how often this occured, as I can only clearly remember three times, but it's possible it happened more, or even just twice. You know the way memory can make things blur together or seem separate. I can see clearly my mother sitting with me on the low, brown, flagstone of the railing on the side entryway to the church, asking me what was wrong, telling me to take deep breaths. In subsequent masses, it got so I would both dread and enjoy the way I could feel one of these fainting spells coming on, and the time I would spend outside with my mother. It was always a pleasure to come back into the church and see how much of the mass I had missed.

Being raised Catholic, I had a lot of anti-sex stuff driven into me. This didn't keep me from thinking about sex during mass, as you seem to experience even now, as a man. I think, though, that my feelings were always more deeply tied to guilt. When I was about thirteen or fourteen, when I was at church I used to think about sex, the masturbating I had been doing, and I would feel so awful and sinful and would ask Jesus to forgive me. Then I would look across the church at some very hot Catholic girl and would curse her for being so attractive. I would ask God, Isn't it her fault for making me want her? Why do they dress that way, except to tempt me into sin? I really developed quite a terrible image of women in this way. It took me years, years to get over this sense that women were leading me into sin, and it totally screwed up my social life later in my teenage years. I didn't understand sex, and no one really took the time to explain how sex and desire fit into the scheme of things.

Sex makes a lot more sense since I have grown up and rejected my religious upbringing. On the other hand, I sometimes miss the sense of it being forbidden.

I enjoyed your post about thinking about sex in church, by the way. I wouldn't be surprised if any of those people do those things in private. What would that mean, though? How does it all fit together? To me, Protestants seem to have a healthier spin on sex than Catholics, but maybe that's not true.
Love,
E-Word