But there is one area that is such a sore spot, such a bloody battleground for the devout--sexuality. I can remember it as if were yesterday, my gay classmate in college screaming at me: "The problem with you Christians is that you guys are so repressed!" During that time, I had to agree he was right. I was so obsessed about sex, and yet I was so uptight about it. I was obsessed with sex because of the culture that tolerated sex-driven media, and let's not forget my raging hormones reinforced by being around other normal college kids who were just as obsessed about sex as I was. On the other hand, I was uptight about it as a result of my religious upbringing. In fact, I never had my first kiss until after college, with my first real girlfriend whom I ended up marrying three years later.
Hmm... wait. No, I never kissed a girl when I was in school not because of the religion, but because I was a loser when it came to girls. But that's another story. Even so, religion didn't help. I had blown off some girls during that time who were into me because I knew they were the kinds I'd end up sleeping with. And much as the Dark Other would have loved that, part of me went out of the way to deliberately sabotage prospective hook-ups and always succeeded. Yup, my struggles with the Dark Other went way back, though on different issues.
So the issue then was sex, as it had always been for Christians. I don't get it. There are lots of issues that could occupy your average student Bible study, but one way or another it always goes back to sex. Even when I was still a kid who didn't even know what sex entailed, I already knew the party line:
Don't have sex. Sex is impure. Unless you're married. It's a sin against God.
Got it.
Of course, kids can be pretty enthusiastic about things they don't understand. As far as i remember, I was a good Christian kid who looked down on all my classmates from grade school who got pregnant in high school and were now officially consigned to the dark fate of working either as starving factory workers or semi-rich prostitutes, or even not working at all, while trying to feed noisy, stinky kids that walked around naked in public. I thought they deserved this fate because they were sinners. (I still think they deserve this fate, though for a different reason--they were too stupid to use protection.)
In retrospect, I was a judgmental smart-ass. You don't have a right to be this judgmental unless you've ever been in a room with a naked, drop-dead gorgeous girl--and you walked away. But the judgmental attitude was there as a defense mechanism against the simple truth that I had no idea how I would fare against temptation. If i were, in fact, in a a situation where I could sleep with a girl, would I be able to walk away and uphold the lofty standards passed on to me by my revered elders in church and big brothers and big sisters in my Christian youth organization in college? Probably not. Did not Christ say the spirit was willing buth the flesh was weak? The Sex Elves in a Japanese manga I once read state it rather more bluntly: "You're mouth says 'No, no' but you're body says 'Yes! Yes! Yes!'"
To illustrate how messed up I was, I'll tell you the story about the time I experienced my first (and only?) phone sex. One time I picked up the phone and there was a girl moaning on the line. I was like, "Er...how can I help you?" And she went, "Would you like to help me come?" while moaning between phrases.
So what did i do? A normal guy would have either put the phone down if he wasn't into that or gone ahead and had phone sex with her. But my stupid heart bled for this poor sinful soul who must have gone through a lot in life for her to seek solace and self-affirmation by having phone sex with total strangers. Next thing you know I was asking her about her life and she was telling me about her parents who didn't care about her, her lousy childhood, her use of sex to find temporary gratification in a hollow, empty world. And then I was telling her about Jesus Christ and how God could fill the hole she had in her heart. I'm not sure, but I think I even spent some time praying with her. Finally she got impatient and dropped the clinching question: "Are you gonna help me come or not?"
"Okay," I said, and proceeded to touch myself.
It went terribly, of course. I was already nineteen and had heard of references to phone sex, but I was so religiously repressed that I didn't really know what it entailed. I didn't know you were supposed to roleplay and say naughty things. Instead I was just moaning on the phone as she was. I had an orgasm in thirty seconds.
"Why'd you stop?" she asked
"I...uhmm...kinda came."
"So soon?"
With this challenge to my manhood, I immediately forgot about our intimate emotional sharing and just fired back, "Serves you right, bitch!"
i'm pretty comfortable telling this story now because I now have the gift of hindsight. I know now that people my age then were struggling with worse things. But back then, i felt so disappointed in myself for failing to turn Miss Phone Sex's heart to God and even indulging her. I was weeping to God and asking for forgiveness for the next two hours. That was how young Christians of my generation were wired. Our minds knew about sex. Our bodies wanted it. But our spiritual conditioning was totally against it. So when I was out there drowning in guilt over having phone sex, I thought I was the most despicable sinner in the world.
Fast forward to what I know now: I now have the knowledge that I was pretty naive.
By the time I graduated, i knew ten people in my Christian organization in college who were having sex. And that's only the ones I knew about.
A girl I was interested in told me she didn't want to get into a relationship after her recent one. When we ended up becoming friends, i found out why. She was pretty guilty for having been sexually active with the last one.
A pastor I knew admitted in a Christian conference that 60% of Christian couples he interviewed in pre-marriage counseling admitted to engaging in pre-marital sex.
"Off the record," a Christian guy told me once, "the marriage certificate is just a piece of paper. For practical reasons, I can't marry her yet. But in my heart, we are married. So we make love. I'm not ashamed to admit it before you and before God."
Interesting sentiment. It was all off the record, of course. Officially, he still maintained the "No to Pre-marital sex" party line in Bible studies. I think his girlfriend even used to support the campaign, "True Love Waits."
The problem I have with Christian culture in the Philippines is that it has no idea what's going on. For the most part, this is everyone's fault because everyone maintains the charade. Bible studies discussing sex take the tone of "preaching to the choir" because everybody agrees with the preacher, but not everybody is abstaining from sex. This creates a culture with a gross misconception of itself. This is a common enough phenomenon in anthropology. One principle I learned there is that how a culture views itself can be radically different from how it really is. This is certainly the case with Filipino Christianity. Christians think that Christians in general are virginal and sexually conservative. This is reinforced by the conservative line that gets affirmed even by people who are not sexually conservative in action. Everyone else thinks everyone else is so pure. They think, the "impure ones" are the exception not the rule. The "impure ones" themselves look at themselves as the aberration.
Open your eyes, people. Christian youth are screwing all over the place.
I'm not saying pre-marital sex is good or bad. That's a totally different issue, one that is complicated and demands dialogue from everyone in the community. What I'm saying is, let's cut the crap and admit what's going on. Pre-marital sex is alive and well in the city of God, and unless we start admitting that, we would never be able to start an honest dialogue about this issue. You know what they say, if you don't admit there's a problem, you're never going to fix it. As long as we are ignorant of the real trends in Christian youth culture, as long as we think sexual activity in Christian yoth circles is limited to the rebellious few, ill-advised sexual activity among Christian youth leading to pregnancy, disease, or a broken heart will go on unmanaged.