The Christmas Story (Explicit)

Come, abide within me;
Let my soul, like Mary,
Be Thine earthly sanctuary.
-Gerhard ter Steegen (1729)

How many December sermons did I sit through thinking (or trying not to think) about sex? Year after year, I would ask myself if I would have been willing to be God's surrogate womb. I would sit at my piano singing the hymn above and imagine Jesus taking shape deep inside me until he was ready for me to reveal him to the world. Because the ultimate proof of God's favor would be motherhood. Children are his reward.

Spirit and flesh get all mixed up in Christianity, especially at Christmas. Christmas is about sex and procreation, an observation Alice Wendleken tries to avoid with pursed lips in The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. Considering the brevity of the Biblical nativity story, the number of  lines devoted to the reproductive organs is quite astounding.

Luke starts the story with the tale of an elderly priest, Zach, wordlessly impregnating his wrinkled wife, and not speaking to her for the next nine months (a punishment from God for questioning an angel). I don't know whether to read that as maddening or darkly comedic. Luke specifies that this couple is "very old". I try not to imagine a post-menopausal arthritic granny pushing a healthy boy out of her pelvis because the story says she considered pregnancy an honor, but my acquaintance with birth makes the picture all too vivid. A miracle, perhaps, but what was God thinking?

With one pregnancy accomplished, next God sends Gabriel to find Joseph's fiancee at her home in Nazareth. Mary is creeped out at being called "highly favored", but Gabe assures her that God approves of her so much that she is going to conceive a boy who will be king. Strange because the Jews don't have kings anymore.

Mary has had some sex education, and she already knows Joseph doesn't fit into this narrative. Gabriel's message is confusing to her. "How--?"

"The Holy Spirit's shadow will come over you, and the baby will be called God's son."

The Holy Spirit's shadow. That's some slang she hadn't heard before. She'll look it up in Urban Dictionary later. Right. "Well, I'm God's servant girl. Sounds good." Gabriel's work is done. He disappears.

(I always wondered if Mary had an orgasm when God impregnated her. I knew I shouldn't wonder that, but... And then when I was 21, I watched mesmerized at the Sight & Sound Theater's "Miracle of Christmas" show as they used music, colored lights, and a bit of drama to portray Mary having an ecstatic moment of, um, intimacy, with God? At least I wasn't the only one.)

Mary must have been ovulating when Gabe visited. And as soon as she misses a period, Mary leaves, too. Teenager or not, she takes off on a road trip to Judea to visit her aged but pregnant Cousin Lizzie for a few months. Cousin Zach never says a word.

And then Mary hikes back up to Galilee with God's son. Apparently before Lizzie gives birth to baby John. On the day all the friends and relations gather to celebrate cutting off a piece of John's baby penis, old Zach gets his speech back again. The story goes all over Judea.

We aren't told exactly when conscientious Joseph hears that his fiancee has cheated on him, but Matthew tells us he's pretty shaken up. They should probably break up.

But another angel shows up, this time in Joseph's troubled dreams. "Don't be afraid to marry Mary. The baby's from the Holy Spirit." Joseph takes his dreams seriously, as we find out in the next chapter, so when he wakes up, he brings Mary to live with him. But, and Matthew is explicit, they still don't have sex. Call it married, call it engaged, call it cohabitation, there is no intercourse going on. No orgasms till well after Jesus makes his debut. I can only hope Mary wasn't as horny as I was during my first pregnancy. Maybe Joseph knew he simply couldn't compete.

And then, they're traveling back to Judea--Mary's third cross-country trip this pregnancy and supposedly an 8-10 day walk. And you thought Jesus suffered for our sins... Small wonder the woman's ready to pop when they arrive! The New Testament doesn't mention a donkey, though he eventually became part of the legend. Maybe because worshipers couldn't handle Christmas, picturing a woman in her third trimester trekking across Palestine with a shy carpenter from Galilee who hadn't made it past second base yet.

Pastors always try to make the stable seem romantic. Behold the Savior's humble origins! But it wasn't a baby whose stretched-open vagina and torn perineum was exposed to the dust and dung. It wasn't a baby whose breasts swelled hard and hot, whose nipples cracked when her milk came in. Was squeamish Joseph her only companion? An observant Jewish husband isn't permitted to look at his wife's intimate parts during labor. He's not allowed to so much as hold her hand while she is niddah. Holy fucking mother of God!

(One pastor actually preached that Mary experienced no pain during Jesus' birth. He based this belief on an obscure verse in Isaiah. I adored that pastor, but I just couldn't believe him, even though I wanted it to be true, for Mary's sake as well as my own.)

We leave Mary still bleeding and cramping in a barn with her infant in a feed trough (attachment parenting wasn't in vogue that year!) and move on to shepherds hearing angels, Magi seeing stars, and all the babies and toddlers in Bethlehem being gruesomely murdered thanks to some rabbis who told Herod what their old scrolls said. Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men; Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

The next part of the story is in the "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure" style. According to Matthew, the new family escapes to Egypt to live as refugees until King Herod dies. They come back later to settle in Nazareth. In Luke's version, they cut off a piece of the baby's penis the week after his birth, and name him according to the angel's instructions. Mary is still niddah for several more weeks. When the flow of lochia finally stops, Luke has them go up to the Temple in Jerusalem to sacrifice some birds. He concludes,

When Joseph and Mary had done everything required by the Law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee to their own town of Nazareth.

Now do the newlyweds finally get to have sex?? Roman Catholic teaching, of course, holds that Mary remained chaste for the rest of her life, which is good for teaching abstinence but doesn't jibe with other New Testament references to Jesus' siblings.

I can't help thinking that the Church was spinning the story from the first. If Theotokos (an Eastern Orthodox title for Jesus' mother) is portrayed as the ideal woman--perfectly submissive, chaste yet available, uncomplaining and undemanding, Joseph is also the perfectly faithful man: conscientious, magnanimous, trusting and self-disciplined to a fault.

Interestingly, Luke and Matthew are the only New Testament writers to say a word about Mary's sex life. Mark begins his gospel with Jesus as an adult while John speaks in esoteric language about light, flesh, and "the word". The Apostle Paul never mentions Mary, saying merely that Jesus was born of "a woman". As if he could have been born any other way...

Have a Fucking Merry Christmas!

Virginity and Vaginas

What is virginity?

It is a physical state, right? A clear line as yet uncrossed. A "before" condition that can be "lost" accidentally, "given" intentionally, or "taken" from an unwilling victim. A status applicable equally to deserving men or women, boys or girls.

Glad you asked! Science can give us no true medical definition of virginity. It's actually quite an imprecise concept, carrying many different meanings in different times and different places. (One medieval philosopher distinguished between four different kinds of virgins.) Virginity is difficult to specify and impossible to prove, not that that keeps people from attempting it!  And it is revealing that no one ever suggests that males be tested for, or offer proofs of, their virgin status. Because virginity has historically been almost exclusively a female characteristic.

Over the centuries, there was a lot of talk about hymens, (especially after they were identified by anatomist Hilkiah Crooke in the 17th century) but this tissue at the base of the vagina is not consistent enough to use as proof of anything. The tissue currently known as the hymen imperceptibly changes shape on its own as a girl develops, it doesn't always bleed when stretched, it often expands the vaginal opening on its own before a girl's first penetrative intercourse, and contrary to popular belief it neither "pops" nor "breaks". Hymens vary in shape (physicians identify five primary shapes), thickness, durability, flexibility, and resilience. To promote a more accurate view of the function of the hymen, the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education has renamed this body part the "vaginal corona".

Men evidently liked connecting the hymen to lack of sexual experience because it played into the women-as-chattel concept, and it excused rough first-time sex. According to Deuteronomy, blood-stained wedding night linens could save a woman's life in ancient Israel. If her parents could not produce these tokens of her sexual "purity" (essential for the pedigree of her offspring), she could legally be stoned to death by the men of her city. Dr. Iman Bibars, working from Cairo, Egypt to empower all voiceless women, knows how deeply these cultural patterns affect today's values, "The honor of the family and of the men are in between the legs of the woman."

Women have suffered so much physical and psychological pain on account of this part of their bodies invisible to themselves that some resort to expensive and invasive hymenorrhaphy surgeries to rebuild "breakable" hymens that will ensure "virginal" blood on the sheets. They use birth control pills to coordinate menstruation with honeymoon sexual activity, or invest in discreet fake virginity kits. Others declare themselves "born-again virgins", as good as new.

Jessica Valenti writes in her excellent book, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women:

"I've become convinced that virginity is a sham being perpetrated against women…"

"[W]hen I argue for an end to the idea of virginity, it's because I believe sexual intimacy should be honored and respected, but that it shouldn't be revered at the expense of women’s well-being, or seen as such an integral part of female identity that we end up defining ourselves by our sexuality."

As a young woman, much of my value was framed by my sexual in-experience. Sheltering—often to the point of isolation—was needed to maintain my "purity" (hymen? vaginal corona?) intact. This high value on sexual naivete motivated the bans on kissing, on dating, on wearing swimsuits or slacks, on walking unaccompanied down our straight two-lane country road to the stop sign visible from our mailbox.

When I was a young woman of twenty, my dad bought a round-trip ticket to unexpectedly accompany me on my connecting flight from O'Hare Airport so that I would not go rebelliously astray on a trip home from Oklahoma City. At the time I was more than mystified. I was being stalked by my own father to prevent me from going where, with whom? I had the uneasy feeling that the whole situation was somehow related to my sexuality, which I already sought to repress as much as possible.

The perceived state of my vagina supposedly increased my value to God, to my family, and to potential mates. I have been to weddings where the bride's father bragged publicly that (as far as he knew) she was a virgin while the guests sat uncomfortably, trying to focus their thoughts on the floral arrangements, the church pews, or anything but the girl's genitalia. The groom's parents never commented on the experience of their son's penis.

Again, Jessica Valenti:

"Present-day American society—whether through pop culture, religion, or institutions—conflates sexuality and morality constantly. Idolizing virginity as a stand-in for women’s morality means that nothing else matters—not what we accomplish, not what we think, not what we care about and work for. Just if/how/whom we have sex with. That’s all."

It is time to abolish the virginity concept. As Emily Maynard put it in her article "The Day I Turned in my V-Card", I'm done enforcing oppression in the name of purity.

Characterizing a woman (making a judgment of her moral character) as a virgin or an ex-virgin tells us nothing and too much at the same time. This sexual "status" doesn't tell us if a girl feels safe and respected or is being coerced and abused. It doesn't tell us if she understands how her body works or what makes her feel good. It doesn't tell us if she can identify healthy relationships, if she knows how to say no. It does not tell us if she is strong or weak. It tells only that someone is concerned with what has been in her vagina and when.

Once upon a time, not many decades ago, a pregnant woman could not teach school once she began to "show". Here in America's Heartland, even as a married woman there was shame in being exposed as a sexual being. Let's walk away from shaming women for their sexuality.

Let's discuss responsibility. Let's shine a light on abuse.

Let's teach young men about respect and consent. Let's teach young women about their right to choose boundaries that are healthy for them.

And let's stop determining the quality of a woman's heart and mind by the experience of her vagina. 




For more reading:

• Virgin: The Untouched History—non-fiction by Hanne Blank
• The Abstinence Teacher—a novel about Christianity and American sexuality, by Tom Perrotta
• Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex—a feminist history of the sexual revolution by Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs
• Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls—a therapist describes the pressure girls are under to be sexy but not sexual, by Mary Pipher

Strange Stories of the Bible: Holy Priests & Perfectionism

Rules for Priests

[Priests] must not marry women defiled by prostitution or divorced from their husbands, because priests are holy to their God. Regard them as holy, because they offer up the food of your God. Consider them holy, because I the Lord am holy—I who make you holy.

If a priest’s daughter defiles herself by becoming a prostitute, she disgraces her father; she must be burned in the fire.

The high priest, the one among his brothers who has had the anointing oil poured on his head and who has been ordained to wear the priestly garments, must not let his hair become unkempt or tear his clothes. He must not enter a place where there is a dead body. He must not make himself unclean, even for his father or mother, nor leave the sanctuary of his God or desecrate it, because he has been dedicated by the anointing oil of his God. I am the Lord.

The woman he marries must be a virgin. He must not marry a widow, a divorced woman, or a woman defiled by prostitution, but only a virgin from his own people, so that he will not defile his offspring among his people. I am the Lord, who makes him holy.

The Lord said to Moses, “Say to Aaron: ‘For the generations to come none of your descendants who has a defect may come near to offer the food of his God. No man who has any defect may come near: no man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed; no man with a crippled foot or hand, or who is a hunchback or a dwarf, or who has any eye defect, or who has festering or running sores or damaged testicles. No descendant of Aaron the priest who has any defect is to come near to present the food offerings to the Lord. He has a defect; he must not come near to offer the food of his God. He may eat the most holy food of his God, as well as the holy food; yet because of his defect, he must not go near the curtain or approach the altar, and so desecrate my sanctuary. I am the Lord, who makes them holy.’”

Leviticus 21:7-23

Growing up, we were taught that many of the rules for priests applied to us, too. We were now God's chosen people, after all, anointed for his service, a "royal priesthood", a holy tribe. "Be ye perfect," Jesus said, "as your father in heaven is perfect." And, oh, we tried!

No wonder we still struggle with perfectionism!