I heard only 10 minutes of October General Conference and it led me to a revelation. I turned on the radio while driving home on a Saturday afternoon in time to hear Elder Alan T. Phillips of the Seventy say, “You are not an accidental by-product of nature, a cosmic orphan, or the result of matter plus time plus chance. Where there is design, there is a designer.” [source]
I spent the rest of the afternoon fuming, composing feedback for the Designer on how badly he designed the female reproductive system and procreation in general (menopause is not fun). The Sacred Procreative Process (SPP) means a man has an orgasm, and a woman does all the hard work. Good fathers are vitally important for raising children, but the conception, gestation, delivery and lactation is the mother’s responsibility.
Bad design.
Plus, sexual pleasure isn’t evenly shared. A woman can get pregnant during the worst experience of her life (rape), or when she’s bored and wishing he’d hurry up and finish, or when she’s loving every second. And honestly, most people don’t want to make a baby every time they have sex. Here – I made a Venn diagram.
This is what your sex drive and procreative drive usually look like. Single horny teenagers, married couples using birth control, post-menopause sex, gay lovers, one-night stands, a summer fling, whatever. I’m going to say that no one wants to make a baby every time they experience sexual pleasure (tell me if you do in the comments). The majority of sex happens without any hope to conceive. In fact, the time when sexual pleasure and procreation overlap is probably just a few years early in a marriage.
This stage isn’t the majority of anyone’s life. And yet Church leaders name sex the Sacred Procreative Process as if procreative sex is most of what people do.
I was grousing and grumbling about that Designer, and then I had my revelation.
Church leaders are expecting humans to act like dogs in heat. The SPP and the law of chastity work great for dogs in heat. No wait! Hear me out!
Female dogs go into heat when they’re fertile. This is the only time a female dog is receptive to having sex with a male dog. This is fine with the male dog. Dogs don’t have a sex drive. The male dog gets interested in sex only when a female in heat gives off pheromones that signal fertility. The only time dogs do the sacred procreative process is when they are making puppies.
The dog’s Venn diagram looks like this:
Dogs are a good example for humans in following the law of chastity.
The Designer should make a couple other changes to the SPP. One is that a woman will not go into heat until she’s in her twenties. Did you know puppies can go into heat as young as six months old? (I googled it.) Don’t let a puppy get pregnant because that’s bad for puppy-mom and the new puppies too. Human females can get pregnant as young as 10 years old. I was 12 when I started menstruating. That’s incredibly bad design. The Designer really screwed up by making females fertile before their bodies and brains have developed enough to carry a healthy pregnancy and be a good mom.
Instead of monthly cycles, the Designer should arrange so that a woman [fn 1] will have a heat cycle once a year. She’s fertile for three days. She knows when this is happening, and culture accommodates this (paid vacation days) (societal norms respect this process). If she doesn’t want to conceive she goes to a “heat resort” where no males are allowed and she spends three days getting facials and eating chocolate. If she does want to conceive, she makes arrangements so that the only man around when she starts emitting pheromones is her husband. They both want to have hot and steamy sex; they conceive. Yay! The SPP worked!
Heat cycles produce other bonuses too. Imagine a world in which no one has a sex drive other than a response to pheromones when an adult woman is fertile. Child sex abuse doesn’t exist because no child gives off pheromones (I’ve decreed heat starts in your twenties). Rape doesn’t exist because if there aren’t pheromones, the man doesn’t want sex. The beauty industry evaporates because attraction has nothing to do with physical appearance. Marriages are based on friendship and compatibility rather than sexual attraction. No one commits adultery because you’re just not around anyone’s heat cycle besides your spouse’s. Prostitution is gone. There’s no such thing as homosexual attraction because there isn’t heterosexual attraction either. Also, no one feels sexually deprived because not having sex when you don’t want sex is just fine.
The law of chastity works great for creatures who have heat cycles rather than what humans really deal with – largely unpredictable fertility and a continuous sex drive.
In All Seriousness Though
Church leaders are out of touch with their teachings about sex. If they want to insist that the Gospel is universal and that its teachings apply to everyone, then the leaders need to come up with a doctrine about sex and procreation that applies to everyone, rather than pretending that human sexuality should be like dogs in heat. The Designer did not design a law of chastity that works with human design.
The law of chastity presupposes that everyone enjoys procreative sex, everyone gets married and stays married and everyone wants children and can have them. There are many people who meet all these conditions precedent, but also many who don’t. The law of chastity overlooks and ignores some common and painful things.
The law of chastity does not mention rape, incest or sexual assault. Sexual violence just isn’t supposed to happen. Church leaders have had to learn the hard way that they can’t assume that women deserve to be assaulted and that victims can’t just forgive and get over it. Any and all progress that Church leaders have made in counseling rape and assault victims has been made because women have taught the men that the Church’s blame-the-victim approach was wrong.
The law of chastity and the SPP do not deal with infertility. You just get a pat on the head and some encouragement. But the doctrine itself does not explain why some people struggle to conceive while others don’t. Parenthood is a product of biology and not a comment on your worthiness and spirituality. People struggling with infertility have had to educate Church leaders that great faith doesn’t bring a miracle pregnancy.
The law of chastity is silent about same-sex attraction. Queer people can probably procreate just fine – they just don’t enjoy it. Telling someone to have sex they don’t like for their entire lives has been a really bad idea. The Church has quit encouraging gay people to get into heterosexual marriages because of the overwhelming number of people insisting those teachings were wrong.
The Church’s insistence that being gay is a lifestyle choice has softened only after untold amounts of misery, and a high suicide rate, among the gay Church members.
Church leaders have gradually given up on policing non-procreative sex between married couples. Birth control, which used to be strongly discouraged, is now up to the couple themselves. Attempts to tell married couples to stop having sex once they were done having children were quickly discarded. Whatever efforts Church leaders made to discourage oral sex have been abandoned. The Designer designed humans to enjoy sex, even when they don’t want to procreate. The Church (and Christianity) keeps trying to label that a temptation we must resist.
The temptation/sin/repentance/obedience dialogue around sex has many negative results. Assault victims were/are stigmatized. Perpetrators are rarely held accountable. Out of wedlock pregnancies burden an unmarried woman much more than they burden the man who impregnated her. Indeed, the historical treatment of unwed mothers is horrific. Children born out of wedlock were outcasts. People raised in purity culture struggle with their sex lives after marriage. Women are made responsible for men’s actions.
The law of chastity does not talk about consent or respect, though it should. Those principles have soaked into the Church from secular sources. And before you comment with, “of course chastity includes respect and consent!” tell me when you’ve last heard/taught a chastity lesson and whether it mentioned consent at all. Even once. Or hinted at it. Anything? No, there isn’t. The law of chastity is based on purity and procreation, and if a person doesn’t already believe their consent matters, they aren’t going to learn that at Church.
A Personal Note
I’m one of the many people raised in the LDS Church who does not fit neatly into the law of chastity. It caused me a lot of confusion and pain, and was one of the reasons I concluded that Church leaders really don’t know what God wants for everyone. The social sciences, psychology, and secular studies about human sexuality saved me from Christian teachings about sex, and LDS teachings in particular.
The law of chastity is designed for only a minority of human beings. The rest of us are better off relying on social science and secular teachings about human sexuality.
[fn 1] I thought about what if the heat cycle happened to the men instead of the women, but I can’t find a species on earth in which that happens. Vulcans and pon farr were created by Gene Rodenberry, not God. Though I believe Spock would agree with me that heat cycles are more logical than what humanity has going on, if the goal is procreation.
Questions:
- Would you be willing to switch from a sex drive to a heat cycle (along with every other human) if it would eliminate all sexual violence and exploitation?
- If you were the Designer, how would you design sex and reproduction?
- Do you have any other feedback for the Designer?