...and found the CONSTANT talk of sex and abstaining from sex and sexual thoughts and sexual encounters in all the meetings and firesides...predatory? I do. If you asked me what the focus of ALL the firesides as a teen was...I'd tell you it was Boyd Packer and friends talking to me about sex...purity...sex and sex. I swear...if they had not brought it up CONSTANTLY..I never would have thought about it. They do the youth a DISSERVICE by constantly talking about sex. I now think it's a hold over from polygamy. The youth are still "fair game" except for those pesky little laws in the USA and I think the the non stop talk about sex is coming from men in power who are secretly obsessing about youthful bodies and telling themselves they can't have them.

Anyone else think all the sex talk was truly sick?

Yep.

When I started attending YM/YW and "standards nights", we got regular lectures on moral cleanliness and something came back from my childhood to haunt me.

It involved a naughty pretend game I used to play with a teenager when I was about 8-9 years old. I knew it was wrong because I hid it from my parents. However, it wasn't traumatic (no force involved), and I had forgotten about it by the time I entered YM/YW.

Those co-ed lectures would have been horribly embarrassing and inappropriate, even without my past. But I don't remember any exceptions being mentioned for child abuse, molestation, or not knowing any better. They NEVER told us that if an older person did something to us, that it wasn't our fault, and to get help or report it. No. In fact, it was better to fight to the death to preserve your purity. Certainly there were some kids who had been abused or were still being abused in my large youth group. What about them?

I prayed for forgiveness. I was unsure if I should confess, and I didn't WANT to, of course. But I never felt totally worthy, and finally I couldn't take it any more. I felt myself blush and my hand shook almost every time I took the sacrament. I finally confessed to a BYU bishop, fearing that I might be excommunicated. But instead, he told me I didn't need to worry, and sent me home relieved. I was finally done with the 6+ year guilt trip.

First week...show a video or have a huge presentation on moral cleanliness. Like you someone feels guilty over a long past event in their life, gets scared, gets anxiety...goes to the Bishop and confesses. Now that confession is in your records and they have successfully controlled you, me and everyone. It is part of the brainwashing...it's how they shame you into strict obedience. There is no such thing as..."it's personal and it's over"...no, they drudge everything up to keep you afraid, keep you enmeshed with them.

And the abuse victims? Exactly...OMG.....

What happens in the MTC is abusive. For fuck's sake, if a Bishop and a Stake President send a missionary out then just take them and start filling their heads with the sales presentation.

Only an abusive cult would then try and find those who lied to their local leaders and send them home in shame.

At the least, if the MTC authorities are going to pry into adults (yep 18 and 19 year olds are adults), they should offer fucking absolution to them and get on with it.

I remember no one, and I mean NO ONE, would elaborate as to what exactly "petting" meant. The older folks would get tight looks on their faces, the young ones would look at the floor. I would study the hem of my dress and visualize petting. Did it mean to stroke their hair? Did it meAn skin petting? No one would say! I developed an attitude of COMPLETE avoidance when it came to sex. The thought of sex terrified me, anyway. This was when I was a kid/teen/twenties.

+1
It's made clear it's not something to talk about, so Mormon youth end up with a lot of confusion which leaves them so naiive they're not sure how to respond when someone makes advances, gets serious, etc.

So true...I would have appreciated a frank discussion, even though it would have made me blush to my bones. At least I would have known EXACTLY what was expected! It was set up as something only married adults could know about. Singles could not only not DO, they could NOT KNOW!

They were giving us the same bullshit back in the 1970s, too. I lived in FEAR of having to ever confess to a bishop, so I kept myself clean. I would have killed myself before I confessed to a bishop. I couldn't chance that.

As for petting. My last roommate, we both got married the same summer. She was 29 and I was 27. I had wondered for years the same thing--petting. She asked me if I knew what it was because she was afraid they had been petting because she got turned on when they kissed. . . . . . . I told her she was safe.

Lol. I don't know how the thought do confessing to the bishop didn't scare the sex drive out if EVERYONE- the thought was terrifying. Like confessing to GOD himself. Ppppbbbttt!

details. Wow! What a sick bunch of perverts.

OMG. I remember being confused by "petting" too!

When I was in high school, I visited my friend when she went to BYU. We went to some meeting (can't remember what kind) and they made a very somber speech about how kids were being kept from their missions because of DRY HUMPING. They actually said those words. That was where I first learned that term.

The funny thing is that I can't remember exactly what the distinctions were. I just didn't want to be guilty of either one.

They even had it broken down to categories of "light petting", or "heavy petting". I can't remember if the distinction had to do with touching bare or through the clothing, or if it had to do with which body parts were the most sinful to touch. Now that I think about it, why would it matter? Seems like they were sure wanting to go into a lot of detail. I was just mortified the whole time.

I graduated the program in the 80s. We were told not to "pet", and that "petting" meant touching any part of a girl that would be covered by a bra and panties.

Luckily Frederick's of Hollywood in the 80s made crotchless panties and open-faced bras or my high school years wouldn't have been half as good.

My daughter was Laurel president, and she was 1 ½ years younger than her classmates. She had two goals: 1) to stop the girls from picking on this one girl who had no money and was unattractive, and 2) stop the girls from detailing their weekend sexual exploits.

The girls bragged about how many guys their were with, and what sexual acts they performed. This gossip was loud, and everyone in the classroom could hear. All the years of YW, and no one said a word to the girls. The mother of the worst one was the Primary president, and wore mini skirts to church. If something is not discouraged, then it is encouraged--you can hardly remain neutral with something as explosive as sex.

I agree with Lori C. Sex was ON TOPIC, was it not? It was the subject of the lesson, and the girls were just following the leaders. My daughter would tell the girls to STFU! They voted her in as leader, so they must have felt some relief.

Also, the Especially For Youth camp at BYU is all about sex, too. The kids practice and learn about dating. In reality, the girls in my daughters ward would keep score on how many boys they kissed and on how many phone numbers they could collect.

I had a calling in the YM's program of my ward in the 1980's. I recall sitting in a ward correlation meeting where the discussion turned towards a pregnant, unwed, young woman in the ward. That year there had been several unwanted pregnancies with the youth in the stake. I brought up that perhaps we should look at what we were teaching the YM/YW. I was asked to expound on what I was thinking and I said, "Well...I believe it is noble to preach abstinence until marriage, but perhaps we should also teach that IF they choose to have sex...there are precautions they should take."

The room went silent. Everyone there looked at me like I was growing a third eye out of my forehead. In an effort to cut the tension in the air I said, "Or...maybe not." The Bishop then changed the subject and that was that.

...and had spent some time in the world I realized that in the normal world, youths are told about sex, but the youths still had their own autonomy and were still seen as individuals. They were praised and thanked for their contributions to the family/school. They were allowed to focus on their schooling and plans beyond High School and this daily focus on religion and shame did not exist. They were happy and did not have that horrid look of impending misery and punishment in their eyes.

went into the young womens program in 1987. On my 12th birthday interview, the bishop asked me if I masturbate. My parents never had the sex talk with me. I didn't even know how sex was performed let alone what masturbation was.

I had some friends, but as a 12 year old girl. I loved horses and dogs and was really good in school, loved science and nature but sex was not on my radar.

They continued to shove down our throats every week. No petting, No Necking. I thought petting is what you do to a pet.

I never did anything wrong, but I came away from each lesson full of shame and guilt anyway. The lessons weren't uplifting at all. just marriage and sex. Isn't that normal for church sermons? (just kidding)

THIS^ Even if a young girl/teen does nothing sexually, the heavy handed, repetitive lessons cause her to feel shame for even HAVING naughty parts. Shame for being the "natural man", and having normal, human thoughts and curiosity. Geez, what does it do to the boys?

Yeppers. I started investigating as a teen in the 80s. I recall my first Laurel meeting very vividly because it was the chewed gum lesson. Not kidding. Sex! Every damn lesson had something to do with chastity and temple marriage somehow: dressing modestly so as not to arouse the boys, being careful to never be alone with a boy until marriage, no "petting" (and no explanations!), slut-shaming, etc.

I don't recall anybody talking about their exploits; it was shameful to admit you'd even kissed someone. There was even a "virgin lips club." The goal was to avoid anything more than chaste hand-holding (no interlocked fingers!) until the temple marriage ceremony. We even made tacky-looking wood triangle plaques with a temple pic in the middle. The three points were labeled [Name], Husband, and God. Talk about a threesome!

All the girls were obsessed with going to BYU and getting married to an RM in the temple. Quite a few were already building wedding scrapbooks with everything from wedding dress designs to cakes and flowers.

I wanted to go to college, get a degree, and have a career. I did. not. fit. in.

While I was in Primary & then later Mutual in the '80s, it seemed like the damn ward leaders were focused on sex more than MTV! That's how crazy they were when it came to sex.

had been appointed to be the Beehive leader. I remember thinking that the lesson manual seemed to go way overboard with the Sex, Sin and Shame stuff, so I didn't use it very much.

I asked my girls if they had any questions about this sort of stuff, (did they EVER!!!) and I answered as honestly as I could manage.

I was always VERY clear that my views about things sometimes differed from what the church taught. Like birth control - I told my girls that I believed that it was indeed a good idea to wait until marriage to have sex, but that sometimes, things don't go this way, and if that is the case, it is a good idea to have a back-up plan - i.e, contraception.

When someone asked about abortion, I said that while abortion is a tragic way to end an unplanned pregnancy, it is sometimes the best alternative to a young life being ruined by bearing an out-of-wedlock child, or having a child born to a young mother who is not in any way able to care for herself, let alone care for the baby. My girls were shocked when I said this, but I backed it up by saying that in my job, I had seen way too many children bearing children of their own, and the frequent consequence of this was neglect and abuse. Babies ought to be born into homes that want them and can care for them lovingly.

Because I was always honest with the girls, they began coming to me with questions that they didn't dare ask of their own mothers. They knew that I would never try to shame them, or rat them out to the bishop. I loved those girls and valued their trust. There were quite a few tears - many of them mine - when I told them that I had to move out of State with my job.

Of course this was during the reign of Spence Kimball, and just a few year since Boyd's infamous 1976 fapping speech.

My daughters did and came to the conclusion that their church was full of perverts and sex-obsessed people.

Before YW one or both of them would suddenly develop a mystery illness and managed to avoid some of it.

They don't like to talk about it today as they are happy with their own families and seem to have healed from all the crazy - needless to say, non-mormon now.

Briggy

I remember all the lessons on the difference between love and lust. Love was of God and lust was of Satan. The lessons usually started with "love" and "lust" written on the chalkboard and then we had to come up with a long list of definitions/descriptions to place under each.

When I was younger, my mom used to tell me that I should experience sex at least once with somebody whom I had no emotional feelings towards just to learn the real difference between lust and love. One can put up all this moral crap (and that is just what it is, crap) on the blackboard and memorize these high-minded romantic things, but when it comes right down to it, lust is very much a part of the emotion called love between a man and a woman (or perhaps even another of the same gender) and trying to deny it is really only one kidding oneself.

The funny thing is that my mom was, and remains, a strong Roman Catholic (as I was raised) and that church's sexual mores aren't far from those of the Mormons--even if the guilt and shame trips were not (in hindsight) as negative or as powerful.

It was around the time I was 12 that I figured out what masturbation was. Around that time, they ushered all of us into the chapel, turned out the lights, and showed us a horror film. BKP giving his infamous "Little Factory" talk. I'm sure there were a lot of red faces. I was thankful the lights were off! All BKP's talk did was introduce a certain level of guilt to something the vast majority of young men engage in.

I was a member of a family where we did not talk about sex for any reason. I learned what it was through reading encyclopedia entries. Looking back, I am amazed that nobody ever asked me about masturbation. However, I was a really pious teenager, so maybe it never crossed my bishop's mind to ask the question.

I also remember one standards night when a member of the stake presidency told us exactly what we could and could not touch. Unfortunately, the lights were on.

For some reason, I can still hear "Do not fondle the breasts for any reason!"

To me....this is the problem. If I want my br#@!$s (spam police won't let me say the word) fondled, I'll make that choice when and if I'm ready and want it. It is not for some married man to decide when I get my breasts fondled. LDS church...ENOUGH ABOUT SEX! Do you have nothing better to talk about? I tell you...you could not even produce 2000 stripling warriors in 2014 to fight for anything because they'd be too terrified of what their genitals would do in battle and YOU DON'T TEACH THEM ANYTHING ABOUT MORALS! Nor do you give them anything to fight for. There is NOTHING in the church worth even living and striving for. What happens after HS and missions? A lifetime of school/working/children/exhaustion.....and then you end up giving those same kids over to the church. What sort of legacy is that? You do all the hard work, take all the financial risks and then give your children away. Literally. Yippee...can't wait to be Mormon...not.

It was "don't do this, and don't do that" information overload for sure. I never heard the term "masturbation" until I joined the teacher's quorum, and then there was a lesson on it every month (not to mention the seemingly endless firesides and movies on morality). Finally, at age 15, after a Bishop's interview where the morality questions were asked, I went home an thought, "I gotta try this." Wow. I did... and it was nice! Dear TSCC, thanks for the idea. :-)