Time for today's Fear of Masturbation update

If there's a sock on the doorknob, it's means someone's having sex with the other sock

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

• Voltaire

Dramatic uprising of stupidity can start from nowhere and only be seen when it reaches its climax.

• Oscar Auliq-Ice

Silly me; I was about ready to let go of my Mike Johnson fixation and move on to other ridiculous things when I came across this story. As far as I know, it doesn’t get much more ridiculous than mixing the American Taliban with the GOP and…wait for it…(GASP!!!)…masturbation.

Yes, that perfectly normal aspect of human sexuality that Conservative Christians have demonized for hundreds of years now is still the source of shame and self-flagellation.

It’s all pretty stupid, but the American Taliban has been demonizing sex to keep people from having it since the Puritans set foot on Plymouth Rock. And it continues today….

Some lucky sucker with WAY too much time on way too much time on their hands found this clip from a conference at Cypress Baptist Church in Benton, LA. New Speaker Mike Johnson (the House’s new incel-in-chief?) discusses a creepy product called Covenant Eyes that he’s used in his home for many years.

Yes, the American Taliban now offers “shameware” to its adherents.

He says, “Covenant Eyes is the software that we’ve been usin’ a long time in our household.” He says he learned about it at Promise Keepers…. He explains that it’s “accountability software” that men can use, and also teenage boys.

“You might want to think about doing this with your sons, so we’ve been doing that.”

What it does is it scans all your digital devices to make sure you’re not furiously jacking off to porn every time you get in bed or at stoplights or during the commercials while watching “Seventh Heaven” reruns. And it sends a report card every week to your “accountability partner” — big thing in evangelical circles, having “accountability partners” — to tell them how much of a godly hands-free no-porner you’ve been that week.

If you watch something dirty, Johnson says it notifies your accountability partner immediately.

And his accountability partner, at least at the time of this video, was his son Jack, aged 17.

“I’m proud to tell you my son, he’s got a clean slate!” said Johnson.

The video must have been last year or so, because according to correct fact emporium The Daily Mail, Jack is now 18.

To underline, Johnson is saying that he and his teenage son get/got report cards each week to tell them, in essence, that father and son, respectively, had allegedly not been masturbating, at least not while watching digital boobyknocker weener programs.

To underline and italicize, Johnson is saying that his teenage son gets/got a weekly report card that said “DAD HAS COMPLETED ANOTHER SUCCESSFUL NO WHACKIN’ WEEK.”

OK, so I don’t have children, but even if I did, I can’t BEGIN to imagine how incredibly creepy it would be for me and my teenage son to be each other’s “accountability partner.”

Not that I think masturbation or any other aspect of sexuality is anything to be ashamed of, but neither do I want Big Brother looking over my shoulder and reporting on my activities to a teenage boy.

“Hey…guess what my Dad did last week!?!?”

I would be more than willing to talk to a teenager about masturbation and answer any questions they might have. I’d want them to understand that what they’re feeling and experiencing is a perfectly normal part of growing into adulthood. But there’s no way in Hell I’d go into detail about my habits. Why would I give that kind of ammunition to a teenage boy?

The idea that one must, for some absurd reason, refrain from engaging in a natural human sexual activity makes no sense. The American Taliban proscribes masturbation as sinful and somehow acting against God. That’s just another way they go about exercising social control. Controlling sex and sexuality is a reprehensible way of keeping the faithful in line.

(Can you imagine being 17 and getting an urgent alert and having to be like “Sorry guys! Gotta go! Dad’s fallen off the whackwagon! UH-GAIN!”)

To put it in bold print and all caps and some italics too, why not: THAT’S FUCKING WEIRD.

Fundamentalist Christians are fucking weird.

Normal people find these people fucking weird.

Yes. Yes, they are. Fundamentalist Christians worry about things that don’t matter- like masturbation or a woman’s virginity. Again, controlling sexuality is a fundamental way in which the American Taliban controls the behavior of its adherents.

It also helps to create ways for Christians to feel guilty for the (completely normal) ways in which they express their sexuality. Of course, guilt and shame are fantastic ways to enforce obedience to a higher authority…and by “higher authority,” I don’t mean “God.” No, I’m referring to the church authorities who make the artificial rules intended to keep the sheeple scared, stupid, and shameful.

To understand Covenant Eyes — not to be confused with Covenant Marriage, which is what Mike Johnson has with his wife — remember that fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals first and foremost need protection from themselves. Understanding this helps explain so much about them. (See: any argument where one of them suggests that without holy direction from God, how would people know not to rape or murder?)

This is why “porn addiction” is mostly something that populates support groups in the basements of evangelical churches. Likewise, if you’ve ever been to a fundamentalist or evangelical Bible study, and they’ve taken prayer requests, whenever somebody said they had an “unspoken” prayer request, in all likelihood what they meant was that they CANNOT! STOP! MASTURBATING!

Is “porn addiction” a thing? I suppose so, in the same way one can become addicted to just about anything. But if you proceed from the supposition that Conservative Evangelicals must be protected from themselves and their “perverted” urges, calling one’s enjoyment of pornography an “addiction” is a great way to start.

If you can create guilt and shame in a place where enjoyment once flourished, you’ll have obedience in short order. This is particularly true when it comes to sex and sexuality.

If you’re able to teach people that things like masturbation, sex before marriage, and sex in an open truck bed as it’s barreling down I-95, etc., are sinful, you’re out of line. There’s no reason anyone should feel guilty about enjoying a normal and enjoyable human activity- especially if they don’t fall out of the truck bed.

Sex is supposed to be fun. It feels good, and what’s wrong with that? Sure, you don’t want to be sleeping with your neighbor’s wife or your teacher’s 14-year-old daughter. There are rules, after all. But if a consenting adult decides to take on the Brooklyn Nets on her free weekends and everyone involved is OK with it, who gets to pass judgment and call it “sinful?” Well, besides people who are jealous over not being included?

Too many people spend far too much time concerned with what others are doing with their bodies- perhaps because they’re jealous they don’t have the same opportunities to have that sort of fun. And so they try to ensure that if they can schtup a group of professional athletes, then NOBODY will.

They create rules intended to instill guilt and shame in people already uncertain about their bodies and how to use them to create pleasure for themselves and others. And that sense of shame, created in the name of religion, prevents them from fully enjoying something they should be able to revel in, free from shame and strictures imposed by outside authorities.

But what it all comes down to is that the American Taliban needs protection from itself. The behavior it wants to ban is what it most fears in itself. It’s not so much that it fears masturbation in others but that it fears what it might do to themselves. The same is true with homosexuality; they fear it because, at some level, they’re terrified of their own sexuality, and the only way they can think of to protect themselves is to ban it outright.

(Ed. note: Mike Johnson once blamed the fall of the Roman Empire on homosexuality. You can’t make this stuff up.)

Will bans stop people from masturbating or having “deviant” sex?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Seriously, you’re talking about banning sexual behaviors, things that are innate to our humanity. You might try banning breathing or eating; you’d have about the same chance of success.

Everything these people do, everything they obsessively try to ban, they do in part because they fear that they personally are susceptible to all the devil’s wicked temptations, that literally anything could take them (or their husbands) off the path of the straight and narrow.

For a lot of them it’s gay stuff. Why do so many deeply socially conservative, outwardly anti-LGBTQ+ men get caught with their pants down in gay scandals? Oh golly, correlation does not always equal causation, but sometimes it do!

For a lot of them it’s just that they’ve been raised to believe all sex is inherently shameful, even the P-in-V traditional married kind if you enjoy it too much, and so therefore porn is forbidden fruit full of delicious cocaine.

Out in the normal world, sex and porn are things that exist, that consenting adults can explore or not explore as they choose. Some people are gay, some are straight, some are bisexual, some are just fun!

All healthy, normal interaction with these things is cut off for these people.

So, Covenant Eyes (which has acknowledged issues with protecting user privacy)…and “accountability partners.” Yes, it’s unbelievably creepy, and, as might be imagined, it sells itself in ways that create more questions than it answers:

A better life is waiting? Like maybe not letting other people tell you how to live it? There’s nothing wrong with watching porn…or with wanting to stop watching it, but that should be a personal decision- just like masturbation or consensual sexual activity or any other aspect of sexuality.

Do it…or stop it…because YOU want to, not because an artificial set of rules created by people who want to control your behavior is telling you to. Religion was created to help people make the world a better place, but it’s been bastardized by people whose agenda seeks to control others.

No one has to be governed by that bullshit, not now or ever. We can- and should- be the captain of our own ship and responsible for our personal moral code.

Mine, f’rinstance, is straightforward- DON’T BE A DICK. Most days, I can live up to that…and when I fall short, I apologize to myself and endeavor to be better the next day.

I don’t need a false god or prophet telling me what to do, think, or believe.

And I don’t need an “accountability partner” to ensure I “experience victory over porn,” masturbation, or my hatred of the Green Bay Packers.

Some things I want to hang onto, knowhutimean??

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