The Fundamentalist Cult Kink Lords and My Personal Sexuality Preface.

That will guaranteed be at the beginning of any hypothetical memoir of mine.

Sexuality is going to be prominent in my stories and posts. Not necessarily because I am a pervert, but because sexuality in my childhood was given an inordinate amount of attention. There were extremely specific rules in my cult—like no anal even if you’re married; when you can and cannot kiss; hold hands, etc. ESPECIALLY no oral. We admonished people publicly and suspended them from church if they did oral. Sexual immorality came up on a weekly basis. I had to stand up and testify at 16 years old for getting hand stuff in front of 300 people. I was standing at my seat with two hands on the pew in front of me. Everyone else was sitting, watching, indulging in their little fetish while I bathed in shame. I had to talk about what happened and apologize.

This analogy is a left turn, but hold tight... I play in a few different fantasy football leagues. One league takes itself absurdly seriously. There is a multi-page FAQ that gets referenced regularly. There are town halls for proposed rule changes. It is run better than most cities. And the rules are probably more complex than your state laws. This rigor, this lawmaking and discussion, cultivates significance. It makes us feel important. It makes fantasy football feel important. And the more we argue about the rules and discuss them, the more important it all seems. The competition is personal and vigorous. The trades are Machiavellian, and there are power dynamics and political plays. I have another league where we barely ever do anything like this. And it's never important to any of us. Both leagues watch the same exact football games, though. And so it seems to be with sex. The game is the same for the most part. But the perspective and consequence can shift dramatically from culture to culture or person to person.

The pedantic rule-making around sexuality was purity culture at its most perverse. We took a thing, purity culture, and then we made it even more extreme, just like a good cult does (whip sound). The whole structure is really the most elaborate kink man has conjured so far. It is an inception-level shame and forbidden kink with power dynamic exhibitionism to boot. I had a girlfriend, the girl who arguably took my virginity actually, that always liked it better if we had a reason to chase or overcome. She would craft scenarios where each of us had to get through some form of resistance. And she was right. It was more fun. And nobody, I mean NOBODY, was having more fun than my cult brethren.

This wasn’t just plain old exhibitionism; we had an omnipotent interested party who would punish us if we were bad. It could take something as inane as holding hands in the back seat and make it absolutely scintillating. You could feel our interested party reacting to every instinct you had, like built-in commentary from a dominatrix, except instead of a powerful woman in knee-high boots berating you on the outside—it was the architect of the universe whispering things from inside… “Do NOT undo her bra,” or “Youuu SINNER,” which is just King James speak for bad boy. You were forced to address that internalized voice. What psychology sometimes refers to as “superego” was actually just our pastors’ version of God, which goes to show just how deep this kinky shit was in your subconscious. This could subtract from the experience or add to it depending on your guilt/rebel levels that day. Either way, once that bra strap popped, you were having an emotionally enhanced experience for better or for worse. These people with their Wrangler jeans and their gilded hand bibles were the true lords of kink. Kink masters. The Shakespeares of spank. The Jordans of genitals. (There are infinite possibilities here; I just haven’t found the right one yet.) Forgive me. I recently even found out that my mom and dad (step-dad who adopted me, for those confused) (still fundamentalists) have been watching Outlander with a TV editor that they purchased with United States currency. They committed financial resources to this kink. It cuts the scene when it gets too spicy. The whole thing is just a tease. They have found a way to tease each other without ever verbally acknowledging what is even happening. Now their episodes are 5 minutes long because most of Outlander is sexually immoral.

The Freuds of flirt?

Anyway, hyper-focus on sexuality molded me and dominated my adolescence and likely still has residual affects at 41. The repression backfired, as it always does. Purity culture is in itself a form of deviance. As a result, leaving the sexuality out of any story where it is relevant feels untrue to myself and to the reporting of the event, leading to a great fear of mine: inauthenticity.