We get this weird confluence of ideological effects about control from this: that women-the-virtuous are supposed to be able to control men’s sexual behavior via this perverse apparatus of non-contact, withholding, vetting (’my future husband will be a virgin just like me’), and within marriage, conditioning (’the woman is the force of purity in the home’); that parents absolutely control every aspect of their children’s lives down to their children’s very desires (’my daughter is choosing to wait until marriage, it’s her choice, because I’ve raised her right’); obviously that women obey the control of all patriarchal authorities; and of course, as you pointed out, that we’re all supposed to be submitting to the control of a silent, un-contact-able being who- don’t forget, in this theology it’s literally true- has pre-determined everything that is going to happen according to what we deserve. In a very real way it’s designed to be as hostile as possible to ANY imperatives that ACTUALLY work as far as influencing people’s behavior - imperatives based on self-determination, self-interest, harm reduction, personal autonomy, etc, as you point out.

I also think you’re right on in your last 4-5 paragraphs in sussing out the total lack of sexual fulfillment that radiates off of these people. Having seen it up REALLY close all my life, it was obvious, and in my experience coming from a fairly well-off Southern background, it frequently goes along with the “Superwoman” syndrome Martin describes too. So that creates this weird co-existence of mothers feeling, performing, and modeling class and educational aspiration (’you can do anything, work, work, work to achieve’) at the same time as they are DEEPLY afraid their daughters will find out that other ways of organizing their sexualities are much more satisfying. Where they both happen at the same time, you see a role model who is miserable in EVERY aspect of her life, who is telling you that to be successful, you must do exactly as she did, only more so… As a girl in this, either you will see clearly that you’d then end up even more miserable and reject it, OR you will also have successfully internalized the pervasive message to women that misery is virtuous and embrace it.

I have my own ideas about why this fear of their children’s being much more sexually fulfilled than they are. Yes, they can’t figure out how they’d deal with it. Yes, there’s fear that their kids would then start to know how really unhappy their parents were and they’d be unmasked somehow. But I also think that there are many, many parents who, if they admitted that happy, satisfying, healthy sex could take place, for their kids, outside of heterosexual marriage, would then maybe risk having to admit their own unconscious desires for kinds of sex that couldn’t be in marriage: deeply repressed gay and lesbian desires. I believe that a hell of a lot of these sexually unfulfilled abstinence-preaching parents have never had a good time because hetero- sex just really doesn’t do it for them, and that this is especially widespread among women. Lesbianism is still so invisible and unspeakable in many conservative cultural quarters, and where women don’t feel entitled to ever experience sexual pleasure at all, women are far less likely to ever go and “brokeback” their marriages or even consciously notice that there is anything not-hetero about how they feel. Which then makes these mothers, and many fathers too, the best, most hard-line enforcers of the abstinence social-control code, because they *honestly* cannot imagine wanting sex with an opposite-sex partner badly enough to do it outside of marriage, so how could anyone else? The more I think and talk to people about this, the more I realize that it is a larger factor than perhaps we ever realized.

And yes, she just seems seriously fantastic. It’s such a freaking joy to meet kindred spirits, especially here in WA.