Power, priesthood, and P*ssy

A short history of church men and their obsession with our wombs

In the beginning were the men, and the men invented gods, and the men thought they were gods, and the gods couldn’t create jack squat without borrowing a wee bit of space in a woman’s body to grow a new human, so they became obsessed with our reproductive organs and that obsession hasn’t ceased.

There are days that I lay in bed staring toward the ceiling in the dark a good hour before sunrise, the only early riser in my tiny apartment with a big family who all need their sleep. If I slide out of bed and tip toe out to the kitchen a few steps away from our cluster of bedrooms to pull my overnight oats from the fridge or slice my papaya, everyone wakes up immediately. So I stay in bed and occupy myself with a bit of meditation, and a long hour of silent brainstorming. It’s in these early morning thought sessions that I deconstruct the remaining remnants of my religious training and my American nationalism, plan my week, silently put my ex husband on trial for the brutality with which he treated me and our babies, listen to audio books about ancient humans, and read the latest Jim Palmer article about Non Religious Spirituality. Last week, on the last day of our vacation to Park City to cool down after a month of intense Arizona heat, my early morning thoughts turned for whatever reason to the religious obsession with the female reproductive organs, and the way that preoccupation shaped my own life, and America today.

For brevity’s sake, I won’t do a deep dive into ALL ancient religions here, except to say that as far back as human religion seems to have gone, woman has been valued primary as a breeder, and that breeding has been attributed to and controlled by “divinity”. One of the oldest religious relics on earth is the voluptuous but faceless Venus of Willendorf, a fertility figure that was mimicked around the region for quite a while, some later versions being found all the way to Siberia. We know nothing of this holy woman except that she apparently has all the necessary parts to reproduce.

Fertility was of course one of the first objects of worship in the ancient world. Without any understanding of sperm and ovum, primitive humans must have felt deep awe at pregnancy and birth. Of course it was chalked up to supernatural forces. In addition to death, harvest, and healing of sickness and disease, the creation of new life was one of the only pillars of religious worship anciently. And women’s bodies were the vehicle by which that sacred, holy, mystical birth was achieved.

Before I was the anti-theist wise woman that I am today, I was Mormon, then Christian. The Book of Mormon is a unique mythology in that it contains almost no female characters at all. There are only 6 in fact: Sariah, Isabel, Abish, Eve (the biblical Eve) Sarah of the Bible, and Mary the mother of Jesus. We know almost NOTHING of most of these women from the Book of Mormon except what they did with their reproductive organs: Sariah gave birth to the main characters as the breeder of the prophet, Lehi. Isabel sold sex. Eve let Adam “know” her and bore the first humans. Sarah birthed the founders of the Jewish nation, Mary was the child bride of the God and gave birth to Jesus. Abish alone had an actual story outside of her womb. There are a few other other nameless women mentioned in the Book of Mormon, the daughters of Ishmael for instance, who were acquired just to be breeders for the men as they built a ship to sail to the Americas from Jerusalem.

The mythology of the Bible does women dirty from the get go as God makes the woman from the man’s rib, tells her she’s to be the man’s little helper, and then commands the man immediately to breed with her. She eats the forbidden fruit and we’re told that the god curses her reproductive organs so from that moment forward, child birth would be painful. As biblical mythology unfolds, men begin to breed with multiple women at a time, branching away from the Adam and Eve monogamy as polygamy becomes the standard, and eventually a “barren womb” and the inability to breed become life destroying for the females who are afflicted. While the men of the Bible have epic hero stories written of them, have their attributes and tastes and accomplishments recorded and praised, women are only mentioned in relation to the men with whom they mate.

It gets fairly pathetic in Esther as she’s thrown into a harem, Ruth having to lay at the foot of the bed of a shirt-tail relative and hope he finds her “fair” and decides to breed with her. Ruth’s legacy is in fact reduced to the fruit of her womb, as a great great great grandma to Jesus.

The buck stops in the Old Testament by the way, dramatically, with the sassy Rabbi Yeshua of the New Testament. For a brief handful of books, the Biblical narrative showcases women as more than just their vaginas. This is beautifully illustrated in the story of Yeshua with the prostitute washing his feet under the table, upsetting the holy men. Yeshua was defiant in his acceptance of her gesture, showing the group that he cared not at all what she did with her body parts. Objectively, he was saying “this human is more than a vagina to me.” In the New Testament, we see women apart from their wombs for just a bit, until Paul takes over and it’s back to women as breeders, silent breeders in fact.

Fast forward two thousand years, and here we are today, living in a world full of people who are still reading their biblical mythology, still listening to biblical pastors, and thus still obsessed with our wombs.

This is problematic both in theory and in practice because of the Judeo Christian reduction of women to our genitalia. Not only has religion enforced fear based practices to control our use of our own bodies, but it has devalued women to the point that we only have worth in relation to men and the babies we bear them. Christianity requires very little of females and limits us to an incredibly small box.

I lived a life inside the Christian Woman box for 44 years, and it was stifling. I remember in kindergarten, long before I even knew basic anatomy, coming face to face with Christian gender reductionism. It was career week at my school, and a parade of parents had come to our class during Show and Tell time to talk about their jobs. I only remember the dentist, who brought sugar free candies for our class. At the end of the week, Mrs. Corey handed out paper and asked us to write a sentence and draw a picture of what we wanted to be when we grew up. My dad, an anchor man on the evening news, had opened my young mind to the intrigue of politics, and I was passionate about President Carter with that Georgia drawl of his. I drew a picture of myself with a flag being me and wrote that I wanted to be the President when I grew up.

I took my paper home later, and innocently handed it to my mom to read, waiting for what I assumed would be a reaction of pride, awe, enthusiasm maybe. Instead, her mouth turned downward into a frown and she looked disappointed, because she was. By dreaming big in kindergarten, I was aspiring to use body parts the Mormon patriarchy hadn’t approved for my personal use, namely my brain, my vocal vocal cords, my gut. My mom told me that day long ago, “Jennie, you can’t be the President, you’re going to be a mommy like me. That’s what Heavenly Father made you to be.” Nothing mattered but the womb I didn't yet know I had, and even at that young age, it had been consecrated to the kingdom of God and his servants.

The Founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, put more energy into controlling and trading in pussy than any so called Christian cult leader to date that I know of. He spent much of his life dictating revelations to his scribes about eternal offspring, “multiplying” and filling the earth, breeding with the “Lamanites” to whiten their skin, and mating with numerous women as “polygamist wives”, including 14 year olds and other men’s wives. To learn a bit about his teachings, the book “In Sacred Loneliness” and the podcast “A Year of Polygamy” are educational. Joesph was obsessed with women’s reproductive parts, and the church he built continues to carry that legacy today. Ironically, the use of the womb within Mormonism has never been the responsibility of the female of whom it is a small part, but of the men in power who say they hold the Priesthood of the Lord.

Which is why even as a very young child, my mom was perfectly comfortable telling me what Heavenly Father and his prophet supposedly wanted me to do with my reproductive parts. And why the first 44 years of my life were mutilated by purity culture and reproductive control. I spent my teen years repenting to my bishops when boyfriends rubbed their body parts against the crotch of my Guess jeans without my consent, guilt ridden for having committed the sin of heavy petting. Agonizing in the swimsuit section of Macy’s in the summers as I tried to find the most modest one piece on the rack to avoid arousing the boys at the ward pool party, which would be a sin also. Obsessing over who my husband would be, and how many children I would bring into the kingdom to defend the Gospel in these latter days. I was married by age 20, went off the birth control pill a year later after my Stake President told me contraception was a sin, and had my first of 4 babies before I had even learned to balance a check book or sort my own laundry properly. My womb belonged to the cause, and outside my role as wife and mother, I had no purpose.

Why? Simply put, men can’t build the Kingdom of God, or create anything without our birth canals. So they have to claim ownership, and do it in a way that convinces us to play along with it, mostly by keeping women always in the role of background characters, dependent on the men for basic survival. And that in part is why the Trad Wife resurgence, bolstered by social media trends, is so pernicious. Women who are stripped of all value outside those that cause men to desire to mate with them, their ability to breed, and their skills in caring for their offspring and the home are unable to do anything other than have babies and care for their husbands and homes.

This was the gist of my early morning mental meanderings. And as I slid out of the sheets when Kevin and the kids finally started to wake up, stripped off my sleep T shirt and stepped into the steamy shower to shave my legs and soap up my own private parts, I had to wonder.

What would happen if the church boys grew up and started worrying less about what we women did with our reproductive parts, and more about what they did with theirs? What if instead of marching in picket lines in front of abortion centers, the Baptists marched outside NFL locker rooms chanting “God commands safe sex, every woman is a precious child of God, y’all are causing abortions” and demanding mandatory vasectomies? What if instead of bishops talking to young women about skirt lengths and bikini tops, they lectured the boys about “she is so much more than boobs and a butt, keep you mind out of the gutter and respect her”? What if YouTube was full of Christian men shaming other Christian men for watching and buying porn, instead of “slut shaming” women like the school teacher in our district who had an Only Fans Page? What if the prophets and holy men preached that the greatest sin of all was to abandon a single mom, and marched on Washington to support mandatory universal child support for life? What if.

What if the religious moms, trapped in the patriarchy themselves, told their daughters that they had value outside their ability to have babies and keep a husband interested, that that the only authority they needed to obey was their own intuition? It would change the world, and I know this first hand because I am that mom, and the daughters I have freed from the power of the priesthood are strong and wild and full of joy. They lean into all the aspects of their humanity, not just their uteruses, and they are thriving.

The Mormon temple was my first experience with Joseph Smith’s hyper fixation on my reproductive organs. It began with water and oil anointing of my “loins” and a blessing to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth, followed by the first command given to Adam and Eve in the Garden, the reiteration of the same phrase. Be fruitful. Multiply. I was under sacred oath and holy anointing to engage my uterus and bring forth Mormon babies in Utah twist on Eugenics. At the end of the Mormon temple session, right before I was pulled through the “veil”and into the faux celestial kingdom, I was asked to chant an oath. “Health in the navel, marrow in the bones, strength in the loins and in the sinews, power in the priesthood be upon me, and upon my posterity, through all generations of time, and throughout all eternity.” This oath was meant to underscore the vast, holy importance of being a Mother in Zion, and the reception of the gift of fertility. But it starkly demonstrates that God himself was incapable of making more humans without my womb, just as He would have been in the mythological Eden in the very beginning, putting Him in a relatively desperate situation had Eve chosen to stay single and childless. Was there a Plan B in the Garden, in case the death threats and commandments didn’t inspire Eve to submit her womb to God’s will and Adam’s seed?

It seems that maybe the women hold all the power, and we just need to use it more wisely and stop listening to church boys.