Blogaround

Photo from a drag show at HUNT bar. Image source.

1. Help support LGBTQ bar in Shanghai, China! (posted June 16) This is a GoFundMe for HUNT, a bar here in Shanghai which has been a huge supporter of the LGBTQ community, and is now having a bad time because of the Shanghai lockdown. It had to close in early March because of the lockdown, and now even though the lockdown is over, there are still restrictions on businesses in the food and beverage industry.

If you want to help the queer community during Pride Month, this is a good way to do it. We need HUNT. It's difficult for people who are openly queer in China; they need to have safe spaces like this to be themselves.

2. My 2022 Reader Survey is still open (until June 30). Thanks so much to everyone who has already taken it!

3. How to support abortion access in a post-Roe America (posted June 25) This article covers a bunch of different areas. Lots of suggestions here.

4. Rent: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) (posted June 20) "That is the core issue with rental housing in this country though: people who think that investments deserve more respect than basic human needs." PREACH!

(Also, John Oliver shows a clip of Dave Ramsey being ... being ... how shall I put this ... when Jesus comes to separate the sheep and the goats, and he says "I was a stranger and you did not invite me in", Dave Ramsey is going to be in big trouble.)

5. Tom Cruise and Scientology: A lesson in cognitive dissonance (posted June 17) "Former Scientologist Chris Shelton paints Tom Cruise as a complete narcissist, adding, 'I won’t diagnose Tom Cruise [as being a psychopath] but I will say that he is not a good person…. It’s just people have no idea. The guy has such good looks and a winning smile that everybody just falls to pieces over him. He’s a monster. And we really need to be clear about that: Tom Cruise is a monster.'"

6. Why Are Police So Bad at Their Jobs? (posted June 2) "Not for nothing, clearance rates have dropped to all-time lows at the same time that police budgets have swollen to all-time highs, suggesting that more funding has actually resulted in police being less effective. 'It is a great public mismatch in understanding, training, and expectations,' Baughman told me. 'Increases in police officers or police budgets have not been shown to reduce crime or make us safer.'"

Here's an article about evangelical women and sex

A wedding cake topper with a bride and groom. Image source.

Here's a interesting article: Do conservative evangelicals enjoy better sex and marriage? A response to Josh Howerton, written by Sheila Wray Gregoire.

I've read some of Gregoire's blog, To Love, Honor, and Vacuum, before. It's a blog about sex and marriage, for heterosexual Christian monogamous married women. She gives a lot of practical advice about women's pleasure during sex, and that's a really good thing because I don't think I've seen any other evangelical Christians doing that. (Disclaimer: I don't know if she describes herself as "evangelical", that's just my read on it.) Literally- I have read lots of purity books and Christian marriage books (which talk a lot about sex), and I don't think I have ever read anything anywhere about "sex should feel good for women, and here are some tips for how to do that", except for Gregoire's blog. 

It's really really good that there's someone in this niche- someone who buys into the basic evangelical Christian teaching like "sex is only for marriage", and gives sound advice for women's sex lives, and speaks out about the connections between purity culture, complementarianism, and abuse. It's very good that there's someone doing a good job in that niche- but man that is NOT my niche, and reading some of Gregoire's posts about why you shouldn't have sex outside of marriage, I just roll my eyes at everything. It's not my niche, but for women who tick the boxes- heterosexual, Christian, monogamous, married- and aren't allowed to listen to sex advice from "worldly" sources, it's very good that Gregoire is there.

Overall, my opinion is that she has a lot of good advice, but it's still within this very weird restrictive framework about how sex is only meant for this one specific context which God intended, and it's not allowed to mean anything different to different people.

(I am actually really interested in reading her books though, and blogging through them- I think as an asexual ex-purity-culture queer-affirming married Christian woman, I would have some things to say. Readers, if you'd be interested in this, leave a comment. ^_^ )

So anyway, this article. Gregoire is responding to a post by Josh Howerton, which had some stats about how conservative Christians have better marriages and sex lives and other positive things. Gregoire digs deeper into the statistics and shows that the data doesn't actually say what Howerton claims it says. 

Here's a quote from Gregoire:

Two co-authors and I recently surveyed 20,000 predominantly evangelical women for our book The Great Sex Rescue, followed by a survey of 3,000 men for The Good Guy’s Guide to Great Sex. While church attendance definitely improved women’s marriage and sex lives, we also found those benefits were wiped out if women believe certain teachings that, tragically, are all too prevalent in our evangelical culture. For instance, ideas like “all men struggle with lust; it’s every man’s battle” or “women are obligated to have sex when their husbands want it” can actually cause women’s marital and sexual satisfaction, libido and orgasm rates to tank and rates of sexual pain to skyrocket.

OOOOH! Oh man, I am extremely interested in this. Because I TOTALLY WAS taught that "all men struggle with lust; it's every man's battle" and "women are obligated to have sex when their husbands want it" and those things TOTALLY DID cause problems in my sex life. Especially because I'm asexual and for a long time I worried so much about not being "good enough" as a wife because I can't do sex correctly. I definitely see how those beliefs can cause huge problems for straight women's sex lives. Very cool that Gregoire did an actual survey about this and got some actual stats.

And then the article gets really good:

Third, Howerton fails to consider women’s rates of sexual pain and pleasure. Howerton proudly declares that highly religious women enjoy better sex. That conclusion is based on just one question asking about subjective sexual satisfaction (“I am satisfied with my sexual satisfaction with my partner.”)

OOOH this is really interesting! I bet "highly religious women" tend to have a completely different understanding of what "good sex" is, compared to the general population of women. (Gregoire talks about that too, later in the article.) For example, I can definitely see a conservative religious woman believing "good sex means my husband enjoys it" or "good sex means I can endure it well enough that my husband doesn't complain; I meet my obligations to him." 

I can definitely see conservative religious women just having no idea at all about female orgasms, female masturbation, the clitoris, sex toys, other ways to have sex besides penis-in-vagina (PIV), the concept of a man prioritizing a woman's sexual pleasure, etc. And when you're evaluating your sex life without being aware of the existence of any of those things, you might feel like, hey things are pretty good.

Like... I'm not saying that all women who grow up in a conservative Christian environment like I did don't know about these things. Not everyone is as naive as me, not everyone is as asexual as me, not everyone is as... 100% buying into it, like I did. But if you follow the rules, if you really do what they teach you and avoid all "sexual sin", then yes, you will indeed have NOT A CLUE about how sex can physically feel good for a woman.

In The Great Sex Rescue, we share our findings that evangelical women suffer from vaginismus, or primary sexual pain, at more than twice the rate of the general population. We found 22.6% of evangelical women had experienced sexual pain disorders,

*raises hand* Oooh, this is me, I had vaginismus

with 7% affected so badly that penetration was difficult if not impossible.

*waves enthusiastically* THIS IS ME

And a belief in gender hierarchy makes vaginismus more likely to occur. Our study echoes 50 years of medical research: Sexual pain is largely a conservative religious problem.

OMG I really want to read her book! This is totally exactly what happened to me.

Wow I am super curious about how she advises overcoming vaginismus. I wonder if she advises women to masturbate! Can you imagine, an evangelical recommending masturbation? For me, I COULD NOT have solved it without masturbating. I would have had to just give up on PIV sex altogether, if I hadn't masturbated- because masturbating was the only way I could learn about my body enough to figure out what would help my vagina to open. 

And also, another thing that was essential to my own "great sex rescue" was the idea that my sex life is about ME, and then I SHARE IT with my husband. It's not 100% about him and then any tiny bit that's not about him is "cheating"- which is what I used to believe. I believed masturbating was cheating, and I believed that me stimulating my genitals myself, during sex with him, was cheating.

But from what I've seen of Gregoire's blog, I doubt she would agree with me on this. I doubt she would agree with me saying "you need to take control of your own sex life, it's about you, and you should masturbate." Hey maybe I'm wrong, but that's just the impression I've gotten from what I've seen of her blog. (Hey if I'm wrong, and she has a blog post that says "married women should masturbate" then I totally want to read it- send me a link!) 

That’s pain; what about pleasure? We found evangelicals have a 47-point orgasm gap, meaning 95% of evangelical men report almost always or always reaching orgasm during a sexual encounter, but only 48% of women do. That doesn’t sound like something to brag about.

YIKES that is a huge gap. 95% of evangelical men almost always or always having an orgasm, but only 48% of evangelical women. DAAAAANNNGGGG. 

I made this galaxy-brain meme to help convey my opinions about orgasms:

Galaxy brain meme (made from this meme generator). The first level says "I don't need to have an orgasm because sex is all about my husband." The second level says "Both partners should orgasm because that's equal and fair." The third level says "I don't need to have an orgasm because sex can be whatever you define it to be."

Let me break down this meme for you:

Level 1: "I don't need to have an orgasm because sex is all about my husband." This is where I was when I first started having sex (though actually Hendrix and I weren't married when we first started having sex). I really had no idea about female orgasms. Me having an orgasm was not at all part of my view of what sex was. I was conceptualizing it the way I had been taught by all the Christian marriage books- that sex is something a woman does for a man. If he was happy with it, that meant I had done a good enough job. As for my own pleasure, I was happy because I was touching him. I didn't even know about arousal, didn't know there was a huge element that was missing.

Level 2: "Both partners should orgasm because that's equal and fair." This is the advice that I think we should give in basic sex ed. The general guideline should be that both partners orgasm. (Or, not just "both", because there could even be more than 2 partners.) This should be the foundation, and then on top of that we can consider specific cases where it might not be beneficial to aim for this target. For example, maybe one partner actually has no idea how to orgasm at all, but now they've heard this advice and they think they're "supposed to", and their partner is acting like they're both required to keep trying and trying and trying even though they're both tired and frustrated, and in the end the non-orgasm partner just fakes it so they can just be done- see, that's an example of a situation where treating "both partners should orgasm" like a hard-and-fast rule would be harmful. But the solution isn't just to conclude "it's totally fine if only one partner has an orgasm"- no, you should dig deeper into what's going on, and do the work of figuring out what each of you want from sex. And also buy a vibrator so you can at least have the experience of having an orgasm, and let that inform your thoughts on what you want from partnered sex.

Level 3: "I don't need to orgasm because sex can be whatever you define it to be." This is what I actually believe- but the advice in point 2 is the advice we should give to beginners. I am kind of annoyed when people say "sex can be whatever you define it to be" even though that's true... because that's really harmful advice for people who are completely clueless. You have to at least tell people "here are some examples of red flags"- and if one partner always orgasms and the other partner never does, that's a red flag. A red flag doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing, but it's definitely something that needs to be investigated further.

I personally do make sure I have an orgasm every time (TMI?). But it's not because "that's what you're supposed to do"- it's because that's what I want to do. It's because I'm experienced enough to know what I want (okay lol I've only had sex with 1 person so maybe not that experienced...). But I can imagine scenarios where one partner is fine with not having an orgasm- and if it comes from a place of really knowing themself, and really feeling their feelings, making an informed decision, then that's a good thing. Nothing wrong with deciding that your own orgasms are a low priority for you when you have sex.

But here's the problem: Someone might think they're at the third level, but they're actually at the first level. Like if you feel like "if I only care about my husband's pleasure, and I don't feel my own dirty sexual feelings, that means I'm a better wife" and so you trick yourself into believing that you're genuinely not interested in having orgasms yourself. Soooo... again, my solution for this is "this is why we need the second level"- like there should be some general guidelines about what good sex looks like, and what things could be red flags. It's impossible to come up with a "one size fits all" but at least there should be a starting point we can give people, and then if they choose to do something differently, they do so because they know themselves well enough to know what works for them.

And I don't want to get into games about "oh you SAY you're okay with [apparent red flag], but actually that's because subconsciously you believe [bad thing]." That's never going to go anywhere good, trying to tell people you know them better than they know themselves. Even if you end up being right, it's not helpful to confront them in this way about it. A lot of asexuals have to deal with this- this "oh you're just saying you don't like sex because [whatever reason] but you need to get over that, and then you will like sex." So I don't want to play those games.

So, okay, circling back around to Gregoire's article: 95% of evangelical men are having an orgasm every time or almost every time, but only 48% of evangelical women. I laid out my whole perspective about orgasms just now because I am a little bit uncomfortable with the idea that a woman not having an orgasm automatically means something is wrong. It could be fine, as I said, if it's an informed choice. BUT WOW, it is DEFINITELY NOT going to be the case that 52% of women legitimately do not like having orgasms. The percentage of women who would go the "informed choice" route and arrive at "no orgasm for me" is WAYYYYY lower than that. So something is definitely wrong. The majority of these 52% are not having orgasms because they are ignorant, or because their partner is not treating them right. This is a problem. Women deserve better.

Moving on:

What if conservative evangelical women are simply more likely to rate objectively bad sex as satisfactory? That’s actually a caveat the IFS gives:

“It is possible that simply being married is more important to highly religious women, which may raise their satisfaction ratings. They may be more likely to look at their relationship through a rose-colored lens.”

Well, we found evidence of these rose-colored glasses. Let’s look only at women who rarely or never orgasm. If they believe in a gender hierarchy, they are 22% more likely to be satisfied with the frequency they orgasm (even though it’s abysmal!) than women who believe in gender equality. The only way women in patriarchal marriages do better is if we consider apathy toward personal pleasure a perk.

This is SPOT-ON. As a woman, if you really, truly buy into complementarian ideology, then you won't have any awareness that it matters whether you have an orgasm or not. Like why would that even be a part of sex?

What happens when sexual pain is a part of the picture? Women who report having experienced vaginismus are 36% more likely to have sex at least once a week if they believe in gender hierarchy than if they believe in egalitarianism. Egalitarian women are less likely to feel they should endure pain for the sake of their husbands’ pleasure than women who believe in patriarchy.

OOOOH! First of all, I find it EXTREMELY INTERESTING that having sex at least once a week is framed as a negative thing for women with vaginismus. Like, from my point of view, yes of course it makes sense that if PIV sex is painful, then it's reasonable to do PIV sex less frequently. But typically these sex-advice experts see "having sex more often" as an inherently good thing, like that's the ideal that they want to help people work toward. (This is a generalization, perhaps I am unfairly lumping in Gregoire with the "having sex more often is inherently better" crowd. See also my review of the book Come As You Are.) VERYYY INTERESTINGGGG that Gregoire is indirectly telling us that the right thing for women who have vaginismus is to have sex less frequently. I mean, I agree with it (though I have a bunch of additional advice I'd want to add), but I'm just surprised to see someone say it.

And also, YES, 100%, this rings true, that women who believe in gender hierarchy are having painful sex more often than women who believe that their needs and their husband's needs matter equally. I, uh, did that. Because "men need it" and that's supposedly the most important thing a wife does for her husband. It wasn't until I was pregnant that I felt like I had a "good enough reason" to not have sex. (My husband never pressured me- I'm glad he is not a Christian and doesn't believe any of this BS. It was this internalized teaching about "my wifely duty" that pressured me.)

And one more quote from the article:

Evangelical culture has told women sex is about satisfying a man’s needs so he won’t stray. We’ve made sex a male entitlement and a female obligation, turning it from a knowing into an owing. Should we be surprised when women downplay our own needs?

Yep. Well said.

So. I am super fascinated by Gregoire's article, in particular because it talks about the intersection of vaginismus and conservative Christian teaching about marriage- and I've also been at that intersection. I want to see more people talking about it. Readers, what do you think- should I try to get my hands on "The Great Sex Rescue" and write a book review of it?

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Related:

How Pregnancy and Childbirth Changed My Asexuality (or, actually, A Post About Vaginismus) 

My Husband Is Not The Entire Focus Of My Sex Life 

If A Wife Is Required To Have Sex, That's Not "Intimacy"

Trust Women

Protesters hold a banner that says "My body my choice!" Image source.

June 24, 2022: Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade 

This is really bad news. Sometimes people need abortion. I trust pregnant people to make that decision.

I don't have anything new to say, so I guess I'll just put some links to some of my older posts about abortion:

"Life's Work" (read this book and become even more pro-choice) 

What Pregnancy Taught Me About Being Pro-Choice 

Why I Am Pro-Choice 

Trudging Along in Our Post-Lockdown Normal

Nucleic acid testing booth. Image source.

Posts about the covid outbreak in Shanghai, China:

Complete list is here: Index of Posts About the March 2022 Shanghai Covid Outbreak

Worried About Another Lockdown (June 10)
Lockdown is Over + Happy Dragonboat Festival! (June 3)
Lockdown Diaries: Shanghai Lockdown Ends June 1! (May 31)
Lockdown Diaries: I Went Out! (May 29)
Lockdown Diaries: We Are Allowed Out! (a little bit) (May 26)
Lockdown Diaries: Slowly Getting Better (maybe) (May 21)
Lockdown Diaries: June 1 Target for "Back to Normal" (yeah not gonna happen) (May 17)
Lockdown Diaries: Restrictions on Chinese Citizens Leaving China (May 13)
Lockdown Diaries: Taking a Whole Building to Quarantine (May 10)
Lockdown Diaries: More and More People Get to Go Out (a little bit) (May 7)
Lockdown Diaries: Some People Can Go to the Grocery Store (May 3)
Lockdown Diaries: Exciting New Definition of "Society" (May 1)
Lockdown Diaries: This is a Human-Made Disaster (April 26)
Lockdown Diaries: More of the Same (April 22)
Lockdown Diaries: 3 Covid Deaths Reported in Shanghai (April 18)
Lockdown Diaries: Dystopian Madness (April 15)
Lockdown Diaries: Part of Shanghai is Out of Lockdown (April 12)
Lockdown Diaries: I am Okay, Shanghai is Not (April 9)
Lockdown Diaries: Dressing Up, Free Medicine, Free Rice (April 6)
Lockdown Diaries: Antigen Self-Tests, and Children with Covid (April 3)
Lockdown Diaries: Covid Case in Our Complex, and Free Veggies from the Government (March 31)
Now All of Pudong (East Shanghai) is in Lockdown (March 28)
I'm in Lockdown Again (March 25)
I'm Still in Lockdown (March 19)
I'm in Lockdown (March 16)
On the Current Covid Outbreak in Shanghai (March 12)

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Hi readers! Here's another update related to the covid situation in Shanghai. I am not sure if I should keep doing these updates or not, because nothing exciting is happening... We're "back to normal" in a lot of ways, but still there's the tediousness of having to get tested every 2 or 3 days.

My son's daycare still hasn't reopened (don't hold your breath for that) so I am still working from home so I can watch him.

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Mandatory testing every week 

So last time I mentioned that we would have mandatory nucleic acid testing on June 11. Well, now the policy is mandatory testing every Saturday morning, at least until the end of July. (See article: Weekly PCR test mandatory for Shanghai citizens. The article says "weekly" but it doesn't say "every Saturday" so maybe it's not necessarily true for everyone in Shanghai that it has to be Saturday. But from what I've seen, it's on Saturdays.)

They're saying that if you don't get tested once a week, your health code will turn yellow. Now, honestly, I don't really see this as much of a threat. I've been getting tested every 2 or 3 days anyway (also taking my kid to get tested) because when you enter public places you have to show you have a negative nucleic acid test from within 72 hours. So... if your health code turns yellow, you're not allowed to enter public places- but if you don't have a negative result from the past 72 hours, you're ALREADY not allowed to enter public places. Like it doesn't seem like "okay it's MANDATORY now, otherwise your health code turns yellow" really makes much of a difference. 

I guess it's a little bit more of a pain to change from yellow health code to green, compared to changing from "doesn't have a result from the past 72 hours" to "does", so, there's that? (Yellow to green, you have to get tested and then your code will turn green after 24 hours, I think. Whereas, if your code is green but you don't have a negative result from the past 72 hours, you can go get tested and then even though the result is not out yet, you are immediately allowed to enter public places.)

But anyway, we have to get tested every Saturday.

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Some Chinese words about covid

疫情 [yì qíng] So this is the sort of catch-all word that is used for the pandemic. If you look in the dictionary, maybe you'd find some different words- for example, "COVID19" is 新冠 [xīn guān] (literally "new crown"); you see 新冠 [xīn guān] in news articles for example. But when people are just talking about the pandemic or whatever, they use 疫情 [yì qíng].

It's interesting to me that 疫情 [yì qíng] means the whole pandemic which started in early 2020, but also people use it to mean Shanghai's lockdown specifically. Like people talk about "before 疫情 [yì qíng]" and what they actually means is before the lockdown (so, March 2022). It's probably not technically the right word to use, but people are using it.

I'd say this is because we'd kind of gotten used to the pandemic restrictions we had from February 2020 to March 2022. We had to wear masks everywhere, and traveling to different cities was a pain because of the requirements for testing and/or quarantine, but besides that, we were okay. It didn't really affect us beyond that. We didn't have, like... fear. I don't know anyone at all who actually had covid in China (that's still true, even after the whole Shanghai lockdown). We didn't worry about "oh we shouldn't go out because what if we get covid." We wore masks because we were supposed to, but the risk was basically zero. We lived life pretty much normal.

And then, March 2022 to May 2022, when Shanghai went into lockdown, that was a whole different thing. That was BAD. So I suppose people are calling the lockdown 疫情 [yì qíng] because it's much more, uh, pandemic-y than the way we were living before.

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Links

Sixth Tone

As COVID Lingers: Extract, Test, Seal. Repeat, Repeat, Repeat (June 18)

Henan Bank Depositors Hit With Red Health Codes (June 14)

SHINE

All right if you've been reading my lockdown posts, you know I don't like SHINE much. But anyway, here are some SHINE articles.

Suzhou eases quarantine rules for most travelers from Shanghai (June 19)

Undetected community infections the source of recent resurgence (June 18)

Get used to weekend PCR screening until July-end (June 15)

Disneytown, Disneyland Hotel to reopen on Thursday (June 14) But still no word on when the actual Disneyland park will reopen.

Super spreader mall ordered to close up shop (June 14)

Infections traced to shopping mall, beauty salon (June 12)

Weekly PCR test mandatory for Shanghai citizens (June 11)

Officials sanctioned for Shanghai outbreak at quarantine hotel (June 11)

ABC News

Virus testing the new normal as China sticks to 'zero-COVID' (June 9)

Blogaround

1. Thank you to all the readers who have taken my 2022 Reader Survey! It is still open (until June 30) so go ahead and take it if you haven't. I really appreciate all the feedback.

2. “Acing” Sexual Purity (posted 2015) Very cool to find people writing about being asexual in purity culture even before I was. A lot of their experiences are totally the same as mine.

3. This Twitter thread (go read the whole thread)

There are things I so wish people understood about what sexual abuse can do to an individual. Please know that I am not speaking for all or even most survivors here. I speak only for myself and some others who have shared their journeys with me through years of women’s ministry.

— Beth Moore (@BethMooreLPM) June 13, 2022

As I said in my previous blogaround, I don't feel like the "sex" part is the most evil part of sexual abuse. This thread from Beth Moore is sort of along similar lines.

4. Star Trek: Discovery’s latest episode makes a rare point about male rape survivors (posted 2017) [content note: rape] "What makes this scene all the more significant is how it deviates from historical depictions of rape survivors; Tyler is not only a man, but a highly trained soldier, capable of killing multiple Klingon warriors in hand-to-hand combat. In a battle training simulation with Lorca, he takes out 36 foes with tactical precision. He’s unquestionably strong, brave, and trained to defend himself at an elite level. And yet none of this saved him from sexual assault. Faced with a situation where someone had enormous power over him and decided to prey on him, he did what he needed to do in order to get out alive."

5. NHTSA Finds Teslas Deactivated Autopilot Seconds Before Crashes (posted June 15) Yeah this is suspicious. As this article says, let's not jump to conclusions and say there's some nefarious plot and that's the reason for the autopilot turning off just before a crash- but clearly *something* is wrong.

6. MTG Oddly Familiar With Satan's Conversations With Prospective Abortion-Havers (posted April 30)

Here's an asexual memory from high school

8 pairs of women's underwear. Image source.

The topic for the June 2022 Carnival of Aces is "Throwback", so I'm going to go back to January 2020, where the carnival theme was "Conscious and Unconscious Difference." I wrote a post back then called LOLLLLL yep should have known right then I was asexual. And now I want to write about about a similar thing- about thoughts I had when I was a teenager, and how I look back on that and view it very differently now that I know I'm asexual.

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I was in high school, and I was talking to someone- maybe my mom?- and the subject of cute underwear comes up. Like am I interested in wearing cute underwear? I said, I think it's kind of a temptation, because if I had cute underwear then I might want to show them to someone, oh noes, and so I don't think I should have cute underwear.

And I'm remembering this now, years and years later, and I'm like, oh my goodness, did whoever I said this to get the wrong idea?

Thinking about, what if she thought I meant... like... like there was an actual real existing boy that I would have wanted to show my underwear to. Oh my. Wow no I did not mean anything like that. Wow, what if someone took it to mean, like... I want Matt from 2nd-period physics class to see me in my underwear. Some high school boy. What if somebody thought that was what I meant?

Like this realization is just hitting me now, years later, and I'm totally shocked because I did not mean it that way at all. Is that a realistic possibility, that someone might have interpreted it as being way more, uh, immediate and sexual than what I really meant? Or... Honestly I don't have a good handle on how a "normal" "average" person would think. I guess that's why I write posts like this, describing my experiences with attraction, even though it feels so weird to talk about it- because if no one talks about it, then no one can have any idea about what the general range of human experience is on the topic.

What I meant was this: I have been told that someday I am meant to have a beautiful marriage, where my husband and I love each other and have sex a lot and the sex is amazing because we love each other fully and we're married and totally committed to each other. And won't that be wonderful, someday, I can be with someone who loves me like that, and we'll be seeing each other's underwear all the time and we'll love it, just love every part of each other's personalities and bodies. This magical relationship which is comfortable and intimate and loving enough that we can share things like that. Like looking at each other in underwear or naked.

So if I wear cute underwear, as a high school girl, I will long for that ideal future marriage. I will fantasize about how it will be, to be so close with a guy, that we can totally see each other in our underwear and appreciate how cute we are. I will look forward to that magical perfect future, and want it so bad... but it's so far away, such a long time to wait, I shouldn't start myself thinking about that yet. It's not the right time for it, and obsessing over something I can't have is a sin. I should focus on following God instead of fantasizing about something way way far in the future.

The other meaning I had, actually, was a kind of six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon game, like let's try to construct some logic that links "cute underwear" with "sin." Well, what if having cute underwear leads to being proud of how cute you look, which leads to wanting to show someone else how cute you look, which leads to actually showing them, which leads to sex? Sort of a word-association exercise, dreaming up a hypothetical path between these two concepts. It wasn't something I actually felt- it was something I was taught to be afraid of feeling.

And, thinking about it now, as it occurs to me that somebody might have thought I meant that it was actually something I wanted to do, in reality, in high school. Like I was really gonna get together with an actual boy and actually show him my underwear. Like, WHATTTTT? OH GOODNESS NO. OH MY. I had crushes back then- very big crushes, so many FEELINGS- but wow, I never ever thought about anything like that. It's shocking to me to even ask myself the question, "Remember when you had a crush on Matt from 2nd-period physics class? Did you want to show him your underwear?" HOLY CRAP NO, like WHAT ON EARTH, NO, OF COURSE NOT.

(Related: Some time in the past few years, this thought occurred to me: "Remember the other guys I dated before I started dating my husband- did I want to have sex with them?" Like, WHATTTTTT OH MY GOODNESS NO, what a bizarre and shocking thought. I never ever thought of anything like that. With my husband, it was different though.)

I wanted that loving romantic relationship, where we know each other completely and share our whole lives. And, I was taught, that is the only context in which you are allowed to have sex and/or show someone your underwear. And so, I viewed sex and cute underwear as a symbol of that kind of relationship. It wouldn't make any sense to have sex or to show your underwear to someone if you didn't have that kind of relationship.

And I totally had no idea that other people experienced attraction differently than me. I thought it was totally obvious that, when I said "if I had cute underwear, I might want to show them to someone" meant "I will wish I was married so much, it will hurt." Rather than, you know, something more like "I want Matt from physics class to see how sexy I am." In recent years, I have learned that apparently a lot of high school kids literally are having sex- so wow, it actually would have been plausible that when I said that, that's what I meant. That's... that feels so unbelievable to me.

(Also, somewhat related: I was always a little confused when people said "it's so hard to not have sex before marriage." Did they mean "I'm so lonely and I hate that, but there's nothing I can do about it"- which is how I felt- or did they mean "I have opportunities to have sex but I have to force myself to turn them all down- and I may or may not be 100% successful at that"...? I sort of suspected it could be closer to the second option, because there were statistics cited about how a huge percentage of people have sex before marriage. But it didn't make sense to me.)

It's interesting to me, thinking about it now, that my desire for sex (or, what I thought was a desire for sex) was only in terms of this faraway vision of "this is the kind of marriage I want to have in the future." Whereas my romantic attraction had both those future ideals and also present obsessions over specific boys. It was "here's my idealistic vision about what kind of guy I want to be with" and "omg I hope Matt looks at me and talks to me, I want his attention so much, and when he smiles and laughs at my jokes, the cuteness radiating from his face is overwhelming, I have to keep myself from giggling, wow I like him so much." Those feelings like, I want this RIGHT NOW, with THIS BOY- and at the same time knowing that maybe it's not actually a good idea to follow those feelings, knowing it won't be the path that would lead to the ideal romantic future I wanted- but man I wanted it so much. That feeling of wanting it in the present reality- in high school I had that feeling for romantic attraction but not sexual attraction. (And then in college I felt sensual attraction in that way.)

(Ah, and then in college there were a few times I felt like "I want to have sex with that specific guy, even though there's no future for us" and I called it "lust" and was very concerned about my "sin" of feeling that way. But I didn't feel that way about guys I had crushes on or dated. And then years later when I actually did have sex, it wasn't anything like I'd expected, so I concluded that those feelings I'd had before weren't actually sexual at all. And maybe the reality is more complicated than that. Not sure how much detail I should go into here- if any ace or aro readers want details, let me know in the comments section.)

And it's hard to say how much of it was because I was repressed, and how much was because I'm asexual. I asked myself that question many times, actually, years ago when I first started to wonder if I could be asexual. "Am I asexual, or just really repressed?" But here's the thing: I wasn't allowed to have romantic or sexual desires back then (except hypothetically when I met the magical perfect guy that God had planned for me or whatever). And I worked SO HARD to repress my romantic desires. BUT WOW, SO MUCH romantic desire. I had to fight it so hard. It was this huge battle. I tried to repress it, but still it was always there. On the other hand, sexual desire... turns out there wasn't really anything to repress.

And one more thing I want to mention: I'm married now, and I do feel like it's amazing and romantic. I won't say "magical and perfect" because real life is never "magical and perfect", but... being married to Hendrix is just so fun. It's different than what I imagined marriage to be. It's better. And I really get to see his cute face every day and tell him every random thought that crosses my mind. I get to live with him and travel with him and raise our kid together. Do we have sex and show our underwear to each other? Yes, and it's good, but that's not really the point; our marriage is so much bigger than that. In church I was always taught "marriage is hard" but I don't believe that- I think living as an adult is hard, and we are doing it together, and sometimes the difficulties of life put a strain on our relationship, but it's never the relationship itself causing the problem. Our marriage itself is a support. It's so much better than what I imagined back in high school, and also so much less about sex than what I imagined in high school.

So. Well this post started with the question of wearing cute underwear, turned into a discussion of how completely different my feelings towards romance are from my feelings towards sex- even though I had always believed I desired both of them- and now here we are. Asexual. Never in a million years would I have thought that me saying "if I have cute underwear I might want to show them to someone" could be interpreted as "there literally exists an actual person that I want to see me in my underwear, and that is something I actually could do here in reality." And that is one of those moments that I look back on now and say, "wow, I am really asexual."

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Related:

LOLLLLL yep should have known right then I was asexual 

What If I Dated In High School

What My Marriage Is Actually About (It's Not Sex And It's Not Jesus)

Blogaround

The asexual flag. Happy Pride month! Image source.

1. How 4,000 Physicists Gave a Vegas Casino its Worst Week Ever (posted 2015) This is fantastic.

2. Uvalde and Police "Duty" (posted June 4) [content note: child abuse, child murder] This is a video from an actual lawyer, about how the police aren't legally obligated to protect people. I've seen lots of people saying that on Twitter, and I'm glad to have a source here from a real lawyer, with the facts and history backing it up. ("Backing it up" in the sense that, yes it is true that this is the way the law *is*. Not in the sense that it *should* be that way. Not trying to make it *make sense*- because it just doesn't.) You should always fact-check things you see on Twitter.

But man, this is bleak. "A lot of people disagree with this particular ruling, and it can be solved with legislation, but as it currently stands, there is no inherent cause of action based on the Constitution that would allow parents and teachers and victims to sue the police for inaction at Uvalde. And unfortunately that is the current state of the law."

3. Missed risk: Long COVID threat extends far beyond pandemic (posted June 5) "Teasdale had an emergency-room doctor friend who’d gone through hell in the last couple years dealing with hospital COVID cases. Yet last Christmas, that friend was telling Teasdale to relax — the threat had passed."

4. 3 Chinese astronauts settling in for 6-month stay on Tiangong space station (posted June 7) This is very cool!

5. Exploitation and Abuse at Hillsong Church (posted May 10) "I need a minute…it hurts to look back because I was so into it, I was so embedded in it, I wanted to believe it. Now that I look back, I’m like damn, they’re trying to manipulate you into receiving and accepting the abuse that they’re causing. It was traumatic and it could have taken my life if I had stayed a minute longer."

6. Pastor Jack Schaap, who groomed a teenage girl for sex, is out of prison (posted May 7) [content note: child sexual abuse] The thing that strikes me is, based on the victim's statement, the main problem was that Schaap manipulated her and got her to really fall in love with him, and it was all lies and he was just using her. I don't think that sex is really the bad part of child sexual abuse- I think it's the whole overall grooming pattern, the way the abuser plays with the victim's emotions and naivety and takes advantage of it, makes her believe that their relationship is really something unique and special, and leaves her devastated in the end.

If Schaap had done all those things but then didn't have sex with her, would that have been okay? I know the sex is what crosses the line into making it illegal, and that's the reason he went to jail. And yes, that absolutely should be illegal. But it feels like the focus is on the wrong thing.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm missing something. I'm asexual and there is so much I don't understand about what sex means to the average person, how it affects the average person.

If the focus is on "an adult had sex with a child"... yes, it is definitely wrong for an adult to have sex with a child, and the adult should go to jail for that- and maybe the focus is on that aspect because it's tangible, whereas the emotional manipulation part is more subjective... but if the whole focus is on the "sex" part, then we will feel we should protect kids by telling them "sex is bad, don't have sex"- but that wouldn't have protected the victim in this case. She was in a fundamentalist church, of course she had been told not to have sex. And also in the report we saw recently about sexual abuse in Southern Baptist churches- of course those kids were taught that it is wrong to have unmarried sex, but that didn't protect them from the abuse.

It seems to me that the actual issue is the grooming, the manipulation, power. Sex was one of the tools that Schaap (and other abusers) used to hurt and control the victim- but I don't think it was the most evil part of it. And we can protect kids better by teaching them the reasons why it's abusive for an authority figure to have a relationship with someone under their authority, the reasons why a big age difference is a red flag, etc. They're exposed to messages from the church about "God says we should be together, let's not let silly worldly things stand in our way" and from mainstream movies about "our families forbid us to be together, but we are so heroic for loving each other anyway, they don't understand us!" and "we can overcome anything because our love is so real and strong." And abusers can easily use that to convince the victim that it's totally okay, what the abuser is doing. So when we educate kids about what's a healthy relationship and what's not, it needs to be thorough enough to offer a counterargument to that.

7. AI versus corporate logos (posted June 3) A neural net tried to generate some logos, and it's great.

8. Mourning and remembrance without an afterlife safety net (posted June 6) [content note: child death, suicide]

9. Ohio GOP passes bill aiming to root out 'suspected' transgender female athletes through genital inspection (posted June 2) "'This is not a real problem,' state Rep. Rich Brown, a Democrat from Canal Winchester, said. 'This is a made-up, 'let's feed red meat to the base' issue.'"

Wow, NOT COOL. This is just being mean to trans kids.

10. What It Takes to Start a Family in COVID-Era China (posted June 7) "One factor that did not play a role in my choice was the country’s increasingly pro-natal family planning policy. After the 'two-child policy' failed to produce a lasting baby boom, Chinese policymakers and demographers have grown increasingly concerned about the country’s declining fertility."

11. Shanghai Lures Graduates From Top Global Schools With ‘Hukou’ (posted June 8) This is a big deal because having a Shanghai hukou makes a big difference in what rights you have related to your kids going to school, buying an apartment, etc- and they don't just give them out. (Except that now, apparently, in certain circumstances, they do.)

12. Montessori Sunday School Encourages Kids To Invent Their Own Gods (posted June 7) [From "The Onion", a satire site- so it's not real.] I actually love this.

13. Man Who Lost Everything In Crypto Just Wishes Several Thousand More People Had Warned Him (posted April 7) [Also from "The Onion", so it's satire, not real.]

14. The 2022 Reader Survey is still open (until June 30). Go take it if you haven't already. Thanks! :)

Worried About Another Lockdown

Map showing the 4 "medium risk areas" in Shanghai associated with an "outbreak" (3 covid cases) at a hair salon on June 9. (Shanghai also has other "medium risk areas" besides these.) Image source.

Posts about the covid outbreak in Shanghai, China:

Complete list is here: Index of Posts About the March 2022 Shanghai Covid Outbreak

Lockdown is Over + Happy Dragonboat Festival! (June 3)
Lockdown Diaries: Shanghai Lockdown Ends June 1! (May 31)
Lockdown Diaries: I Went Out! (May 29)
Lockdown Diaries: We Are Allowed Out! (a little bit) (May 26)
Lockdown Diaries: Slowly Getting Better (maybe) (May 21)
Lockdown Diaries: June 1 Target for "Back to Normal" (yeah not gonna happen) (May 17)
Lockdown Diaries: Restrictions on Chinese Citizens Leaving China (May 13)
Lockdown Diaries: Taking a Whole Building to Quarantine (May 10)
Lockdown Diaries: More and More People Get to Go Out (a little bit) (May 7)
Lockdown Diaries: Some People Can Go to the Grocery Store (May 3)
Lockdown Diaries: Exciting New Definition of "Society" (May 1)
Lockdown Diaries: This is a Human-Made Disaster (April 26)
Lockdown Diaries: More of the Same (April 22)
Lockdown Diaries: 3 Covid Deaths Reported in Shanghai (April 18)
Lockdown Diaries: Dystopian Madness (April 15)
Lockdown Diaries: Part of Shanghai is Out of Lockdown (April 12)
Lockdown Diaries: I am Okay, Shanghai is Not (April 9)
Lockdown Diaries: Dressing Up, Free Medicine, Free Rice (April 6)
Lockdown Diaries: Antigen Self-Tests, and Children with Covid (April 3)
Lockdown Diaries: Covid Case in Our Complex, and Free Veggies from the Government (March 31)
Now All of Pudong (East Shanghai) is in Lockdown (March 28)
I'm in Lockdown Again (March 25)
I'm Still in Lockdown (March 19)
I'm in Lockdown (March 16)
On the Current Covid Outbreak in Shanghai (March 12)

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Well I cannot believe I have to keep blogging about this, but, we are still not okay here in Shanghai.

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We can go out now

So, lockdown is over (Shanghai lockdown officially ended June 1). We are allowed to go out wherever. No restrictions about crossing the Huangpu River or crossing district lines. Malls are open again. The subways are all running. People are slowly transitioning to working at offices rather than working from home. People are very happy to be out in the world again.

But: No indoor dining yet. Middle school and high school students are back in school, but younger students will not be back to in-person classes at all this semester. And my son's daycare is still not open. Also, traveling from Shanghai to other Chinese cities requires jumping through hoops and maybe doing a 14-day quarantine on arrival.

When entering a public place, you're required to use your phone to scan the "location code", which will register your information so there's a record of who was there and when. And you're required to show you have a negative nucleic acid test result from within the past 72 hours. (Both the location code and the nucleic acid result are managed by the "health code" program in Alipay or WeChat.)

Actually, they've slightly changed the rules on this: If you don't have a negative nucleic acid test within the past 72 hours, it is also acceptable if you have a nucleic acid test from the past 24 hours which is still waiting for the result to come out. This change was announced on June 5. 

I think it's a good change and makes sense, because sometimes it takes 12 hours or maybe even longer for the result to come out, and it's a bit ridiculous to have to build that into your plans about how often to go get tested. (Fortunately the testing is free- they said it's free until June 30.)

At the same time, it means that people might just go for weeks without going anywhere that has a security guard checking people's covid tests, and then just go get tested real quick right before they want to go somewhere, and the result hasn't even come out yet... I mean honestly I am not that concerned about that though. The test result will come, and then if it's positive you can just contact-trace. It's not really enough of a risk to justify inconveniencing everyone. 

(And okay, yeah I know with covid everyone has a different opinion on where the line is for "it's not really enough of a risk to justify inconveniencing everyone." You are welcome to make fun of me for being fine with "you need to get tested every 72 hours or else you can't enter public places" while I also think "and if you got tested but the result is not out yet, that should put huge restrictions on where you're allowed to go" is taking it too far.)

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Scattered lockdowns

Since the citywide lockdown ended, Shanghai has been reporting somewhere around 0 to 5ish "community infections" each day. "Community infections" means people who were not in locked-down areas but tested positive. In other words, in places where there's been enough testing and lockdown already so that there really should be zero covid there, how many positive cases were found.

When a covid case is found, the pandemic control rules are more or less the same as they were before the lockdown: The covid-positive person is taken to quarantine, all their recent close contacts are taken to quarantine, their apartment complex is put into 14-day lockdown, and any places they visited recently are closed and disinfected, and other random people who were there are also required to get tested. And the places that are locked down or closed are classified as "medium risk" or "high risk" areas. (There might be a little bit of variation on this: I have heard of situations where the lockdown would be less than 14 days due to omicron having a shorter incubation period than the original, and also I have heard of situations where only 1 apartment building (where the covid-positive person lives) was put in lockdown, and the rest of the apartment complex is unaffected.)

So every day, there are a few apartment complexes, businesses, etc, which are locked down and designated as "medium risk." There's a list published somewhere of all the "medium risk" areas in Shanghai.

So, this is still happening every day, but it's only affecting a very small proportion of the residents of Shanghai. The vast majority of people here are allowed to go wherever. Also, since it's not the whole city shutting down like before, the people in the locked-down areas should still be able to get normal food deliveries. (I don't know this for sure though because it hasn't happened to me.) Even if you're in lockdown now, it's not like it was when the whole city was in lockdown.

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Rumors

But there have been rumors going around on WeChat, saying the whole city will be locked down again, or whole districts will be locked down, or every area will get locked down for a few days at some point- lots of rumors. The Shanghai government has said that there will definitely not be another citywide lockdown. (See this June 6 post from SHINE.) But, we were all here in March when the Shanghai government reassured us that there would definitely DEFINITELY not be a citywide lockdown, and look how that went.

We all remember that, and then we all lived through 2 months of citywide lockdown.

So umm, not that much trust in the government's reassurances about lockdowns right now.

Anyway, then Pudong New District (the area of Shanghai where I live) announced that on June 11, there will be mandatory nucleic acid testing for all residents. We also received a notice about it in our apartment group chat, which said the testing will be in the morning of June 11, and our apartment complex will be in lockdown for the 3 hours when the testing is taking place. And then after that we are free to go and not in lockdown.

Other districts in Shanghai are also doing mandatory testing now. I am not sure if it's all the districts, and not sure if they are all doing it on June 11, but basically this is the general situation in Shanghai.

So anyway, today (June 10) everyone went to the grocery stores and bought all the vegetables. We did not, because by the time we thought of it, we looked on one of the grocery apps and the vegetables we wanted were gone... Anyway, hopefully tomorrow the groceries are restocked and we won't have any problems getting food.

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Links

SHINE

Massive Shanghai screening after hair salon staff test positive (June 9)

Sixth Tone

A Shanghai District Declares Snap Lockdown for Mass COVID Testing (June 9)

In Locked Down Shanghai, a ‘Shadow Pandemic’ of Domestic Violence (June 9) [content note: descriptions of domestic violence]

What Does it Cost to Test China for COVID-19? (June 9) 

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Next post: Trudging Along in Our Post-Lockdown Normal

"Moon Knight" and Boundaries With God

Layla, in her superhero outfit. Image source.

[content note: spoilers for the Marvel tv show "Moon Knight"]

Okay I want to talk about one part of episode 6 of "Moon Knight" (the final episode of season 1). After Marc/Steven is killed (don't worry, he gets better), Layla finds the stone statue of the Egyptian god Khonshu, and breaks it to release Khonshu. Khonshu had previously used Marc/Steven (this is one physical person with several personalities) as his "avatar", but he was no longer using him as an avatar due to being imprisoned in a stone statue. After Layla frees Khonshu, Khonshu says he needs an avatar, in order to fight against the Egyptian goddess Ammit. He wants to use Layla as his avatar. She says no.

She says no.

She says no! I love it!

(Actually the first thing she says is, "Are you joking?" I love it!)

Layla had seen how much Marc had suffered as Khonshu's avatar. (Being an "avatar" of an Egyptian god means you get superpowers from the god, but also they control your life to some extent. Some gods seem to be nicer about it than others.) She tells Khonshu, "Marc didn't trust you. I don't trust you." She says no.

Khonshu tells her he needs a human avatar to save the world or whatever, and she still says no. 

As an ex-evangelical, I feel like there's a lot you could say about "Moon Knight" and the evangelical Christian concept of having "a personal relationship with God." A bit of background about me: I had a "personal relationship with God" for a long time. I was so devoted, desperate, passionate, submissive... It was all about him, all the time, I was so obsessed. I woke up early every day to read the bible. I prayed on my knees in my dorm room. I "took captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ"- any wisp of a thought I had that could be sinful, I stamped it down and then threw myself on his mercy and repented of it. I sacrificed so much for him. Anything I wanted, anything I cared about, anything I had worked hard for, I knew I had to throw it away at a moment's notice if that's what God told me to do, and if I felt sad about it, well that was a sin.

That relationship... it was overwhelming, it was my entire life, and after I got out of it, I concluded that it had been abusive.

There were 2 big things that damaged my relationship with God, and led to my leaving it behind:

1. I found out that Christian leaders had lied to me about a lot of things- the biggest one being LGBTQ rights. I listened to queer people's stories, and found that actually, the "traditional" teaching about being queer- which is that it's wrong and you need to repress yourself, and if you pray hard enough then God will turn you straight- actually leads to depression and suicide. And accepting yourself leads to life. I discovered that queer people weren't evil and trying to destroy marriage or whatever. They're just normal people.

And more than that, I discovered that evangelicals had lied to me about so many different groups of people. They said non-Christians can't ever be happy because they have a "God-shaped hole" in their hearts- well, that's not true. They said atheists secretly know that God exists, but pretend they don't believe in him, because they want to sin. They said everyone who gets an abortion will regret it. They said everyone who has unmarried sex will regret it and never be able to have a good marriage. (It ROCKED MY WORLD the first time I happened across a blog post where someone wrote "I had premarital sex and I don't regret it." That's also why I published my own post after I got married- I’m Really Really REALLY Glad I Had Sex Before Marriage.) They said all other religions are about trying to earn your way to heaven, and that can never really satisfy people, but Christianity is different.

So much of evangelical Christian teaching is built on the idea that "these other groups of people are wrong about their own personal lives, and we know better." It was all stereotypes and strawmen- no one ever said "let's actually listen to people who are different from us, to find out what they think"- of course no one ever said that, and it never even occurred to me that that's what we should be doing. You can't give those false teachers a platform and actually listen to their voices- that could lead us astray! We need Christian leaders to act as translators to make sure the message gets packaged in a way that doesn't challenge our existing beliefs. 

We only "listened" so that we could tailor our evangelism sales pitches better.

Anyway, I found out about all this, and so I changed my beliefs. But God didn't change. I changed because I discovered new information- but what was God's excuse? He knew all this, all along, and he used me to preach bigotry against queer people.

I discovered my God was a monster, and I had to leave him, and it hurt because that was my whole self- my identity was in Christ.

2. I found out about systemic racism. Yes, it turns out, as a white American I have privilege that people of color don't have. (This was when I lived in the US- I'm in China now, and it's different.) Racism is a sin that's built into the structures of American society- and I prayed to God every day and God NEVER SAID ONE WORD TO ME ABOUT IT? WTF??? Police brutality, mass incarceration, underfunded schools, wage gap, wealth gap, redlining, maternal mortality, discrimination in various places in everyday life, etc etc etc... Our whole culture is full of the sin of racism, and I didn't even know about it??? 

God was extremely busy giving me rules about what romantic feelings I was or wasn't allowed to have, but he never told me that I benefit from centuries of white supremacy? WTF????

On paper I believed that God loved everyone of all races equally. All people of all races are equally made in the image of God. But my God sure didn't act like it.

For example: Christians pray for God to help them find a new job- but how could I pray for that, now that I had found out that candidates with "black-sounding" names are less likely to get called for job interviews? How could I believe that me getting a job was somehow caused by God, when in reality white privilege also played a role in it? Maybe God should focus less on helping me, and more on eliminating the racism that exists in the hiring process.

So, those 2 things are the main reasons my personal relationship with God ended.

It turns out, I wasn't simply in a relationship with "God" or even "the Christian God" or "Jesus." I was in a relationship with one specific version of God. One specific version of Jesus, the version preached in the white American evangelical church. I thought He was the only God- it was Him or nothing, Him or no God at all. That's not true. There are many versions of God to choose from. Even within Christianity, there are many different versions of Jesus.

And now I choose Them myself. I don't let any church or pastor choose my God for me and say that's my only option. I only choose a God that I can in good conscience follow.

(And of course, the reason I thought there was only 1 option for which God to believe in was because of evangelicals completely misrepresenting and lying about people who believe differently than them. [See above, point number 1 of why I ended my "personal relationship with God."] Of course I knew that some people "claimed to be Christians" but didn't believe all the same things we did. I was taught that those people were rebelling against "the clear teaching of Scripture" and didn't actually care about the bible or God or truth or right and wrong. They were "watering down the gospel" to make it "inoffensive." They were "capitulating to the culture" instead of "standing firm for God's truth." They "made God in their own image" whereas we followed the real God even when it cost us. Those people were fake Christians who were just trying to take the easy way out. I'm sure that's what the evangelicals are saying about me now.)

After that, I decided I will never have a "personal relationship with" a god again. I will never worship again. Yes, I believe in God, and I like to think I follow Jesus' teachings- but I do it on my own terms. I believe things because they make sense to me, because I can see the reasons why they are moral and right. No more of this "God is making me do something and I don't know why but I just have to trust and obey"- never again. I was taught that was the definition of "faith" and it was a very important part of being a Christian. No, I don't believe that any more. That's not "faith", that's "giving cover to authoritarian leaders who want to control everyone's lives and use God as an excuse."

I'm never going to have a "personal relationship" with a god again, because the power imbalance just makes it impossible for it to not be abusive. (For me personally. Maybe for other people, it works because they have a different understanding of what "personal relationship with God" means.) Imagine trying to make major life decisions, about getting married, moving to a different place, finding a new job, having kids- and there's Someone in your mind and in your heart who knows everything, every detail of every possible outcome, and They give you some indication of which option to choose. It means you have no choice anymore, because how can you go against a suggestion from an omniscient being?

(Or rather, in practice, it becomes a game of trying to figure out whether random happenings and weird thoughts that pop up in your head are "signs from God". [And guess what, if you get it wrong, it's YOUR FAULT! Probably you're so sinful that, even though on some level you knew what God was telling you to do, you selfishly chose what you wanted instead!] Rather than, you know, actually comparing the actual real-life facts you have about your options.)

I don't want Them here, in my head. I set a boundary, and I engage with Them on my own terms. I don't pray because it's too intimate; that's a boundary I have.

I love Them. I still do. Of course I do. And any God who can't accept this boundary is not worthy of being my God.

There was a period of time when I was going to a "small group" at an international church in Shanghai, and we were reading a book about "spiritual disciplines" and there was one chapter about how you should dedicate your whole life to God, 100%, don't hold back, and it went on and on and on about how it's so HARD but it's the RIGHT choice... And I didn't like it. I told these church people, it's NOT necessarily a good thing to devote your life to Jesus, if it's a bad version of Jesus. Make sure you really do the work beforehand to investigate whether that god is worthy of your devotion. Because I was devoted to a bad version of Jesus before, and it was bad.

SOOO ANYWAY. Moon Knight. Marc definitely had a "personal relationship with god" and it was toxic and he wanted to get out. (Arthur Harrow, the main villain from the show, had also been Khonshu's avatar before, and Harrow says it devastated and broke him too.) Layla knows all this, and so when Khonshu says he needs to use her as his avatar, she says NO.

Even when Khonshu tries to tell her she needs to do it because the world is at stake or whatever. She says no. Here's a lesson I wish I had learned a lot sooner: When someone tells you that you *have to* do something, that doesn't necessarily mean you *have to* do it. You should only do it if it benefits you. I'm thinking specifically of things like jobs and contracts and being told "you have to sign this"- well, just because someone says "you have to sign this" doesn't really mean you have to. First make sure you understand what it is you're agreeing to, and if there's any part that you're not okay with, you can say no. Obviously, if you say no, then that means the other party also doesn't have to hold up their end of the deal- but make sure you understand all of it before agreeing to anything. And sometimes they want you to sign something that doesn't benefit you- don't sign it. Even if they say "you have to."*

Layla is willing to work with Khonshu, but not willing to give herself to him as his avatar. Boundaries.

Later, the Egyptian gods resurrect Marc/Steven, and Marc/Steven negotiate with Khonshu before agreeing to be Khonshu's avatar again. I love it. (However, in the after-credits scene we find that Khonshu is still lying to Marc/Steven, so, uh, still didn't totally work out...) Also, Layla becomes the avatar for the goddess Taweret- see, she considered her options and found a god who would be better for her than Khonshu.

It also makes me think about Mary, the mother of Jesus, when she was visited by the angel and told that she would become pregnant and give birth to the Son of God. Could she have said no? Would she have been better off if she had said no? I kind of want to write a fanfic where God chose a different young woman, but when the angel goes to tell her, she turns him down, and Mary is the second choice. (Maybe God wanted to pick someone who didn't have a good understanding of boundaries, who didn't know she could say no.) (UPDATE: And here it is! Mary's Choice.)

(And don't get me started on Jonah.)

So this is my advice: Set boundaries with God. Don't do things just because "God said"; only do things that have good reasons to back them up. That requires using your own mind to evaluate the situation, rather than just "obeying" or "submitting to God." Because honestly, there's no such thing as simply "submitting to God"- you're submitting to a specific version of God, and you have to do the work first to make sure it's a god that is worth that.

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Related:

Captain Marvel, Boundaries, and Why I Don't Go To Church 

They Prayed About It (a post about the #NashvilleStatement)

I Didn't Like the Ocean in "Moana" Because it was Too Much Like God

It Was Beautiful When Star-Lord Rejected the Gospel

If Thanos Tells You To Build An Ark, You Say No 

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* Okay I want to elaborate about this career advice, since nobody ever explained it to me clearly. This is way off-topic so I'm just putting it here in a footnote at the end:

If there are things you have to sign to start a job, and you refuse to sign them, then that probably means you lose the job. So, in most cases, yes, you would sign everything they want you to sign. But there is a possibility that the documents they want you to sign would put you in a bad position, and actually you're better off without that job. So do be aware of that possibility, and read everything, just to make sure. Typically, though, it is normal that when you start a job, you have to sign a bunch of things- I don't think you need to be scared that they're trying to screw you over- typically these are all very normal: contract, non-compete agreement, confidentiality, those types of things. Definitely read them all and make sure you understand, though. And maybe it would also be useful to do research to get an understanding of what's "normal", so you know when something doesn't seem right. And then go ahead and sign them.

(Yes you will definitely have to sign things to start a job. Of course! And it benefits you to sign a contract; otherwise what guarantee do you have that the company will pay you? The contract obligates you to do things, and the company to do things. You need that. Just make sure that the things it obligates you to are reasonable.)

On the other hand, if you are leaving a job on bad terms, and they want you to sign something that seems a little shady, what benefit is there to you? If you don't sign it, what are they going to do to you, since you're leaving anyway? Only sign it if it benefits you. (I'm thinking of this example from Workplace Stack Exchange. The entire situation is a disaster, please don't take any of it as a model for normal behavior- but in particular, there was one part where the company wanted the developers to all sign something to say they are not the one who sabotaged the code, and a senior developer told them all not to sign it because there was no benefit to them. I very much recommend Workplace Stack Exchange- you can learn a lot about how the real world works and how to have boundaries and a realistic view of what's what.)

Please don't let "I am supposed to be a good kid and sign it because they said I have to sign it, and I should follow the rules" be a factor. Seriously, forget about that, that should not influence your decision at all. HR is just people, same as you; they're not some kind of objective authority figure who deserves your obedience. 

Of course, "if I don't sign it, they will be mad at me/ it will burn bridges, and that could cause problems for me in the future" could be a factor in your decision. Because of how it could affect you in the future. 

(If you're leaving a job on good terms, then yeah you'll likely sign everything they want you to sign. No need to make problems for them, if they haven't made problems for you. Be good to people.)

(And obviously if there are bigger moral issues like "this will harm innocent people," that would also be a factor in your decision. I'm not saying "be a caricature villain who says 'screw everyone else, I only look out for myself.'" I'm saying that there's nothing inherently good about following rules for the sake of following rules.)

This is all very different from being a student in school. I did what the teacher said because they're the authority figure and I'm a good kid- but then you shouldn't view HR that way. HR is completely different. And here's the piece I was missing: You do what the teacher says, because then the teacher will give you a good grade, which benefits you. See? So it is in your best interest to follow the teacher's rules in terms of requirements for your homework or whatever. It benefits you. But sometimes someone who is "in charge" might say you "have to" do something, but you shouldn't just believe that really means you "have to" do it. You evaluate what the results will be, and decide if it's a good idea or not. And don't let "I'm a good kid so I am supposed to do what they say" be a factor. AT ALL.

Obedience is not a virtue.

Just a little career advice from Perfect Number.