Habits Hidden Under the Habit
by Edwin L. Young, PhD
May 14, 2010

 Mother Superior found that her suspicions, based on the young novitiate’s carpel tunnel syndrome on her right index finger, were proven correct when she confronted and asked the novitiate, “Have you stopped masturbating?” answer me yes or no.[i]  The hidden habit of the Nuns’ has been overlooked while the Monks, Priests, and Reverends of whatever persuasion have been undergoing public strip searches by our media and legal system.

Amidst the entire hullabaloo about priests sexually molesting young boys, the more interesting truth is about the secret sex lives of nuns.  Perhaps an exploratory look behind the cloister doors is needed if we are to attempt to gain a dispassionate, balanced perspective on the issue of the relations between the sex of both genders and religion, politics, and history.  A candid look at the bare facts should stimulate a broader examination of our beliefs about, our philosophy regarding, the psychology of sexual development within the context of our culture’s history and its structures and systems. 

In the late sixties, I had the occasion to learn about the massive efforts undertaken by the Catholic Church to provide Catholic Seminarians and Priests with retreats, led by psychoanalysts, to deal with their rampant sexual desires, secret and guilt-ridden sexual behaviors, ignorance, conflicts, and problems.  I did not know then but certainly do now that psychoanalysts and psychiatrists are guardians of middle class conventions and morals.  For them, deviance is virtually defined as any departure from the conventional and thus requires treatment.  Nowadays their preferred method of treatment is pharmacological with an occasional dash of superficial, ten-minute therapy sessions to check up on how the medication is working. 

The psychosexual developmental history of many religious leaders, ministers and priests of all persuasions, usually included an early family and social environment that was sexually repressive yet accompanied by the usual wealth of unavoidable, omnipresent, titillating incidents.  Typically, sex, per se, was presented as taboo and sinful.  That extended, of course, to masturbation.  The combination of a sexually repressive environment, omnipresent titillation, and the pubertal hormonal sexual Sturm und Drang of adolescence can, for many a morally and socially immature youth, cause them to rush for protection from themselves into the Church and its anti-sexual preaching.  Put such a young person with a Priest or Reverend with their own unresolved adolescent sexual conflicts is like dropping matches into gasoline.  Naturally, those psychoanalytically led sexual retreats entailed an underlying premise that ‘conventional was normal’ and ‘unconventional sexuality was not just sinful’ but abnormal and required psychotherapy.  One could liken that to a kind of syrupy exorcism. 

The participants in those retreats had not grown up in ‘culturally sanitized bubbles.’  All had grown up in typical American communities with typical American biases against natural human sexuality.  All had grown up with the typical double standard of prohibitions against sexual acting out or even hints of sexual innuendos in speech and yet in the midst of sexually provocative media, deliberately exhibitionist clothing, peers and adults making out everywhere they looked, and peers giggling and sharing what they hoped were the nastiest of sexual secrets.  None of them had grown up in social environments that were free from what these religious and psychological authorities pejoratively were branding as culturally onerous conditions?  Within the psychological constraints that were being so mildly and beneficently imposed by ‘experts’ upon these poor fellows, they were now stuck, not with just religious guilt but with possibly that worst of all stigmas ‘being mentally ill’.  Catholics certainly had their Protestant cohorts in this menacing menagerie of cultural contradictions that were warring like psychological Titans against the genetically immutable sexual aspect of the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens.

Those with cultural savoir-faire today certainly know that humans are sexual beings from birth and the ‘normal’ hormonal Sturm und Drang kicks in with puberty.  The sixties had already introduced birth control devices and pills aplenty as well as sexually liberating literature.  The other major factor in the sixties sexual revolution was technology.  Technology in tandem with the population explosion were major conditions that would act as instigators for upheavals throughout our society, not just the sexual revolution The excessive birth rate in WWII led to a huge population of Boomers for which conventional society and its institutions were unprepared.  Economic, housing, and educational institutions, for example, were no match for the Boomers.  They had to be taught in classes without walls and to live in communes.  No one could supervise and indoctrinate them in conventional ways of life, much less conventional sexuality.  Returning Veterans got whatever jobs and housing were available and boomers got the open road.  Second hand cars were easy to come by and groups of these young savages, in mixed groups, could pile into a worn out VW Bus and roam, unfettered, across the asphalt trails of a befuddled, struggling, adult America. 

Thus, the sixties became noted for the sexual revolution among women and for its freewheeling sexual experimentation between both genders.  Its icon is the muddy slopes of Woodstock complete with naked girls whirling in unchoregraphed, frenzied, erotic dance with loud, bellowing music challenging the social status quo in the background.  Finally, when these Boomers showered and dressed up as the nine-to-five began to open for them, clamoring for their crisp new dollars, Madison Avenue swooped in like the fabled ‘American Eagle.’  Smelling success in the lingering scent of earthy lust, its admen soon learned that sex sells to their nostalgic prey who now were watching the newly coined television money machine from the comfort of the Boomers’ sell-out plush, air-conditioned, techno-outfitted game rooms.  Their sexploitation collaborated with the distractions of plentiful marijuana the Boomers had stashed away after they left their communes and orgies and wild, fornication inducing music; a new sound of music that had been so neatly matched to both their bucolic freedom and poverty-stricken frustration.  “Slip Sliding Away,” the sixties and dropped into the era of the ‘Organization Man’ and woman, of course, thanks to Gloria Steinem and her ilk.  Thus was born and died the dropout generation with its uni-gender ‘sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll’ of the sixties’ hippy, flower child.

I do not know if sexual molestation of youth by the clergy was widespread before the sixties.  However, certainly the stage was set for it from then on.  After all, a twenty-year-old seminarian in the sixties who was likely to be a forty-year old Reverend or Priest in eighties was also a product of the sexually saturated, culture defiant, sixties that, by the way, had been preceded by a childhood from their hyper-conventional, sexually repressive, forties and fifties.  While there were few female seminarians in those days, these young women had been subjected to the identical cultural forces, as had been the young men.  Add biology, the no respecter of any period in history, that is to say the unmitigated nature of human sexuality, into the mix and the stage is set of a conflagration of illicit sexual taboo busting.  There is a wealth of archaic literature describing the sexual dalliance of the ladies under the habit in earlier centuries as well as their liaisons with male religious office holders and lords and ladies of the nobility and the court as well.  It is just my speculation that it is not solely the cruel spotlight of the hypocritical media making it seem that sexual impropriety has just popped up, like jack-in-the-box, for today’s scatological entertainment.  No, rather, I do believe that the tide of modern times have generated a wave of clandestine wantonness, at least from the perspective of the genuine prigs and the self-righteous, hypocritical right-wingers.  I will leave my assessment of our culture’s sexual patterns for later.

Let me now turn to those in the Habit.  In the early nineties, I had the occasion to see a client, a middle-aged woman, who had gone to a Convent in her youth in order to escape her sexually repressive parents.  In therapy, she was able to see that her rush to the Convent was precisely due to those sexual-cultural conflicts I described earlier.  While there, she was, much to her chagrin, still plagued with what she referred to as her filthy thoughts and desires.  She found that she was not alone in her plight and soon fell into secret sexual encounters with another novitiate and then another and then with Mother Superior and then with Monsignor.  Finally coming to grips with her lust, she left the convent, married, and had a daughter.  History repeated itself and the daughter wound up in a convent.  The sexual history repeated itself and the daughter eventually left the convent as well.  The mother and daughter became very close and confided in one another.  The mother began to work through, with her daughter, to what she called a more enlightened and free philosophy of sex.  At the time that I saw the woman, she reported that her daughter was engaged.  Improbable as it might seem, the daughter happily and successfully was employed as a strip and lap dancer in a ritzy club.  My client was now thoroughly enjoying solo-sex but also had an occasional guiltless, fulfilling sexual fling with men her age that she found were highly aroused by the thought of having sex with an ex-nun.

At length biology, like truth, will out!  While I do not ascribe totally to Freud’s causal views on sex expressed in his “Civilization and Its Discontents,”[ii] it does contain points worthy of consideration.  However, specifically with respect to patterns of sexual behavior, I am more inclined toward an evolutionary perspective.  Between humans, especially but not exclusively between male and female, there is an eternal return of our long forgotten evolutionary roots.  The stag in rut spots the doe in her estrus and showing the lordosis reflex.  If she takes off running, his adrenaline puts him in high gear to pursue her.  Anthropomorphizing, let us say she just wants to know hard he will try for that brief, climactic, fantastic, fuck! 

We humans are animals too.  Our biology is still what it was millions of years ago.  It is just hiding underneath our Victorian and Freudian-like civilization and is barely disguised by our swanky or gaudy sartorial suits, our cultivated, courtship decorum, and those ever so subtle body language signs and linguistic seductive insinuations.  It all boils down to the animalistic wailing meaning “Can we fuck?”  All of the accoutrements of our religious and social institutions, each with their idiosyncratic prohibitions and prescribed mating rituals, must somehow be dealt with and rationalized, in order to get down to that longed for lust filled rutting of genital against genital. 

The balancing act between the pressures emanating from civilizations’ omnipresent inhibiting conventions and primitive evolutionary drives waxes and wanes over the eras and periods of history but the war against the barriers to fulfillment to momentary lust will inevitably be penetrated like the flimsy hymen standing between two frenzied, lust-filled, young lovers.  It does not matter whether we are referring the hetero or homosexual sex, once the mammalian trip switch is flicked, civilizations’ conventions and prohibitions, whether religion or law, go poof in a wink.  For the vast majority of humans, sex is going to have its way sooner or later, conventions of Churches, puritanical laws, and threats of public humiliation notwithstanding.

The sexual conventions of each era are always seen as irrational to some subsequent generation.  In the present, still as irrational as ever, they merely serve to make humans suffer for their evolutionary history.  Sexual peccadilloes of sexual addicts of one sort or another provide perfect pretexts to force these witless deviants to pay for elaborate disguises before the act and the spin of expensive public relations damage control after the fact.  In olden days, ostentatious, expensive costumes not only announced one’s status but also laboriously disguised one’s true animalistic sexuality.  Now the unfortunate politician whose cohorts may have discovered their deviant proclivities may find their sinister diviners extracting donations, that is to say blackmail, from them for political campaigns.  Similarly, those of the cloth may find themselves faced with exorbitant lawsuits.  Strange as it may seem, some of these errant souls may be solicited by editors to buy their story for equally awesome funds.  The austere, hypocritical officials who blindly uphold the status quo while going undetected for their own sexual dalliance are often found to be the worst offenders of their own codes of sexual morality.  Ahh, were it not for blackmail, would any legislative bill favoring the Machiavellian types get done?  Would any unscrupulous lawyer get their huge, ill begotten, settlement?

Some segments of our own and other cultures are blazing paths toward freedom from such irrational sexual repression.  Sad citizens in others still warily sneak around incognito into motels, those zoned gyms, the backs of adult book stores, or to brothels, or even slip into airport restrooms and anxiously tap their foot.  All of these unfortunate victims of a befuddled civilization are hoping to not be discovered and therefore have to pay the ‘undiscovered predator’ or pray for forgiveness to a compromised Bishop.  Some who are totally free of what the culture labels deviant will still tremulously reach out and touch near a volatile erotic zone of their legitimate date as though Zeus’ lightening will strike them dead for the transgression.  Yet, alas, some revolting others will enjoy the sport of exploiting and profiting from the idiotic and feckless human psychotic sexual duplicity rampant in our culture.  All of these intricate machinations in our culture could be relegated to the archive of historical follies if only we humans could learn to toss the ‘Habits hiding our habits,’ disclose our true natures to ourselves and the world, accept those sexual habits that heretofore have been repressed and disguised by moronic mores, embrace our evolutionary roots, and blossom into our authentic sexual selves.