Children of the porn
or “Everything I need to know about sex I learned at church rummage sales”
Are you looking for quality porn, at rock-bottom prices? If so, relief could be as close as your local Christian church.
Now don’t get me wrong. You won’t find many upstanding Christian churches peddling Playboy or Penthouse, or any of that male-oriented photographic porn that gets most of the attention. But go to their rummage sales, and check out the books. You’ll find plenty of the porn that doesn’t get much attention—well-thumbed paperback novels containing all manner of promiscuity and perversion. Smut so raunchy, it could never be staged for a camera without the walls of society crashing down. The porn of... housewives.
My most memorable church-porn experience hails from my conservative home town of Port Alberni, British Columbia. There, in a church gymnasium, beneath the crayon Jesus art of young children who have no inkling of what they’re being indoctrinated into, lay the books. Such beautiful, filthy books. Let me tell you my gruesome tale.
The woman sitting behind the book table greeted me when I arrived. She was perhaps forty, and had the beet red face of the dangerously obese. She smiled that familiar “I’d be on Prozac if it weren’t for Jesus” smile, and stared at me through glasses that magnified her eyes just enough to make me feel ill at ease. On today’s journey, this tragic stereotype would be my guide.
I browsed through the books. My first selection was a small red hardcover titled Your Youth: Getting the Best Out of It. I flipped it open and read:
So you see, God made the sex organs for a sacred purpose, that of passing on life. That is why it is proper that they be used according to God’s rules.
This one certainly looked promising. I have always been intrigued by God’s attitude toward genitals—it seems there are so few correct uses for them, and oh-so-many incorrect uses. Another passage caught my eye:
Masturbation weakens a healthy conscience and love for what is right… it cultivates wrong thinking and wrong desire. In fact, masturbation can lead to homosexuality.
Hmmm. It seemed to me that if masturbation led to homosexuality, our society would have a queer majority and a straight minority, rather than the other way around. But who was I to argue with such divine reasoning?
I picked up the next book on the shelf, and the familiar sense of church-porn irony kicked in. For here was a chaste little paperback titled My Secret Sins. In sharp contrast to its righteous neighbour, this book appeared to be about having a great deal of fun whilst fucking large numbers of people. Out of wedlock, no less. I flipped it open, using my patented “instant smut-finding” technique.
Instant smut-finding technique, you ask? I’ll explain. It’s easy to find the smuttiest bits of a second-hand paperback. Just hold the book so its spine is facing straight down and its pages pointing straight up. Then slowly relax your grip, and let the book fall open in your hand. You’ll be surprised at how often it will fall open to the smuttiest bits—which are, of course, the bits that the previous owners have re-read the most.
In this case, my smut-finding resulted in this pious jewel:
Juanita, making this strange animal sound in her throat, leaped from the edge of the bed, literally tore off her bikini, then dropped to all fours in front of us and wailed: “Whip me! Somebody whip me, please! Oh, hurry! Make me hurt, please!”
Hmmmm, I thought. Is this what Jesus would do? A quick skim through the book confirmed my suspicions. It was crammed with explicit, kinky sex, garnished with healthy doses of—you guessed it—masturbation and homosexuality. No surprises there.
I glanced up at the book lady. She smiled. She had the strangest look in her eyes—half deer-in-the-headlights and half power-mechanic-at-a-strip-club-after-work. I got the distinct feeling that she was checking me out when I wasn’t looking. I also noticed that she was reading one of those trashy period romances, the cover of which depicted a fecund young couple undressing each other with a Southern plantation in the background.
I went back into the books. I had stumbled into a mother lode of sexuo-Christian hypocrisy! For every tome of piety, there were two tomes of porn. Amen and semen, dogma and doggie-style, erection and resurrection—you name it, it was there.
And then there were the sex-horror books! The sex! The horror! The preferred reading material of the horny housewife elite, sex-horror books are the crown jewels of any church rummage sale—pulp novels which invariably dwell on innocent, morally-upstanding young women being graphically raped and murdered by all manner of Satanic beasts. I picked up a book named Incubus, and performed the smut-finding test. I must say, you know you’re at a good church when you can pick up a book and read this:
Stepping over the fallen form of Tim, the molester dropped to its knees to mount her... And now hope died, for Jennie felt the start of the awful entry that had killed so many others. The great slick bulb that topped the organ was the size of a grapefruit, and now she closed her eyes and screamed in pain and fury as this monstrous protuberance began to part the delicate petals of her body....
I looked up to find the book lady staring at me. Our eyes met, and for a moment she seemed to flush, as if the silken fingers of an unseen demon were softly stroking the blood-engorged lips of her sopping labial tumescence.
She gestured at the book in my hand and smiled. “That’s a really good one,” she said.
Somewhere in my upper brain stem, a light winked on. A pre-recorded voice intoned: “Warning. The situation you are in is extremely disturbing. Please exit this situation immediately.”
So I quickly bought all of the naughtiest books and walked out, past the crayon Jesus art and into the parking lot, leaving the church and its miserably happy hordes behind.
My church-porn odyssey was over. At least, until next Saturday. To celebrate another successful week of bargain hunting, my mum and I hastened to the local farmer’s market, and there, in the sight of God Himself, we bought some rhubarb. •
Originally published in The Peak, July 12 1999.
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Letter published in The Peak, July 19 1999:
“Getting the joke”
They say that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. I wonder if Glen Callender feels like he’s doomed.
Under the surface, his “Children of the Porn” humour piece in last week’s Peak reads more like the racist yarns of Rudyard Kipling or some not-so-subtle Nazi propaganda film than humour. Here’s how the joke goes: You take a group of people that most people have a vague understanding of and single one of them out--in this case a Christian woman at a church rummage sale (in Kipling’s case an Indian, in a Third Reich film some Polish person). Then you describe that person in the most stereotypical, hackneyed terms and simply extrapolate the rest of their religion (or class or race or whatever other collection of people you despise).
The butt of Glen’s joke is a “Christian repressed housewife about forty, [who] had the beet-red face of the dangerously obese.” No punchline necessary. Everybody who already thinks like you (or Kipling or Goebbels) laughs and laughs.
Maybe it is rationalized that this church book sale woman and other W.A.S.P.s like her dished it out for centuries and now it’s time to fight fire with fire. Point taken, but when does it stop? Group stereotyping and the easy, prejudiced chuckle fit the palm of the self-styled revolutionary as easily as that of the oppressor.
Here’s to hoping that history won’t repeat itself and Glen won’t grow up to be a power-broker himself--a government bureaucrat or influential writer pushing his right and proper upbringing down other peoples’ throats. We’ll see. In the 1970s Roger Daltrey sang, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” Don’t be fooled again Glen. Pendulums do swing, history repeats, and the satirist ultimately becomes the satirized.
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