Missionary Self Abuse
I happened upon this video of a Mormon mission president preaching to the missionaries in his charge about the problem of masturbation among the missionaries. The female missionaries were escorted from the room because masturbation isn’t a big problem for women and because it would be inappropriate to talk about S-E-X in mixed company. It shows just how seriously masturbation is taken, and how afraid of it grown men are.
The mission president goes so far as to blame the low baptism rate in his mission on masturbation among the missionaries. I wish I was more shocked by this video, but the views expressed therein are typical. Those two years of my life were such a pressure cooker. The expectations to work 12 hours a day, win converts, and do it while completely suppressing my youthful sexuality were suffocating and dangerous. I learned a lot on my mission, but I wouldn’t call them the best two years of my life.
Update: Thanks to Kullervo for pointing out the rest of the videos in this series. For those who aren’t familiar with the kind of fundamentalism that Mormon missions tend to breed, these videos are very instructive and sickening, Parts 1 and 6 especially.
Walking backwards to avoid seeing a picture! I would laugh if it didn’t make me sad to see how afraid he is of seeing some skin. Little does he realize that his fear is his real problem, not his desire to see nudity.
Tags: LDS, masturbation, mission, missionary, Mormon, religion, self abuse
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George said,
February 26, 2008 @ 10:34 am
Waaaaaaaahahahahahahahaha
What happened to “hold on to the rod” thing???
Hahahaha I’m not saying masturbation is a good thing but, but… come on people use your brain… masturbation = all the mission problems…. ???
February 26, 2008 @ 10:46 am
Let’s just say that, from the picture in the video, the mission president appears to have received extra helpings when he received his “Endowment”. That rod he’s holding to is extra long.
February 26, 2008 @ 12:14 pm
You should watch all sections of the talk. The masturbation segment got all the attention, but I don’t think it was as frustrating to me as the general framework that allows these inferences. The first segment actually pissed me off the most, because it lays out the twisted, abusive logic of Mormonism in general and its magnification on a mission.
I actually am really glad I went on a mission. Not the best two years of my life, but an important two years, and an experience I wouldn’t trade. Plus, I went to Germany so I don’t have to feel guilty about converting anyone to an embarrassingly false religion. There were definite downsides, but experiencing the bullshit and coming through it intact was really important in the formation of my adult identity.
February 26, 2008 @ 1:24 pm
He doesn’t read the so-called scripture refs to “self-abuse”, just lists them. But the first says it all:
Romans 6:12-13
12 Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof.
13 Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.
Actually, he didn’t include vs 13 … I wonder why? Reading this aloud would have been good for some outbursts of evil giggling and no doubt would have cost the kingdom of god a few more baptisms — ’cause, you know, every time a missionary masturbates, god’s plan dictates that another soul be lost.
Yeah, my member is no longer a member of TSCC and still quite alive I should say. Though I’ll give the church this: guilt is a powerful aphrodisiac. Righteous indeed.
February 26, 2008 @ 3:15 pm
Kullervo, I once worked within earshot of a sales department. It made me sick how the supervisors manipulated the salespeople with threats, peer pressure, rewards, whatever it took to bring in the sales. This mission president reminded me of them. Mine weren’t so blatant, but we were baptizing at an OK rate. I’d hate to see what kind of pressure would have happened otherwise. It might not have gotten as bad as this Yahoo with his holly rod, but there was plenty of pressure to produce good numbers even while they denied that numbers were important.
mel, I must agree that some things just aren’t as enticing now that they’re not forbidden. Leaving the church has had at least one bad effect, there’s a lot less deliciously forbidden in my life.
I hasten to add lest anyone misunderstand that this doesn’t mean that I’m moving on to even more naughty things as if sexuality were a gateway drug; just that I’m learning to live with less of the thrill of being tempted by the forbidden.
February 26, 2008 @ 9:39 pm
personally, i find masturbation to be a great releaser of tension and also a wonderful drug-free treatment for migraines. TSCC should loosen up; it might make the rates of antidepressant use go down if all the women received vibrators instead of roses on mother’s day.
February 27, 2008 @ 12:49 pm
I would pay to be in a sacrament meeting when—ahem—massagers were handed out to the sisters “because our mothers work so hard that they need a little relief now and then”.
Equilibrium said,
April 21, 2008 @ 9:34 pm
Hey y’all, I really appreciate how you guys have raised attention to these sound bites. I think it helps me, and helps us all reason through what was going on in our missions with a fresh perspective. I recorded that zone conference by accident, and kept it under my hat for 4 years.
7 months after I posted these clips, the old missionaries of the Toulouse mission have caught a whif of them, and are getting pretty vocal about it. I’ve been getting some pretty harsh responses, most of them trying to scare or guilt me into taking them off the internet. I guess I knew it was only a matter of time, but I am still surprised about how angry they are that I would actually reveal something like that about my mission.
April 22, 2008 @ 4:59 am
They are leaving some interesting comments on YouTube. It’s a hard thing to have your beliefs called foolish. But it needs to be said. Too much of my youth was wasted under the sway of men like Pratt. I hope the LDS church can wake up to the damage it is doing in the name of sexual purity.
Don’t let them convince you to take them down. It’s important that thinking and tactics like this need to be held up to the light of day.