Hot For Jesus

Knowing where I ended up, people often want to know if I was molested as a child. I wasn't, but not for lack of trying.

I first discovered the exciting world of sexual abuse in sixth grade, when my elementary school passed out educational comic books as part of a health fair. The plot centered on a gang of pleasantly diverse superheroes who rescued kids from the horrors of physical and sexual abuse. There was a whole teeming underbelly of titillation that I alone was privy to by grace of being the only student dorky enough to actually read the comic book. The kids inside had stumbling alcoholic parents at whom they screamed "I HATE YOU" and got lots of attention from the compassionate adults who wanted to help them. It was like the Days of Our Lives of child abuse.

Just when you thought Matt was going to get socked for missing curfew, the non-threatening black kid appeared to rescue him before fist hit mandible. But when Sally's somewhat-dashing alcoholic father made suggestive comments to Sally, I felt my face flush. I looked around at the other desks, but no one else had lucked into this school-sanctioned pornography. Sally was drawn scared and upset by the artist, her eyes quivering with urgent motion lines. I rubbed my pencil against the page, wishing I could erase her distress into sexy complicity, thus increasing my vicarious thrill. I wanted the non-threatening black kid to come back and engage Sally in a threesome with her boorish pops while I watched.

Afterward, I found no shortage of young adult novels with which to feed my ignominious appetites. After reading about a girl who gets molested by her dentist, I spent my time in the chair sucking in my stomach and trying to look sexy with wads of cotton in my cheeks. I quivered with anticipation when alone with an adult, breathlessly wishing and completely terrified that they would cross the line. I fantasized about someone taking advantage of me because it was the only kind of sex I could imagine being able to engage in without feeling guilty. As a Southern Baptist girl, I couldn't fantasize about boys my own age; having sex with one of them was like purchasing a one-way ticket to Hell. But if the dentist, an adult in a position of authority, decided to drill me in more ways than one, well surely God couldn't be mad at me for that.

One of the girls at middle school told me that a pervert had once shown her his dick through the library window and I was green with envy. What had she done to deserve a pervert? I was busy scouring the card catalog for child abuse literature and the most I got was a glimpse of my little brother's tiny wang as he sprinted from the bathroom to his bedroom. My entire childhood felt like watching a pervert jerk off through the library window – me, cocooned in a place of safety and learning, looking out at the dirty, visceral realities of life, intrigued but unable to connect.

As I grew older, the feeling of being on the fringes of something I couldn't quite participate in only increased. Even at church camp, sex lurked in the forests beyond the chapel, where it was rumored that many attendees had lost their virginities. I was a graduate of the girls-only camp for the younger demographic, but the teen camp I started attending at 12 was like a den of iniquity compared to that place.

After a day sweatily crowded into outdoor church pews listening to sermons about the dangers of secular media, and singing songs about God (sample lyric: "I don't want to be a hypocrite/ cause they're not hip with it/I don't wanna be a Pharisee/cause they're not fair you see), the Christian teenagers teemed into the camp for free time. Puberty hormones and a healthy fear of God combined into a mighty aphrodisiac that had underage blondes rolling up and tying their What Would Jesus Do T-shirts to show off tan navels and the pimply, Jesus-loving boys hanging around the swimming pool drooling during the girls' segregated swimming time. All that fire and brimstone merely stoked the fire in our loins.

The camp had been around for a century and the rule book had changed little since it opening. Though I had been warned of the rigorous rules about shorts lengths, I hadn't received any guidelines about swimwear. So when my grandmother had taken me to Dillard's, I had picked out a tasteful tank top with brief-cut bottoms like the other girls in my class were wearing. My intriguing and mysterious bumps, usually wrapped up like Christmas presents, were hinted at by the cut of the new suit. When we changed before the scheduled swim, the other girls were staring at me. I instantly felt awkward, my skin peeking out white and fluffy like a cumulus cloud in a pillowcase.

"Look who's getting boobs!" shouted one of the girls, actually poking at the fleshy orb spilling over the top of my bathing suit. Mortified, I crossed my arms over my chest, but not before I had noticed that yes, she was right, I was getting boobs. Big boobs. Big, gorgeous boobs which would later earn me an extra 50 an hour but which at that moment seemed low on the list of things a young woman would want on her chest. A kinder girl led me away from the crowd rapidly gathering around my puberty sideshow and explained that the camp did not allow two-piece bathing suits.

Stuck back on my bunk with no television or company, I flipped open my personalized Precious Moments Bible (it would be replaced within the year by a "True Love Waits" bible). Starting from "in the beginning," it didn't take me long to realize that the Bible was chock-ful of kinky shit. Before I was even out of Genesis, Lot's slutty daughters were devising plans to get knocked up by Dad. There was more rape, incest, and adultery than on Telenova, and I didn't really notice what I was doing when one hand slipped inside my past-the-knee-length shorts.

Even with all the admittedly sinful diddling and fingering and rubbing and stroking I had done before, I had never once done something as terrible, as sacrilegious as what I found myself doing now.

I was masturbating to the Bible.

I don't remember what section in particular it was that got me so steamed up, although I think it was in the Old Testament. What I do remember is the sense of horror when I realized what I was doing. I knew I should ask God for forgiveness, but I was frankly too ashamed to face him. That night, as the swaying and weeping teenagers repented from the afternoon's PG hedonism, I made my way down the aisle to "rededicate my life to Christ" and just hoped that would take care of it without getting too specific.