Mormon Chastity Metaphors That Really Need to Go

[Third Hour]

Mormons love their comparisons, metaphors and analogies, and some of them are really good. Hugh B. Brown's Currant Bush, the classic Bicycle comparison to the Atonement, and any of President Uchtdorf's Airplane connections. These are beautiful, hard-to-misinterpret figures of speech. If you slide all the way down the figurative language ladder, though, you'll eventually hit the bottom rungs: chastity metaphors. These comparisons aren't canonized or approved by Church leaders, but they still stick around like fruit flies. They're hard to swat away and while they seem relatively harmless, they indicate something is rotting nearby. Talking to the youth of the Church about chastity and sexual virtue is uncomfortable and difficult. That said, we can surely do better than these easily-misconstrued or wildly inaccurate comparisons. The Wilted Flower This one seems harmless enough on the surface. People are getting compared to flowers—how bad could it be? Pretty bad, as it happens. The implication that everyone has an expiration date, that after a certain biological time period someone loses their worth? Subtly insinuating that after someone has "wilted," they don't smell...

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[mirkwood]

Chastity metaphors that need to go?  ALL of them.  Let's just talk plainly to our kids.

[Just_A_Guy]

I dunno.  I get how a lot of these can be conceptually harmful (c.f. Elizabeth Smart).  But some acts do follow us throughout our mortal lives.  A criminal record is, temporally speaking, permanent.  Child support, parental responsibilities, and a crazy ex, are not expungeable.  Physiological damage from substance abuse may prove irreversible.  The psychological damage/trauma involved with--say--combat, or surviving child/sex abuse, can be lifelong.  And increasingly, we are learning that engaging in premature sexual relationships (and the inevitable collapse of those relationships) tends to be a bellwether for emotional commitment issues later in life.

I'm all for keeping our metaphors useful; but suggesting that innocence and chastity (among other virtues) are merely "paths" that can be abandoned with impunity and then rejoined again at one's leisure with no lasting fallout, seems itself unhelpful and deceptive if not outright destructive.

[The Folk Prophet]

1 hour ago, Just_A_Guy said:

I'm all for keeping our metaphors useful; but suggesting that innocence and chastity (among other virtues) are merely "paths" that can be abandoned with impunity and then rejoined again at one's leisure with no lasting fallout, seems itself unhelpful and deceptive if not outright destructive.

I also wonder how it is that people who are taught these metaphors aren't able to separate the warning from the plain, repeated teaching of repentance and the miracle of the atonement. The miracle of repentance and the atonement is that chewed gum can become unchewed, the fence post with holes in it can be made whole (or hole-less), etc.

I am slightly skeptical* that so many seem unable to make this association.

Of course I agree...sometimes the completion of that hole-less-ness won't come about until the resurrection. And...more importantly, the holes made may well cause enough problems of one nature or another that the healing may never be fully realized.

Note: I'm not arguing for teaching using these metaphors. I just find the railing against them a bit overwrought -- which pretty much sums up how everyone reacts to everything nowadays.

I can't say there is anything wrong with the idea that these metaphors aren't the best way to teach the subject. But...meh.

*By which I mean to say, in some ways this sort of thing just feels like another way to criticize the church.

[mirkwood]

As a teen growing up in the debauchery known as the 80's I thought the metaphors were stupid.  I still do.

[Guest MormonGator]

14 minutes ago, mirkwood said:

As a teen growing up in the debauchery known as the 80's I thought the metaphors were stupid.  I still do.

Well in fairness the country was still sort of recovering after the civil war, the assassination of James Garfield... 

OH! You meant 1980s! 

Edited April 28, 2017 by MormonGator

[mirkwood]

1 hour ago, MormonGator said:

Well in fairness the country was still sort of recovering after the civil war, the assassination of James Garfield... 

OH! You meant 1980s! 

 

[NeuroTypical]

I'm seeing an epitaph: 

Here lies Mirkwood. The greatest rock an roller of all time.  Shot dead at age 100 by a jealous lover.  It's a shame we never saw him in his prime.

[Sunday21]

On 2017-04-27 at 9:31 PM, MormonGator said:

Well in fairness the country was still sort of recovering after the civil war, the assassination of James Garfield... 

OH! You meant 1980s! 

@MormonGator seems to be living in his own time stream! It's a clue! He's Dr Who! (Note the rhyme) How's the tardis?

Edited April 29, 2017 by Sunday21