All vices are given up—smoking, drugs, excessive drinking, porn. Adults may consume one alcoholic beverage at the weekly movie night. Our young women are supposed to be natural; they can wear makeup but shouldn’t be overly concerned with their appearance or trendy clothes. According to Grandpa, “a woman’s hair is her crowning glory,” so we must grow it long to be attractive for the men.
But unlike most Christian denominations, sex pervades our lives. It is glorified, Godly. Cartoon images of naked women fill our religious literature. The Holy Spirit of the Trinity is a buxom, hot, horny goddess wearing only a heart-shaped bikini held on with pearl strings. Photos of bare-breasted women adorn our monthly newsletters. Instead of covering up, women can show as much skin as is allowed in the countries we live in, and they often wear nothing more than a sarong around the house. Our sex is our service to God. Refusing sex is being hard and selfish, unyielded to God’s will. And our absolute obedience is expected.
We have been in our new house for several months when I wake up from a nightmare. I’m a big girl at four—my mother tells me how serious and mature I am for my age, but I still want her when I’m frightened. Searching around in the dark, I see a little flickering light and hear some noise coming from my mother’s loft. Trembling, I quietly climb the shaky bamboo ladder. I’m not supposed to be climbing it, and I hope she will forgive me for disobeying and cuddle me instead of swatting me.
As my head peeks over the platform, I see her and my father naked on the mattress. More scared of my father than the bad dream, I hesitate. I’m stuck—afraid to climb back down and afraid to be seen. My mother spots me, and before my father can bark at me to go away, she says, “What’s wrong, honey? Are you okay?”
“I had a bad dream,” I say, quaking.
“Oh, sweetheart, come here.” She plucks me off the unsteady ladder and pulls me over to her mattress on the floorboards of the loft.
My father looks very annoyed at the interruption.
“Would you like to watch a magic trick?” she asks, as if the idea for a great game has just struck her.
I nod, relieved to be allowed to stay.
My mother sits me next to her and kneels beside my father, who is laying on his back, unusually quiet. She begins to stroke his penis up and down.
I watch in surprise as it starts to grow and stand up!
“If you keep doing this, eventually the man will come,” she says in her teaching voice.
I watch, fascinated and confused about what it means to “come.”
My father grits his teeth with a grunt, and white stuff sprays out of the top of his penis onto his tummy.
“Did you see that!” my mother exclaims. “Like a magic trick.”
I stare quietly. That’s gross, I think, as she uses tissues to wipe it up. But I say nothing.
“Only big boys like your father have semen come out. Little boys like your brothers don’t have semen yet.”
I nod, taking in the instruction.
“Daddy wants to sleep,” she says, glancing at him. “Are you ready to go back to bed?”
“Yes,” I say, eager to leave. No one disturbs my father’s sleep without painful consequences. She helps me down the ladder and tucks me into my bunk, and we pray together, “Protect and keep us safe, give me a good sleep and good dreams. Send Your angels to guard me.” I’ve forgotten about my nightmare. Somehow, I know that my playmates don’t have this knowledge that I’ve just learned.
I feel odd. And strangely older.
Of course, even though I’d never seen sex that up close before, I already knew all about it.
The Mo Letters the adults read at Devotions often have cartoons of nearly nude people, with titles like Child Brides, The Devil Hates Sex, God’s Whores, and God’s Witches!—Beware! “We want our kids to have a healthy, natural attitude about sex and not think it is something to be ashamed of or feel guilty about,” Grandpa says. “Sex is Godly and natural. If we introduce it to the kids at a young age, they won’t have hang-ups about it like we grew up with.”
One of my first coloring books was about sex. It had realistic drawings of a naked, fully aroused man having sex with a woman with a flower crown on her long hair. It had a full-frontal diagram of an open vagina with arrows pointing to the clitoris and urethra, and an equally detailed diagram of a penis and scrotum. “You need to know where babies come from,” my mother said as she placed it in my little three-year-old hands.
It was boring to color because most of the comic had to be done in skin tone. A quick once-over with a beige colored pencil that was closest to my own skin color and I could move on to the naked, chubby cherubs floating on hearts that surrounded the couple having sex. One of the coloring pages showed a baby growing inside a naked hippie woman’s tummy, and another showed her giving birth. I snickered with pity when I heard that some Systemite kids thought babies were brought by storks or grew in cabbages. How could they be so stupid? Babies come from sex.
In his Mo Letters, Grandpa attacks the unhealthy and restrictive American attitudes toward sex. He fondly describes his own early sexual encounters with his nanny as an example of good parenting, telling about how, when he was just a few years old, his South American nanny used to put him down for his nap by sucking on his penie. He proclaimed how he loved it, but one day his mother caught the nanny and fired her. His mother took a bowl and knife and warned him that if she ever caught him playing with his penis, she’d cut it off. Her threats freaked him out, but it didn’t stop him from having sex once he figured out how to do it with his cousin at seven years of age.
Since the year before we’ve been receiving advance chapters from The Story of Davidito, the new child training book Davidito’s nanny, Auntie Sara, is writing. It describes Grandpa and Mama Maria’s ideas for how to raise healthy, Godly kids, with stories from Grandpa’s home about how they are educating their young son, Davidito, who is a couple of years older than I.
This handbook provides a detailed description of Davidito’s sexual development. Chapter 36, “Learning Fun at 20 Months, Sex!” explains how Auntie Sara puts toddler Davidito to sleep by playing with his penis, just like Grandpa’s nanny had done with him when he was a boy.
“He gets quite excited when I wash his bottom and his penie gets real big and hard,” she writes. “I kiss it all over till he gets so excited he bursts into laughter and spreads his legs open for more. . . . He got to where he liked it so much, he’d pull people by the hand down onto the floor and would spread his legs apart for ‘the treatment.’”