The Octopus of Sexual Repression
by John Wijngaards
During my time as lecturer in St John’s Mayor Seminary Hyderabad, India, I held various functions, among them to be spiritual guide to many students. One Catholic student from Kerala, whom I will call Samuel, confided a problem. I still see Samuel sprawling awkwardly in an armchair facing me. Tall, light-tanned complexion, 18 years old, nervously wiping his shining black hair aside as he threw anxious glances at me.
“Tell me”, I said.
“I’m getting white stuff from… well, my front…”, he said, pointing at a spot between his thighs. He waited, still looking at me. “From my penis.”
“So?”
“It’s like curdled milk…”
He waited again, then spurted out: “I told my neighbour (the student living in the room next to him). He says I’ve committed a serious sin. Against chastity.”
For a moment I was stunned. Where should I start?
Samuel wasn’t the only one to reveal abysmal ignorance about sex and utter confusion about sexual morality. Other students harboured similar problems and, strangely enough, all those students hailed from the Indian State of Kerala. Our local Telugu-speaking students from Andhra Pradesh were much better informed in matters of sex.
Why was that I wondered?
When visiting villages, Telugu mothers would proudly cradle a baby in their arms. If I showed an interest in the child, a mother might smilingly say: “Magadhu!” – “It’s a boy!”, lifting his nappy to show the baby’s sexual equipment.
Where did that disarming Telugu openness about sex come from?
One reason I discovered is that the Telugus live in close-knit village communities or town neighbourhoods. Tiny mud-wall or brick houses are stacked one against the other. Homes are often one-room establishments in which parents, teenagers and children sleep huddled together, some stretching on low manzams, beds made of ropes strung between a wooden frame, others simply lying on the floor, wrapped in a blanket and resting on a reed mat. Small children are often naked when ambling around the house. As they grow up, they see the adults undress before taking a bath. They notice them make love in the morning, or at night. The monthly periods of girls and grown-up women are keenly followed by the whole family.
Moreover, our Catholic communities in Andhra Pradesh are firmly embedded within an overwhelmingly Hindu culture. And the main idol worshipped in Hindu shrines and temples throughout Andhra Pradesh is a short or tall shining, black-granite pillar of stone, the lingam. It represents the erect male member of the God Shiva. An elongated saucer-type ring made of stone at its base stands for the yoni, the female sexual organ. The yoni will have a spout on one side so that libations that are poured out over the lingam, collect in the yoni and can easily be drained off.
People in Andhra Pradesh refer to sex with few inhibitions. The Telugus freely speak of a man’s lingam and a woman’s yoni. Family names include the word ‘penis’: like Mahalingam, ‘large penis’, and Gurulingam, ‘the teacher’s penis’. There are villages called Lingampalli, Rasalingam, Lingamguntla, Lingamkonda and so on.
Things are quite different in Kerala as I was soon to find out. Many Catholics live in solitary cottages in the hill country of the Western Ghats. Strict Catholic discipline imposes bodily isolation and silence about sex. Let me spell out some examples I came across…
The Catholic obsession
Anyone who knows the Catholic Church will have recognised that what I have been narrating regarding the Catholic community in Kerala applies equally to traditional Catholic communities anywhere in the world. Fear of sex and the attempt to repress it are, regretfully, international Catholic phenomena. Catholics in Kerala are not more beset by the sexual muddle than Catholics elsewhere. The problem does not lie in a country or its culture, but in traditional Catholicism.
I knew it only too well from my own country: Holland. In the twentieth century the Dutch Catholic Church was reasserting itself after centuries of Protestant persecution. The Dutch Catholicism I grew up in was fiercely loyal and totally committed to their faith. At the time 14,000 Catholic missionaries from the Netherlands evangelized Asia, Africa and Latin America – the largest national group of Catholic missionaries in the world, matched only, at one point, by the Irish. Dutch Catholics were thorough. They meant business. Unfortunately, this also applied to sexual morality.
Let us stay at home and take a look at my family.
As I have narrated in an earlier chapter, my mother came from a family of nine children. None of these children received any sex education. They were warned, again and again, that indulging in sex was sinful – a mortal sin! – but sex itself was not explained. Sex was haunted by fear and hid in darkness. My mother once told me that as the oldest child in the family she accompanied her mother, my grandmother, to a conference in the parish church. Preacher was renowned Father Henry de Greeve. “He preached for an hour”, my mother said. “Thumping his fist on the pulpit he roared: ‘The world wants sex, dirty sex. But I warn you: sex will drag you to hell! Everlasting hell!’ ”
“It was awful”, my mother recollected. “Awful. Then he shouted: ‘I tell you parents: to save your children from hell, keep them green! Yes, keep them green!’ ”
But keeping children ignorant is a recipe for disaster.
One of my aunts, Caroline, two years younger than my mother, only found out during her wedding night what intercourse means.
“It was a drama”, my mother said. “Caroline was shocked. Sickened. Disgusted. She cried the whole night. The marriage was scarred for the rest of her life.”
“I was lucky”, my mother said. “When I got engaged to your father, he discovered my anxiety and ignorance about sex. He gave me booklets to read that explained everything. I had to read them in secret because my father would have taken them from me.”
My grandfather, in fact, in spite of fathering so much offspring himself, firmly adhered to the traditional Catholic policy of sexual repression. One day he cycled with some of his children along the Apeldoorn Canal. It was summer. Some half-naked men were swimming in the water. As soon as he saw this, my grandfather shouted down the line: “Look left! Look left!” – that is: away from the canal. Nudity was absolutely tabu.
On Saturday evenings all the children would be given fresh underwear. Of course, with such a large family, girls crammed into one bedroom, boys in another, changing your vest could reveal breasts and changing nickers even more unspeakable body parts. So granpa arranged a strip-and-cover ritual. He would wait till all of them were standing near their pile of change. Then he would blow a whistle and turn off the main light switch in the house. In total darkness vests and nickers were taken off, fresh ones put on. Sin averted! Imagine the spiritual damage that could have been done if anyone saw his or her own body, or that of a sibling!!
Fear of the naked body also reigned supreme in convents. One nun confided to me that sisters were ordered to wear a designated chemise, a kind of night shirt, when taking a bath. They were allowed to wash their nipples and genital area under the chemise, but on no account were they allowed to look at such things.
When I stayed in hospital for eye treatment which involved a fever cure, another nun narrated how she had been visited by her superior.
“Sister”, the superior had said. “I pity nurses like you.”
“Why?” she had asked.
“Well, nurses like you have to wash other people’s bodies. You are seeing so much sin every day…” She meant seeing the naked genitals of women and men!
Murderer with many arms
Such things were still in my mind when I was invited to take a short trip on a fishing boat off Kovalam Beach in Kerala. The sea was calm. I admired the rugged fishermen as they sought out and located a net left overnight across a tidal underwater flow one mile from the shore.
When the net was pulled up from the water it revealed a mass of glistening wriggling sea creatures: sardines, carps, lemmings, lobsters, crabs and – to my delight – an octopus.
An octopus lives on the bottom of the sea. Having no bones, it can flatten itself and squeeze through narrow slits. It is a master of camouflage and disguise. It can change the colour of its skin at will, turning speckled and light yellow on light yellow sand, grey when slithering on grey rocks, green when hiding among weeds. But all the time its eight arms are ready to strike out and strangle unsuspecting victims. The octopus lies in hiding, unseen, till it kills with deadly ferocity.
This stealthy strangler, I saw, was the perfect image for the insidious Catholic obsession with sex and hostility to sex. Hiding under clever guises of pious camouflage, the octopus of sexual repression wreaked havoc with its many strangling arms. It held teenagers in a state of terror of its unseen threat. It snuffed out the joy of sex in the bedrooms of Catholic couples. It doomed timid Catholics to avoid marriage altogether and drove more adventurous Catholics, by rebound, to explore incest, pornography and other sexual excesses.
But where did this unchristian sex-demolisher come from? And how had it managed to infest the soul of traditional Catholicism? I was determined to find out… It took me years to fully pin the culprit down. The main engineer of Catholic disgust with sex proved to be Saint Augustine who lived in North Africa from 354 to 430. His influence on later centuries is truly enormous. Quotes from his more than 100 writings dominate medieval theology. Augustine is the Church Father most admired, revered and studied till the present day.
‘Doctor of the Church’ Augustine teaches that original sin is passed on by sexual passion in the parents. He tells Christian parents that the physical expression of a loving relationship in marriage can only be excused by the need of producing children.
“Sex is tainted with sin. Though sex is necessary to have children and so unavoidable, there is something disgusting about sex. A good Christian man knows this. He loves in his wife what is spiritual. But he hates in her what makes her a woman, her mortal sexual flesh…” (Augustine, Sermon on the Mount, book 1, § 41 & 42).
Well, Augustine is wrong.
When, through evolution, God created us to be male and female, he made us sexual beings. That means we have sex organs, sexual feelings, sexual pleasures and intercourse. There is nothing shameful or disgusting about them. Of course, we need to use our sexual powers responsibly, like any other gift we possess. But sex is good. Sex too is a gift, not evil or caused by sin. It is holy and good.
Through his flawed ideas Augustine greatly contributed to the stranglehold of the Octopus on so many Catholic lives, the Octopus of shame about sex, disgust with sex, repression of sex. So my sixth commandment for Church reform is: Abandon the misguided repression of sex advocated by St. Augustine.
—
Excerpt from Chapter 18 in Ten Commandments for Church Reform. Memoirs of a Catholic Priest, by John Wijngaards (Acadian House Publishing 2021; 256 pages, 75 photographs).
The book is available in USA and UK bookshops. Main distributors are Acadian House in the USA – click here, and Gazelle Book Services in the UK – click here.
It can also be ordered through Amazon (USA: $ 20.90; UK: £ 15.78).
For more information about the book, read here!