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A quick note before we get started. This series has been a long time in the making. I have been researching this history, working with clients inside it, and thinking about how to talk about it for years. It is not something I am putting together casually. It matters to me to get it right.

This series is also built around the history and teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. If you are a member of the Church, the references will be familiar. If you are not, the specific history I am walking through will not match your faith tradition exactly. But much of this conditioning was shaped by the broader culture of conservative Christianity in America during the same era, so chances are you absorbed a version of it too. I have coached enough clients from outside the Church to know that the conditioning from high-demand religion tends to land in remarkably similar ways across traditions. The specifics will differ. The shapes it leaves in your body and your marriage often do not. So if you are listening and you are not Latter-day Saint, stay with me. The history may not be yours, but the work probably is.

Let’s get started

Bennett and Rosalie have been married for twelve years. They met at BYU, got sealed in the Salt Lake Temple six months after their first date, and by every external measure, they have built a good life. Three kids. A house in a nice ward. He serves in the Elders Quorum presidency. She teaches in Young Women. They pay a full tithe. They faithfully do Come, Follow Me with their children each week. Rosalie stays home with the kids and homeschools them, which is what she always thought she wanted. Bennett works long hours at a job that pays well enough.

And Rosalie is on a Zoom call with me on a Tuesday morning, crying, because she cannot remember the last time she felt desire for her husband. Just… nothing. A flat line where something used to be, or where she was told something would be, once she was married and it was finally allowed.

She keeps saying, I did everything right. I did everything they told me to do. Why doesn’t it work?

The Story She’s Actually Living In

The script Rosalie has been following was written long before she was born, by people she never met, for reasons that had very little to do with her marriage or her body. She thinks she’s living her own life. She’s actually living inside a set of instructions assembled piece by piece over more than a hundred years, and she inherited them without knowing they were there.

This is not a story about the church, the prophets, or the apostles being bad. It is a story about how institutions develop, how rules accumulate, and how a woman in her mid-thirties can end up feeling broken when she is not broken at all. She is simply responding, very predictably, to decades of very specific conditioning.

This is a big conversation, so I am splitting it into a five-episode series. Today we cover the hundred-year history of how we got here. The next two episodes go inside what this conditioning does to women and to men. The fourth episode goes deep on the teaching that sexual sin is the sin next to murder. And we close with an episode called The Natural Man, where we reframe some of this through new tools so you have something practical to take with you.

Once you see where this came from, you get to decide what to do with it.

Joseph F. Smith and the Architecture of Standardization

At the turn of the twentieth century, the church was a very different place than it is today. Polygamy had just been officially ended. Statehood for Utah was new. The Reed Smoot hearings were happening, where a sitting apostle was being grilled by the United States Senate about whether Latter-day Saints could be trusted as loyal Americans. The church was under enormous pressure to become more mainstream and uniform.

Joseph F. Smith became president in 1901 and served until 1918. During those seventeen years, he standardized almost everything. Ordination ages for young men. Meeting schedules. Curriculum materials. He set up family home evening in 1915. He emphasized home teaching, priesthood authority, and uniform courses of study. He was an institutional architect, and his instincts were toward order and consistency. In a church that had just come through decades of persecution, that made sense. People needed stability.

But here is where it gets important for Rosalie. Joseph F. Smith was also explicit about sexuality, and his teachings are where the framing of sexual sin as second only to murder originated. In his book Gospel Doctrine, which became a Sunday School manual for generations, he wrote, “We desire with holy zeal to emphasize the enormity of sexual sins. We hold that sexual sin is second only to the shedding of innocent blood in the category of personal crimes.” He called sexual sin an abomination, said it must be shunned as the gates of hell, and described it as destroying the world. That framing got reinforced in later First Presidency statements, including one in 1942, and we will spend a whole episode on it later in this series. But the emotional and moral weight the church now places on sexual purity traces directly back to Joseph F. Smith.

So imagine what he built. A church where everything had a prescribed structure, and where sexuality was treated as the most dangerous terrain a person could walk. That’s the starting point.

Heber J. Grant and the Temple Recommend Checklist

Heber J. Grant was sustained as the next prophet in 1918 and served until 1945. In 1940, something significant happened that most members today don’t know about. The church formalized the temple recommend interview into a standardized set of questions. Before that, worthiness was more subjective, more conversational, a relationship between the bishop and the member. After 1940, it became a checklist.

Are you a full tithe payer? Do you attend your meetings? Do you wear the garment? Do you sustain the authorities? For endowed members, the handbook for the first time expressed concern that they should be wearing the temple garment in their daily lives. Before that, garment wearing had shifted slowly from a temple-only practice to an expected daily practice, but it was not formally a condition of temple access. Now it was.

And this is the word I keep coming back to. It got weaponized. I know that is a strong word, so let me tell you what I mean. I do not mean church leaders set out to harm anyone. I am sure they did not. What I mean is that a set of behaviors that had been personal and between you and the Lord got turned into tools of access. When a bishop can decide whether you enter the temple based on whether you checked the right boxes, those boxes stop being between you and God. They become gatekeeping. Tying everyday behaviors, what you drink, what you give, what you wear, how you spend your Sunday, to the most sacred access the church offers, turns ordinary life into a series of tests. Pass them, you get the temple. Fail one, you lose it.

I want to say something else here, because it is important, and I want to frame it carefully.

I love the prophets. I sustain them. I believe they are called of God to lead His church. And I also believe they are mortal men who love God deeply and try their very best, and who live inside the cultural moments of their own time, just like the rest of us.

Joseph Smith asked questions. That is literally how the Restoration started. A boy in the woods with a sincere heart asking, which one is right? The gospel was not restored through blind acceptance. It was restored through questioning. Questions are not a lack of faith. They are an act of faith, when asked with a sincere heart.

What if some of what gets attributed to God’s direct will is actually the product of good men doing their best within the cultural moment they live in? What if the exact wording of a temple question, the timing of a policy, the emphasis of a teaching, are shaped partly by the mortal men making those decisions, and not every piece is a direct instruction from heaven? Scripture itself acknowledges this. Joseph Smith was corrected by the Lord more than once. Brigham Young taught things later prophets have stepped back from. The priesthood restriction was lifted in 1978, which means for decades before that, something was being taught as God’s will that was later revealed to be something different.

That is not a threat to faith. That is how revelation actually works. Line upon line. Precept upon precept.

And if we can hold that truth, we can also hold this one. A policy change that made sense in a bishop’s office in 1940 might land in a fifteen-year-old’s body in 1990 and shape how she shows up in her marriage in 2026. The men making these decisions were not seeing that chain of effects. They were stewarding an institution through a complicated moment. But the effects happened anyway. And they are still living in you.

It is not just the policies themselves. It is who is enforcing them. In Latter-day Saint culture we have a name for this. Priesthood roulette. The answer you get to a worthiness question depends almost entirely on which bishop or stake president is sitting across from you. One hears your confession and sends you home with a reminder that the Atonement covers you. The next hears the same confession and puts you on formal church discipline. The checklist is supposedly the same, but the interpretation varies wildly, and so does what happens to your temple recommend.

This was always true, but it became a much bigger issue once so many things got tied to temple access. The personal interpretations of one man are now shaping your experience of the most sacred space in the church. That is a heavy thing to put on any one leader, no matter how good his heart is.

What actually matters is whether you feel worthy in your own relationship with God. The Spirit is the true witness of that. Not a checklist. Not another person’s assessment. You know when you are right with the Lord, and the Lord knows, and that is the relationship that matters most.

That changed what it meant to be a faithful member. It went from a relationship to a rubric. And that rubric did not stay frozen in 1940. Over the next several decades, the checklist kept expanding, because the world around the church kept changing in ways that felt threatening. Which brings us to the era that shaped most of you listening.

The Sexual Revolution and the Church’s Response

Most of you listening were not raised in the 1940s. If you are in my audience, you likely grew up in the 1980s or 1990s, in a specific window of church culture that was its own intensified moment. To understand what that era did to your body and your marriage, you have to understand what the church was reacting to in the decades right before.

The 1960s and 1970s turned American culture inside out around sexuality. The birth control pill became widely available. The Supreme Court struck down bans on contraception. Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1973. The women’s liberation movement was reshaping how women thought about their bodies, their work, their roles. Premarital sex, cohabitation, and divorce became more socially acceptable. The gay rights movement crystallized with Stonewall in 1969. The Motion Picture Production Code was abandoned in 1968, and suddenly content that had been unthinkable was on movie screens.

To a church that had spent seventy years standardizing morality and tying personal behavior to temple worthiness, this looked like the world coming apart.

The church responded forcefully. In the April 1971 general conference, Elder Milton R. Hunter gave a talk called “Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery.” He said, “We are living today in a very permissive society,” and that “a sexual revolution is being proclaimed.” He warned that enticements to illicit behavior were everywhere. That language of alarm got repeated throughout the 1970s. The church saw itself as a bulwark against a collapsing moral order.

When the Equal Rights Amendment was moving through state legislatures, the church got politically mobilized for the first time in decades. From where we sit today, it can sound strange that the church would fight against a constitutional amendment that said, “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” That sounds pretty unobjectionable. So why was the church so opposed?

The First Presidency laid out their reasoning in official statements, including a detailed insert in the March 1980 Ensign. They said the ERA was not really a political issue, it was a moral issue. They worried the amendment’s vague wording would lead to court interpretations that would undermine the family. They named fears about a “unisex society,” increases in “homosexual and lesbian activities,” women being drafted into combat, the loss of legal protections for stay-at-home mothers, unisex restrooms, and the expansion of abortion rights. They believed erasing legal distinctions between men and women would erase God-given differences and destabilize the family.

Phyllis Schlafly recruited Latter-day Saint leadership into her Stop ERA coalition, and the church mobilized in a way it had not done in decades. Barbara Smith, the Relief Society general president, was activated to lead Latter-day Saint women against the amendment. Wards were asked to send women to state International Women’s Year conferences to oppose feminist proposals. Sonia Johnson, a member who publicly supported the ERA and founded Mormons for ERA, was excommunicated in 1979.

From today’s vantage point, the reasoning can sound alarmist. Many of the specific fears either did not come to pass or came to pass anyway without the ERA. But I want you to understand the emotional logic of the moment. The church was watching the sexual revolution, the women’s movement, and the gay rights movement all happen at once. From inside the institution, it felt like the traditional family was under attack from every direction. The ERA became a symbolic battleground for all of that anxiety. It was never really only about one constitutional amendment.

Homosexuality was another front in that same cultural battle. It had been a relatively minor concern in official church materials, but in this era it became a central focus. It was named as an excommunicable offense in 1968. BYU ran an aversion therapy program for gay students from the late 1950s into the mid-1990s. The church’s messaging about gender and sexuality got more specific, more urgent, more prescriptive.

This might sound oddly familiar, because we are living through another one of these moments right now. The cultural conversations around gender, sexuality, marriage, and the family are shifting quickly, and the church is responding in ways that echo what happened in the 1970s. More emphasis on gender roles. More specific teachings about sexuality. More defensive framing around the family. I am not saying that is wrong or right. I am saying it is a pattern. If you want to understand how today’s teachings will land on the children growing up right now, look at how the teachings of the 1970s landed on the adults I coach today. Policies and emphases made in moments of cultural alarm tend to have long tails.

Something interesting happened alongside all of this. In the 1970s, the church actually started teaching more openly about the value of sex within marriage, also as a response to the sexual revolution. If the world was going to celebrate sex in damaging ways, the church needed to reclaim a positive vision of sex between husband and wife. But alongside that opening, the church doubled down on everything else. Women’s roles as wives and mothers got more emphasized, not less. Modesty got tighter. Sexual sin got named more often and more gravely. The rhetoric escalated on every front where the culture was loosening.

So by the time the 1980s arrived, the church had been actively pushing back against the surrounding culture for decades. That same impulse, that fear of the culture eroding the family, is what shaped the modesty teachings, the purity culture, the heavy emphasis on women as wives and mothers, and the intensification of sexual guidelines that you grew up with. All of it expressed itself in the lessons and pamphlets that landed on the children growing up in that era. Including you.

When It Landed on You

The prophet during most of that window was Spencer W. Kimball. He became president in December 1973, after the sudden death of Harold B. Lee, and served until his death in 1985. But his influence on church sexual theology started long before. He had been an apostle since 1943, and in 1969, while still an apostle, he published The Miracle of Forgiveness, a book that became a fixture on Latter-day Saint bookshelves for decades. It contained some of the strictest language on sexual sin the church had ever put into circulation. It was given to young people who had confessed sexual sins as a kind of spiritual prescription. It was used in bishops’ offices, in missionary preparation, and in Young Women and Young Men lessons. When Kimball became president, that framework got carried forward with even more force.

In the same era, another book was shaping Latter-day Saint understanding just as powerfully. Bruce R. McConkie’s Mormon Doctrine, first published in 1958 and reissued in 1966, was treated by members like an encyclopedia of revealed truth. The church never officially endorsed it. President David O. McKay actually asked McConkie not to reprint it because of its errors and tone. But members did not know that. They saw a book written by a general authority, filled with confident, authoritative-sounding definitions of every doctrine imaginable, and they treated it as definitive. Bishops referenced it. Seminary teachers quoted it. Young people took it as the final word.

Mormon Doctrine treated sexual sin with the gravest possible language and reinforced strict gender roles. Because it was alphabetically organized and read like a reference work, its definitions carried the weight of settled truth even when they were really just one man’s strongly held opinions.

Between these two books, an entire generation of Latter-day Saints formed their understanding of sexuality, worthiness, and gender through books that were never officially canonized but functioned as if they were. Underneath both was the same framework Joseph F. Smith had planted and Grant had codified. Checklist religion. Do these things, in this way, and you are worthy.

The presidents who came after Kimball carried the same orientation forward. Ezra Taft Benson, Howard W. Hunter, and Gordon B. Hinckley led the church through the late 1980s, 1990s, and into the 2000s. The For the Strength of Youth pamphlet got more specific and more prescriptive. Modesty got tied to specific inches of sleeve length and neckline depth. Dating rules got formalized. The oral sex letter was circulated in 1982, telling members to avoid certain kinds of sexual expression even within marriage. Pornography got named as a modern plague. The Family Proclamation came out in September 1995, with its language about divinely appointed roles.

So that is the shared landscape. Every Latter-day Saint who came of age in this window walked through it. But the messaging hit boys and girls differently. Same foundation, very different shapes on top.

What Landed on the Girls

I want to start with the messaging that landed earliest and most pervasively, and that is purity culture and modesty teaching. This came at you in Young Women every Sunday, in seminary, at youth conferences, at girls camp, in firesides, and in your home. Boys absorbed pieces of it, mostly the modesty piece as it related to not stumbling and respecting young women. But it landed disproportionately on the girls. They were the ones taught they were responsible for their own purity and for the thoughts of the boys around them.

The framework of this teaching was virtue, and in this era, virtue meant almost entirely sexual purity. The Young Women theme included values like Faith, Divine Nature, Individual Worth, Knowledge, Choice and Accountability, Good Works, and Integrity. In November 2008, the First Presidency added Virtue as the eighth value, explaining that the addition would help each young woman be worthy to make and keep sacred covenants. Elaine S. Dalton, the Young Women general president, gave several conference talks defining virtue. In April 2011, in “Guardians of Virtue,” she defined virtue as a pattern of thought and behavior based on high moral standards that includes chastity and purity, and she told young women they must protect, shield, and defend moral purity. She told them they should never text words or images to young men that might cause them to lose the Spirit, lose their priesthood power, or lose their virtue.

That last piece is important to sit with. A girl was being told that her behavior could cause a boy to lose his priesthood power. That a text message she sent could be the thing that took a boy’s spiritual standing from him. That is a heavy weight to put on a fourteen-year-old. It positions her as the manager of his spirituality, not just her own.

The phrase that captured all of this for many Young Women in the 1990s and 2000s was, “Guard your virtue with your life.” It came from a 1991 Ensign article quoting earlier prophetic teaching, and it became a refrain in lessons through the decade. The literal meaning is that a girl should be willing to die rather than lose her chastity. Spencer W. Kimball had taught this directly in The Miracle of Forgiveness, writing that it was better to die in defending one’s virtue than to live having lost it without a struggle. Generations of Latter-day Saint girls absorbed that framing. Your virtue, meaning your sexual purity, was worth more than your life.

What that does to a girl is significant. It tells her that her body, specifically her virginity, is the most valuable thing about her. More valuable than her life. More valuable than her gifts, her intelligence, her relationships, her future. And if she loses it, willingly or not, she has lost something irreplaceable.

Then came the object lessons. If you grew up in Young Women in this era, you almost certainly experienced at least one. The chewed-up piece of gum. The licked cupcake. The rose with the petals plucked off. The cake everyone touched. The wilted flower. The board with nail holes that could not be made whole again. The plucked donut. The wadded-up dollar bill. These were not in any official curriculum. They were Sunday School folk doctrine, passed from teacher to teacher, used in countless wards. The message was always the same. Once a girl had been touched, used, or sexually involved, she was less. She was damaged. She had lost something that could not be recovered, no matter how much she repented.

Elizabeth Smart spoke publicly years after her abduction about how this teaching shaped her response to her assault. She had been taught the chewed-gum lesson as a young woman, and when she was kidnapped and raped, one of her first thoughts was that she was now worthless, that no one would ever want to marry her, that she was filthy and dirty. The teaching she had received, intended to protect her chastity, became a chain that kept her with her abductor. She believed she had nothing left worth running back to.

These object lessons were not edge cases. They were widespread. And they landed on a generation of girls.

Layered on top was the modesty teaching, which became increasingly specific through the For the Strength of Youth pamphlet across multiple editions. The 1990 edition added explicit prohibitions on short shorts, tight clothing, off-the-shoulder shirts, and shirts that did not cover the stomach. By 2001, the pamphlet had grown from 19 pages to 44, with a more spiritual framing that told youth their dress and appearance showed the Lord how precious they considered their bodies. Young women were specifically counseled to wear clothing that covered the shoulder, avoid clothing that was low-cut in front or back, and maintain modesty in all their dress.

This is where the line was tied to inches. Skirts must cover the kneecap. Shoulders must be covered. Stomachs must not show. There are widespread accounts of leaders requiring girls to kneel on the ground before church dances to make sure their skirts touched the floor, of girls being sent home or asked to change at activities, of constant evaluation of female bodies against a list of rules. The boys did not undergo this kind of inspection. The boys’ modesty section in the same pamphlet was one paragraph. The girls’ was the focus.

Underneath the modesty teaching was a particular framing about boys’ thoughts. Girls were taught that what they wore could make boys stumble. That an immodestly dressed girl was responsible for the impure thoughts a boy might have when he saw her. In his April 2005 General Conference talk on pornography, Elder Dallin H. Oaks told young women that if they dressed immodestly, they were “becoming pornography to some of the men who see you.” That phrase echoed through seminary lessons, youth conferences, and Young Women lessons for years afterward as “walking pornography.” This made the girl responsible not just for her own sexuality but for everyone else’s. She had to imagine, every morning when she got dressed, how her clothing might affect the spiritual life of any boy who saw her. That is a job description that would crush an adult, much less a thirteen-year-old.

On top of all that purity teaching came the messaging about women’s place in the home. In February 1987, President Ezra Taft Benson gave a fireside for parents called “To the Mothers in Zion.” It was so significant that the church printed it as a pink pamphlet and distributed it through home teaching the following month. Benson taught that mothers should not postpone children, should welcome every child the Lord might send, and should be at the crossroads of their children’s lives, at home, when those children left and returned. He counseled women not to work outside the home except in unusual circumstances. Eight months later, in October 1987, he gave a parallel talk in priesthood session called “To the Fathers in Zion,” telling fathers their sacred responsibility was to provide for the material needs of their family.

President Hinckley continued this thread through the 1990s. In his October 1996 conference talk, “Women of the Church,” he taught that the greatest job any mother will ever do is in nurturing her children, and that no one can adequately take her place. He acknowledged that some women had to work, but advised them not to do so simply to indulge a taste for an elaborate home or fancy cars. In his October 2000 talk, “Your Greatest Challenge, Mother,” he told mothers to let their first interest be in their home and not to trade their birthright as a mother for some bauble of passing value. The Family Proclamation, presented by Hinckley in September 1995, formalized this with the words that mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children.

Put all of this together, and the girl in this era absorbed something very specific. Her body was sacred but dangerous. Her sexuality was powerful but threatening. She was responsible for managing her own purity and the thoughts of every boy around her. Her worth was tied to her virginity, which she should defend with her life. Her worth was also tied to her motherhood, which she should treat as her primary calling. She should dress in ways that did not draw attention to her body, but she should also be feminine and pretty. She should be a guardian of virtue. She should prepare to be a wife, prepare to be a mother, and let those callings be the center of her life.

That messaging shaped a generation of women. A 1987 fireside about mothers staying home. A 1990 pamphlet measuring girls’ bodies in inches. A 2008 addition of Virtue to the Young Women values. All of it landed on a generation of girls, and decades later, those girls are women in their thirties and forties who cannot find their own desire and cannot imagine their own bodies as places of pleasure. That is not a coincidence. It was taught.

What Landed on the Boys

The boys got a different version of this conditioning. The messaging aimed at boys was not about being responsible for someone else’s thoughts. It was about their own bodies being dangerous, their own sexual development being a problem to be managed, and their relationship to their own desire being something to fear.

The most influential single piece of male conditioning from this era was a talk Boyd K. Packer gave at the priesthood session of October General Conference in 1976, called “To Young Men Only.” It was published as a pamphlet and distributed continuously from 1980 until 2016. For thirty-six years, this was the standard text for talking to boys about their bodies. If you were a teenage boy in the church anytime from 1980 to about 2010, you almost certainly received this pamphlet.

In it, Packer described the male reproductive system as a “little factory” in the body, designed to produce a “life-giving substance,” with a “release valve” for nocturnal emissions. He told boys this factory worked slowly, the way it should, but warned them not to “tamper with it.” If a boy masturbated, Packer said, the little factory would speed up, the boy would be tempted again and again, and would become subject to a habit that would leave him feeling depressed and guilty. In the same talk, Packer told a story about a missionary who had punched his gay companion. Packer said, “Somebody had to do it.”

Sit with that for a minute. A church apostle described a Latter-day Saint teenage boy’s penis as a factory. He framed normal sexual development as a problem of self-control. He told boys their own bodies were essentially a hazard they were responsible for managing. And he gave them a model where the answer to discomfort with another man’s sexuality was physical violence. That landed on millions of Latter-day Saint boys during their most formative years.

It did not land in a vacuum. Packer’s talk worked alongside The Miracle of Forgiveness, which contained an entire chapter called “Crime Against Nature” focused on masturbation and homosexuality. Kimball wrote, on page 78, that masturbation often led to grievous sin, specifically homosexuality, because masturbation done in private evolved into mutual masturbation with someone of the same sex, and then into total homosexuality. That was the chain Kimball laid out for boys. Touch yourself, and you start a slide that ends in something the church taught was among the gravest possible sins. From 1976 to 1988, the church encouraged missionaries to read The Miracle of Forgiveness as part of their preparation.

The effect on a teenage boy was that his own body became something he was at war with. Every normal physical response was suspect. Every spontaneous arousal was a temptation he had to resist. Every nocturnal emission required him to wonder whether his thoughts had caused it, and therefore whether he needed to confess it. The confession culture made this heavier. Boys were interviewed about their sexual behavior more invasively than girls were in many wards. A teenage boy could end up in repeated interviews with his bishop about masturbation, sometimes weekly. He could lose his temple recommend, get pulled from passing the sacrament, get delayed from receiving the priesthood, get his mission call delayed, all over a behavior his body was doing in response to his developmental biology. And every time he failed, the cycle of shame deepened.

Then came the pornography era. As the internet became widespread in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the church’s messaging on male sexuality intensified again. In October 2004, President Gordon B. Hinckley devoted an entire general conference talk, “A Tragic Evil Among Us,” to pornography among priesthood holders. He framed pornography as a “raging storm” destroying individuals and families, and described men trapped in addiction so powerful they could not break it. The church created overcomingpornography.org and launched an Addiction Recovery Program. Pornography got named in nearly every general conference for years. The framing was apocalyptic.

What this did to Latter-day Saint men is significant. It created a generation of men who learned that their own desire was the enemy. Not external desire. Not bad behavior. Their own internal sexual life, their attractions, their arousal, their fantasies, their physical responses, all of it became a battlefield. They were taught to monitor themselves constantly, to confess often, to fear their own minds, and to expect that any moment of letting their guard down could begin a slide into addiction or apostasy.

Then, after years of being taught that their sexuality was dangerous and shameful, they got married. And the church said, now, on this side of the temple, sex is good. Express yourself. Connect with your wife. Many of these men could not flip that switch. The body and the mind and the spirit had absorbed too many years of being told that desire itself was the threat. Some of them carry pornography histories that haunt them. Some carry shame about masturbation that follows them into marriage. Some have anxiety around their own performance because they were taught their whole lives to mistrust their own bodies. Some cannot enjoy sex with their own wives because the conditioning is louder than the permission.

That is the male side of this inheritance. We will spend a whole episode on what this did to specific men. For now, just understand that the conditioning that shaped Rosalie also shaped Bennett, and the same is true in countless Latter-day Saint marriages. The men carrying this are often even less aware of it than the women, because masculinity in our culture does not give men much language for talking about what they have been carrying.

What This Taught You About Each Other

There is one more piece of this before we move on, because it shapes what happens inside the marriage in ways that often go completely unnoticed. The conditioning did not just shape how you saw yourself. It shaped how you saw your spouse before you ever met them.

If you grew up as a girl in this era, you absorbed a very specific picture of what boys and men were like. Boys were sexually voracious. Boys were visual. Boys were one wrong outfit away from losing the Spirit. Boys were in a constant battle with their own bodies, especially around masturbation and pornography, and that battle was something they would carry into marriage. You also learned, more quietly, that boys could not be trusted around their own sexuality. They might cross lines. They might pressure you. They might lose control. The same teaching that told you to guard your virtue with your life implied that someone might try to take it from you, and that someone was probably a boy. So you learned to be on guard. To watch for signs. To stay covered. To not put yourself in situations. The men in your life, your future husband included, were going to want sex more than you did and probably in ways you would have to learn to tolerate or accommodate. And underneath all of it, you absorbed the deeper message that sexuality itself was inherently dangerous. Not just outside of marriage. Just dangerous, full stop. A force that needed to be contained, managed, watched. You learned to expect that sex would be something he wanted from you, and your job in marriage would be to be available, to be willing, to manage his sexual life by being his outlet. The framing of sex as something a wife provides for her husband, rather than something they share, was baked in long before your wedding night. And the framing of sex as something fundamentally risky, even with your own husband, was baked in just as deep.

You also learned that if your husband ever looked at pornography, it would destroy your marriage. The teaching of the late 1990s and 2000s was apocalyptic on this point. Pornography was a “raging storm.” It was an addiction more powerful than the man could overcome on his own. It would break temple covenants. It would put your sealing in jeopardy. It would corrupt your children. So you walked into marriage afraid of something you could not control, watching your husband for signs, braced for the day you might discover it. And if you did discover it, you had been told this was a marriage-ending event. The script said you were the wronged party, your covenants had been violated, and your reasonable response was devastation, possibly separation. There was no script for, this is a struggle my husband is having, we can talk about it, we can address it together, this does not have to be the end of us. The script said catastrophe. So when reality showed up, catastrophe is what many wives felt, sometimes far out of proportion to what was actually happening.

If you grew up as a boy in this era, you absorbed an equally specific picture of girls and women. Girls were the gatekeepers. Good girls did not want sex the way boys did. A virtuous woman was sexually controlled, modest, and pure. The ideal wife was the woman who had successfully managed her sexuality her whole life, kept herself for you, and would now grant you access to her body within the bounds of marriage. You learned to see female desire as something rare, and probably a little suspicious. A woman who wanted sex too much, who initiated too eagerly, who was too comfortable in her own body, did not match the picture of a virtuous woman the church had painted for you. So you came to marriage looking for a wife who was sexually willing without being sexually hungry, available without being assertive, present without being demanding. You wanted her to want you, but not too much. And when your actual wife turned out to be a person with her own complicated relationship to sex, neither of you had any idea what to do with that.

And what about the marriages where this script gets reversed? Where she wants sex more than he does? That happens far more often than church culture acknowledges, and when it does, both spouses are left thinking something is wrong with them. She thinks she must be oversexed, too much, the problem. She tries to want less. She tries to suppress her own desire. She blames herself for being unhappy in a marriage where she is not getting the sexual connection she longs for. And he thinks something is wrong with him too. A real Latter-day Saint priesthood holder is supposed to want his wife. If he does not want her the way the script says he should, he must be broken, or she must not be desirable enough, or he must be doing something wrong. So the two of them end up isolated in shame, neither able to talk about what is actually happening, because the script does not have a category for them. When reality does not match, the people inside that reality blame themselves instead of questioning the script.

So picture what happens when these two scripts meet at the altar. He shows up expecting to be the one who wants more. She shows up expecting to be the one who provides. Both think her job is to be available. Nobody thinks her job is to be a sexual person in her own right with her own desire and her own pleasure. And then they spend twenty years confused about why their marriage feels like a transaction, when the script they were both following set it up to be exactly that.

This is part of why marriages between two faithful Latter-day Saints can become so quietly lonely. Both spouses are following a script. Neither one was ever given a script that included her as a full sexual person. So they perform the roles they were taught, and they wonder why it feels hollow.

Where This Leaves Us

So that is the history. A hundred years of institutional decisions, cultural reactions, and escalating rules. Standardization that became gate-keeping. Gate-keeping that became a checklist. A checklist that got installed in a child’s nervous system before she had any ability to consent to it.

And now, twenty or thirty years after that child grew up, both the women and the men who absorbed all of this are sitting in marriages wondering why something that was supposed to come alive has not. Rosalie is one of those women. Bennett is one of those men. There are other versions of this that look different on the outside and just as costly on the inside.

Before we wrap up, I want to acknowledge something. I know some of you are thinking, this did not happen to me. Or, my friend grew up exactly like I did and they seem fine. Some women and some men did come through this conditioning with a healthier sense of their own bodies and their own sexuality. There are real reasons for that, real protective factors that made a difference. We will talk about that over the next two episodes, because it deserves real attention.

Next week, we go inside what this did to a woman. The week after, we do the same for men. Then we spend a whole episode on the teaching that sexual sin is the sin next to murder, where it came from, and how it still shapes the way faithful members think about their own desire today. And we close the series with an episode called The Natural Man, where we take a fresh look at that phrase from Mosiah and give you something practical to take into your own life.

Alright my friends, that’s all I have for you today. Remember, love is a journey, not a destination. Stay committed, stay passionate, and stay connected. I’ll see you next week…ba-bye.