“I was really hoping that I could, um, move back in here for a while,” Linda probed her mother.

“Here?” her mother asked.

“Yeah.”

“No, you know that’s not possible.”

“Why not?” Linda asked.

“How would it look for a married woman to move in with her parents apart from her husband?”

“He hits me, Ma.”

“I can’t say I’m surprised,” her mother sighed.  “What did you do?”

“What do you mean, what’d I do?”

“What did you do to make him angry?  He didn’t just hit you out of the blue.”

Linda fought off her instinctive reaction to her mother’s judgment as she searched for a diplomatic answer to keep the conversation going.  “I guess I didn’t do what he wanted me to,” she said finally.

“You took a vow, a very serious vow.”

“Can’t I just stay, like, a few days, Ma, please?”

“And then what?  You gonna get a divorce?  What do you think we are, Protestant?”

“Ma, you just don’t understand.”

“Linda, I was…I was 18 years old when I had your sister. Unmarried…and all alone…before I met your father.  I’d suffered long and hard.  How dare you come here and tell me I don’t understand.  I understand.  Now, God gave you a husband…who provides for you.  And you…Look at me.  Go home to Chuck.  Be a good wife.  Listen to him, and obey him.”

Linda’s mother thought she was sending her daughter home to be a particular kind of submissive masochist,^[1] Mrs. Chuck Traynor (or a “normal” woman, accepting his “implicit” right to hit her as she learned to “submit to his stronger will,” all while she took no pleasure in it whatsoever).  She assumed that Chuck was, what I am calling, a dominant masochist (fig. 4), someone with Linda’s best interests at heart.

fig. 4

She knew what a handful Linda could be.  She had no way of knowing that Chuck was much closer to a sadistic top than a dominant masochist.  And she certainly had no way to know that she was sending her daughter out to become Linda Lovelace of “Deep Throat” fame.

This scene from “Lovelace,”^[2] affected me deeply.  Linda’s mother, written by Andy Bellin and played compassionately by Sharon Stone, is compellingly authentic.  Though her how-would-it-look line sounds crassly self-serving today, it was the effective meaning of one of the “laws of Paul” in the seventies: Abstain from all appearance of evil.^[3]  Her refusal even to “appear” to support divorce by allowing her daughter to return struck home.  We didn’t drink, dance or smoke to prove how much better we were than Catholics.  At least that’s what I learned, which is not the same as saying that is what I was taught.  (It should be obvious by now that I learned many things I wasn’t necessarily taught.)

Linda, played by Amanda Seyfried, was lying to her mother.  Her line, “He hits me, Ma,” though objectively true wasn’t the reason she showed up at her mother’s door.  But I understand completely why she didn’t say, “He pimps me out for money, Ma,” to the woman who became so righteously indignant when the tie-strap of Linda’s swim top was undone to avoid tan lines.  And I honestly don’t know how her mother would have responded if Linda had told her the truth.

I didn’t see this film because I was interested in Linda Lovelace, but because Amanda Seyfried chose to play her.  (And now I’ll have to pay more attention to Sharon Stone.)  I’ll follow any actor who gives me aesthetic moments like the mother-daughter confrontation in “Mamma Mia,” especially one who can go toe-to-toe with Meryl Streep.  Sophie, the daughter played by Ms. Seyfried, was troubled about the mess she had made inviting three possible fathers to her wedding.  Her mother, played by Ms. Streep, thought (hoped) she didn’t want to marry.  Poor Linda Lovelace thought “Deep Throat” might be her stepping stone to becoming Amanda Seyfried (or, Meryl Streep).

I’ve never seen “Deep Throat” or anything else Linda Lovelace has done.  Clips I’ve seen in documentaries, and now recreations in “Lovelace,” don’t recommend the film to me.  I’ve never read her book Ordeal.^[4]  I do recall sneering and scoffing when I heard about it.  The mother-daughter scene in “Lovelace” made me question, why?  The only answer I came up with is that I had seen pictures of Ms. Lovelace smiling.  I supposed she took some pleasure in sex and public attention.  Thinking and writing about my own masochism I had to repent of that sneering and scoffing.

Part of me (perhaps the submissive masochistic part) would like to tell a different story, a story about an innocent boy who rescued a stash of porn from a dumpster, hid it in the woods, read it, returned again and again to look at its pictures, and became corrupted.  That’s a story I could sell to my fundamentalist Christian friends.  And it’s based, at least, on a true story.  It’s just not mine.  It was another boy’s story when he brought that stash of porn to me and asked me to keep it away from him.  He lived next door while I worked on “The Tripartite Rationality Index.”^[5]

It was summer.  I had no air conditioning, not even a fan.  I stayed up late until the apartment cooled down enough that I could sleep.  This boy came over and sat with me at night while his mother was out, or even if she was occupied at home.  She wasn’t exactly a prostitute.  She got all dressed up, went out to a bar or club, picked up a man, brought him home and lived with him as long as he paid the bills.  “You should marry her,” the boy said to me more than once.  “She’s pretty.”  She was pretty, especially when she went out to hunt.  I didn’t marry her.  I only talked to her once, long enough to convince her I wasn’t a child molester.

I didn’t have access to porn as a child; I was quarantined.  I use that word because of a story my mother told me recently on a different topic.  After I was born she spent many lonely days in the hospital at Christmastime.  She heard about another woman whose baby was born in the car on the way to the hospital.  She asked a nurse if she could visit that woman and see her baby.  The nurse told her that neither was in the general hospital population, having given birth (and being born) in such unsanitary conditions.  Though it seemed harsh to my mother at the time, it became her rationale for hell, God “quarantining” the righteous from the evil.

My mother was twenty-two-years-old.  She had just given birth to her first child.  And this was the authoritative word of medical science.  Suddenly my childhood made sense to me.  I was quarantined, not to keep me in hell, but to protect her “innocent” baby from the evil world.  It was 1953; discrimination was still a matter of good taste.  The problem was, the porn was already in me.  And I am truly sorry that I infected the pristine female world she constructed for me with my dirty male mind and desires.  (I know a Freudian would have a field day with that, but I’m being as sincere as I know how to be.)

My mother, however, was not alone in her germ theory of sin, sin as an infection from without.  “I feel dead inside, no, something worse than death,” reads an excerpt from nineteen-year-old Hannah’s diary, the main character in the film October Baby.  “I am still a child, a child trying to find a place in this world.  I have so many unanswered questions, questions I feel but can’t even begin to speak because there are no words to express them.  Something is missing.  Why, God, do I feel unwanted?  Why do I feel I have no right to exist?  Why do I spend more time wanting to end my life than live it?”

Knowing that this was a Christian film, a pretty girl who didn’t have a boyfriend, take drugs or drink or smoke and yet felt as Hannah did, seemed to recall Paul’s letter to the Romans (Romans 3:10-18 NET):

There is no one righteous, not even one, there is no one who understands, there is no one who seeks God.  All have turned away, together they have become worthless; there is no one who shows kindness, not even one.  Their throats are open graves, they deceive with their tongues, the poison of asps is under their lips.  Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.  Their feet are swift to shed blood, ruin and misery are in their paths, and the way of peace they have not known.  There is no fear of God before their eyes.

“Hannah, I believe that what you’re feeling is normal and is even expected,” wasn’t counsel from her Baptist minister, but from her doctor.  For it was not sin that caused her to feel as if the sentence of death had been passed against^[6] her, rather it was a quasi-mystical intuition that she was a failed abortion, the truth her parents had hidden from her.  They hadn’t even told her she was adopted.  Once I got over that hump, it was an okay movie about a young woman dealing with an extraordinarily painful reality.  And Rachel Hendrix as Hannah is a delight to watch.  When the filmmaker’s finished the pro-life-message-film their financial backers paid for, Hannah, back where she started, visited a Catholic priest.

“I can’t figure out how to let go of the fact that I feel hatred for myself and others,” she told him.  Another secret she had learned along the way was that she was a twin.  Her elder brother was more damaged in the botched abortion and died three months after their birth.  “And I feel guilty,” Hannah continued her confession.  “Part of me feels like he should be alive and I shouldn’t.  I wonder if he would have been a better person than me, what he would have been like.  I just hate myself for feeling this way.”

So Hannah came very close to actually confessing the sin in her flesh.^[7]  The priest told her about Jesus’ forgiveness, and her ability through Him to forgive others.  And I should probably remember that a Christian film is intended for Christians as an audience.  I’ve already written that most Christians I know don’t see themselves as “great sinners who were forgiven much and were called by God to forgive lesser sinners than themselves.”^[8]  And who am I to see things so differently?  For who concedes [me] any superiority?  What do [I] have that [I] did not receive?^[9]

In the previous essay I quoted, “If O is willing to sustain her devotion all the way through to her own destruction, so be it.  She wants to be ‘possessed, utterly possessed, to the point of death,’ to the point that her body and mind are no longer her responsibility.”^[10]  To my religious mind this would have sounded (and sounds) absurd.  I kept my own masochism from my first wife as a shameful secret as I resolved to follow God as Moses instructed Israel (Deuteronomy 30:15-19 NET).

Look!  I have set before you today life and prosperity on the one hand, and death and disaster on the other.  What I am commanding you today is to love the Lord your God, to walk in his ways, and to obey his commandments, his statutes, and his ordinances.  Then you will live and become numerous and the Lord your God will bless you in the land which you are about to possess.  However, if you turn aside and do not obey, but are lured away to worship and serve other gods, I declare to you this very day that you will certainly perish!  You will not extend your time in the land you are crossing the Jordan to possess.  Today I invoke heaven and earth as a witness against you that I have set life and death, blessing and curse, before you.  Therefore choose life so that you and your descendants may live!

Preoccupied with my attempt to obey him in my own strength, I didn’t hear, I also call on you to love the Lord your God…and be loyal to him, for he gives you life and enables you to live continually…^[11]  So I did not love the Lord my God, walk in his ways, or obey his commandments, statutes and ordinances.  And my first wife divorced me for my religion.  “I don’t want to read the Bible,” she exclaimed.  “Everyone who reads the Bible turns out like you!”  That’s when I began to feel as if the sentence of death had been passed against^[12] me.  And that’s when I began to hear, and perhaps began to choose, death instead.

For if we are out of our minds, Paul wrote in his second letter to the Corinthians, it is for God; if we are of sound mind, it is for you.  For the love of Christ controls us, since we have concluded this, that Christ died for all; therefore all have died.  And he died for all so that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised.^[13]

I began to perceive in Scripture a diminished responsibility for righteousness for one led by the Spirit: For who concedes you any superiority?  What do you have that you did not receive?  And if you received it, why do you boast as though you did not?^[14]  I have been crucified with Christ, Paul wrote the Galatians, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.  So the life I now live in the body, I live because of the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.^[15]

I sat silently in an adult Sunday school class as a woman was reprimanded for quoting this verse, because she hadn’t earned the right to say it by her own works of righteousness as Paul had done.  And I was the one who had whispered it in her ear the night before as a possible path of righteousness.  I never expected her to shout it from the rooftops in Sunday school!

But Paul wrote, I do not set aside God’s grace, because if righteousness could come through the law, then Christ died for nothing!^[16]  Or do you not know that as many as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?  Therefore we have been buried with him through baptism into death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too may live a new life.^[17]  How may we live a new life? …through the glory of the Father…just as Christ was raised from the dead.

I began, tentatively at first, to perceive a diminished responsibility for sin for those led by the Spirit: Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer me doing it but sin that lives in me.^[18]  But my religious mind (and not mine only) thinks this is a cop out.  It confuses confessing sins with taking responsibility for them, though it knows full well that if we deliberately keep on sinning after receiving the knowledge of the truth, no further sacrifice for sins is left for us, but only a certain fearful expectation of judgment and a fury of fire that will consume God’s enemies.^[19]

“‘What does a Christian seek,’” Carmela Ciuraru quoted the author of Histoire d’O in her article ‘The Story of the Story of O,’ “‘but to lose himself in God,’ Aury, a devout atheist, once said. ‘To be killed by someone you love strikes me as the epitome of ecstasy.’”^[20]  While it is still somewhat difficult for me to grasp exactly what Dominique Aury meant, I agree that to be killed by, or through, Someone I love and yet live by and through Him is the epitome of ecstasy.

I know these things because I have received them from his Spirit.  But it is impossible for me to determine or to gainsay how much I feel these things through my masochism.  And if my masochism is the wrath of God revealed from heaven, that is truly amazing, that the wrath of God…revealed from heaven against all [my] ungodliness and unrighteousness^[21] is also an aid in my enlightenment to, and salvation from, that very ungodliness and unrighteousness.

So, do I whip myself into a euphoric state of submission to obey God?

It’s a fair question, given what I’ve written.  The primary meaning of the Greek word translated subdue is “to beat black and blue, to smite so as to cause bruises and livid spots” in Paul’s confession: Instead I subdue (ὑπωπιάζω)^[22] my body and make it my slave, so that after preaching to others I myself will not be disqualified.^[23]  Frankly, I have no idea if I should take this literally, nor do I care.  Paul also wrote (Colossians 2:20-23 NET):

If you have died with Christ to the elemental spirits of the world, why do you submit (δογματίζεσθε, a form of δογματίζω)^[24] to them as though you lived in the world?  “Do not handle!  Do not taste!  Do not touch!”  These are all destined to perish with use, founded as they are on human commands and teachings.  Even though they have the appearance of wisdom with their self-imposed worship and false humility achieved by an unsparing treatment of the body – a wisdom with no true value – they in reality result in fleshly indulgence.

I have pondered this question idly from time to time: if Paul engaged in self-flagellation as a spiritual exercise before he wrote to the Romans and the Colossians, did he continue it as a fleshly indulgence after realizing it had no true value spiritually?  But I don’t know the answer to either component of that question, or even how to know how to search out an answer.  I suppose I could consider it the thorn in Paul’s flesh (2 Corinthians 12:7b NET):

Therefore, so that I would not become arrogant, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to trouble me – so that I would not become arrogant.

My elderly Pastor thought that thorn was failing eye sight, my Catholic friend thinks it was masturbation and Bishop Spong^[25] thinks it was latent homosexuality.  I feel a little ridiculous pronouncing it self-flagellation, though I’m intrigued by the possibilities for self-acceptance the Holy Spirit created by being non-specific here (e.g., Paul could have said precisely what he meant).  I’ll probably wait and ask Paul.

But no, I don’t whip myself into a euphoric state of submission to obey God.  I believe (I believe; help my unbelief!^[26]) the death He has given me in Christ Jesus and the fruit of his Spirit.  I have whipped myself at times as a lonely fleshly indulgence.