Self-esteem is hard to come by in an environment permeated with negatives. The church told me I was born a sinner, a wretch, detestable in God's sight unless I mentally made a paradigm shift and agreed to believe a certain laundry list of dogmatic ideas (the divinity of Jesus, virgin birth, etc.). I needed to turn my life over to Jesus, renounce myself, live only for him; then all would be well. BUT, whether I did that or not, I could be certain that God and/or Jesus (the concept of the trinity was so confusing) was on the constant look-out. He (it was always a male deity) was snooping into my mind at every moment. He knew every thought I had, he peered at everything I did. I had NO privacy whatsoever; God was always there watching.

My body, I was told, is the temple of the holy ghost (I Cor. 6:19) and not my own. As a youngster I was even more confused about who this holy ghost was and how he/she fit into the heavenly cosmology. But God was particularly interested in what I did with my body, I could be sure of that. The teaching was that the body was corrupt (the flesh is evil) but that the holy spirit enjoyed residing there anyway. I found it very convoluted and contradictory. (See Gal. 5:17, "For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other...") The confusing doctrine that a member of the holy trinity takes up residence in the body—the body which is (according to the New Testament) corrupt, "flesh-like" and evil—is, in my view, one of the most glaring contradictions of Christian teaching. It has caused church people for centuries to go through all kinds of mental and physical torture in order to purge the body of all manners of imagined evils.

Now, as a child I was told that there were definitely good and bad things that could be done with the body. It was good to have an erect posture, but not so good to have an erect penis. It was good to brush my teeth, but not to talk too much and absolutely no swear words were to come from my mouth. Obesity was technically sinful, but the preacher didn't say much about that because half of the Baptists listening to his sermons were fat.

But this God of the fundamentalists was especially interested in our genitals, I learned as a child. He was obsessed with them, in fact. A female friend told me a few years ago that her training was similar and as a girl she visualized God as a being who saw little else but her genitals. He was a genital guard god ("God," by the way, is "dog" spelled backwards!). As boys we were taught that the penis wasn't to be touched except when urinating or washing and then only briefly. "If you shake it more than three times after peeing, that's playing with yourself and God wouldn't like that."

Children in school often would tease one another by accusing their friends of playing with themselves in private. Everyone has heard the childish prank of telling a gullible classmate that masturbating would cause warts or make hair grow on the palms of his/her hands. Then everyone would laugh as the nervous kid would glance at his/her own hands thereby telling the others that he/she did "it." The message was clear: society frowned upon masturbation but early in life we learned that it was extremely rare to find anyone who didn't masturbate, whether they admitted it or not.

There was another Christian teaching which did nothing but inspire fear and extend psychological control over my young and impressionable mind. That belief was the parousia, the peculiar Christian teaching that at any moment Jesus is going to return and take all Christians with him—away from this horribly sinful and wicked world. As youngsters we were told about this doctrine over and over again. Often we were asked to think about how glorious it would be to finally see Jesus. "But, what will you be DOING when Jesus returns?" we were asked. Will this God-man find you doing something virtuous when he returns or will you be embarrassed or disgraced by being engaged in something evil? Since we children were not likely to participate in "adult sins" such as murder, use of alcohol, industrial fraud or genocide, we were left with the impression that it was our duty to God to make sure we were always being praiseworthy just in case Jesus would return within the next five minutes. That meant, among other things, that we would not be caught by Jesus while we were being unkind to another, viewing a motion picture, using playing cards, dancing or, worst of all, doing something "improper" with our own bodies. The attitude we youngsters adopted was similar to that which is provoked by the proverbial statement mothers make to children, "Always wear clean underwear in case you are in an accident and are taken to the hospital." Don't do the forbidden things because chances are Jesus will catch you at it when he returns and he and all the Christians at that moment will be looking at you with disgust and pity. That would be even worse than being seen in underwear with skid marks.

The list of forbidden activities now seems banal but at that stage of development it was an important part of our fundamentalist lives. The dancing prohibition in particular is comical because it so obviously relates to the evangelical attempt to have people not recognize sexual impulses of any kind or put themselves in any situation where they might be stimulated. I am reminded of the question and answer joke about Baptists: "Q: Why don't Baptist couples ever have intercourse in the standing position? A: Because it might lead to dancing!"

Early formation of a negative self image is very closely related to our perception of our own bodies. Elimination of urine or solid waste is icky, we were told as children, and, by association, everything else pertaining to that region of our body was especially detestable to our holy, pure and spotless God.

I think these impressions are conveyed unconsciously by parents from the very beginning of life. There are often those moans or sighs which parents emit when they are confronted by full diapers. It isn't always a pleasant task caring for a baby and our negative attitudes, I feel, are often picked up by the infant. Somehow the notion is formed that the region between the legs is unpleasant to others and, if the diapers aren't changed promptly, it definitely becomes unpleasant to the infant as well. The negative self-image about the genitals is being formed at a very early age.

Nancy Friday, in her new book The Power of Beauty, writes about self-loathing and poor self-image and how it springs from a negative attitude toward our genitals. "Call it self-respect or self-love, our opinion of our genitals is central to the image of our entire being. Thinking we have a sewer down there influences how we see ourselves, clothed or unclothed. We don't admit it consciously, but when we look in the mirror or imagine how others see us, our unconscious takes the sewer into account and our self-image is distorted by the ugliness hidden between our legs. Like the tint on Lady Macbeth's hands that can never be washed clean, our genital disfigurement is displaced onto other parts of our body, becoming the ugliness of our underarms, the fleshiness of thighs, the nose, the feet, the legs, wrong, wrong, wrong!" (page 205)

As we grow older we are told to keep our genitals covered, clothed. Don't let anybody else see them. Don't touch. It all adds up to a grossly negative approach toward ourselves and, in later years, toward our sexual nature.