Class idea I'm kicking around.

If I ever get the chance to design a class "just 'cause", I was thinking I'd do it on sexual deviance in American Religious History, not necessarily because that's a theme that I'm interested in, but rather because it's an excuse to assign kids a bunch of books I'm titillated and appalled by. I think I would want to cover:

1) The evolving sexual mores of the Children of God.
2) Mormon polygamy and its getting outlawed.
3) Mormon fundamentalist cults and polygamy.
4) The mid-19th century Oneida free-love community.
5) Shaker celibacy.
6) "The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk" (that fictional book where the girl becomes a nun and is forced to sleep with priests).
7) "The Quaker City" (a fictional exposure of Philadelphia that I haven't read but I've heard includes lengthy descriptions of the city's underground brothels and how they satiate unquenchable Quaker lust).
8) That one Mormon memoir where the woman talks about BYU marriage culture, gives details of her wedding night, and talks about her struggle with compulsive masturbation as well as the one time right after she had dropped out of the church but was still wearing her sacred undergarments and she and the other girls working at the health club where she worked had to go and scrub down the drained jacuzzi in their skivvies and they all laughed at her undergarments since they looked so different from her bras and panties.
9) Maybe assign the recent Mormon version of "Pride and Prejudice" to talk about marriage culture at BYU?

The only trouble is that the department most amenable to this would be gender studies, and who wants to wade through a lot of gender bullshit to teach a class that's really about titillation? I'd probably be safer by making some uniting theme like "sex, theology, and Christian culture in U.S. history" to keep things safely historical, I think.

I also wonder if kids would flood my class, or if I'd get into trouble talking about the titillating parts by creating a weird classroom dynamic.