Celibacy unit readings...

So for my "Roman Catholic celibacy" unit for my sex class, I assigned a chapter from a recent ethnography of Catholic seminaries. 

I had just glanced at bits, but reading it in preparation for teaching, it's even better than I thought, since it's mostly interviews with all these people who entered the priesthood for really fucked up reasons and end up lonely and unprepared to deal with sex and channel it in odd ways (e.g. one who talked graphically at a youth retreat and got kicked out of seminary).

Probably the best anecdote, however, was the (priest) author's memory of 4 people who disappeared overnight when he was in seminary, leaving behind only rumors of sexual improprieties, including the 2 guys who were caught giving each other a bath.

Close up was the spiritual advisor who recommended that students not use online porn, but rather magazines, since the diocese was the seminary's service provider.

I texted some of this to my one friend with the cat, and she texted back -

The whole celibacy thing is so weird.  Even polyamory seems less weird to me.  And those people are f'ing weird!

When I texted back that Pope Francis seemed to do it well, she agreed, but said that those who didn't ended up "fucked in the head".

Later that night, we talked over the phone, and she said that she actually found the bathtub story kind of touching, because it was 2 men touching each other in a loving way, rather than one having his libido build up and burst outward into some horrendous or self-destructive act.