Sexuality Archives

Book Review: Taylor Petrey’s Tabernacles of Clay

February 22, 2026July 6, 2020

Tabernacles of Clay offers a comprehensive look at sexuality and gender during the period of post-World War II “Modern Mormonism” and amidst a “religious revival” (Petrey 6). While I was surprised, maybe even initially disappointed that “plural marriage” syntax from the 19th century was not included, it is not needed. More than enough sexual, gender, …

Is this real?

February 22, 2026May 23, 2014

By Jessie Christensen

I don’t pay any attention to football, college or otherwise, and hadn’t heard of Manti Te’o until his “fake girlfriend” story hit the news last year. I found his story oddly fascinating, and a quick internet search turned up a number of articles about similar online scams. The interesting thing to me is that so many people lie on the internet for no other reason than boredom, loneliness, and curiosity about how other people will react to them. There usually isn’t any kind of tangible physical gain for the perpetrators, and often there isn’t a tangible loss for the victims. However, it almost seems worse to me to be stealing things like trust and intimacy, rather than money, from people.

Running buddies

February 22, 2026June 10, 2013

By Shelah Miner

We come together in the early morning dark, on street corners or in front of our houses, whispering our greetings to each other. We have sleep in our voices, and mascara under our eyes, with hair pulled back in hasty ponytails. No one cares that I wear the same thing almost every single morning.

Under the cover of darkness, we know each other intimately. When we’re running side by side, it’s somehow easier to talk about the mean girl in my daughter’s class, or her struggles with her calling. Nothing is off limits– we talk about doubt and faith, the joys and sorrows of our husbands and children, politics (even when we disagree), sex, how we all want more sleep and less time on the sidelines at soccer games, vacation plans, periods, grocery shopping, shaving our legs, recipes, why we don’t want to have another baby, why we’re dying to go back to work, who gives the best pedicures, and all our fears.

Sexuality and the Mormon Marriage

February 22, 2026January 31, 2011

By Natasha Helfer Parker

AS A MARRIAGE AND FAMILY therapist and a member of the LDS Church, I have been interested in how Latter-day Saints approach intimacy. In February of 2009 I began a blog, The Mormon Therapist, designed to provide LDS members with an anonymous venue to share personal struggles. I have been inundated with questions and stories about …

Teaching Young Women about Sexuality

February 22, 2026September 18, 2010

By Marintha Miles

My son will turn twelve next week. Last Saturday he held a girl’s hand as he escorted her to the center of the gym in a Stockton Stake Center to learn the Waltz. “Were you nervous?” I asked. He wasn’t.

“But she was. I could tell.” And then I remembered being a twelve-year-old girl, wearing pink Chapstick and mascara, and using Avon Self-Tanning Lotion that made orange streaks on my legs. I remembered Robbie, the freckled boy up the street that I had a crush on. He liked me back. One night I snuck out of the window with almost all the girls at my slumber party and we ran up the street in our pajamas to meet him. He and I snuck away for a few moments to the secluded corner of his carport where he asked me the long awaited question, “Will you go with me?” I was delighted to say no, almost as delighted as I was to have him ask. The satisfaction that he had asked, that somehow I had wiled him into liking me, was enormous. I was desirable. I was in control.

In Kathryn Soper’s brilliant article Why Standard Nights are Substandard, and subsequent essay Emergence she begins by exploring the way chastity is almost always addressed within LDS culture.

Powder Fresh

February 22, 2026June 7, 2010

By Kathyrn Lynard

It looks and smells innocent enough, with its pale pink label and delicate scent. But that’s the whole problem.

Yes, this is a post about antiperspirant. Specifically, about an antiperspirant scent that sends a particularly creepy mixed message: I’m a woman, but I smell like a baby. I’m talking about “Powder Fresh.”

Filling My Senses

February 22, 2026November 8, 2009

By Kellie Purcill

It’s getting warmer here in Australia, Spring slowly rolling into Summer. The rosellas are flirty, all coy glances and side shimmies towards each other, working out who they’re going to fly away with. More skin is being bared in town as bikinis and boardies reappear after winter’s chill. Sand sugars calves, bellies and shoulders, enticing me to the beach, the sea, the sun.

I wake in the middle of the night, too warm in the flannelette sheets, an ache low in my belly, skin throbbing from a disappearing dream. There’s a bird calling from somewhere nearby, pausing to listen for an answer that – as yet – hasn’t come. The cadence of the call soothes my impatient twitching as I consider the ceiling and lie there, waiting. Waiting for my pulse to slow, the burn to ease, for sleep to drag me back to senselessness.

Ladies, start your engines

February 22, 2026November 2, 2009

By Kathyrn Lynard

November’s UP CLOSE topic is sexuality. This post is about understanding female sexuality. If you’re not comfortable with the topic, please don’t read the post.

A couple of weeks ago I was concerned about some psychological symptoms I’d been experiencing, so I sat down for a chat with my psychiatrist. “How are you feeling these days?” he asked.

“I think I’m a bit manic,” I said. (I have chronic depression and occasional hypomania, diagnosed as Bipolar Disorder II.)

“Really?” he asked. “You appear to be doing really well–why do you suspect mania?”

I will not quote my exact response, because I’m confident it would be TMI. But it boiled down to this: sex. Feeling sexy. Especially, unusually sexy. Hypersexuality is a common symptom of mania, so I figured that was the most likely explanation for my consistently ardorous (is that a word?) mood.

But surprisingly, the psychiatrist disagreed.

Let me tell you about the birds & the bees…

February 22, 2026March 3, 2009

By Leslie Graff

I started my lecture that Thursday morning by polling the students in the upper division family science course I was teaching at BYU.

“How many of you had ‘the talk’ with your parents?”
25% of my students in my raised their hands.

“How many had homes where sexuality was discussed openly and on repeated occasions?”
Again 25% of my class raised their hands.

“How many of you never had any discussions with your parents about intimacy and sexuality?” 50% of my class raised their hands.

Pharoah’s Dream

February 22, 2026February 26, 2009

By Michelle Lehnardt

Most likely, you remember this talk of President Hinckley’s, it was just weeks after September 11th, 2001 and given in the Sunday morning session– the session where the prophet speaks to the world. We had a renewed hunger for prophetic counsel that fall and waited eagerly in our homes and halls for his comfort and guidance.

As always, President Hinckley spoke boldly and yet with grandfatherly intimacy. His words echoed our sorrows on the tragedies we’d witnessed and our trepidation of the war to come. And then he said this: