Dear Hope, I can't imagine writing that one down. I'm not quite sure why, though. I consider my "youthgroup" years--let's say 13-19 or so--quite sexually repressed, often weirdly so. The attitude toward masturbation was one of the weirdest: "You can't masturbate without lusting in your heart, and that's wrong, so by default, keep your hands off yourself!" I was often convinced by that...and other times, well, I wasn't. By the time of that conversation I mentioned, I had a pretty different take.

But I'm not sure I know what sexual restraint and a "moderate" view of sexuality would have looked like for my 16-year-old self. I shudder to think of having had the kind of access to porn that kids have online now. I can think of better conversations than those I generally heard, but no matter what, I personally needed to be "repressed." So I try to laugh at those ham-handed forms of spiritual advice without sneering at them, because in the end, they probably did me more good than harm. I certainly recognize that they harmed others more, and that's another reason I'd probably never put this kind of story out there.

Nice chatting with you as usual.