Message-ID: <40026asstr$1040623822@assm.asstr-mirror.org> Return-Path: User-Agent: Microsoft-Entourage/10.1.0.2006 From: Carol X-Original-Message-ID: Mime-version: 1.0 X-OriginalArrivalTime: 22 Dec 2002 23:48:03.0656 (UTC) FILETIME=[917A1480:01C2AA14] Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by sara.asstr-mirror.org id gBMNm691030295 X-ASSTR-Original-Date: Sun, 22 Dec 2002 23:48:57 +0000 Subject: {ASSM} "Changing Partners": Jeremiah's account of commune life Date: Mon, 23 Dec 2002 01:10:22 -0500 Path: assm.asstr-mirror.org!not-for-mail Approved: Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.moderated,alt.sex.stories Followup-To: alt.sex.stories.d X-Archived-At: X-Moderator-Contact: ASSTR ASSM moderation X-Story-Submission: X-Moderator-ID: hecate, gill-bates An introduction, by Carol Some time ago, when I had finished publishing my 10-part account of my childhood living in two communal households of former members of the Children of God, (which readers can search for under the single identifying word "cobillard" either at http://www.google.com/grphp or at http://www.asstr-mirror.org/search.html ) I received a series of e-mails from a middle-aged man, a house builder, who said he had been born into and lived in a commune of quite a different sort from mine in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. He wanted my assistance in telling his story about his growing up and his coming out in that commune. His account required substantial editing and grammatical and textual correction. (To give you some idea of its extent, the text you will read is about twice the length of his original submission.) As a writer I have tried to be faithful to what I think he was trying to say, even when I found it to be distasteful. It is, after all, a disturbing account of bizarre child rearing that included child abuse -- sex imposed on young teens by a middle-aged cult leader -- and incest and the depersonalization and the deification or sanctification of the sex act itself. You will doubtless see my writing style in it; his words had to be greatly changed to make sense and to read as a story. I have tried to give it literary quality of a certain genre without changing either his meaning nor adding to or detracting from his story. If you encounter vocabulary that your local builder doesn't use, Jeremiah probably didn't use it either: it was added by me. In some places I have removed ambiguity, but I may have done so at the expense of editorial accuracy. I have deleted from his story some points that might facilitate identifying him or the commune. I am sure he has no more wish than I do to become a public figure. I have put his account in story form and tried to add some semblance of logical order to replace Jeremiah's stream of consciousness reporting. The disturbing quality is mitigated by the time period in which it occurred: the offenses described here happened some 25 years ago (although they may have continued later), and by the apparent ratification of those events by the youthful participants after they came of age. On the other hand, statutory rape is not cured by ratification in the absence at least of marriage to the abuser (this can happen, I was told during my research, if the offence is reduced from statutory rape to seduction), and incest (more common than we realize) is severely punished in those (few) cases when it is found out. Furthermore, the account below demonstrates that the writer at least, and apparently the others with whom he lives and most probably the vast majority of that commune including his mother and twin sister, suffered permanent psychological damage. As far as I can tell they have never been able to function as normal members of a family, much less a loving family. Whether they were able ever to function reasonably as members of society once they were out of the commune is not fully revealed to us. I cannot say whether the account is true or not; the important things are that it could be true, and that this or similar events and practices have been attributed not just to primitive tribes in far-off lands but to numerous 1960s communes and sects and cults in the USA. (The point that I personally have the most difficulty with is that the cult members should have been expected to have sex every day, and each time with a different person; yet Jeremiah does allow for days off and it is well known that some communes actually were configured that way.) Some of these millenarian cults have been well researched and described in books and news reports, occasionally following mass suicides. (Readers should not write to argue that David Koresh was murdered and did not commit suicide. It does not change the conclusion. They should also not write to say that we don't know that the leader of Jeremiah's commune was a millenarian like Koresh and that Hale-Bopp guy Marshall Applewhite, leader of the Heaven's Gate cult, who was also fixated on sex but the other way, cutting off his followers' testicles, even though we don't.) It is worth noting that public and/or cult-leader conducted defloration rites are not uncommon. (patriarchal obsession with virginity) (Indian Muslims) (Irish father) In some contemporary indigenous cultures, including notably in Angola, fathers routinely deflower their daughters. In some Muslim countries, of course, defloration of the bride is routinely done by the groom in front of certain family members. Here, however, the cult or tribe leader is said to have undressed and had sex with 14-year-old girls in front of most of a membership of 50 or more adults and children, and the event is said to have been viewed as a positive and holy experience by the girl, her mother and the audience. Readers will be aware that I am horrified by sex between adults and children. Ritual sex is not uncommon in tribal societies, however; and incestuous defloration within the family happens on occasion in all societies. A girl I work with, born in America of immigrant Hindus, told me recently that in some remote Indian villages families to this day piously send their daughters to the local priest to be deflowered prior to an early marriage. The Fred West case, in England, while notorious is not atypical: West deflowered his own daughters at a young age, but he also raped and sometimes murdered other teenage girls (and one of his daughters too), apparently mostly lodgers and runaways, in front of his family members and friends. West committed suicide in prison while awaiting trial and his brother killed himself too; his wife Rosemary is serving a life term in Durham Prison. I have given some thought to the apparent success of Jeremiah's commune in avoiding the law. I did some research into communes and alternative lifestyles for my senior thesis at college, and it is, of course, intuitively true what the "principle of the vanishing rule of law" enunciated by Du Pontavice and others says: that family life is largely outside the scope of legal control. Happy families (and one might say communes) do not come to the attention of the authorities and only when there is some crisis and internal dissent does the law intervene. A regime of unconventional or even legally (and socially) abusive sex is not inconsistent with happiness in individual cases. The Internet holds uncountable essays attacking such major religious social-, mind- and (as the case may be) sex-control regimes as the Children of God and Scientology. These, however, are (or were) large institutions. Jeremiah's commune may have been small enough to achieve consensus, or at least consent, to its leader's creed, however outrageous. Although Jeremiah does not say so, it seems to me after having edited the paper that the cult leader or guru ("Pops") started his commune in the early 60s, perhaps after enticing (and deflowering?) a much younger girl whom we come to know as "Moms" to live with him in an alternative lifestyle, and then bringing in a series of (young?) women and men. With these he would establish a rotating schedule of random sex matches, and in due course initiate teenage offspring into the practice. If Jeremiah was 14 in 1977 he would have been born to one of Pops's young female recruits and sex partners, Drusila, in 1963 and for a period of at least 15 years he would have been having regular sex with his own mother as well as all the other female adolescents and adults of the commune. We get some insight into Jeremiah's subsequent life following the death of Pops: a free-sex home of a few adults ("a couple of" men, "several" girls) where the offspring are excluded from the regime of sex. We do not know how old the current children are nor what they do among themselves or with others, but we are led to suppose they are as normal as kids can be who are non-marital children of uncertain parentage. One supposes that DNA testing would reveal something. It happens that during a recent business trip I sat next to a man who identified himself to me as a federal district judge. After striking up a conversation, he volunteered to me (I never volunteer any information to anyone; a lawyer boyfriend once told me that more people have gotten into legal trouble for doing that than for any other reason) that he had recently sentenced to a long prison term a "stupid" (his term) pedophile who had downloaded onto his computer (true, not very bright; especially given that it's exactly what Gary Glitter got sentenced for, but of course Gary was even stupider since he brought his computer, complete with child porn, to a computer shop for repairs) obscene images of children (not a nice thing to do, and in my humble opinion, not very nice to look at and even less nice to make). The judge wondered how adult aficionados of sex with children could be unaware that each and every underage female they could meet on a Internet chat forum and who was willing meet them in person was an undercover young-looking FBI agent, a Policewoman Decoy on duty. What the good judge did not say, but in effect implied, was that the police find it easy to go after downloaders and collectors of child porn on computers, following a trail of URLSs/DNSs, credit-card numbers and chat room logs, who may only be very indirectly responsible for child sex abuse (excluding, for purposes of this argument those who abuse and photograph their own or their neighbors' children) whereas those who abuse children collectively under the guise of religion have not heretofore been easy to identify and to prosecute. The unending stream of Catholic priest cases does not, of course, relate to collective abuse: those prosecutions have involved (mostly) angry parents as well as allegedly abused children. (Adult heterosexual sex by priests doesn't count as it, albeit fornication and often adultery, has been going on for centuries including by popes themselves; and among the Eastern Rite Catholic priests and Episcopalian converts to the Latin Rite, often married before ordination, it is quite naturally expected.) In Jeremiah's case and in others like it, there may be no complainant available if both parents and children were believers and are happy with what transpired. A code of omertà at work. Moses David (Berg) has been denounced, especially after his death, but he had a very large organization many of whose members scarcely knew him. Jeremiah's commune seems to have had fewer than a hundred communicants including children; their chances of denunciation would have been that much less. All that said, I repeat what readers of my own essays will already know: I have no objection to (in fact, I endorse and applaud) children being free to explore without hindrance themselves and their bodies, alone, as couples or collectively, but only with others of their own age, maturity, intellect and inclination. Interference by older children and adults, and most especially by persons in loco parentis, is without any doubt child sex abuse. Incest attacks the very foundation of family bonds, as Jeremiah's case proves. Inbreeding by Saudis is of no more concern to me than inbreeding by the Appalachian mountain boys in the film "Deliverance", but inbreeding in general society is a valid subject for public policy concern. One of my dear correspondents has tried to draw a distinction between adults who think and act from the standpoint of adults and those who play out the roles of children when imposing their sex drive on infants. I reject such reasoning as a pedophile's charter. A child cannot consent, and a parent has no power to consent on the child's behalf, for sex and, worse, defloration by any high priest let alone a self-appointed one, or by himself or any other adult, and it goes without saying that the claim of divine authority is no defense. That I personally consider virginity a nuisance to be disposed of at the earliest suitable opportunity does not detract from what I have just said; indeed it makes the whole concept of a defloration party based on religious worship ridiculous. If there is to be a celebration over a girl's defloration it should be organized and conducted by the girl herself, celebrating good riddance to an irrelevance. I hope nobody will write to me with a contrary view because it will only make me mad. Jeremiah ceased to reply further to my e-mails, which have now begun bouncing from his address, and I cannot add anything to what I have written above or to what he has written and I have edited below. In particular, Jeremiah has not clarified some issues that give rise to particular skepticism: the genetic issue (inbreeding, although there is some doubt after careful reading as to how much this was really an issue or a problem); the question of evolving demographics (what became of the children as they grew up). Having been interested since elementary school days in the lore of Hawaiian royalty, I cannot help thinking of the child born to Nahi'ena'ena and her brother Kauikeaouli (Kamehameha III), lovers (as allowed by local royal custom) until Christian missionaries forcibly separated them. The child, genetically afflicted, lived only hours. Nahi'ena'ena herself died soon afterwards, aged only 21. This essay is not intended for titillation, although some may find that in it, but rather for information and perhaps discussion. There is really no clearly suitable forum for this kind of forthright and lurid account of childhood initiation into a regime of daily sex with different partners, all dominated and controlled by the pedophilic cult director, Pops. Adults are, of course, free to have sex with different partners daily or even hourly if they so desire and have the capacity, and in some places the minimum age for this is as young as 16, which is still a little young, I think, when the other party is 30, 40 or even 50 years old. (Let the record shows that I am in my early 20s and I do not go out with men over 30.) It is the adults having sex with the children and orchestrating sex between the children that I object to. (And yes, I know, "pedophile" is an improper term because it means "child lover" and no lover of children would abuse them as this one apparently did.) Besides, if the report is correct Pops banished human "love" from his commune in favor of the daily assignment of sex partners "on behalf of God" and in the encouragement of impregnation of female members of the cult by unknown male members so that only mass DNA screening could have sorted out the paternity of their many children, at least a few of them presumably incestuously conceived. Such assignment of parentage could have done nothing, however, about instilling a sense of filial love or of family unity, both concepts banished from the cult as obsolete and redundant. I hope readers will consider the following essay critically and intellectually. Not having been personally involved in the events discussed and not vouching for the accuracy of the account I cannot encourage readers to contact me. The public posting of any outrageous views they may have by readers on "alt.sex.stories.d" is probably better than writing to me. I am anyway firmly convinced that kids are entitled to express themselves but need defenses against bullying and intimidation and that adults have no business interfering with minors. While I studied psychology, sociology and anthropology in college at least at the survey-course level I have no qualifications for judging others' conduct except my own life experience. Plus, as I said, I am unable for good and sufficient reason, which I hope you will appreciate without my having to go into it, to answer e-mails personally. Indeed I will only see them for the next two weeks or so, since that's about the limit of time I can focus on any subject without getting bored. I have revived my hotmail address for those couple of weeks. This is a very important subject; and because it is one that is best described in specific sexual detail, I think, discussion is excluded or impeded in conventional Usenet groups and online forums (or "fora" if you are a pedant). It may be recalled that I am a trainee researcher, writer and (very) junior analyst/editor of reports on business and politics and not a scholar of sex, deviancy or religion, although they may also recall that I have had a certain amount of experience in those areas as well. I publish this essay for what it is worth as the edited personal account of someone I have never met of experiences he claims to have had. I would caution others not to place too much reliance on it nor to draw too many conclusions from it. I suppose that in a forum of sex stories (a forum to which I am not a subscriber and whose stories I am not in the habit of reading) different readers will draw different conclusions from it, and that if they read it to the end they will do so for quite varied reasons, some nice and some not so nice. Like me, Jeremiah was born into a special community of followers (or in my case former followers) of a self-appointed, sex-obsessed prophet. As to whether having such a past is liberating or burdensome I leave it to others who care to do so to pass judgment. Readers may want to think about the fact that "Jeremiah" is one of the books of the Bible, and that unlike other books of the Bible, it is known, since the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls, to exist in two substantially different versions, one 1/8 shorter than the other. Perhaps there is a message there, although I don't know what it might be. A final note: I had expected it would take me half a day to edit Jeremiah's essay. In the end, his disjointed sentences, difficult grammar and confusion of facts caused me to spend four days on it, with review and proofreading for many days after that. If you liked it or if you, like me, are concerned with the issues raised, do put a dollar into the next abused children's or abused women's charity collection box that you encounter. Or, if you can afford it, please put in five dollars. At least. And say a prayer. Love, Carol ----------------------------------------------------------------------- "Changing Partners": Jeremiah's account of commune life, defloration parties and sexual dictatorship in 1977 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- I am Jeremiah. I read with interest a recent account of the life of the daughter of a former member of the Children of God. I too was a product of religious commune life, but one quite dissimilar. I decided to try to write down a few words on our very different and yet similarly evocative experience. I am a builder and not a writer, and I need help in writing this account. This is about our communal and religious life, a life in which sex was a major focus of worship and existence beginning at puberty and in which our religious and communal leader dictated all elements of our lives and our sexuality and rejected many of the conventions others take for universal regarding family relationships, incest, sex between teens and adults and so on. I did a bit of checking in the library and confirmed that while our own commune has gone unrecorded much has been written about other, similar ones. My story, therefore, can be validated in principle. Little was unique to our old commune: not the use of sex and genitalia as instruments of worship, not the arrogation to himself by our leader, as self-appointed tribal chieftain and religious seer, of the sole right and duty to deflower each girl when she came of age, not the orchestration of incest, and not the mystification and glorification of rites of puberty and of virginity and defloration. "Penis as appendage of God", indeed penis worship and glorification of the erection, are something potentially within us all, however much subliminated and suppressed. I write below of how women, my birth mother Drusila among them, adored and cherished their pubescent sons' and lovers' penises, nurturing those penises as they grew, taking them into their mouths and then into their vaginas, rejoicing in the semen that they gave them, delighting in their growth and development during puberty. All the women and girls of our commune sought to act out the physical part of our creed; older women in particular sought to teach young boys about the beauty of the vagina and, while themselves pleasuring and being pleasured by their partner's mouth and penis, de-emphasizing penis pride and fixation on the part of boys. (This was another reason why masturbation was so wrong: it focused upon egotism and self rather than upon God, the physical other and the production of offspring.) To them, boys should appreciate the vagina; it was for girls, on their own initiative and with guidance from God but without emotional blackmail from any boy or man, to "set the parameters of awe of penis" as Pops once put it in a sermon. It was for this reason, he said, in addition to the practical function of assuring maximum erection and likelihood of impregnation, that a girl should explore the penis, lick and cuddle it, and take it to her soul in advance of coitus. Girls should know in the most intimate way from their first sexual experience the origin of blessed semen; and boys should know, likewise, the beautiful receptacle for their semen and the site of human fecundity. One of the boys asked Pops during sex education class whether mutual oral sex wasn't an allowable and perhaps better alternative to sequential oral lovemaking and foreplay. Pops became quite agitated at this, arguing that during "69" one would inevitably be concerned with self more than partner, and the selflessness and divine worship, otherwise part and parcel of oral sex, would be subverted. Oral foreplay, the taking of penis in mouth and the arousing of clitoris and relaxation of vagina, he insisted, were to be without concern for self; what made them enjoyable was the devotion to God and partner that they represent, and the anticipation of climax, ejaculation and impregnation and the pleasure and satisfaction and fulfillment and salvation they respectively conferred. Furthermore, as it was inadmissible that ejaculation should be into a girl's mouth rather than her vagina, only sequential oral sex could be allowed. Most mothers and aunts must be satisfied with the vicarious pleasure of imagining their boys' penises pleasuring and being pleasured by other, younger, females. At least some of the older women in our commune who were so fixated could, on the other hand, act out their fantasies with the full support of our religious leader and of God. Even more than the cult of the oversized penis, the mystery of puberty and sexual development captivated those women. If they were lucky, the penis our women might love in God's name would grow over those first months they fondled and loved it and become larger than life. It would ejaculate sperm and perhaps father children for them. Today one may be outraged by stories of adults having sex with 14-year-olds but the reader should remember that the authorities did little to search out and punish such practices in the 1960s and 1970s and earlier, and that it was in fact widespread among some communes and some polygamous families. Sex between older women and younger men, even within the family, has historically rarely been punished in fact. To this day it is not just middle-aged men who go on sex tours overseas; in certain foreign resort areas pubescent boys are lined up waiting for middle-aged female clients to claim them, and their penises. Even here at home, whether because of shame or because of the lack of it, few boys ever complain, even those who were at the time reluctant targets of female lust. As for our girls having sex with older men of our commune, this two was banal. One of the women I live with has remained in touch with a friend from the commune; she says that through counseling her friend and come into contact with many, many similarly affected girls and women only a few of whom had any commune connection. It's just that many young girls find boys their own age boring, and while they might have second thoughts later their immediate impulse is to be deflowered by an older man who showers them with gifts and attention and sophisticated conversation. Our girls had a different impulse: they were captivated by God, and by his prophet, our leader, Pops. Today they do not seek retribution; if they feel deceived and taken advantage of in one sense, as for Pops they have nothing but fond and pious memories, and recollections of bliss. Besides there is another possible explanation: perhaps it's because trial lawyers are uninterested when there are no assets and no insurance to pay their fees. So they don't invent causes of action and provoke anger and contrived injury. Those who refer to biblical writ can easily find authority for involving adolescents in sex and for making puberty the marker for full adulthood. Indeed, I am not passing judgment on it now, because I am no worse for the sex that I enjoyed with older women. Indeed I recall my young penis in the vaginas of older women as times of incredible ecstasy and learning. There is a real social advantage to structuring and institutionalizing the sexual expression of youngsters and in ridding the community of sexual competition and of obsolete notions such as adultery and oedipal guilt. On the other hand, our young girls, although they really blossomed at their deflorations, were burdened with early childbirth and household obligations and certainly denied the freedom to choose their own roles in life. The women with whom I now live, themselves all deflowered by Pops and later impregnated as teens by him or other boys or men of the commune, claim to be happy with their, and also their children's past and present lives. This is true even though they may (or may not, in any individual case) regret that with Pops long gone, none of those children will enjoy a ritual defloration. This only suggests that life's expectations are ruled by childhood indoctrination and current possibilities. Our leader's assignment of gender roles and his imposition of sexual obligations seemed fair, reasonable and divinely ordained to us at the time, and even today their validity rings true to me, even where the law of the State and the pronouncements of feminist activists find objection. Twenty-five years later and from the vantage point of a different context one could say otherwise, but I don't see it that way. A life spent filling a predestined, assigned functional and sexual role is not necessarily either bad or unfulfilling. On the other hand, if Pops's creed had been true, or entirely true, surely God would have brought us a successor prophet and leader. And I must admit that we today have mixed feelings for our children, with whom we have difficulty in expressing love; and we leave them to the freedoms they have come to demand given their access to television and to public schooling. We lack social skills that others have, because our cult leader dictated to us in God's name much of what in open society requires choices and decisions to be made. As a cult, our commune had that aspect: cult leaders universally take for themselves the exclusive right to think and decide and rule on behalf of community. Delegation to such a cult leader of the burden of thinking and deciding is, to some degree, intrinsic to any faith; and delegation of decision-making in life matters is common in cults and not uncommon in communes. I think all the complaints made against cults in general and against communes such as ours in particular derive from this delegation. In reading this story, remember that these events occurred beginning some 25 years ago and that the commune was dissolved long ago and its leader has been dead for at least ten years. Still, in view of the cult's practice of public defloration at puberty it seems wildly improbable that anybody who had any responsibility, and indeed anyone who participated or watched, is going to want to be identified. Although most of the responsible adults may be dead now, any parents still alive and even some of those who were then minors could be at risk in today's prosecutorial and litigious climates, freely applied retroactively to old cases of perceived abuse. Perhaps a full account of our lives would be superfluous: there are plenty of accounts of 60s communes. What was different, not unique but different, about ours was the emphasis on puberty as gateway and public defloration as rite of passage to adulthood, and adulthood as imposing obligations of frequent sex and procreation. These are, of course, common in tribal societies and it would not be wrong to label us a tribe. I set out to discuss this uniqueness with reference to my own coming out at puberty. As I noted above and as I demonstrate later with anecdotes from my past, puberty holds incredible fascination for human beings of both sexes and of all ages. In real life, people find this physical transformation of the body, a transformation that tends to occur almost without the child involved paying much attention and almost before he or she realizes what has happened, to be so curious and so beautiful that they want to watch as if by slow motion photography. Having been asleep so to speak during their own event, they would like to observe and perhaps participate vicariously in that of others -- typically of boys, whose penises suddenly become fully operative and aggressive and capable of giving and receiving joy on an indescribable scale, dispensers of life-giving semen. It is no surprise to me that mothers embraced Pops's invitations to share joy with their sons. As you will read, while I had sex repeatedly with all the women of our commune, my penis was sought out, and then monitored, fondled, kissed and sucked in particular by the three most important older female persons in my life: the commune leader's wife and co-prophet Moms, the commune nurse-practitioner Aquila and my own birth mother Drusila. They did this seemingly with the specific aim of cataloging its growth and then bringing it to its maximum level of erection before it would ejaculate into their vaginas. Puberty, it seemed, meant something very special to them. (Of course I cannot deny that as I grew older, I relished especially the opportunity of having sex with adolescent girls of the commune as they reached age 14 and were deflowered. Perhaps there is a parallel here.) These three women, while they would continue to have sex with me subsequently on a schedule determined by the commune leader, lost much of their ardor and interest in the cuddling of my penis after I reached full maturity and it grew to its full size. My puberty was over and I was no longer that cute changeling they had known. It is more than somewhat ironic that the same woman who says that only a bigger than average penis can give her full satisfaction may be the woman who is most solicitous, most eager to embrace in her hands, her mouth and her vagina the penis of a pubescent boy, to satisfy an insatiable curiosity about its development. Obviously not every boy developed at the (late?) schedule I did, and this may account for the reason I received special treatment. This included many or most of the older women of our commune and not just the three I have mentioned. This says something about the female mind, or at least of the minds of those women who were drawn to our commune. Interestingly and remarkably, and I confirmed this with the other younger men at the commune, the accusation often made that most-menopausal women lose sex drive was largely disproved in a regime of daily changes of partners. Our creed, and our regime of sex, had the enthusiastic support of older women, as indeed it had from the commune members of all ages, children through adult. Our tribe, our cult, our commune followed a self-declared prophet who had no pretensions to universality (which is to say he didn't seek to convert the world, or to make his commune much bigger than it was) but whom we followed slavishly. We called him "Pops". Not surprisingly, his wife was "Moms", although their relationship was maybe more as co-prophets than as husband and wife, as you will see. They did have sex together when the posted schedule provided for it, and Moms was pregnant several times; but it is statistically more than likely than not that her offspring were fathered by her boy lovers from within the commune. Although Pops is, as I said, dead now it would give away the identities of too many people to identify him by his real or his biblical names. He himself always tried to stay under the radar and to get along with outsiders. He could be very ingratiating, which is of course how he recruited so many women, many of whom brought money with them and just gave it to him when they joined. Think of him anyway as another Rev. Jim Jones, consumed by a theology of sex and death: just one more of many millenarians in the 20th Century. Add some small streak of anti-government militia politics and perhaps a bit of misogyny, and there you have it. The focus of Pops's theology was sex as the performance of God's command, and sex for childbearing as the repayment to God for His having given us life. And, sex early and sex often. Sex should, he decreed, be enjoyed once a day, every day if possible, each commune member over the age of 14 with the partner for that day of Pops's choosing, and in a prescribed ritual of oral foreplay and vaginal sex that he had ordained. Only, however, after Pops himself had first publicly deflowered the girl, or Moms the boy in a joyous public ceremony of prayer and ritual oral foreplay and vaginal sex, a ceremony of blood and semen. By the time I reached age 14 there were some 50 members in our commune, which occupied a ranch and farm; with the birth of more children, despite regular departures the numbers grew thereafter. There were a very few new recruits in later years, and few of those stayed long. Philosophically and hierarchically it seemed from the inside more of a benevolent dictatorship than anything else; whether outsiders would have seen that clerical dictatorship as benevolent I cannot say. Pops defined creed in biblical terms, but he interpreted the Bible in his own fashion. Economically we were supposed to be a self-reliant colony. In fact, I think we were also something of a Ponzi scheme, where new members were expected to bring in wealth and give it to Pops and thus indirectly subsidize old members, and all of us worked to raise food and make things or to provide services to sell. Marriage was scorned and "spousal" (i.e., monogamous) love banished; even the fact that Moms was, or was said to be, married to Pops was largely ignored. In common with a number of the mid- to late-20th Century communes, members were supposed to have sex with others at random; but "random" was defined by Pops, and he had a calculator or a mechanical computer of some kind that he would use to assign partners night by night. Pops, however, may have influenced the outcome of the computer calculation in his own, and Moms's favor. Pops insisted on keeping track, through Aquila, of the timing of girls' periods, ostensibly to monitor pregnancies and to manage health matters. If a girl might be pregnant, Pops wanted to know immediately so that she could receive proper prenatal care from the midwife, Delilah. Priscilla told me that during their first pregnancies Pops would meet with girls often, feeling this was an important element of pastoral attention; he would also try to be there for one of their prenatal exams to bless the fetus, or so he said. Pops claimed that the girls appreciated it as they always felt God's presence when he was there and they were, after all, carrying God's child. He wanted them to continue to have sex through their pregnancies on the basis that they should be constantly reminded of the holy act of communion that had brought them to that condition. It occurred to me years later that Pops might have used the information he obtained from Aquila and Delilah to assign young girls to himself on the dates when they were the most likely to be fertile, and that notwithstanding Pops's constant dismissal of the relevance of paternity he had contrived to father a maximum of the commune's children himself. The women we now live with have been debating this issue for years; some, on the other hand, that Pops may have been pairing women and girls during their fertile period not so much with himself but mostly with the young men newly arrived to join our commune. Boys and men not born into our commune typically did not stay with us long; they lacked the spiritual commitment and the willingness to deny themselves the right of personal property. Pops had a mystical power over girls, and even those women who did not grow up in the community and therefore had not been deflowered by him in public ceremony seemed to have a special and unshakeable devotion. As far as I know, the main reason for women's departure had to do with claims to parental control over children and not to sex or property. I doubt that Pops ever in fact returned whatever "dowry" such girls had brought with them. Even today and in the group I live with, our women have nothing but fond recollections of Pops, even if they now gossip about his personal life and think the regime they grew up in to be weird. When she saw me writing this, one of them reminisced about her own act of defloration, of having held Pops's testicles in one hand and his great penis in the other, taking the penis lovingly into her mouth and then bringing it to her vagina for her first ever sex. Only when I asked her to consider the event out of context did she concede that it was bizarre. She refused to consider that the age difference -- a middle-aged man deflowering a young adolescent -- had any relevance at all. At the time they had participated in their first sex our girls considered that act quite a normal life event, never thinking that it was perhaps unique to our commune. They wanted Pops's penis in their vagina urgently, and they wanted to receive his semen; they wanted to bear his baby. One could tell this from the expression of those many girls who, still lying down on the mattress after Pops's had dismounted and overwhelmed by the event, would reach down to their vagina and coat their fingers with his semen so they could feel its texture, could examine it closely. No more than any ordinary girl or women with men in general, our girls would scarcely have been so awed by and so eager to embrace the penis of anyone other than Pops. The adulation was personal to God and to Pops. In a sense like Charles Manson's girls, who were said happily and unhesitatingly to fellate any visiting man on Manson's orders, our girls were entranced by Pops and eager to do whatever he told them, anything whatsoever that would please him and God. In the same vein, on looking back we decided that if an occult California group could follow its millenarian leader to mass suicide over the Hale-Bopp comet, then how much less surprising it should be that so many girls should believe in Pops's creed and delight in his penis. Thus each girl on the occasion of her ritual defloration at age 14 looked upon it as normal and accepted behavior. The pubescent girl would be enthralled and entranced, she would long to kiss and embrace Pops's penis from the moment he undressed himself on the dais. She would gladly do this thing she had never done before, that she had only seen occur on the dais: take it into her mouth and love it, then, with it at its maximum stiffness and bristling with Pops's lust and God's expectation, lie back, her legs apart, to welcome her first penetration and the mingling of her blood and his semen. His penis sliding into her vagina, squeezing between her labia and stretching her vaginal walls, would be the appendage of God at his sacred work and the dispersal of his semen within her womb a holy event. She was giving up her virginity not to Pops but to God himself, feeling His spirit envelop her as she did so. Boys' introduction to sex by Moms was far less mystical; here it was, I think, more a matter of peer-group pressure and personal eagerness to grow up and to have sex. Aquila would have had a hand in this. In addition, however, by the time of their own 14th birthday boys would have attended many, many initiations of older boys by Moms, and they would have seen both the process -- the boys penis lovingly kissed and sucked by Moms and then guided by her into her vagina while, in the minutes leading up to his ejaculation a tableau of mounting bliss built on his face. Not only would Pops incant a sermon as the congregation watched, but when the boy had finished Moms would rise to address the group, the boy standing next to her, proud of his new status, his moist penis testimony to his success. Moms would sometimes remind the girls present that their duty to God lay in completing the task she had just started, and in bringing forth children with this new adult, promising them extraordinary pleasure as they filled their duty. Pops's asserted his divine right and duty to deflower each girl, and this notwithstanding that she might possibly be his daughter, something neither he nor we could ever know, but none of us saw any impediment in that or were allowed to consider it as relevant or, in any particular case, likely. Intellectually we believed that closeness to Pops constituted closeness to God, each such link representing an additional blessing, and sex being God's own designated channel of communication by blood and semen. It was therefore a matter of some regret for many to be restrained in that way by Pops's creed from speculating as to whether any particular child had been fathered by him. Even as Pops deemed it irrelevant, we believed that any child of Pops must necessarily innately possess some of his own blessed attributes and that for him to deflower a female child of his own in front of us must be a further blessing for her as well and an honor for him and for God. Adulthood was at the age of 14 or when Pops would decide that a boy or girl was physically ready after personally examining him or her in the nude. He was fixated upon puberty. I don't know the details, but I do know that he contrived in various ways to keep track of the state of the genitals of those children who reached puberty at earlier ages, even though they would have to wait until 14 for coming out. There are lots of ways he could have done this because Aquila kept a record of their size at the time of our last physical exam. He felt he needed to know that children were developing normally, especially in matters of sex, at least in general terms. Details could be left to Aquila. As part of our home schooling he often lectured to us in sex education class. His sermons went on at great length about the place of sex in our creed. And as in many primitive tribes, he (or, as the case might be, Moms) alone would introduce a young person to sex, in front of the congregation, as an act of worship. Children actually looked forward with eagerness to that day: they had been indoctrinated into the creed from infancy. For us it was an act and a celebration of faith, and a duty of both passion and religion that Pops would publicly deflower each girl when she came of age following a detailed script and choreography that showed off her body and especially her vagina while his penis entered it for the first time. Similarly Moms would celebrate with each boy his first act of sex, inviting the whole congregation to appreciate his young erection and his first vaginal ejaculation. Two of the times when I saw her do this were while she was pregnant, and she tried to make those events into a celebration of fecundity as well as of ejaculation. She actually mentioned one of those times that her pregnancy was the result of a previous public first-sex celebration. As I was still under 14 at the time, her announcement made me wish that I too, when I came of age, could impregnate this holy woman. When that day came, however, she was already over 40 and as it turned out wouldn't be getting pregnant again. Her statement about the putative father would of course have given away his identity and been contrary to Pops's rules. It may or may not have been true but it shows how she valued the occasions. These public exhibitions and celebrations were first and foremost religious services but they were also sex instruction for the children present and sex experience for the pubescent postulant. They also gave Pops a chance to show off his penis and to dominate and awaken to sex a nubile young girl. But to us they were lessons and examples of earthly and heavenly love. Pops's was a ritualized form of sex, following a specified pattern of oral foreplay and vaginal penetration designed to maximize both pleasure and the likelihood of conception. [I don't see his logic, since African women subjected to female genital mutilation and presumably incapable of orgasm still have large families, but I do applaud Pops's departure from misogyny and his solicitude for women getting some brief pleasure out of a procedure designed to burden her with constant childbearing. -- Carol] In our commune birth control was strictly forbidden. There was a staff midwife (I only remember a couple of births that had to be referred to a hospital for Caesarians and the like) and the nurse practitioner Aquila, and by and large they took care of health matters, except for dentistry or the very occasional medical crisis. We were all home schooled and while not isolated from outside society and playmates we were conditioned to be cautious in regard to them. Aquila gave us regular health checks and recorded our height and weight. At the time I thought it not at all strange -- how did I know? -- that among the measurements she regularly wrote down on my chart was the size of my penis, its precise length and its girth. She would take notes as she asked a child various very personal questions including some on what he or she may or may not have felt or observed in relation to sex and what his or her thoughts on it were. She had wanted to know, for example, when I was 10 or 11 what I thought of girls' nipples and whether I thought I would ever like to touch them and whether I had ever had any thoughts of a sexual nature towards boys. Another time she asked if I knew what "69" was. I didn't, and when I told another adult what she had asked me it caused a ruckus. She was said to be particularly exercised over any trace of effeminacy in a boy, but as it turned out whatever expertise she was claiming in the matter was spurious. One boy she seems to have taken for gay turned out to be perfectly happy to have sex with Moms and with any other female allotted to him. The friction engendered by the accusation and other confrontations he had with Pops and others later, however, led to his leaving the commune and, indeed, joining the Army. That of course threatened to cause real problems for Pops because of the need for the boy to clarify his status, providing proof of birth registration, social security number, high school equivalency diploma and so on, and more specifically the possibility of a background check for a security clearance. Apparently there are particular provisions to help people "coming out of the cold" get documents: militia types, tax protesters and the like. But I don't know what the military police or the FBI would have thought of a kid admitting to having had sex with his own mother. It seems that something was done to help him and perhaps he avoided having to get such a clearance by seeking a non-sensitive specialty. I never saw him again. Unsurprisingly, I think, the commune attracted a certain number of individuals with kinky or even perverted interests. It was Aquila, indeed, and not any of my friends or any of the other children who taught me to masturbate. I was not quite 12, and while she was checking my blood pressure and weight and height and so on, she had me stand still as usual by the scale so she could pull down my underpants to measure my penis with ruler and tape measure and to feel my testicles to check their size and shape, their texture and their state of development. The procedure took several minutes as she proceeded with all deliberate speed and care. She had done this so many times that I thought it was a normal thing for nurses to do. She made me cough, as in future doctors who examined me would do, but by that time she had already accomplished what she wanted and was no longer really paying attention. Then she asked me if I was jerking off yet. She took my flustered answer as "no" and had me sit down, my underpants still around my ankles, and she smeared some petroleum jelly on my penis and told me to put my hand around it. Then she put her hand over mine and made me rub it, and when I had got a hard-on she took her hand away and watched until I had finished. The procedure of getting an erection didn't actually happen quite so smoothly as that description may imply: my penis was small and soft and I really didn't know what I was supposed to be doing. Of course even when I did get an orgasm nothing came out. I knew from having attended defloration ceremonies and from sex education that semen was supposed to be ejaculated, but despite all that training and visualization I'd never thought about what masturbation was supposed to accomplish. Anyway, when she saw me twitch with pleasure Aquila said I was done and that everything was fine, and that in a few years I would be sleeping with girls and this would be good practice. She also said that she needed to measure my penis in its erect state, that this was important for her to know, and she undertook its measurement that way as well, first rubbing its head herself it to restore my erection, then looking at it from a distance as if admiring her handiwork, comparing her skills in the matter with my own. In later physical exams she would just tell me to give myself an erection and then she would take her measurements. This went on until I was around 18, and she would always be watching me closely as I made myself erect for her tape measure just as she would later watch me while my erection subsided and I tried to provide a urine sample for her to test. The fact that masturbation violated, in principle, one of the godly commandments that Pops railed about -- not spilling one's seed on the ground -- didn't occurred to me until years later; but of course I didn't have any seed yet. In fact, Pops's concern with the harmful effects of masturbation was directed principally at the over 14s, boys who anyway would be experiencing a full and constant sex life, and it was apparently intended to maximize the quantity of sperm they would ejaculate into girls and the likelihood of conception. But given that Pops had left it mainly to Aquila to enforce that directive there was a certain irony in her being the one to initiate me to masturbation. As a matter of fact, when I was a child she had used every opportunity to see my penis, such as when I was brought to her with a cold or a scrape, and at one time I assumed that this was something every health worker did as a matter of course, that maybe the condition of one's penis was an indicator of one's general health. Less than three years later I would start to be paired with her occasionally for evening sex and nighttime companionship and I got to know more directly her fixation with pubescent boys' penises. Now that she had Pops's approval to do it, because I was over 14 and had been assigned to her for the night, she loved to fondle and examine and kiss and play with mine at length, and with my balls too. Even if she was going beyond what she was supposed to, she could now do this with impunity and at much greater length than she had during my physical exams. Like those other older women I mentioned, after my penis had fully grown she became less interested in handling it and then if I strayed from Pops's prescribed form of lovemaking she would object. At the time I welcomed the attention not only for the pleasure it brought but because I actually thought all that sucking would make it grow faster. With all the hype given to women's supposed preference for jumbo penises as I said I found it curious that like her so many of our other women were entranced by my penis in its early pubescent state, happily playing with it, teasing it and testing its capacity for erection and ejaculation, sliding it in and out of her mouth and then watching what effect that stimulation had on it. Yet these same women seemed to lose their special interest in it after the same penis grew to its full size. I can only suppose that it is the process of puberty itself that holds the mystery and intrigue. This was certainly true for Aquila. Like every other adult recruit to our commune she had her private reasons for being attracted to the community, and I suspect that the opportunity not only to observe but also to handle children's growing genitals was one of them. She certainly couldn't have done that on the outside. I am now aware that most women aren't in fact aroused by male nakedness nearly so much as men think they are or should be, and that Aquila was anyway aberrant. I now know that an erect penis may, for a girl, be a source of awe and curiosity and interest but that it is not generally in and of itself a source of titillation. His penis may be a constant source of concern and interest to a boy, but it is of only incidental and occasional interest to girls until and unless the teasing minuet leads to more. Until then, caring, protection, caresses and status count for more. But at that time how could I know? Anyway, for us, all those things -- and even, in a sense, the caresses, were provided by the commune as an institution and not by individual boys. To this day I do not fully understand what Aquila was thinking. I only know that my penis was a constant source of delight for her and as she explored it she rewarded me with more pleasure than, as a boy seeing occasional defloration ceremonies, I had ever dreamed of. Nonetheless, when we were having sex together I kept worrying that Aquila was finding some fault with my penis, some blemish in its appearance or some defect in its performance, but she never would say what she was up to. She would just keep on with her expression of vague dissatisfaction and disapproval, like that of the librarian who sees you checking out a book she thinks is distinctly inappropriate for someone of your age, or perhaps someone of any age, but who lacks the authority to stop you doing it. Furthermore, Aquila would not permit me to explore her vagina with my fingers or even examine it visually for very long, which I once tried to do by way of retaliation for her own meddling with me. She just told me rather sharply that I must only use my tongue in exciting and lubricating her, and in just the manner Pops had directed. So there was some hypocrisy and cynicism in her actions. I wondered as well if she really enjoyed sex, or whether she just did out of religious duty and to have the opportunity to conduct her own research, such as it was. She never had any children of her own. One of my friends said of her that she always gave the impression of being a voyeur at her own sex act. She told me once that she had an argument with Pops over her need to measure the quantity and quality of each young boy's ejaculation at least once a year, and that she resented Pops's refusal to let her do it. I guess she must have made some boy do it once, and he complained, because by and large I never heard of her asking Pops's permission for anything. When she told me that story I said that she seemed less interested in the sexual development of the girls than of the boys but she denied it, saying that she carefully monitored their breast growth and vaginal condition but that those statistics were less relevant to health matters, an argument that seemed ludicrous to me. I guess Pops would have allowed a boy to masturbate in a flask for her if there were some valid health reason, but her intrusive curiosity was not enough, and once again it came down to Pops's conviction that God had decreed that semen spurt into a girl's vagina and only there. His decree that sex should start at age 14 was surely related to that decree, and to maximizing pregnancies over a girl's lifetime: of going forth to multiply. I have heard that the Koran specifies age 14 as the time of maturity for boys, but it also specifies age 12 for girls; and anyway Pops would certainly never have read the Koran nor given it much credence if he had. Some other communes promoted public nudity and sex at will by adults and teenagers. The children in ours slept separately and would have been unlikely to see adults at sex except for Pops or Moms and their partners at a defloration. That there was in fact limited public nudity and that sex took place in at least partial view of others was a matter of overcrowding or space sharing in the rooms occupied by adults and not of religious or community dogma, and it was in subdued light. There were exhibitionists among us -- just as Pops and Moms were exhibitionists when you come down to it -- but most adult members of the commune considered that they were doing their religious duty in seeking to procreate, and their reward was the pleasure of orgasm, the satisfaction of fulfilled urges. Our major instance of orchestrated and visual sex was the defloration party. Its infrequency and its doctrinal justification combined to make it for us the major life event and a family celebration rather than public sex. I know that outside the context of a defloration for a boy or man to display himself naked in public on purpose, and all the more for him to be seen with an erection by children, was unthinkable: as much an act of gross indecency as it would be in the outside world. On the other hand, this would of course not be the case with respect to acts of sex incidentally and necessarily taking place in a room where other adults too happened to sleep. One is not acting out sex to an audience, arguably the case of a ritual defloration, but acting privately even if within sight of others. In a pornographic performance one flaunts orgasm and ejaculation; in private sex deprived of privacy ejaculation is, in principle, unseen (or at least ignored) and there is absolutely no intent to titillate an incidental observer. Necessity brings habit, and with habit one becomes comfortable, content. I don't mind being watched during sex now if my partner is so inclined, and a couple of the women with us today quite like to be seen by others in the act of coitus with me or others. I thought first it was a matter of thinking they are so attractive and so sexy and perform so well that they wish to be noticed, but they're no longer the sexy teenagers they once were and they still try to be seen. They still regard sex as prayer and have no shame or inhibition in its enjoyment. At the commune privacy was a luxury and it was something I learned not to demand, or even seek. So lack of privacy became a habit and I became comfortable with it and still am. As in any group there were secret and not-so-secret jealousies and envies, only partly suppressed: not everybody is beautiful when naked, and as one grows older whatever beauty one had will sooner or later fade. Keeping the light down could be reassuring; it's enough, and perhaps sexier sometimes, to be seen in shadows. We loved to watch Pops as he undressed and initiated young girls not only because of the religious aspect and the fact that their defloration brought them closer to God, but also because young girls are pretty and their nudity is delightful to see and their acts of sex entertaining. We all of us appreciated the pious aspect of the event, but as adolescents we were aroused by it too. We felt, consistently with Pops's creed, that holy first sex should definitely not be hidden under a bushel nor take place in a dark room. We, watching, knew that the girls were entering a new and exciting stage of their lives, and they themselves were invariably excited and eager to proceed, honored to be invited by God to join in communion with Him. Pops standing, naked before us next to the girl he was about to deflower with his penis standing tall and quavering and the girl shy and excited showing off to us as a group for the first and last time her breasts and vulva, represented all that was holy and productive. Moments later, Pops's penis penetrating the girl's hymen was paving the way for us whose penises would follow, as well as opening up that girl to the creation of life. Like those in the outside world, girls in our commune liked men to admire their clothed breasts but for us it was a matter of recognizing them, as Pops once put it, as "bait to bring men to God" and "to arouse God's penis on behalf of God's vagina" for the propagation of His children. At their defloration showing those breasts off unclothed for the first time, they were inviting men to join them in the physical worship of God, now collectively and soon individually. In the ethic of our community, for a girl's body to be thereafter sought after by the men was good, to want to ejaculate insider her was acting out the purpose of life. While men (other than Pops of course) would supposedly have no say in the scheduling of sexual partners, one certainly did not want to start off one's sex life with a stream of disappointed and reluctant boys and men; each girl would be eager to please and would be making a promise to arouse, excite and pleasure each man. To see a girl so gladly take Pops's penis into her mouth, for her lips to close over it, was evidence that she had accepted his creed. Her demeanor would be not so much sexy as holy. For Pops then to ejaculate into her womb was the consummation of her self-dedication to God. I saw all our girls, without exception, approach Pops's penis with this incredible delight, put it in their mouths with an urgency and an adoration that defy description. Every girl viewed her defloration as the culmination of all her life that had gone before. Despite whatever apprehension they might have over pain and pregnancy, they knew the end result was fulfillment of God's purpose, that orgasm, ejaculation and impregnation were part and parcel of His eternal plan. Most girls would afterwards recall the event with blissful sighs. They saw it as the gateway to adult sexual satisfaction, the beginning of their physical and emotional interaction with men and boys, but always, of course, interaction with them as surrogates for God. Our girls had a far better sex life, qualitatively and quantitatively, than the general population in my opinion. I never knew a girl to hesitate when invited to be deflowered by Pops at a ceremony of public worship; nor did I ever know any girl to have second thoughts, or to complain about it, later. Nor did any girl demur to the expectation that she would have sex on a nearly daily basis, rotating, with all the adult boys and men of the commune. Our approach to sex was simply different, and we simply did not see it as part of a love relationship of two human beings. Later, after Pops's death, when we had free access to television, movies and secular magazines, we realized that our approach was different, but by then it was ingrained and for most of us irreversible. As for the defloration itself, Pops always asked the birthday girl before he undressed her if she were sure she wanted to proceed. Removing her clothes was itself a celebratory event, most especially, of course, her brassiere and panties. This would be our first glance at a young girl's loveliest places. Pops would be very solicitous in every way, and of course with all the attention he gave to her vagina in foreplay she would be very well lubricated indeed and less likely to feel pain, I think. The whole congregation would be there, including their own peers and younger children too, and no girl would want to disappoint the crowd or to spoil the grand occasion, or give up the grand opportunity which she expected would lead to passion and ecstasy. To do so would surely have displeased God as well as frustrated their own desires and expectation. What is interesting is that Pops put no pressure whatsoever upon young girls to accede to the defloration precept of his creed. It was, in fact, the women teachers and child minders who had inculcated the expectation and desire for it, the wish to replicate a ceremony they saw only occasionally and in a religious setting. It is interesting, from the vantage point of today, that it should have been women who would so strongly and effectively propagate the cult of the prophet's penis. After all, Pops was generally, except in the defloration context and during his nighttime sex in his corner of one of the bedrooms, if not prudish or bashful then at least conventionally decent. His attitude towards women, outside his appointed liaisons, was always as far as we knew piously correct, his treatment of girls was fatherly. By comparison with over 14s who had entered into our adult life, under 14s were positively protected from exposure to sex and indeed to social or physical relationships with persons of the opposite sex of any age, with the sole exception of a rather sterile sex education, a regular mention in sermons of sex and procreation as religious duties, and attendance at occasional deflorations. Perhaps this is why children, both girls and boys, stared so intently at Pop's penis when they did have occasion to see it as it so dramatically and confidently would enter a virgin's vagina. I have to admit, by the way, that no other male in the commune, and certainly not I, could have substituted for or replaced Pops in that role, and led to the commune's collapse when he died. The girls would be, as my sister Priscilla was, very reverent with Pops's penis, treating it with awe and what might be described as humble piety combined with the anticipation of pleasure and of blessing to be given and received. I cannot know this, but I suspect they sorely regretted that the process of ejaculation itself was out of sight and out of their control; on the other hand Pops had made clear the holy writ that decreed ejaculation must be in vagina and that impregnation must be facilitated. In their deflorations I think that any pain they would otherwise have suffered was largely suppressed by a trance-like state that Pops managed to induce as he undressed them. Their commitment to the event was sealed from the moment they took his penis into their mouth, arousing and lubricating it. Indeed, Pops would have made such an issue about the mingling of blood and semen for God that when a girl didn't produce any tangible blood at all she might be disappointed, even humiliated. For that reason it might be in a girl's interest to feign pain and its happy tolerance in the name of God. From the standpoint of the children of the congregation watching the defloration happen there was natural curiosity and the opportunity to see what sex was all about; for older boys and men there was a chance to have an advance peek at the private parts of a new member of their sexual circle. Girls, even little girls, were just as eager to watch, especially when it came to one of the boys, a boy they probably had been playing with for years. They would see a boy having his pants lowered, then his cute, sexy penis revealed and brought to erection, then having sex for the first time. Here, after all, was Moms, second most important person in the commune's hierarchy, undressing that boy, kissing his penis, and putting it in her vagina. One sensed that the care Moms took with the young boy's penis, within view of all the girls of the commune, was intended to educate them in how to excite that penis, and more particularly how to see to it that the eventual discharge of semen into her vagina would be maximized. Why else would she continue to lick and to suck at just the head of the boy's penis even after it was fully erect, teasing and exciting the boy to the point of total commitment to her will. There was never any giggling or any covering of eyes on the part of the girls during this lesson; they seemed genuinely appreciate the solemnity and importance of the occasion, and its meaning for the future of the girl or boy. As for the teenagers and adults in the congregation, there was not supposed to be any element of voyeurism or titillation involved in these events, but no matter how much Pops sermonized and lectured, with such a large crowd in attendance I don't know how it could have been avoided. It was accepted that our girls' introduction to adulthood in a formal ceremony of defloration was an integral element of our faith, a pious public event. However human nature does not entirely follow theological principles. Seeing a beautiful act of sex on stage is bound to arouse a male and even a female. That our faith declared Pops's penis to be a holy instrument changed nothing; nor did the fact that it was in fact quite impressive in its erect state and that it always seemed to produce enough semen to leak out visibly from the girl's vagina afterwards. One of the reasons Pops always held the deflorations in the evening was so that the commune members could retire immediately afterwards with the partners he had assigned them for that night. There would be a short party with a fancy tiered birthday layer cake after the defloration in honor of the newly admitted young adult, and from even the youngest age I could tell how agitated and aroused all the other adults were, how eager they were to pair off for bed. Even our nursery staff were in a hurry and anxious to see us off to bed so they could go about their business, which as I know now and guessed then, was to have sex. Objectively Pops was middle-aged and hardly an attractive sex object or performer, at least to a non-believer. We knew little about his past except that he had always been trailed by a train of fawning female believers of various ages. The men among us had joined later, or been brought along by women whom Pops had seduced to his religion and to his body. Or we might have been born to the commune. He relied, as I guess many men do, on his advanced powers of persuasion over women as well as the absolute faith of his religious followers generally, men, women and children. To us he was the philosopher and messenger of God, and so he was spiritually beautiful and his penis would be too. When we saw his penis in a young girl's vagina, we and the girl imagined this as God's work and his flowing semen as God's fluid. Far from thinking the girl abused we considered her divinely chosen and blessed. We were the vicarious beneficiaries of our leader's sexual ecstasy; and of course as I said we men became aroused and would ourselves be looking to our assigned partner to receive our own tense and erect penis and to accept with joy our ejaculation within an hour or so of the conclusion of the party that followed the defloration. Hadn't Pops just reminded us how sex was a form of prayer, that ejaculation was God's Holy Word in answer to that prayer? The introduction of a boy to adulthood was no less important an event than that of girls. Where boys were concerned, Moms did her best to make it an equally pious and happy affair, but of course a boy's body is somewhat less captivating than a girl's to a general audience, and Moms was at least 40 years old at the time of my own first-sex with her. Her initiation of boys would inevitably turn into a celebration of his penis as she tried to impart religious meaning to that boy's erection while she proudly showed it off before and after having sex with him. It was a measure of Pops's persuasive ability that he gained total acceptance within the commune and the cult for his interpretation of God's commands regarding sex and the body. It seems indeed remarkable to me now that nobody ever questioned his doctrine in the matter of defloration and his claim of absolute right as prophet to deflower every girl at age 14, and Moms's right to receive every boy at the same age, celebrations which could occur several times a year. Few years went by without at least one defloration. It is probably even more remarkable that nobody ever complained about his or her coming out party later. Today still, the women who live with me have only the fondest recollection of their own deflorations by him and mourn his passing terribly. The regime of assigned partners, changed every night, was also happily received for all those years. We still have sex with random partners in our house, but now we have to earn their attentions: they do not automatically agree to our advances. There is no posted roster of partners. I can envisage men and women choosing such a life independently of a faith which promoted it, and indeed numerous atheist communes did the same random pairing as we did. But that so many of our women and our men positively argued for the practice not out of lust but out of faith testifies also to Pops's power to attract a loyal following based upon intellectual argument and not just the promise of easy sex. It should be apparent from the incidents I relate in this essay, including my own sister Priscilla's defloration and our joint happiness in having sex together right there on the dais afterwards, how we all looked to Pops for guidance and how his instruction was readily obeyed. That sex with her was surely the best and most fulfilling act of sex I ever could or shall have, and it was made so because it was at Pops's command and because we both knew it made Pops, and therefore God, totally happy. Meanwhile, we were supported by the joy of the entire congregation as it watched us. Our orgasms would reflect God's delight at what we were doing, nothing less. God wanted us to come together, on His schedule and in His manner, with maximum arousal and penis in vagina, He wanted semen in vagina and he wanted conception. Above all, He wanted us to have loyalty to our group, to love that group collectively in His name, and to share that His love, to witness constantly, with each and every adult member of the opposite sex. It was only through Pops's vision that we were able to see the irrelevance of family and the uniqueness and exclusivity and breadth of God's love, and His command to equalize the sharing of sex among His believers in his Prophet. One of the many justifications cited by Pops for this was the replacement of the Ten Commandments by "Love Thy Neighbor As Thyself". It followed that Pops was right to undertake the assignment of sex partners since his assignments would be free of discrimination, false love and untoward personal influence or preference. I still think that this was correct. The main problem is and was that religious law, while not exactly superseded by civil law, is no excuse from prosecution. Thus while Pops's policy that adulthood begins at 14, and that young people can and should begin to have sex at that age is undoubtedly correct as God's law, the fact that the law fixes the age of consent at, say, 16 or even later means that Pops's creed simply can't be implemented at the age God specified: the state wields sufficient power on earth to defy God and to prosecute any attempt to do so. That said, our commune never met with interference at the time. Pops took his chances and he got away with it. His good fortune was that his followers continued, without dissent, to support him and to this day he has never been denounced, not even in death. Assignment of each night's partners by Pops was supposedly without respect to age. They were expected, but not obliged -- how could they be? -- to have sex. Once one had reached 14, or later in the event that Pops should judge that a kid was not yet ready after inspecting him or her in the nude, one was made a full member of the community and the church, with all the duties and the privileges that entailed. Perhaps for good reason the preliminary inspection of the postulant's sex organs was a task that Pops would not delegate to Aquila. This was to be a ceremony of public worship and defloration and it was vital, he said, that everything would be properly controlled. From the day of entry into the adult sexual community, maximization of the chances for parenthood, anonymous in the case of the father, was a religious obligation. Pregnancy was proof of pious commitment to the Lord of the woman and her partners and their obedience to His most urgent command. Conception was a blessed visit of the Holy Ghost. As a result there were pregnant women all about and there were many children under foot all the time. Each birth was a joyous event. For baby boys there would be a public ceremony of circumcision, "following in the pattern of Jesus and his apostles and myself", Pops would say, in the course of which he would bless the child's penis and all its future sex partners and progeny. I have alluded to my sister Priscilla. She was a twin sister, or more probably a twin half-sister since we differ so much in physical appearance and temperament. Pops had decided that the two of us would be welcomed and introduced to sexual and communal adulthood on the same day. He took us aside and gave us our physical examinations. Physically, Priscilla was quite mature, which is to say that she had grown-up breasts and hips in proportion and dark pubic hair; but then girls anyway mature earlier than boys. I was less so. My genitals had started growing but hadn't finished the process. I had some pubic hair. I had the usual teenage fixation with sex, and to my mind I was ready and eager. Aquila having taught me to masturbate, I knew I could produce semen, and being curious I had checked out my sperm under a high-power microscope and seen them swimming around. Once accustomed to having regular sexual relief it was impossible to stop; yet Pops's admonition about saving semen for one's partner's vagina made me uneasy to masturbate once I started producing it. I don't know why Pops examined Priscilla and me at the same time unless it was to avoid having to explain the nature of the event twice since girls and boys were almost never naked together. His commanding demeanor prevailed over my hesitation to undress in front of Priscilla, who would never have seen me that way before. During my examination Pops, having had me lower my pants, looked at my crotch closely, lifted up my penis to look beneath it and then rubbed its tip a bit. When he saw it respond and start towards an erection he nodded decisively. Thinking that he might deem my penis not yet big enough, I had told him about my microscopic examination; I don't know if that influenced him or not, but he made a face -- perhaps because I was admitting to the sin of wasting my sperm. Priscilla watched this interview and examination with some bemusement and started to laugh -- quite unfairly I thought -- at the point when I mentioned my masturbation. Pops's examination of her was more thorough even though it was obvious before she undressed that she met all his criteria. I wanted to think he was punishing her for having laughed at me, but I suspect he had other motives. He felt her breasts, cupping each with his hand, then he ran his hand over her pubic mound and looked inside her vulva, feeling inside for a moment with his fingers, clearly appreciating what he found. He then smiled broadly -- not at her exactly, more at an unseen and absent congregation -- and told her she was God's perfect specimen and that he longed to see her in communion with his church. He asked about the date of her last period, adding that while having a period would not have caused him to change the date of her party he would have needed to make some adjustments in that case. He asked her if she knew what would be involved, and she said, without hesitation that she was looking forward to it. I had the feeling that Pops might be about to expose himself by way of demonstration, but he didn't do that. Instead he pointed to my penis and said that she had certainly seen previous deflorations, and surely she knew how penis became erect, and how they blossomed when aroused into God's organ. It was for that reason, he reminded her, that she would be asked to kiss and embrace it on the day. I was somewhat embarrassed by this, but Pops quickly changed the subject. He gave Priscilla some further details that she already must have known from our home schooling about the nature and purpose of the hymen and how it was now time for her to divest herself of it and seek motherhood. He said that she should think of his penis as the penis of God, and that it was not his pleasure but God's pleasure that was at issue. Semen came out of a penis as an expression of delight, but semen was first and foremost the enabler of life. Pops told Priscilla that she would then and forever afterwards be free to express her sexuality, but that she should do so to God and in God's name; that her assigned partners would be surrogates for God and that her love should always be for God alone. (He then went on to compare nuns' chastity unfavorably with our women's dedication to all of the Lord's commandments, and to say that he and he alone had synthesized God's commandments into a logical way of life.) Pops said that a girl's vagina was God's pathway, and she should always remember that. He told her that by accepting his penis, she would be accepting God's body and spirit as well as his command; that once she had done that, as in the laying on of hands in the priesthood the power of creation would be delegated to her. He hoped that when she took his penis into her mouth she would take care to examine and appreciate it, and that its holy nature in no wise detracted from its role as instrument of pleasure for boy and for girl. Our defloration party was then fixed for a couple of weeks afterwards, on our 14th birthday. We had both, of course, attended such parties before but this was to be our own magnificent coming out party, and uniquely a party designed specifically for fraternal twins, a girl and a boy. It was also, within Pops's world, the first time that our relationship, irrelevant to his creed, was ever to be acknowledged. We were nervous; yet we had been raised and educated to love God and to see sex as a way of worship and a fulfillment of humanity. In common with some other religions, ours imposed a methodology of sex, a choreography for the assigned partners to follow from their arrival together at the assigned bed to their mutual undressing that ended only when the boy's penis had ejaculated into his partner's vagina. The woman was specifically guided to act before and after ejaculation in such a manner that would maximize the chances for conception. Like those Muslims who try to follow the practices of their prophet in exquisite detail in their daily lives and those Christians who ask themselves constantly in respect of the Savior "what would Jesus do", we tried to follow the pattern of our prophet in our sex, and more particularly in our foreplay. Pops explained that he had sought the real meaning of the Bible in context, and that God's true plan for man and woman was not to be found in the psychologically disturbed rantings of guilt-ridden and sexually repressed "saints" but outside the Catholic Church and the Reformists, in the Hindus of southern India, apostles of fecundity and sexual pleasure. Pops would instruct us on how sex was to be performed with tongue and mouth and penis before and during our own defloration party, but of course we had all seen it before, most of us from early infancy. Oral foreplay was vitally important to Pops, and he made it a rule for all of us. Incest and sex between adults and young teens were practiced in our commune not because they were desired in their own right but because blood relationships were not recognized as having any significance and all adults were deemed equal, and adulthood began at 14. Parentage was anyway doubtful and discussion of paternity discouraged, so one never knew, much less cared, as between older men and younger women whether or not there was any blood relationship. If we had thought about it at all, sex between mother and son would, I think, have been looked upon as a simple extrapolation of Jesus at his mother's breast, however ridiculous that might seem to you. What Pops actually said was that when Jesus was on the cross and his mother was looking up at him, unlike in the picture he in actual fact wore no loincloth and it was his circumcised penis his mother was looking at, as should be obvious to anyone. He also pointed out, quite rightly I am now assured, that Jesus had a brother James, and that whatever Jesus's origins might have been, James was conceived by means of Joseph putting his penis into Mary's vagina and having an orgasm. [It is James's (also known as Jacov) ossuary that recently was sent from Jerusalem to Toronto to be put on display. -- Carol] So whatever her condition when Jesus was born, Mary was not a virgin when she died. Today I see how contrived and illogical some of Pops's arguments were, but he did have his facts right and I have to say that the women I live with still accept most of what he said as true and still believe in all the rules Pops taught them, without however failing to recognize their need to obey the state's penal law now. They expect and demand to be fully aroused by oral foreplay before sex, and I suppose that is no bad thing. I am willing and happy to eat a woman's pussy, knowing that she will immediately afterwards suck my penis almost to orgasm and then happily finish up with my penis in her vagina. It is funny but for years following my own first sex with Moms I believed that everybody performed sex the way we did, and only after I came to talk of sex with workmates from normal backgrounds did I learn that not every couple engage in ritualized oral sex as foreplay, that many women are unwilling to take their partners' penis into their mouth for extended, or even momentary, pleasure and many boys will not perform cunnilingus. In our commune these were things that all of us were happy to do, and that we found delightful. I found that many outsiders in fact envied my lifestyle, and the incidence of divorce and broken families and financial insecurity among them convinced me that there was a lot of hypocrisy in those who would cite "religious" and civil laws to attack us. Collectively we enjoyed stability, sexual pleasure and emotional satisfaction on a level well above that of the general public. In our commune babies were raised communally and attachment to a specific mother considered as irrelevant as knowledge of the identity of one's father. Babies never had the opportunity to bond with their mother; Pops saw such bonds as a terrible violation of the integrity of the commune and an obstacle to the baby bonding directly with God. As Pops insisted on children calling their mothers and everybody else but Pops and Moms by the biblical names he would have assigned them, there was little recognition or affection attached to the maternal relationship. I don't even know the legal last names of most of the old commune members. A mother and son having sex together proved that the maternal relationship was irrelevant. Pops could not totally suppress that relationship, but given its enforced non-recognition in public the occasions when sex was programmed by him for mother and son did not attract any special attention or comment, certainly not by the parties concerned. Few would have remarked on the maternal relationship anyway as it was something almost never mentioned or acknowledged by either son or birth mother. From immediately after birth mothers were discouraged from acknowledging any bond with the infant and lactating mothers were handed babies to feed on a random basis. She would have had no responsibility over his care or education, and unless she happened to work in the nursery quite likely would never have seen him nude from the date of his birth until the time of the celebration of his first sexual intercourse with Moms on his 14th birthday. Within a few days after that, she might very well be assigned to have sex with the newly welcomed adult; invariably mothers acted with devout responsibility in fulfilling that obligation solely as God's representative and without regard to any personal feelings that were inconsistent with our creed. Such feelings would represent sinful discrimination. It was, in any case, a delightful honor for older women to have sex with the new adult and to assist in his further education, particularly in matters of sex and thus in matters of salvation. My own experience with my birth mother Drusila was, in this respect I think, quite typical. Yet, although those were the rules, and the outward observation of those rules, once a couple was in bed there could be subtle and even non-so-subtle deviations from them. At least I found this to be so in my own case. On a normal statistical basis and taking account of "days off" and other absences, not to mention "nonperforming days" (for it is folly to assume that everyone would be ready, able and willing to perform even a religious duty of sex every day after a tiring day out working; and indeed once I passed my teenage years I realized that even I might be too tired for sex on occasion), I should have been assigned to any particular female once every three weeks or so, more or less. On thinking about it I saw that it didn't work out quite that way. Especially in their first year after coming out, teenage members of the congregation were more often than not assigned to Pops and Moms and to other older members. That meant that over that period I was assigned every 10 to 14 days to Moms, and somewhat less frequently to Drusila. Without any obvious sign of recognition I quickly got the impression that Drusila was treating me with subtle preference. That preference was, however, solely in bed: our relationship had never been close because I scarcely saw her. Pops forbade the recognition of any direct family relationships and any sentimentality or affection -- with the sole exception of the sex act itself, when assigned to take place between commune members who happened to have a blood relationship. The effect of Drusila's gentleness and solicitude was to make our sex together both natural and joyous. She took a certain initiative in sex that most other women did not, and, in a way like Aquila but far less clinically she took the opportunity to constantly examine and play with and kiss my penis with great tenderness, only reluctantly taking it out of her mouth to let it enter her vagina. In retrospect I see that she was conditioning me to respond to the nuances of sex and teaching me to respect the sacred sensuality that God had instilled in men and women. Any woman who had followed Pops's creed had the right to an equal opportunity to conceive God's babies; any man faithful to that creed the obligation to "spread his seed equally among women believers". Arousal and orgasm were "by, of and for God and not any individual." We were never allowed to forget this. Drusila, in undressing and displaying and opening her body to me and in receiving my semen was at all times just an older friend and sex partner, surrogate for God, never my mother, never seeking to divert my love away from God, our creator, our sovereign ruler and our lover, to herself as an individual. Love was neither mentioned nor considered, only constant reference to our love for God. Today and in retrospect I think of those extended moments of my mouth kissing Drusila's vagina and her mouth on my penis as more than just foreplay and lubrication but, in a philosophical and transcendental sense, an opportunity for us to celebrate my unacknowledged origins inside her womb. Our exchange of fluids paralleled our exchange of spirit: not our own spirits but God's. But at the time I didn't think of such things, only of the physical act and the physical pleasure, together with their sacred significance. She was just a lovely older partner fulfilling God's will. She loved to have my penis sliding in and out of her mouth, and her demeanor was not one of performance of duty but of genuine sensuousness, without any loss of piety or sanctity in the process. Her eyes were always open at such times; but then hadn't Pops told all of us to keep our eyes open at such moments? I loved to press against and to caress her breasts as much as I liked to have her fondle and suck my penis. She had a unique way of looking dreamily in my eyes as, afterwards, my penis would be going in and coming out of her vagina, my libido and excitement building up to a crescendo of orgasm and ejaculation that would cause her to embrace me and shiver with pleasure of her own whether she had climaxed or not. She would kiss me occasionally on the cheek, encouraging me and expressing, as I thought, her satisfaction with my thrusts. It made me wonder whether her wish for such an event had something to do with her having joined and remained in the commune. Her fascination with my penis was undeniable, however much she tried to pretend that she treated it no differently from that of all the other boys. I know this is true because I discussed it with the other boys. Pops had always told us that we should think not of our partner, and still less of love for our partner at such times, but always of our love for God, who was Himself providing that pleasure. Implicitly, although he beat around the bush when saying it, that stricture applied even more if the partner happened to be a mother or aunt or sister or cousin. Still, I was much more concerned to assure that Drusila had an orgasm than I was with other partners, if only because she was bringing me so much physical pleasure. So it pleased me to play with and to lick her clitoris and her vagina as long as she liked, even if she reached an early climax while I did it instead of, as Pops preferred, after my penis had entered her vagina. If she had no orgasm at all, I would be disappointed, even though she would tell me it didn't matter. Of course it is true that women often are quite happy just to be cuddled, but I took to heart Pops's admonition in the matter. It was only long after I had left the commune that I discovered that in other places such a relationship between a mother and son would carry heavy baggage of shame and guilt. As those qualities were totally unknown to our creed so long as Pops's strictures were followed and my own experience was nothing but positive, I refuse to dwell on the issue today. Our relationship was, according to our religious beliefs, entirely wholesome. We had been told that it was society's fixation with sex, original sin and a Satan-oriented and anti-biblical notion of "filth" that had led to the civil law making an issue out of incest making the innocent and lovely performance of God's will into a crime. It was our practices, not those of other faiths, that were closest to biblical norms. The proposition I alluded to before, that mothers have a mystical affinity for their sons' penises, thus accords with my own experience. There is more than a little truth to the Oedipus myth. I did not think of it that way at the time, although now I realize Drusila's delight in fondling my penis must have been related to that fact. Tribal societies have been known to encourage mother-son (as well as father-daughter) intimacy at various levels; in Pops's creed it was a matter of simply refusing to acknowledge the family relationship so the questions of motivation and justification for sex between them couldn't arise. In retrospect I think that, somewhat like the nurse Aquila, Drusila was observing my penis so closely because she so much enjoyed, however vicariously, the process of puberty itself. After all, it is at a relatively early stage of puberty that the penis becomes functional, the hormonal balance driving the attentions of the boy and sparking his libido and his capacity for sex. Drusila went in some respects much further than Aquila. First she would have me undress her, and we would kiss passionately while I caressed first her breasts, then her labia, clitoris, vagina. She would insist upon herself undressing me, first taking off my pajama top and then, with some ceremony and with feigned surprise and real pleasure at the sight of my penis, lower my pajama bottoms. She never had the pleasure of doing this when I was an infant; perhaps she was making up for lost time. When my penis came into view Drusila would gaze at it, and after removing the bottoms completely, she would bring it to her mouth and tease its tip with her lips and tongue so that it would become fully erect and she would continue to gaze at it in that state while taking off her own nightgown, teasing me with first her pussy and then her breasts, inviting my attentions, my touch, my mouth and then in due course my penis to satisfy her. Drusila told me once that she regarded it as her feminine duty to try to keep my penis at maximum erection all the time I was in her presence, an obvious impossibility but even so a lovely goal, I think. She wanted it to be soft when she first unclothed it; it was important that my penis be erect due only to her own ministrations. She would hold and caress it, bring it her lips, kiss and suck it while holding my scrotum, until it became hard and stiff. If, out of anticipation or excitement I already had an erection I would have to try to make it soft again. Even though it was not in the order of sex acts that Pops had prescribed she would often fondle my penis right away after we were both naked and before I began to lick her vaginal area, first running her finger up and down its underside in a way that would make me jump with excitement. I was left with the impression that while Aquila had a real medical ruler, Drusila had an imaginary one in her mind and that she was registering my penis's development. Her violation the order of procedure regarding male and female oral foreplay that Pops tried to enforce was atypical of her: normally she was very observant of her religious obligations. She never acknowledged the fact of her deviation and nobody else seemed to notice; I was of course scarcely likely to complain about her special attention, which felt so good. I knew that the better the foreplay the better the sex, the longer she played with my penis the more semen I was likely to ejaculate and the longer my orgasm might last. After having played with my penis to her satisfaction by way of preliminary introduction, Drusila would without further comment spread her legs for me to excite her. This would begin the cycle of sex as specified by Pops. When I had finished she would resume attending to my penis in the ordinary manner of our sex protocol, licking and sucking it languidly. The end result was that by the time I told her to stop for fear that I would ejaculate into her mouth rather than in her vagina -- something I knew would upset her given her piety however much I myself might have liked to do it -- she would be at such a heightened state of excitement that she might climax soon after I entered her. The size of my penis seemed not to matter. I might not have stopped another girl or woman from causing me to ejaculate in her mouth if I thought she would like it, but I did somehow hold Drusila on a special plane. She seemed so fond of my penis even though it was still growing, still smaller than average. I saw her in the shadows on occasion with older boys and men, and her relationships with them was more formal than with me, following Pops's orders precisely. I asked her once, and she admitted she achieved orgasm much more often and more completely with me than with older men. Somehow, perhaps genetically, she and I had compatible personalities and our sex reflected that compatibility. She had two other boy children, my younger half-brothers, and in later years, after they reached the age of 14 and had their initiations with Moms, I saw our birth mother treat them the same way she had me. I never, of course, saw her having sex with them from close up, but I could recognize the glances, the motions, the responses as those I had enjoyed in previous years. Unfortunately I never felt able to talk to the boys about it and I don't know how they were treated by other women. I can say that by the time I had gotten older, out of my teens, Drusila had begun to treat me, too, more formally although by then I was only being paired with her once a month or so, or most frequently at intervals of a few weeks. The strict sexual protocol of the commune related to the belief that the couple, as individuals, were only filling a momentary role on behalf of God. It was only natural that one's ardor toward a partner cooled immediately after sex, and that the next morning there would be little recognition of what had transpired the night before, even if you were still together in the same bed. Love was never personal, not as between sexual partners and not as between mother and baby. Love was exclusively in God's domain. My relationship with my twin sister Priscilla had been even less close than that with my mother Drusila because we had not been raised by the commune as siblings, and young and pre-pubescent boys and girls did not much interrelate outside of whatever classes we had together. I had always been led to regard and to treat Priscilla no differently from any other of my peers, so once initiated our sex with each other seemed natural and normal but, in the way of our commune, quite formalized. Having (as you will read subsequently) experienced her publicly given by God to Pops and then by Pops to me as sex partner, it was difficult to see her in any other way. Our sex together was lovely, but our relationship followed the commune's protocol exactly, duplicating precisely what Pops and she had done together at her defloration. She attended to my penis exactly as Pops had prescribed, and no more, taking it in her mouth as she had taken his big penis on the day, but, with the exception (as I write later) of those few times when, pregnant, she encouraged me to come in her mouth, stopping well short of allowing me to approach orgasm orally. Here it was not my control over the situation but hers; somehow Priscilla excited and stimulated me to the point where I lost all self control and I would not have been able to take my penis out of her mouth if she had not pushed it out and pushed me away, making it clear that I should transfer it to her vagina and ejaculate there. It was clear to me that notwithstanding her strict application of the rules to me, she would not have imposed any limit on Pops's penis in her mouth and would have been glad to take his semen into her mouth and even swallow it. However, whatever exception she might have made for Pops she would not make for others. I cannot say, in fact, that Pops ever let her do it, probably he didn't, but I mention this to show what a special place he held in the hearts of the girls and women of the commune. And after all, Pops had decreed that ejaculation must be in her vagina, and she was not taking any chances, not at that time anyway. I asked Pops once what a girl should do if, by accident, a boy did ejaculate into her mouth and he said that should never happen, and that if it did she was obliged somehow under his creed to put that semen into her vagina immediately and to see to it that such an accident did not recur. Only later, during her pregnancies, did a special and inexplicable sixth-sense sort of understanding open between Priscilla and me in our sexual relations. Indeed, towards the end of her pregnancies it did happen a couple of times that I ejaculated in her mouth, and I could tell that she had mixed emotions: at that late stage of pregnancy, despite Pops's wishes, she might rather not have sex at all and so letting me come in her mouth put an end to the task earlier than might otherwise have been the case. She did not, as it happens, rush off to try to get a funnel or a turkey baster or whatever else a girl would use in those circumstances; she either swallowed it or discreetly spit it out. Putting my semen in her vagina would anyway have been totally irrelevant in view of her pregnancy. Whatever she did do with the semen was out of my view. Anyway, that "sort of understanding" we shared and I spoke about never outlasted her pregnancies and things would get more formal again after the birth. Neither she nor I, of course, would know who was the father of her babies and we were prohibited at the time from hazarding a guess. She was, in any case, not charged with raising them, or for that matter nursing them except to the degree they were picked up at random and put to her breast, any more than any other birth mother would have been allowed in our commune to raise her own babies. I know that she took them with her (the oldest then being about 11) when she left the commune, but that's all I know. When, later, after the commune had closed I discovered the strength of outside society's taboo on incestuous relationships I was genuinely astonished. By then it didn't seem to matter; Priscilla and I had gone our separate ways and completely lost touch. The commune had, after all, not fostered any durable bond between us or with our other siblings. Even my bond with my mother proved fragile. Outside the commune as inside it except in bed, we proved to be relative strangers. My feelings today over my sexual relationship with Priscilla are quite the same as over that I had with Drusila: appreciation for the wonderful pleasure and the homage I we were, together, able to pay to God. I see no reason for regret, as the civil law's ban on intra-family sexual relations is no different in its status before God and God's law from that against, say polygamy in relation to the Koran. On the day of our 14th birthday, our birth mother Drusila dressed Priscilla and me in our best clothes. Although Drusila had not had responsibility for raising us or any other children it just happened that it fell to her to manage the defloration party. It was a new experience for me to have such attention from her and, as we bathed and got ready to dress, to see Priscilla naked and preparing to be sexy and holy rather than just going out to play. Before then she had been my twin sister, a kid, just our Priscilla; but we had been told that discrimination against community and in favor of blood family was sinful. We did not have much to do with each other because girls and boys were largely if not completely schooled apart. If she had been naked in front of me before I had scarcely noticed and cannot remember it now. I yearned to see girls' naked breasts, but except for the defloration parties or incidental glances of sex in the night if, unusually, I passed one of the rooms where adults slept and peeked in, there was little opportunity to do so. But henceforth she and I would be acknowledged as adults and treated as such. We would move immediately following the event into the adult quarters of the house. We would be expected to have sex, even together. Her body took on a new significance, and it would soon be available to me as well as to others. She had been nude briefly at her clinical examination by Pops; there the attention had been focused on her breasts and her vagina. Now I saw her again as she stood bathed and waiting to be dressed, and I saw all of her and I saw her as a whole. I could see that she was really beautiful in her demure, pious and virginal innocence. Then she dressed, and the body I had briefly admired was covered with pantyhose, a bra, a slip and a dress. I watched her breasts disappear into that bra with greatest regret, Dressed, she was just another pretty girl, clothed and invisible. I would soon see her again in the nude with Pops making love to her; after that, as an adult she would be included on the roster for me and for all the other men, and perhaps Pops would assign her to me. I knew that other brothers and sisters had come together that way. But first she had to be deflowered, a privilege that was reserved to Pops. There would be a worship ceremony followed by public proof of sexual capacity. Her virginity would be donated to God. We would all see her blood mixed with the semen of God's prophet. None of us would think this "sacrifice" as anything of a diminution of her body or any loss: rather it would be a gain for her in terms of holiness and membership in a sacred body, and of eligibility and opportunity for motherhood. I too would have an initiation ceremony: I would have sex with Moms. I would give her my semen and be blessed by God. Moms would cradle and cuddle my penis, bring it to erection, show it off to the congregation, receive it in her vagina and make it ejaculate. The reader unacquainted with commune and cult life cannot imagine the emotional impact for the participants and the observers of such a sensitive and critical event that, to outsiders as I see so clearly today, appears deviant and perverted. I should point out, however, that my research showed that various ceremonies of girls' defloration and of boys' first intercourse are extremely common in many parts of the world, and not only in primitive societies. Even among American nuclear families it is rare but far from unknown. After an early supper we all gathered in the big meeting room of the main house. There were at least 40 children and adults, the bulk of the congregation and commune. Pops and Moms, dressed in clerical garb, were at one end of the room on a dais with Priscilla and me. Everybody else was seated in front of us. Now Pops was lecturing to the two of us, reminding us about the significance of the day, telling us to expect infinite joy but that our pleasure came with religious and social obligation. He reminded those adults who had grown up in the commune of what they had experienced in their own deflorations and he told children what pleasures and duties awaited them in the future. The members of the congregation squirmed in their seats as they strained to hear because he enlivened his sermon with anecdotes and everybody loves gossip. There followed a religious service, and a lot of biblical passages were recited from memory, mostly about going forth to multiply, about circumcision and about virtually every other reference to sex and sexual parts of the body contained in the Bible. We had heard all of it before. This service lasted, it seemed, a very long time but it was probably less than 30 minutes long in fact. I was restless and impatient; surely others were, too. But then the readings and sermon were over and our double defloration party began. Priscilla was to go first. Pops very ceremoniously kissed Priscilla on the lips; then he began undressing her in a formal sort of way. He unfastened and lifted her dress over her head and put it on a small table. He took off her slip. He stood behind her, cupped her breasts through her bra, then unfastened the bra and handed it to Moms. Her breasts really were magnificent. The audience stared at her expectantly; there were murmurs in the room. I had been told to stand alongside and watch, and I watched closely; indeed I stared at her fabulously sexy body. Priscilla seemed somewhat embarrassed, unused to public nudity, public performance and stares, but Pops went about his business of undressing and fondling her without noticing. Her eyes were focused directly on Pops's all the while. Priscilla was cute, beautiful, and sexy and now certainly every boy and man would want her. Pops whispered something in her ear and she stood up straight; her breasts moved forward and up as she straightened her posture. They heaved as she breathed in and out, charged with the emotion and the importance of the event. I would have loved to have touched her, to have fondled her the way Pops was doing. Still, I knew I was to be dedicated to God through Moms that night, and I tried to concentrate on what I would have to do. Would I be able to have an erection? Could I give Moms an orgasm? Could I soon impregnate one of the commune's women? Pops moved to the front and adjusted the head of a spotlight, a gooseneck lamp standing on the table, so that its light would shine directly on her crotch. Now we could see her pubic hair through her pantyhose. Pops smiled with satisfaction and now carefully pulled down her pantyhose and removed it from her feet one by one. Priscilla stood there, completely naked now, her lovely breasts and her hairy vulva in full view. It was obvious that everybody, child and adult, was paying attention and admiring her nakedness. Pops ran his hands tenderly and sensuously over all her body. He caressed her breasts, ran one hand over her stomach, touched her vulva lightly and briefly spread her labia to show us inside and running his fingers along the slit and into her vaginal opening. He turned Priscilla towards him and kissed her passionately. Then he began undressing himself rapidly and without ceremony. His clothes all off, he stood there with his penis still soft and recited some more prayers and incantations. He rubbed his penis briefly as if to try to stimulate it to erection. He then went over to Priscilla and clutched her again, kissing her with more passion than before, more than I had known him to possess. From the side I could see his penis beginning to rise and strain against Priscilla's body. He kept talking to her in a low voice that others could not hear, telling her how much she was loved by God, how God had told her to bring her His happiness and his ecstasy. His voice was hypnotic. By now Pops's big penis was hard and stiff, and he had to pull away slightly from Priscilla to allow it to spring upright. He looked down at it, and gave it a series of further strokes; then he put her hand to it and invited her to hold it for a moment, which she gladly did. He kissed her again, and took her by one hand and they turned together to face the congregation in their nakedness, his penis prominent in front of him, her smile proving how happy she was and her breasts a sort of beacon to the crowd. How intimidating it would have been to an ordinary young girl; but for Priscilla this was a holy event and she was fulfilling a life's dream: to be initiated by the prophet and loved by God. This was to be the most dramatic and exciting moment of her life. She would be imitating Mary, mother of Jesus, in accepting God's semen, delivered here by His prophet. Priscilla had been raised and educated with this event in mind. In her home schooling she would have been told constantly about the place of virginity and defloration in our beliefs. Sex education was taught as part of religious education, and in quite elaborate detail. Regular textbooks were used, but our teachers fashioned the class lessons to relate to our own beliefs and to Pops's -- and God's -- plan for us. Priscilla had always known, as I had, that the passage to adulthood would be a public religious celebration, and that it would be joyous and pleasurable, as well as perhaps, for her, briefly painful and bloody. For her, Pops's semen was God's body and blood, his penis God's wand, predestined to enter her vagina, the communion chalice. Just as other girls in the commune before her had welcomed it into their vaginas, so would she. She would learn how physically, emotionally and spiritually happy a penis could make her when received as part of God's law, how she would be fulfilled and help perpetuate humanity in God's image. The main purpose was not her joy, a reward to her for following God's law, but her pregnancy: she should go forth and multiply. If God truly blessed her she would become pregnant immediately with Pops's child. How she longed for that to happen. How she longed for Pops's penis to make her whole by creating a fetus within her. Pops took Priscilla's hand and pressed it again around his stiff penis, a symbol that he was welcoming her into adulthood and inviting her to have her first sex. She glowed with anticipation, accepting his invitation. She ran her hand up and down, squeezing it lightly before letting go; her hand brushed against his scrotum. He kissed her again and then bade her lie down on a mattress covered with a pure white sheet and set on the dais. I recall some discussion between Pops and Moms about how the mattress should be placed so that the congregation would have the best view of Pops's penis as it penetrated Priscilla's vagina. To them, public witnessing of a defloration, the consummation of a girl's dedication of her body to God, was equally as important as other religions' custom of witnessing of exchanges of vows in a wedding or, indeed, the Muslim witnessing of defloration of a bride by her groom. Now Priscilla lay down on the mattress with grace. He gently spread her legs apart, her feet towards the congregation, and I heard him tell her that he was going to make her ready for God's passion to enter her. He refocused the spotlight so it shone once more between her thighs. At this point he had one hand over her right breast, the other over her pubic mound, his fingers inside her, lightly stroking her clitoris. He moved over and we could see again, briefly, inside her vulva, her vaginal opening. Pops looked around at the congregation, then lay face down with his head between her legs and began to suck at her pussy, first gently and then more furiously. I saw his tongue moving into, out of and all around the opening of Priscilla's vagina, flicking against her clitoris before repeating the cycle. Never had I been so close to a sex act, and I felt excitement within my own penis. A few members of the congregation stood up to see better and Pops moved aside very briefly to accommodate them. I thought at the time that this was a bit rude and irreverent on their part, but Pops must not have agreed and it was he who set the limits of reverence and sacrilege. He liked to be observed closely while he presided at these deflorations. From the side, I could see his tongue at work. He lifted up his body to adjust his penis, so big and still so hard. I could sense in the congregation rising tension and heavy breathing. The audience was sharing Pops's lust, but it was lust harnessed as prayer and as dedication to God. In due course Pops lifted his head up and looked critically at Priscilla's vagina. He felt inside with his fingers, running his index finger around its opening; and he seemed satisfied that her condition met his expectations and happy with his work. He gave it one last kiss and rose to kneel before her; I heard him tell her that he could see she was open, excited and ready for sex, but first she should make his penis ready to enter her. She would take his penis into her mouth to kiss and to love it as he had kissed and loved her vagina; she should do this in God's name. Surely she already knew all this as she had seen it happen before. He took her by the hand to help her to her feet. As she stood up, Priscilla looked at Pops with an expression of awe and piety. Pops moved back and sat in a chair set alongside, and she stood before him, staring at his already-erect penis in adoration. I could see drops of dew now at its tip, and excitement and desire in Pops eyes. Pops drew Priscilla towards him and pulled her hand down to signal her to kneel before him. Now his big penis was in front of her face and she could see inches in front of her those drops of pre-cum. Pops moved slightly on the chair and his penis swayed before her. Priscilla hesitated, then reached over to touch it. More confident, she grasped his penis with one hand, then the other, and began to feel it all over, including his balls. Pops told Priscilla again that she should now take his penis into her mouth and that she should remember God's will, his sacred instructions. As I stood there watching, Pops's words made me think of my own penis, smaller and clothed, and wonder about its holiness. I thought ahead to the role assigned to me, after Priscilla would be done, and thought of the mystery of God's plan and hoped I could fulfill my role in this celebration and worship. I saw Moms standing on the dais, watching silently but with satisfaction all that was happening. I wanted to flee to her for security; on the other hand I was eager to see as close up as possible the process of sex and the defloration of Priscilla. She remained kneeling there nude, penis of the seated cleric and prophet in front of her, love and devotion to God in her eyes, her beautiful breasts within sight of us all, their nipples teasing and exciting me and doubtless every older boy. Her hands were now at her side and she remained kneeling, immobile, staring at Pops's penis as in adoration. Any thoughts I had about my own imminent first sex were interrupted as Pops's hands moved towards Priscilla and I knew something critical was about to happen that I should watch. Pops's hands were at the sides of Priscilla's head, gently pushing it down so her mouth was over his penis. Her tongue flicked over the pre-cum and then her lips closed around the head of his penis as Pops smiled a heavenly smile and murmured a benediction. For the first few strokes he set the pace, lightly guiding her head up and down. Then, momentarily, Pops lifted her mouth off his penis so that we could see it: still hard, now vibrant with his, and we thought God's, excitement. His big penis was very wet with Priscilla's saliva. It was a giant obelisk, shining wet as after a rain and for now an object of devotion for the congregation. Pops once described it that way. Priscilla was fulfilling the role assigned to her today by God, seeking communion with Him through the prophet's penis. Pops's penis pulsated in time to his heartbeat. Priscilla's mouth was open and ready; she awaited his signal to resume. Pops nodded to her; she lowered her mouth and closed her lips around the tip of his penis. She moved her head up and down rhythmically as Pops sighed in delight. The congregation was witness to the prophet's erection and to the new congregant's communion. Pops told Priscilla that God loved her and that he was so happy and that she should be, too. Priscilla continued for several minutes, her mouth closed around Pops's penis, her head rising and falling at a constant pace, raising our own tension and expectation with each stroke she made. We could see that she had become comfortable and happy with her task; she was now taking the time to stroke the tip of his penis with her lips, kissing it, rubbing her tongue over it, on each upward stroke in a way that went beyond Pops's instructions to her. As she moved her head, her breasts swayed. The image of the innocent, virginal Priscilla making love to God through Pops's penis stirred pious love and sexual excitement throughout the hall. For a 14-year-old girl with no prior experience of sex she had adapted quickly, and clearly she was herself ecstatic seeing the effect she was having on her prophet. It really was hard to believe she had never done this before; surely this was another example of Pops's magical powers over girls and women, telepathically guiding them to do his and God's will. Priscilla could see that emotion was heightened too among the watching members of the congregation. Presently we could see a hint of delirium in Pops's face telling us that his orgasm was very near. Priscilla had continued longer than expected; her oral sex was supposed only to assure a firm erection, not to allow her man to approach orgasm. Ejaculation should not take place in a mouth: semen must flow into a girl's vagina and only into a vagina. Later at the party she would say to us that she had been carried away by the spirit, by Pops's evident satisfaction, by the crowd's evident delight; and after all, she could not be expected to know how long she could continue to suck a penis before causing orgasm and ejaculation. I am sure that, forgetting all about her assigned aim of pregnancy, she would have been happy for Pops to have ejaculated into her mouth but this was not allowed in the protocol we followed and Pops suddenly pulled Priscilla's head from his penis, leaving it bobbing about. I thought I could see a bit of semen leaking out of its tip, suggesting he had stopped Priscilla just in time. He recited a further blessing, rose, drew her up so that she stood opposite him and kissed her gently, then again and more passionately. He took her by one hand and again faced the congregation, his penis glistening, fiercely erect and Priscilla's vulva as beautiful as ever. He gave the congregation a moment to admire his and Priscilla's sex organs this additional time, then spent a few minutes explaining again the doctrine of defloration and the joy of sex as worship. He guided her back to the mattress. Pops positioned Priscilla just right, her head towards the wall, her legs spread very wide apart, her vagina again facing the congregation. I thought of sex education classes we had, and I realized they had not conveyed all the truth of sex. Pops's sermons had been truer: he had always talked of beauty and holiness. Now, looking at Priscilla's vagina I saw a thing of such great beauty; I desperately wanted to touch it. Some men and boys were uncomfortable with their own arousals, staring at her vagina as I was, adjusting their clothing around their own penises. We could all see inside her labia, her vagina wide open, excited, aroused from his kissing and licking, ready to receive the prophet's big penis. The lamp was shining on it again; who could not love this girl (if not directly, then as God's own vehicle), who could not want to feel her breasts, to stroke her vulva, to penetrate her vagina with his penis? All the men and boys in the room, and all the women too, must have felt the emotion of the moment, the erotic electricity. People were uncomfortable in their chairs. I was terribly excited. The sight of Priscilla's beautiful breasts, her beautiful vulva and vagina, made me proud, and then I had feelings of guilt because I knew pride was sinful and that I should not have special feelings on account of our blood ties, ties that on other days and other occasions would scarcely have occurred to me. She was Priscilla, but I was not supposed to love her the way I loved God, but just as I loved and respected any other member of my congregation. I was not supposed to admit any feeling that would interfere with the duties, sexual and otherwise, that God had assigned to me by the fact of my birth as a member of this commune. But seeing her breasts and her vagina that way, how could I resist wanting her? I Could I ever touch her? There was no reason in our religion or our world why I could not; all depended upon Pops. Would I see those beautiful parts of her again soon? Her breasts, youthfully firm and sturdy and erect even when she reclined, heaved and I dreamed that she had desired me as much as she desired Pops and I desired her. Yet this was Pops's event and I must not be guilty of coveting Priscilla, Pops's partner for now. Adultery and incest were to us unknown as sins, explained away by Pops's divine logic; for that very reason it was unthinkable that we would be jealous or covet another's partner who would, if it was God's will, soon enough also be our partner. But as Pops moved over to the mattress and knelt on the floor, his penis high and proud, the spotlight on Priscilla's pussy, it was clear that he had told the truth: God had ordained her to give him her virginity, to surrender herself to that big and lovely penis. This defloration would be a holy event; Pops was doing God's work. Pops moved over on top of Priscilla, placed his legs between hers and his elbows on either side of her body, and he leaned his head down to kiss her. Priscilla seemed captivated by the solemnity and holiness of the event. Her eyes were now closed, her body expectant. Pops adjusted his body, positioned his hips above hers. His big penis hovered above her vulva, still pulsating. It was the glorious penis of a holy prophet, ready now once again to do its work, claiming the love and the loyalty and the devotion of this virtuous virginal girl. With his hand, Pops guided his penis towards Priscilla's vagina. It passed her labia, entered her vagina, penetrated her hymen and continued downwards to its full length in one slow but steady motion. Priscilla began to cry out softly but caught herself, and Pops said something to reassure her. He kissed her on the lips, silencing her. I don't know how much pain she had felt, but she had been told in my presence, when Pops had examined her vagina a week or so before, just how her hymen was configured and what she should do. And, of course, what God expected of her. For one moment, now, Pops remained still, his penis fully inside her, apparently relishing the moment. Neither moved at all. We could see the base of his penis and his scrotum firm against Priscilla's body, signaling that Priscilla was now an adult, full member of the congregation I would momentarily be joining. Together they were the image of God's love and God's procreation. Then Pops kissed her again, very tenderly, and his buttocks began to rise and fall, tentatively at first. When Priscilla didn't complain, he began to move his body faster, his balls waving back and forth as he did so, loose in their scrotum. His penis, in its motion, became a thing of holy beauty, her vagina God's sacred receptacle. Pops was breathing heavily and grunting or sighing, meanwhile looking Priscilla in her eyes, which were now open. Occasionally he would kiss her again, or he would caress one of her breasts, by way of reassurance. Priscilla was sighing, expecting, as she had been told, to feel the approach of the Holy Ghost. A few times Pops would raise his body slightly and look down at Priscilla's body and perhaps at his own penis in motion. He would say some soft words to her as he continued his work. I could see his big penis squeezing through her labia, in and out in a regular cycle, with sometimes just the very ridge at the beginning of the tip showing itself as the penis was withdrawn. Twice his penis popped out of Priscilla's vagina and bobbed about, very wet with her mucus, very stiff, taut, shivery. He would say something to Priscilla; she would grasp it and guide it back into her vagina. It is images of her happy face, her blissful, glowing demeanor and of Pops's big penis entering and then, after a pause exiting and re-entering Priscilla's lovely pink vagina for its deflowering thrusts that will remain forever engraved in my mind. Her obvious rapture then and her happiness over the memory of the event forever after marked it as one of the highlights both of her own life and of mine as its witness. However odd you think such an event to be, on objective reflection it is no odder than what many major religions profess and perform, even today. I am now reminded of that sight as well as the religious and sexual and emotional significance of the day whenever I see the photograph taken on the day of Moms and Pops with Priscilla and me in our Sunday best clothes. The picture shows us dressed in our Sunday best and about to cut the first slices of the big layer cake that had been baked specially for the occasion. It is, I think, significant that the kind of cake that others use to celebrate a wedding was used at the commune to commemorate deflorations. Priscilla's happiness over the event spread to all the congregation, who took her bliss, as Pops had said they should, as proof that the Holy Ghost had entered her body and her life, assuring salvation for her soul and, we hoped, fecundity for her body. As the movement of Pops's penis continued the tension in the hall was palpable. Now accustomed to the new sensations in her vagina and, as she later said, indeed feeling the arrival of the Holy Spirit, she anticipated the onrush of sexual release. Priscilla responded with a reciprocal movement of her own hips and she watched Pops's face for possible signals as to how she could pleasure him more. Her expression and her actions were showing, I thought, piety, sensuousness, dedication and awe. She was doing the Lord's work, receiving His Prophet's penis, welcoming God's juice into her womb. She later confided that most of the girls wanted desperately to become pregnant at their defloration ceremonies, considering that the child that would result would be the special child of the prophet of God and thus specially sanctified. This, of course, ignored the fact that the girl would probably be having sex with others in ensuing days and paternity might be impossible to know, as well as Pops's refusal to allow public speculation about a child's paternity. The congregation, myself included, had seen initiations like Priscilla's many times before. As a child I had known my penis would grow, my turn would come for sex with Moms and then sex with other girls. They would give me pleasure and receive my semen. Such was our sex education and our catechism. Now I watched Pops's penis entering and exiting Priscilla and I saw how much she was loving intercourse and she was loving God. We had been taught that every part of our bodies was holy and that the parts that made babies were especially beautiful. I knew that sexual communion, our act of creation, was duty as well as pleasure, that it was an act of beauty. Priscilla's vagina seemed so responsive to that big penis, her vaginal walls and labia pressed against it as it moved in and out and her mucus making his penis wet and shiny in the spotlight. I knew that my smaller penis could not be so sensuous and perhaps it would not give pleasure, and I worried. Priscilla's vagina was so virginal, so pure, so holy, so virtuous. I watched Pops's scrotum, his balls, in their movement. Their sight together excited me. I started to think again about myself, just recently into puberty; then I remembered that concern with my own problems and worries was a selfish and unholy distraction. But something intervened: there was in the room a sudden electricity. Pops was approaching orgasm; somehow I could sense this. Perhaps the signal came from Moms, who knew better than any of us the patterns of his sex. In the past I had only seen Pops initiate girls from a distance. Today I was right there, and it was my own sister who was receiving his, and God's, blessing. It was her vagina that was feeling his penis move up and down, her vagina into which his semen was about to pour. The congregation also must have sensed the coming climax. People stirred. Pops had often spoken in sermons of "waves of semen" as manifestation of God's eternal love, of fecundity as proof of his pleasure with man and with sex. Here we saw the evidence: a girl happy to receive the penis of God's prophet, happy, if the Lord should will it, to bear his child. Pops's body tensed. He stopped his up-and-down movement for a split second, and then he resumed it purposefully and with force and steadiness. As his expression changed to a mysterious relaxed serenity I knew he had begun to ejaculate, and that with each downward thrust one more of those waves of come would have been rushing out of the tip of his penis into Priscilla's womb. I wished I could see this happen. I wanted to see Pops's semen flow from the opening in his penis the way semen had jumped from mine when I used to masturbate. I wanted to see the great quantity of semen that his big penis would produce. I wanted Pops as a role model. I wanted a penis like his. I wanted virginal girls to worship me, to give themselves to me, as they did so happily to Pops. I stopped dreaming and looked at Pops's face. His orgasm and his delight were reflected in eyes, in his smile. Now I could actually see some excess semen flowing along Pops's penis and out of Priscilla's vagina, and his continued thrusts made a slurping sound in the wetness. His big balls slapped against Priscilla's bottom. Suddenly he stopped his movement and lay still on top of Priscilla, his penis inside her as far as it would go, her breasts against his chest, his mouth against hers. Pops moved off Priscilla and sat beside her on the floor. His penis was wet, sticky, shiny; it stuck out, directly away from his body, and glistened in the light. As the minutes passed it became limp; it wrinkled. In addition to covering his penis, wetness had matted Pops's pubic hair. He reached down and felt himself, running his fingers under his balls; then he moved over to sit next to Priscilla. The lamp still shone on her open vagina. Semen, the Prophet's come, dripped from it, mixed with Priscilla's blood on the white sheet as proof of their perfect communion and a sacrificed virginity given to God. Pops leaned over and ran his fingers over Priscilla's wet vulva and said some words to her that I could not hear. He grasped her hand and they rose in tandem; standing beside her he lightly stroked her vulva again and told the congregation what a wonderful sex act God had received. He pointed to Priscilla's breasts and to her vulva and said again how holy she was now, how blessed she was to be so beautiful and so divinely sexy, and that he hoped and expected, and God hoped and expected, that she was to be the mother of many. He told Priscilla not to dress yet but to stay next to him. He put his hand on her shoulder, then on her breast; he caressed her some more, ran his hand down to her pussy yet again to feel its wetness. Then he looked over at Moms and nodded. It was to be my turn. Meanwhile Pops moved behind Priscilla and stood there, his soft penis pressed against her rear, his hands caressing her breasts and his fingers tracing her nipples as he watched Moms and me. He turned Priscilla's head towards him and kissed her once more on the mouth, then drew her hand to his limp penis in a gesture of reminder, closed her fingers around it and left them there. It is only as I write these words that it occurs to me that Pops did not ask Priscilla whether she had had, in fact, an orgasm, or if she had not, offer to try to bring her to climax. Moms came over to me. She undressed me: took off and put aside my jacket and tie and shirt, shoes and trousers. She drew me into the light, knelt before me and pulled down my underpants in a dramatic gesture before the congregation. She stared at my penis in adoration, kissed it lightly, fondled and stroked it, ran her fingers through my pubic hair. She cupped my balls with her palm. I was reassured that Moms seemed happy with my genitals, that the size and shape of my penis did not surprise or displease her. I was nervous; she told me to be calm. She took the tip of my penis into her mouth for just a second in a welcoming and reassuring gesture, then pulled it back out and looked at it, wet. Now Moms arose and began to undress herself. It was not a striptease, more like Mrs. Robinson, as she took off and discarded each piece of clothing in turn. It did not take her long: blouse and bra, skirt and some kind of stocking-socks and shoes. Her largish breasts were now directly in front of me, in my line of sight. They were not old and not young, sagging only a little, but firm enough for their big nipples to be pointing at me, or perhaps at my penis. I looked down at her and I could see an outline of pubic hair showing through her panties, and some wisps of hair peeking out through the leg holes. She told me to help her remove her panties. I knelt before her and lowered them to her ankles and she stepped out of them. Her vulva stared at me, inches away. She drew my hand to it, put my fingers into the crack and the tips of my finger into her vagina. She pushed my faced towards it: I kissed it and ran my tongue along its slit. Now she pulled me up and drew me over to the mattress. She lay down upon it with her legs wide apart in a sort of gesture of benediction upon all the congregation, and she told me I should kiss her vulva, put my tongue in her vagina and make it moist the way Pops had done to Priscilla and the way I had seen other boys make love to her when they had been initiated. Pops came over and he adjusted the light so that it shone directly on Moms's vulva and so the congregation could see what I did. Moms's vagina felt and tasted freshly washed. I ran my tongue tentatively around her opening and put it where she told me to, flicked it at her clitoris as she had previously told me to do. I pushed my tongue as far as it would go into her vagina and ran it up and down and around the vaginal wall. Moms told me to rub my tongue some more along the outside. With her hands she guided my head where she wanted me to be. I began to taste her mucus; Moms was becoming aroused. After several more minutes she said I had done enough, and that I should sit in the chair just as Pops had done. Her vagina was ready for me; it seemed to be calling on my penis to penetrate it, but my penis was still flaccid. Moms arose from the mattress and knelt in front of the chair, in front of me. She grasped my penis and took it firmly into her mouth. She knew exactly, expertly what to do for I could feel a tingling sensation, especially underneath the head of my penis, and her lips pressed against the tip each time she moved her mouth up and down. When she did this, the fantastic tickling sensation excited me enough to overcome the apprehension and stage fright that was keeping me from achieving an erection. Her tongue pressed more against my penis, and as the tip crossed her lips on its way out she would lick around it with her tongue. Moms seemed infinitely patient; with her stimulation and her apparent satisfaction with my response to what she was doing, my penis was quite rigid, if not fully erect. I was now feeling not only excitement in my penis but warmth throughout my body. Pops came over and recited that I was entering the communion of God, that I should be proud of carrying on His commandments. He looked at my penis in its half-hardness. He said my penis was perfect; that an erection was work of God, that God was inside my soul. He told Priscilla to look at me, to admire my growing erection, to respect the will and the work of the Lord. As Moms continued to stimulate my penis the tingling intensified and, free from insecurity I could feel my erection becoming firmer. Moms smiled and did not stop. I wondered if, contrary to Pops's creed, she was going to cause me to ejaculate in her mouth. Pops said something more about a hard-on representing the Lord in action, and the penis answering His call. He said that puberty was an entry into the kingdom of sacred sexuality, that sex was holy duty and that its reward was orgasm and fecundity. Now Moms took my penis out of her mouth to show it to the congregation. It stood straight up and out from my body, pointing right at her face. Now, she said, I was ready to become an adult: "You must put your sperm in my womb. My vagina, the vagina appointed to you by God, is ready for you." Moms pulled me up and over to the mattress, and she lay down, pulling me down on top of her. She reached for my erection, which however had now a little of its rigidity, and guided it into her vagina. It went in easily because her vagina was big and wet and slippery and my penis was still only half-grown. Suddenly I had no need to worry about my penis because I was, indeed, having vaginal sex. My penis was in this holy woman's vagina and it was going in and out the way it was supposed to and it was making me, and I hoped Moms, feel so good. I stopped pumping for a few seconds to catch my breath and to allow my penis to get harder. I felt grown-up and satisfied as my penis stiffened some more. I resumed my pace, and even the light, teasing friction of my small penis against the walls of Moms's big vagina was enough to generate the sexual energy and excitement needed for the release of my semen. I knew the congregation could watch my penis as it rose and fell, entering and leaving their co-prophet's vagina and I hoped the sight pleased them. I began to feel that I could capture an orgasm if only I concentrated; I tried not to listen to Pops's continuing commentary and blessings, his talk of "this young man who is having his first sex with God's co-prophet and will join you now in holy procreation." As I moved my body more confidently, imitating what I had just seen Pops do, Moms remained smiling sweetly at me. I knew she was happy with me and so was God. The adults in the congregation would be seeing my penis as it made its way in and out of Moms's vagina. They would know that I was becoming one of them. Meanwhile I saw out of the corner of an eye Drusila in the front row, watching me intently. I was, I knew, not supposed to think of her now, or at all, as my birth mother but only as another adult congregant. Still, it seemed to me that she was, against our creed, recognizing me here specially as her own child, not just one child of the commune. She was watching me having sex for the first time, sex with the wife of the prophet, co-prophet herself, and what she saw seemed to mean more to her than all those previous defloration and first sex celebrations that had gone before. But perhaps I had misunderstood the creed; maybe it was OK to be proud of a son in the course of this a religious event. I was, after all, the center of attention in a service of celebration and worship before the entire congregation. I was on trial, as my penis was; I was on the verge of joining adulthood, entering upon God's work, receiving God's secret ecstasy. If only I could pass the test; if only I could ejaculate here and now. I concentrated harder, and suddenly I felt a rising of sexual tension within me. In an instant I felt I could, I would after all, ejaculate into Moms. I could pass this test of having sex with a woman, the holy co-prophet, in accordance with God's will. I could pass my sperm to Moms in holy communion. We would, together, share an instant of joy. In those passing seconds, after I became secure in the knowledge that I would ejaculate, I thought of how I had attended identical events so many times before, and how each time the boy had succeeded in making Moms happy, and how each time the boy had become a man and had entered into the commune's active sex life, fulfilled God's obligation, enjoyed God's sexual bliss. This secret rite was part of our cult. In succeeding today I would have helped the children in the congregation, even the smallest children, to learn that sexual pleasure was holy, and that it was, or should be, universal. Every girl and every boy would have seen in the flesh the beauty and sanctity of the sex act, the demonstration of our creed. Now my thoughts came back to Moms's holy body beneath me. I saw her big breasts flattened against her chest, her big nipples pointing at me. I felt her wet vagina massaging, gratifying, my penis on its in and out strokes. Then I worried again; I worried that perhaps she would not have an orgasm and that I would have failed God in some way. Just a few more strokes would bring me to orgasm. Each time I pulled my penis up it teased me. Each time I looked Moms's body would flirt with mine, seemingly asking for my semen. Each time I pushed my penis down and into her vagina, the promise of ejaculation became more intense. I glanced quickly again down at my penis, working its way in and out of Moms's vagina. This was, I thought after all, the meaning of life. But could I satisfy Moms? Moms seemed to read my thoughts. She smiled at me and told me to kiss her. I did, and she returned my kiss with passion. She told me to go on, that I could finish, that she felt so good. Perhaps she exaggerated; perhaps she was only trying to encourage me. More than ever, however, I now loved God through her body and wanted to show Him that love through my ejaculation. Then my semen, my sperm, was on its way and I sighed involuntarily. I could feel my semen in motion; then a lightning flash of joy throughout my body as the fluids rushed up my penis and out its tip into Moms's body. Wouldn't it be lovely, I thought, if I could father Moms's child. I wondered again if she was really satisfied, if I was yet physically capable of giving a woman, giving Moms, an orgasm with my penis, and whether it mattered to God. As I had started to come, Moms had moved her hips in sync with mine, following my penis as it penetrated her. This had reassured me. I did not ejaculate a lot, and my penis, loose in her vagina, did not feel the tight friction that would have perhaps made the sex better for her and for me. But I was deliriously, devoutly, happy and I kept on pumping even after I had finished coming. It continued to feel so good. Now Moms sensed that I had climaxed. She felt my penis softening and she gently pushed against me to signal I should dismount her. She congratulated me on my first sex and said she hoped it had been terrific and that I had done my holy duty in front of the community and I could feel proud and that she was so happy and quite satisfied. I asked Moms whether I should do something else, thinking of kissing her clitoris again and remembering Pops's occasional mention of women's entitlement to orgasm as God's gift. But Moms said everything was fine, that I had done just right and that she, and God, were very happy. She would kiss my penis to show me how much I was loved. Priscilla, the girl I scarcely acknowledged as my twin sister, was standing with Pops and watching. I had forgotten her presence. She looked sexy and holy. Her posture was firm; her breasts still beckoning, her vulva now, with its sticky come drying on her pubic hair, the preserved wetness of God's prophet, so very, very exciting. I hadn't realized that a girl's genitals could, by themselves, be so beautiful. Why, I wondered briefly, did society insist on covering them up? How was covering up a girl's sex organs so different, except in degree, from some Arab woman's black tent? I felt so happy for Priscilla, and still I tingled with the orgasm and the ejaculation I had just experienced. I wanted to be closer to her; why couldn't I share my feelings with this sexy girl? And it seems that she, too, might have thought something along those lines: I knew she had watched every detail of my sex with Moms and that she had been watching my penis ever since, and now she followed my eyes to look down at her own vulva. I wondered what she was thinking. Perhaps we could touch, with our hands if not our genitals. We looked, both of us, over at Pops. I stood together with Priscilla and I took her hand. This was a spontaneous gesture and did not represent family recognition, which would have violated the rules. Instead, the two of us had simply responded to sexual electricity, the sight of each other's body. We had been trained to attribute arousal to God, but that we must wait for Pops to tell us to proceed. The congregation could see us, both fully naked, images of God that we were. They would have seen that Pops did not respond negatively to our initiative. Pops made a speech about the holiness of coitus. He went on for many minutes, reminding us that we should banish love for human beings and reserve our love for God alone. He told us that we should banish too social conventions, rules of the outside world, because they had no place in God's world. We had to break convention to prove our love for God. He looked at my penis, which had started to stiffen again as I looked at naked Priscilla. It was covered with stickiness; again now it pointed straight ahead at the congregation. Seeing Priscilla at sex and in the aftermath of sex had been an incredible excitement for me. I knew, or thought I knew, that in ordinary society that was a forbidden excitement, but Pops had told us to reject ordinary society and its fraudulent rules. They meant nothing to us. Pops must have noticed that my holding Priscilla's hand and my looking at her smiling face, her breasts, her vulva, was arousing me once more. He could scarcely not see my semi-hard penis. Every time it would start to soften, a glance at Priscilla would make it harden. Pops started elaborating on what he had already said. He said again that we should break taboos that were made by man and not by God. Such taboos were pure superstition. He was looking now at us, and at my penis, at Priscilla's vulva. I wondered: was he referring to me and to her? To our urge to join our bodies together, right now? Pops went on: our love for God should be unique. As for our love for man, we should treat everybody equally. Blood relatives have no greater claim on our emotions and our actions than any other member of the congregation, or of society, as the case may be. We must not love people the way we love God; Jesus hadn't meant that when he said we should "love our neighbor". That was a misinterpretation, a mistranslation; it was out of context. We might "admire" and "respect" and "show affection for" members of our family, but that did not mean we should show them any more or any less than we showed others. And if we were to relate to our family equally, then any rules about incest were false man-made rules that violated God's commandment. He said that to prove his point, I should now put my penis into my sister Priscilla and bring to her an offering of God's communion. I should prove to the congregation that I accepted God's true rules. I should give Priscilla a piece of God's love, a drop of God's fluid. We might not see that fluid as it is flowing from male to female, but its flow was a transmission of the Holy Spirit and it represented the transmission of life from the living to the yet-to-be-born. I loved Pops for what he was saying. In my heart I knew he was right. And as we were all of us, Drusila, Priscilla and I, totally committed to Pops and to his faith we should rely on him for guidance in these matters. We knew that Pops's religious doctrine was not immutable. It evolved and was perfected as he received and interpreted divine inspiration. The fact that a newly deflowered couple had never been invited to share their bodies in public did not prevent Pops from interpreting Scripture to allow or to require it now. Such a command Priscilla and I, both now full consenting adults who, in the sight of God were related only to Him and not to each other, would gladly obey. Priscilla was smiling. She really had such a lovely body. She gazed at my penis once again, I thought lovingly and hopefully. Priscilla's breasts were strong and beckoning, smaller and lovelier than Moms's. I wanted so much to hold them, to kiss them. She moved over and sat on the mattress her legs spread wide apart, and I could see that her vagina was still dripping with come. My penis was now drooping; Pops looked at it and then at Priscilla said that I should just kiss Priscilla's vulva briefly, and then she should take my penis in her mouth and make it stiff. I did what he told me, kissing her vulva deeply and lovingly, tongue in vagina. I tasted Pops's semen and delighted in it for its holiness. I arose and sat once more in the chair. Priscilla followed me and knelt before my penis, cradling it in her hands, fondling, caressing it. She took it fully into her mouth, licking my semen and Moms's mucus, relishing and loving them as the work of God, the tools of God's trade, the traces of his holy co-prophet and her love act with me. Knowledgeable from her experience with Pops's penis in her mouth, Priscilla kissed and sucked and drew her head up and down until my penis was erect, much stiffer even than before when it was in Moms's vagina. My eyes were drawn to her breasts, so beautiful and so firm, then back to my penis, disappearing and reappearing as her mouth moved up and down. I felt her virginal essence; she was giving me the last of her innocence and sexual tension welled up inside my penis and inside all of me in a way that I had not felt when Moms, our mother image and co-prophet, had performed the same act. I had never before today thought of this girl in terms of sex, yet now she was for a brief moment mine, and what's more she was sexy in such a godly way, so capable of giving me joy and of witnessing to God in the way of our creed. And all of this was happening before all those witnesses, before our congregation, adults and children alike. Priscilla took my penis, now fully erect, fully excited, from her mouth and kissed now just its round tip. She lay down on the mattress as she had before, the light once more on her pussy, her knees bent, her legs spread wide apart. Her vagina was wide open, ready and waiting for my penis to penetrate it. Priscilla's eyes told me of her love for God and His prophet and for my penis and for all of God's work. She reached out her arms to welcome me. I could see her vagina already it was wet and lubricated. My perfunctory kiss had sufficed for our foreplay. What next transpired is a scene of such beauty and ecstasy that I think of it constantly, every single day of my life. I mounted Priscilla, my penis poised over her vulva. She took and held it, placing its head directly over her vaginal opening and signaling to me to start. Now I was inside her just as, a few minutes ago, Pops had been, and I was making love; but this was not Priscilla with whom I was making love, it was God. Her vagina was narrower and tighter than Moms's, and it felt so good. Lubricated with Pops's semen, her narrower vagina still provided more friction for my penis as it coursed in and out, up and down. I wasn't sure I could come again, but I dearly wanted to. I wanted to love Priscilla in God's name and I wanted my penis to bring her its proof of God's love. It took me many minutes, but as I looked Priscilla in the face, and as we smiled passionately, or rather piously, at each other, and as I looked down at her breasts and, from time to time my own penis entering her, I had another orgasm. Somehow the congregation, it seemed, could sense this; I heard murmurs and felt an air of satisfaction and happiness throughout the hall. Sex with Moms had given me confidence; but this now, to have my penis in a girl of my own age, giving and receiving such intense pleasure, brought me a feeling of total satisfaction, of total bliss. I was so proud that the congregation could see my stiff penis completing her body and completing her spirit. I would, of course, never again have the privilege, consistent with our creed, of making love before the assembled communicants. I had not expected, and I had not had the right to expect, the privilege of possessing Priscilla this way, of having sex with her, today. I felt incredibly blessed. I don't think I could have had much semen left to ejaculate into Priscilla's vagina, but the feeling of orgasm transported me, spiritually and sensually. My entire body shook. Priscilla asked me if I was happy and as I looked at her she was reassured, and she smiled and kissed me and we kissed again and again with pious passion, my penis still inside her. I told her I was incredibly happy. I saw her smile and I saw her breasts and I wished I could stay in just that position forever. Then my gaze followed hers and we looked together towards our mother. She, Drusila, chastened by Pops's warning about loving family in the way we should love God, or loving family more than community, tried to be inscrutable. But I could see she was proud, even if parental pride of such holy events as my experience and Priscilla's defloration was somehow deemed sinful in a way that the acts themselves were not. Two of God's children had made love in front of her, and because she had given birth to us we were, for her, God's very special and her very special children, and for us to share God in this way had to be a source of delight. I saw, as we separated, the eyes not only of Drusila but of all the crowd focused first on my penis, then on Priscilla's wet vulva. It was a breathless, envious sort of expression that they had, and I felt wanted and blessed by God to have possessed for the moment such a pious, sensuous and lovely partner. We rose together from the mattress and faced the congregation again, the evidence of our communion shimmering in the light. Pops gave us a paper to read from, a statement of faith and of prayer and of love for God and for God's procreation. We kissed each other, and stepped away from Pops. I stood behind Priscilla and could not resist pressing against her and cupping her breasts with my hands. So long as Pops tacitly approved, she welcomed these further attentions from me. The audience seemed to appreciate the opportunity to see more of her nakedness; doubtless the men were longing to share her, as they surely would in the coming nights. I would have sex thousands of times over the next ten years that I remained at the commune, and hundreds of times with Priscilla and with Moms, always following the same script of oral foreplay and vaginal sex. But it would never have the same intensity as it had that night, with our mutual pleasure enhanced by the congregation -- our family's -- appreciation. This had been my honeymoon, and God had been with us and inside us. When, in later years, I attended other deflorations I dearly wished that the girl or boy could have the same experience, but of course they could not: Priscilla's and mine was the only joint defloration the commune was ever to have. Long after, I learned that Jewish boys have a bar mitzvah coming out party at about that age. So we were not alone in our celebration of puberty and entrance into adult life. I have to assume the sense of public piety and pride of passage are the same. Pops and Moms moved to the center and said a few words about the religious significance of defloration, and the responsibility of membership in God's commune. He spoke of the virgin's blood and the man's semen mingling in happiness and the expectation of future communal bliss. But he warned against personalizing sex, reminded us that our obligation was to the community as a whole and to having babies, that we should treat all our partners equally. He reminded us that the love that inevitably sprang out of our coitus should be reserved only for God, never for each other. He restated the commune's creed that partners should change places daily. He closed as usual with a prayer for God to help us to be fecund and multiply. Then we dressed and we began our party. Priscilla and I were congratulated, kissed, hugged by everyone: every adult, every child. Surely each member of the congregation of the opposite sex knew that, very soon, that person would share a bed for the night with one of us just as, today, Priscilla and I had done with Pops and Moms and with each other. For now Priscilla and I were adult members of the commune and the congregation. I could not help noticing, however, that once the defloration ceremony was over Priscilla's attitude towards me, just as Pops had said it should, reverted to formality and distance. Only when again we would be assigned by Pops to have sex would I see her respond to my glances and my approach in any meaningful way, emotionally and sexually. She was a creature of God: her sexual life was bound by God's commands as enunciated by God's and our prophet. Girls and women must be chaste except for God; and passion for a human body, assent to a penis appointed by his prophet to approach their bodies was God Himself at work, if and only if Pops had directed it. For there were false gods too, and we must beware of them and keep them at bay. The only allowable and holy sex was as directed by God through his prophet, with the partner specified by Pops for that day. This does not mean that, as children and teenagers, we did not relate to each other as boys and girls but that we knew at all times that sex was not a matter of our whim but of God's direction, that is by command of Pops as proxy for God. For the next many months it seemed I would be paired mostly with women older than I by at least ten years, and Priscilla with older men of the commune. We were full members and age was supposed to be irrelevant. Perhaps it was an educational process; anyway after those months had passed, age did not seem anymore to be so much of a factor. But still, for a few years it seemed that I was assigned much more often than statistically probable to Moms, and Priscilla to Pops. In fact, the two prophets always seemed to be assigned the newest and youngest congregants. Only occasionally Priscilla and I would be paired and I would repeat the delight of that evening on the dais. Almost right away I was assigned to Drusila, and it became clear what Pops constant railing against the rules on incest and mother-son lovemaking as an ungodly, "earthly" ban was about. It was, he so often said, intended to keep young people and teenagers in ignorance and under control, and of course we accepted his argument, God's argument, on the subject. Pride was, after all, a deadly sin. All of us were to do as we were told, and perform our religious duties as assigned. As I have described, Drusila was very sweet to me, and not at all demanding or bossy the way some of the other middle-aged women would be. She seemed so dreamy when we were having sex, as if my penis really did represent the appendage of God making love to her womb. More than once she would reach down after we had made love and coat her fingers with my sperm and bring them to her mouth, as if to make a further statement of our common bond. I was to see this gesture repeated often by other girls and women including Moms, perhaps as a way of giving thanks, or of wanting to be close to God's life-giving fluid; I never knew. Then and now it reminded me of the holy communion of bread and wine served in other churches, symbolizing or indeed being, the body and blood of Jesus. And, likewise, one could see in their faces a look of blissful communion with God. I learned a lot about female anatomy from Moms, who was eager to explain exactly why she preferred this or that sort of embrace or caress. At the end of the room where she and Pops slept on their respective beds there was a small light, and it would shine on my penis while she would study it, monitoring its growth and progress, as it seemed, just as the nurse Aquila and my own birth mother Drusila did. She would have me spend a lot of time kissing and licking around the inside of her vulva, and she, in turn, spent a lot of time looking at and playing with my penis and my balls, kissing and licking, but never to the point that I would come in her mouth. Instead, she would stop and give me time to cool off before having me mount her. It was her way, she said, of making more stuff come out, and of course it felt terrific. In those early months after the defloration party I didn't have an awful lot of come inside me. That changed over the next year or two. When, later, I would come in greater quantities and my semen would leak out of Moms's vagina, she would ask me to massage her there. She might, as Drusila had, coat her fingers with some of my semen and put them in her mouth. Then she would kiss me and I would taste my own semen on her tongue. But my fondest memories of my early sex relate to the woman seeking out my penis and taking it into their mouths. Girls seemed to like most of all to retrieve it in its soft state and to kiss and lick it, running their tongue around its tip, until it would be semi-hard, then putting it in their mouth and sliding it in and out, pausing every so often to allow the blood to fill until it reached maximum stiffness. Moms, Drusila and the other older women knew, and I soon learned after that first time on my 14th birthday, that for a woman to take a man's penis into her mouth and, with love and holiness to make it slide in and out as his erotic tension increases gives him the most fantastic pleasure it is humanly possible to experience. As Pops so often intoned while Moms was so pleasuring a boy's penis in her mouth on that dais at the time of his initiation, this joy is brought not by your partner but by God, it is your reward for following his Law. After my own first time, when later I would have taken down my partner's panties or lifted up her nightgown and, laying her back, kissed and sucked at her vagina to the limits of her pleasure, the woman or girl would do this to and for me just as Moms had done that first time, with everybody watching. I might meanwhile grasp her breasts -- Mom's or Drusila's heavy breasts, or Aquila's or Priscilla's or one of the other teenager's smaller ones, or one of the many girls and women with in-between sizes -- trying in some way to signal my delight over her body and over my approaching ecstasy. It must be more than 5,000 times since that first occasion when I sat in the chair on the dais and first Moms and then Priscilla took my penis into their mouth, that I have enjoyed such oral foreplay and then, when I was at the threshold of ejaculation turned my partner over, spread her legs, put my penis into her vagina and tried to bring us to orgasm together. This was the challenge that Pops set for us, and sometimes it happened more or less in synchronization. Mostly it did not, but it was still fabulous, intense pleasure, for both of us I hope, each and every time. Almost. I hope that our own children -- now that, the commune gone, they are expected to go off on their own -- can experience the delight of Pops's prescription for sex, including oral foreplay. I certainly have described to them what we do; perhaps they have peeked at us unseen. It is exquisite, certainly it is God's handiwork. For many months after that first day Priscilla wound up, as I said, with Pops a lot of nights, but in the early days of my adulthood as often as not (because I would be having sex with another female nearby) I would be close to where Moms and Pops were bedded down, and I could see how much their interest went beyond straight sex and involved much of this oral foreplay and how Pops and Moms dominated, or as they would say, trained, young people to pleasure them in God's name. So it was not just for me: I, with my penis, was far from the only target of Moms's interest. It is interesting to see how Pops and Moms used some of the same arguments the breakaway Mormons use about plural marriage; although of course they edited the arguments so they applied equally to both sexes. At least they were also concerned with giving pleasure, and I could see that, with the young girls, Pops would try not to stop until they said they had climaxed or were on the verge of climaxing. I tried to imitate this: that, seeing my partner about to have orgasm I would quickly move up along her body and insert my penis where my tongue had been. If need be, Pops (and following him, I) would masturbate or resume kissing his girl or woman's vaginal area after sex. There were, naturally, some girls who had a very difficult time achieving an orgasm, and Pops tried to work with them specially to overcome their disability, as he saw it. Maybe, in fact, this explained why he was so often paired with younger girls. Indeed, I came to wonder how many of the babies being born had Pops as their father. There was no way of knowing, and we were anyway supposed not to speculate about paternity. Priscilla and I, or one of us, could have been among them. The possibility that he was her father did not stop Pops from having sex with any girl, of course; who knew and who cared who was any particular girl's father anyway? This was God's will. I have since heard of genetic problems said to result from incest but aside from miscarriages that could occur with any pregnancy the issue never arose in our commune. Countries like Saudi Arabia where everybody seems to marry his cousin apparently find any negative genetic impact to be limited. By the time Priscilla reached 16 she was pregnant, but that was normal for us. In retrospect one might ask what took her so long. She was so pretty when pregnant, I loved to see here nude in that state, her breasts fuller now. Babies were constantly arriving in the commune and all were more than welcome. I was assigned to sleep with her a number of times while she was pregnant, and although at first it was odd having sex with her that way, I grew to love the sight and the fact of pregnancy. My penis was fully grown; she had blossomed even more as a lovely young woman, and when Pops would assign her to me she would respond sensually, even pregnant, especially pregnant, to my movements, my caresses, the strokes of my big, erect penis. As I said, nobody ever questioned the logic, in a regime of promoting impregnation, of not just allowing but encouraging an already pregnant woman to have frequent sex: one was not free to question any of Pops's logic. Other girls were pregnant too, one or more of them perhaps with my own sperm. Our creed was to treat all women equally, and men were not supposed to concern themselves with paternity and filiation. God had made man to impregnate women at his direction; and to control their otherwise unbridled passion men should have sex every day and to vary their partners. But to avoid chaos God had directed Pops to guide each member of his congregation in the right way and assign him to the right partner on a daily basis. If all mankind followed God's rule in this way there would be no prostitution, no divorce, no abortion, no homosexuality, no deviancy. In our creed, women were not, as they were in the outside world, sex objects isolated from God and His work. Our women reserved their vaginas for men who lived in the Way of God, whose semen flowed at God's command and carried God's spirit. It was only right and natural that their role was pregnancy, childraising, with keeping house and with making things that could be sold for the support of the community. Women who had brought family or inherited wealth to the commune should recognize that the wealth did not belong to them as individuals, but that God had given it to them in trust for Pops's holy work. They should not resent having to work, or living at the same level as all the others. There must be no complaints against Pops's commands. For all its claims to postmodernism, the commune was, after all, very traditional in assigning functional roles. Pops, from time to time, would have to deal with human nature and occasional hints or even expressions of resentment and dissent. I was taught a trade, or rather many trades, all connected with building and construction. By this time the commune had set up a construction company and we did renovations and small building works. Our overheads were low, we worked hard and to specification; our prices were fair, so we were always busy. I was not allowed to work away from the commune except sporadically as apprentice trainee because of child labor laws, but I continued my home schooling and as part of my apprenticeship I worked on prefabricating things in our workshop. Every so often there would be some exchange with state authorities, but enough of the women were certified teachers and they had enough approved textbooks so they could satisfy the authorities, who were anyway cautious about interfering in religion when there was no obvious mistreatment of children. I suppose they never got to see underage pregnancies; and in fact I know from some problems I had later that few of the births were registered when they were supposed to be. After I got to be 16 I was able to spend more time on outside work and when I was 17 I took exams and received a state diploma. For those first months of my fifteenth year, however, I was frequently paired with the commune's senior women. I would be studying and working by day, and assigned most nights at random by authority of Pops, or by his computer or whim, for sex. Of course one didn't in fact have to have sex each and every night we were assigned, but we were expected to, and the opportunity was there. It's nice in theory to plan for sex every night, but reality is likely to intervene. My penis was growing; in the meantime the older women told me how good I made them feel, how good I was making God feel; how much they wanted my come inside of them. For some, pregnancy was still possible; didn't I want to make them pregnant? My penis was God's appendage; their vaginas were God's receptacle. They would kiss and suck my penis, stop and then start again; then let my ardor cool, saying I would ejaculate more and it would be better for both of us. I know that Pops had in mind that older women appreciate the attention that young men give their bodies, and that young men can benefit from the instruction they will get from older women. I remember him saying that "technology transfer" in this manner was far more efficient than relying on youngsters to learn by experiment and from experience, and that he thought (no surprise) that this, as well as the variation in partners he decreed, would maximize the number of pregnancies in our commune. Pops's solicitude for the older women extended to his insistence that, whether fertile or not, they be treated and receive sexual pleasure just the same. We boys all, as a result, learned to think of women of all ages as sensuous and lovely, representing God and his sexual expectations of us. In retrospect it is nice to be able to see women of all ages as sexy and capable of giving and receiving orgasm. The attention that we paid to them was reciprocated, as I have said, in genuine effort paid to us, especially when it came to undressing and beginning the process of foreplay. Younger women, girls, were rarely turned on by the sight of my penis as older women seemed to be; and the absence of courting and hours-long role play made many girls diffident and ill prepared just to spread their legs so I could start licking their vaginas. Pops had not provided a lot of details on how to excite young girls under such circumstances but I did learn that the younger a girl was the more she needed to be fondled and embraced, her breasts caressed and kissed, before I asked her to lie back so that I could kiss and lick her down there. I came to appreciate just how beautiful is the vulva and everything inside it, and how responsive and tender a woman is the more solicitous her partner has been. The trouble was that Pops said that youngsters should master his protocol of sex and stick to that, and to that alone, and he was unresponsive to the matter of kissing and foreplay elsewhere than in the genital area. This is to say that there was nothing wrong with it, he just had little to say. This may be because girls acted differently in his presence: they regarded him as so holy and such a father figure that they were, so to speak, instantly aroused in his presence. Certainly this was true at the defloration ceremonies. When, on the dais, he guided a young girl's mouth to his penis, he was not only initiating her but instructing her on how to express her sensuality. His mouth at her vulva would have already brought her to, or close to, orgasm. It would not be hard for a pubescent or post-pubescent girl to make boys and men deliriously happy; what she would have to learn beyond that was the discipline of insisting upon her own pleasure and, if she did not quickly become pregnant, doing whatever might improve her chances of pregnancy. As for training boys, Moms's opening of her body to us could only be an introduction. As new young male members of the adult community, Pops relied on the other older women to work with us in the ensuing days and months to explain the more complex aspects of female sexuality. With years of presumably happy life and happy sex, behind them they, far more than their younger sisters, had the self confidence needed for brilliant sex. I have to assume that they were not doing without, and that their orgasms were not faked. Yet, our mandated sex was ritual. There were no rules against embraces and cuddling; indeed they were encouraged. Pops liked breasts and wanted boys to see and admire them. Otherwise, Pops's ritual of oral foreplay did not allow of great variety or digression. It was mouth at vagina first, for as long as the woman thought necessary or the man had interest. Then it was penis in mouth, at least for a few minutes, perhaps much longer. And then the main event of penis in vagina, leading to ecstasy and ejaculation and, for all we knew, impregnation. The women spoke often about foreplay and about oral sex as foreplay, and they admired Pops for his commands on that point. Pops's admonition was that the Bible instructed us that ejaculation must be in vagina and only in vagina: man's seed must not fall upon the ground, or something like that. He interpreted that to allow and indeed require adequate foreplay, and he felt that conception was far more likely if a woman had achieved orgasm. This, of course, was without prejudice, in real life, to a woman, or for that matter a man, being too tired for an extended performance. Some girls and women, some or much of the time, were dutiful and did their holy duty but a man could tell that they were tired, or dispirited. Others were positively joyful at sex all, or almost all, the time. A few were fatigued by pregnancies. But for us sex was commingled with religion, in a positive way and not by way of constant prohibition and limitation. One does not normally abstain from prayer on account of fatigue and I, perhaps with a touch of machismo, tried to perform, however tired, if my partner was eager. For us, sex was one form of prayer, Pops said. Orgasm was a response by God to that prayer. Women were entitled to our semen. To deny a woman the opportunity to conceive, to use birth control or even to abstain from sex when the opportunity arose was if not equally as much a sin as abortion-murder then a close second. Nothing pleased Pops, or as he said, God, more than to see the radiant smile of a pregnant woman. It was important, he would go on, repeating a constant theme of his, for men to assure their partners maximum orgasmic pleasure through oral foreplay to reward them for having undertaken their holy duty of sex and procreation. However, lengthy oral foreplay concentrated on vagina and clitoris meant that sometimes a girl would climax quickly, before penetration of her vagina. This was against Pops's specifications for how and when this was to occur, but there wasn't much we could do about it. I know that certain girls seemed to lose some of their eagerness after that point, particularly with respect to their duty to reciprocate and to spend time exciting their partner's penis orally. Instead, I would find that having had their own pious and sexual satisfaction and with my penis already erect, they would want me just to put it in their vagina and finish up. It seemed to me that a woman should no more show impatience at one of the holiest parts of the sex act, the benediction of the man's penis by her mouth, than during any other act of worship but if I said anything it would only make trouble -- even though the "benediction" characterization came directly from one of Pops's sermons. And wanting me to hurry up and get it over was even more disrespectful of God's presence and His communion. Still, the standardization of sex had a distinct advantage in the context of communal life as partners became virtually interchangeable, their wants and needs substantially the same. Surprise and variety, it seemed to me (and seems to me still) are grossly overrated, and in fact Pops was quite clever in having devised a method of sex that maximized orgasms for both partners and, by my own observation, left all the members of the commune and most notably the women eager to continue active sex lives as long as they lived. It also freed women to take the initiative, as there was little doubt about the eagerness of both parties, nor any question about whether and how they would proceed, at least once breasts and genitals came into view. A girl might be coquettish, but absent some ill feeling between her and her partner or a stupid misstep on his part there was little doubt about what was going to happen. And in the crowded environment there was little room for and little point of subtlety. The minuet of sex might be swift or slow but it would be the timing, not the steps, that would differ. Pops was correct in his teaching that oral foreplay is an efficient means of arousal and lubrication; and indeed one rapidly passes the point of no return, where with wide open, wet vagina and penis vibrantly excited the two lovers desperately needed each other's body. In the commune, our misfortune was lack of space entailing lack of privacy and subdued light. The loss was our inability to view each others' bodies very often under bright light, something which we might have enjoyed. Tactile arousal is nice, but seeing a partner's undressing in the light is nice too. I need scarcely say that crowding led, on occasion, to friction. As a builder I was constantly pressured to make what space we had more efficient. That there were more women than men in the commune seemed to be an advantage, although it created scheduling problems for Pops. It was obvious that men have more urgent needs, that women are more often indisposed, or that at a particular moment in pregnancy, they have other concerns. Most men seemed to love having sex with a girl in late pregnancy; but not every girl welcomed the attention at such a period. I don't mean to be sexist about all this, but that's the way it seemed to be. Pops could and would reassign partners in such circumstances. In long harangues after supper and before pairing us off for the night, Pops would talk to us about holiness and duty and then about going forth to multiply, and we would do it. He told us that the pleasure of sex was our reward, that we were entitled to pleasure. He went on about female anatomy and about how women were entitled to orgasm too, and what men could do with mouth and fingers, and so on. But mostly he talked about woman's duty to receive Godly semen and her duty to reproduce. The expression "barefoot and pregnant" was very apt for our commune, but girls were proud of their pregnancies, and pregnancy was, I myself found, itself a source of sexiness and seduction. Pops never to my knowledge addressed the issue of why, if his aim was solely conception, a girl who was already pregnant should be pressed to have sex, perhaps against her inclination. Nor, of course, the issue of post-menopausal or infertile women, but perhaps I am being unfair, sexist and ageist. I can only say that by and large Pops's commands and his order of sex and his assignments of partners were accepted without argument or discussion, and his theology went totally unquestioned. I have been told, anyway, that "sex as sin" is purely an early Christian line of thought, and Pops always argued that it was a false interpretation of God's law, as could be proven by careful reading of the Old Testament. The rules of sex as laid down by Pops were accepted and self-policed by the community because we lived and ate and slept and had orgasms in common and in sight of each other. We were always reassured that becoming aroused by the sight of others having sex was also part of God's plan. While the defloration service should be mainly a religious ceremony, Pops always allowed that it should also arouse us, to make us want to have sex and conceive as soon as possible. That logic applied, too, at other times, when couples were having "private" sex in the various bedrooms, all shared by lots of people. Although lights might be dimmed there remained enough ambient light and moonlight most of the time to see others in their passion. The environment was enough to arouse, so it was just as well that every healthy person was assigned a partner every day so long as one was available. Our lifestyle was not designed to tease and arouse; but neither did it interfere in natural emotion and expression of that emotion, albeit only with partner assigned to him for that night. It was the use of our arousal to enhance and to highlight our religious intent, obligation and action. In retrospect it is strange that any one mortal, a Pops or a Jim Jones or a David Berg or a David Koresh should be accepted as God's messenger to dictate people's manner of life and of procreation. But Pops's rules were not unique, certainly not his order of random pairing, and I suppose that communal sex was not either. His recognition of women's right to orgasm was gladly received. Once personal love was banished, women had, in fact, an easier time of it because they could demand, and get, attention to their G-spots, or to their clitorises if that is different. Obviously not all performers are equal, but the variety of partners seems to have pleased people. Otherwise they would have left. Some few did, as often as not over personality clash, money or children rather than sex. Those who remained had different motivations, tied more or less to religion or sex, or to both. It wasn't really very hard to distinguish between those girls who enjoyed pleasuring their boy of the night orally, and those for whom it was just part of the job. Membership in the commune provided them with security, and sex went with that. If they were denied a personal relationship with their babies, that was just another price to pay. Oral sex technique, however, was in the end what distinguished one female from another. Some of the teenage girls in particular were quite competitive in terms of how they engaged in oral sex. Since the boy was not to ejaculate into her mouth, such a girl would try to manipulate his penis to make him excruciatingly excited, to bring him with lips and tongue just to the point of orgasm and then bring him back down to earth, having to restart almost from the beginning with penis in vagina. This was, I know, something the girls discussed quite openly among themselves. It was also apparent that they used the power this gave them over sex -- since Pops's decree that a girl should take her partner's penis in her mouth and bring him thereby to maximum erection and arousal was the only time during sex in which the girl would be taking the initiative -- to force upon the boys a parallel competition of sorts in the matter of their girls' orgasms, and notably their own oral foreplay with clitoris and vagina. In the normal order of things, the boy would be kissing and stroking with his tongue all his girl's sensuous and sensitive parts, and if she was shy or embarrassed to make him continue or to instruct him in how best to please her, she could still make her displeasure known by her own perfunctory treatment of the boy's penis while in her mouth. Every girl, after all, had in her mind's eye during the entire sexual engagement the promise of God of fecundity's reward of ecstasy, and the glorious public celebration she had undergone, with Pops's bright penis standing tall before her and before the congregation on that day of her defloration. Thus every boy, it was said, was surrogate for God and his prophet, and every boy should be seeking to emulate Pops's perfection in the sex act from the moment that he and his assigned partner undressed each other to the moment he ejaculated into her vagina and, it was to be hoped, impregnated her. This was, as Pops had constantly said, the Story of Life. How often, during the prayers after defloration, had Pops held his penis and said that God had given us the power of sex to perform his commandment, that man's desire was God speaking. Standing behind the newly enfranchised girl he might hold her breasts and tell the community once again how these gifts were bestowed by God as part of his Plan, that a girl must accept that it is her obligation to fulfill that Plan, that the final part of attracting a boy is for that boy's penis to ejaculate in her vagina and that this should happen every day, but only between the partners who God, in his wisdom, have been brought together for that moment through his prophet. Pops spoke hypnotically, and he always entranced the crowd, and they yearned to do his bidding, which after all spoke to their libido. To hear once more Pops's sermon on semen and blood was to think at once of one's own appointment for sex that night and to anticipate its pleasures. Unlike some other communes nudity was neither a goal nor an issue, nor common at our farm except of course during the act of sex itself. Girls tended to dress quite modestly, as Pops preferred. Outsiders would have thought our girls demure and chaste. Although there was some small opportunity for finessing the system, self-selection of partners was deemed in Pops's world a sinful arrogation of power. Flirting and arousal were subtle and generalized, always clothed in piety. A young girl or an older woman might flirt, but it would be on behalf of all the females present. She might send signals, her breasts and hips might excite, but although the excited boy would surely embrace a girl, help her undress and make love to her that night neither would know which girl that would be until Pops had spoken. The certitude of a sexual liaison and of an orgasm almost every day made much of what in ordinary society and even within marriage is flirtation and sex play largely redundant. Never, but never would any girl or woman have sex out of turn, with any person or at any time not appointed by Pops. At least, such a thing never happened to my knowledge; if it had it would certainly have reduced the ardor of the parties later that day, and would have been a violation of God's rules and a desecration of penis and vagina. Indiscriminate lust was pointless; our desire was reserved for the girl to whom we would be assigned. We knew that we were more observant of His rules than other people because we, and only we, understood God's word and God's true command, and we observed that command literally and physically and made each other and God, too, very happy. We knew what we were doing was right, and that our method was right. We could see, in the room we were in, other penises in other mouths, other mouths lubricating and arousing other vaginas, and then we would hear the softness and the wetness of sex: our sex and others' sex, all paying homage to God and his commands, and to Pops who had taught us how to be holy and how to be sexy. We would ejaculate, quietly or not; we would try to give our partner an orgasm too so that she would receive God's blessing. This was the message that other prophets too, I think, had published. Penis in vagina was holy. Orgasm was sacred. Earlier philosophers and prophets who had juxtaposed sex and sin were misguided. Conventional social rules were spurious. The communal life suited many. Some came and stayed because of the sex, others accepted the command to have sex as an obligation to God for His providing for us, and for His gift of life itself. In addition to an assurance of sex without too much of the mating dance that precedes it in open society came a system of social rules and some economic security. A holy dictatorship is a reasonably effective organizational pattern once human needs are met and political rivalries suppressed, as they easily enough are in the cloak of religion. Because we were told not to love individuals as individuals, but only God as God and, in a different and lesser fashion, society as a whole we did not develop the solid friendships and the family ties that are common in ordinary society. I know that when our commune foundered many members had psychological and emotional problems adjusting to life outside. Few if any of the adults married and settled down as stable nuclear families; but then we had been raised to reject both monogamy and the authority of the state to monopolize ethics and to control bodily function. It was refreshing to have a different partner almost every night. One tried not to have favorites, but obviously I found myself more compatible with some women and girls than others. And while older women could teach me new tricks, the young teens had the loveliest bodies. One in particular, Naomi, a year younger than I, seems to have violated all the rules in contriving (she has since said) to have herself paired with me repeatedly on successive days on several occasions. At the time I assumed it was a matter of random selection. Forbidden to think of such things, it was only after the commune failed and she joined the group leaving with me that she admitted this had been the case and that it was part of a deliberate plan to have me father at least some of her babies. This would have made Pops very angry, but evidently he never noticed. As Pops's protocol for sex sought by regimented teasing and oral foreplay to maximize semen production and ejaculation and chances for impregnation, I had seen nothing unusual in her staying in bed for an hour after sex, a pillow under her rear end, even though I might rather have continued our sex play. I would look at her, at my semen dripping from her vagina, and feel proud as well as satisfied, that I, a gangly teenager, could be so desired, could represent God in the task of human joy and procreation. We are, it is true, temporary visitors on this planet, God's messengers. Our impulses and desires represent God's impulses and desires, as Pops said, and sex should be without shame at all, for it is in furtherance of God's command. On nights when I was assigned to Naomi, she would not wait for me to undress her, but would disrobe spontaneously and the sight of her naked breasts would drive me into a frenzy, eager to see the rest of her. I would kiss and lick her from the tips of her nipples to the inner sanctum of her vagina, and she would reward me with sensuous oral foreplay and, finally a responsiveness in vaginal sex that few other girls could muster. The lesson, if there is any, must be that there is a certain hard-wired cattiness within girls, even when they are genuine believers and seek to adhere to scriptural precepts. There are many issues which we could never fully understand, and for which we had to accept Pops's command as proper interpretation of God's will. Sex was just one of them. According to Naomi, Pops's creed was not always quite what most members of the commune understood it to be. She said many girls found that if they sought, or Pops volunteered, a counseling session that the session might well include "communion with God", an unscheduled session of sex. Again in common with so many prophets and missionaries -- and as it turns out Catholic priests and Jimmy Swaggart -- sex may prove to be an essential part of "counseling", at least for the clergyman. Eventually Pops died, and about ten years ago Moms came to grief with the authorities over entitlement to property and over taxes, and apparently she worried over possible accusations concerning the children. She was certainly unable to manage the congregation in any reasonable fashion. Pops had never planned for his succession and no one else, certainly not Moms, had the talent that he had for sermonizing and for asserting authority and control. Or, for that matter, managing the assets he had managed to collect over the years from incoming members. Certainly nobody possessed the qualities that had enabled Pops to lay claim to the title of God's Prophet. The last ceremonial defloration took place a couple of weeks before Pops died and there will never be another. Afterwards, without any centralized command authority for ruling sexual liaisons the commune fell into anarchy. No woman and no man had acquired the social skills needed for long-term or even short-term relationships; and the religious structure that had been centered on a single dictator completely collapsed. Our bond had been Pops's creed, and it died with him. The community broke down into groups, couples and individuals; all had to try to learn or to develop new rules for social and sexual interaction. Not all could accomplish that task. Even those who overcame the hurdles would have difficulty in relating on only to the children but to the adult commune members as well, for they lacked, as it turned out, the relational skills that were unneeded so long as Pops dictated even the smallest details of our interpersonal relations. Even more likely was it that they would fail as independent citizens in the outside world. Having been assigned sex partners without effort and without having to please on a subjective level, few were prepared for what they found to be, for them, an onerous minuet of flirtation, captivation and, just perhaps, capitulation. Moms disappeared, taking with her one of the boys and, I think, most of the money. After she had left, stories of her early life with Pops started to circulate, including an allegation that a much older Pops, an itinerant preacher, had seduced her at a very young age, that the two had run off together, and that in due course they had been joined by others in setting up the commune while he developed his theology and recorded his revelations about celebratory defloration at puberty, abandonment of family relationships and rotation of partners for sex. The commune quickly foundered with the two of them gone and I joined up with a couple of other men from the group and several of the girls and their kids and we have ever since bought run-down and derelict homes and lived in them while we refurbished them; then we would sell them and move on. Pops used to rail against confiscatory taxes even though he never filed tax returns anyway; we get by under section 121 of the Internal Revenue Code. We have never been in one place long enough for the authorities to excite themselves over our lifestyle and habits and our kids. My background has made it impossible for me to relate to family and to lovers the way outsiders do. Free of Pops, we have come to forbid sex with minors and we have discovered birth control. We no longer have a cult leader or a dictator. We have a group life and we raise kids communally. If we have an inner regret that these kids must look to themselves for decisions about life and about -- especially -- sex, there is no longer any Pops nor any grand penis to lay claim to their virginity. We may have sex "early and often", but not so early nor so often as before. We have, for eminently practical reasons of legal authority, learned that we have to respect parentage. We still, men and women, find it impossible to pair off with any permanence; I can only say that our relationships are eclectic. As others have said, the age of communes is past. Our household is not a big commune but just a few adults and kids living more or less freely, and we have cleansed ourselves of the illegal practices of the past. But the fact is that the Pops's rules of relationships and childrearing and his prohibition on expressions of personal love and recognition of family relationships affect us still in ways that have made it impossible for any of us to relate to each other in any genuinely affectionate way, or to express love outside of physical act of sexual congress. Indeed, but perhaps less importantly we also find it hard to escape from Pops's protocol for foreplay and ejaculation. Such is his legacy. I want to repeat that the events I have recorded occurred many years ago. I did not know, I could not have known as a child, of the laws and social rules of the outside world that conflicted so fiercely with parts of our creed. It is obvious from the standpoint my present time and place that the authorities, and probably the readers of this story, would be outraged by what occurred. But I now know, following brief research, that our commune was scarcely alone: that each and every anti-establishment and unconventional rule of our creed was shared also by some or many other communes. It goes on in secret places even today. My present lifestyle is still unconventional, but it is not illegal. And yet, when I remember the day of Priscilla's defloration and her happiness that day, and I look at the photograph of me and of her cutting the cake, I have to think back on how brilliantly happy she was to receive God's communion, to have Pops's semen merge with her blood in testimony of her love for God. I know that she could not have waited until she arrived at "legal age" for that watershed event. And I remember that for all the days that she remained at the commune she blessed that event, that day and God's gift of sexual fulfillment; that she viewed her pregnancies as fulfillment of God's eternal command. She gladly dedicated her babies to God, gave them to the commune to raise as His children. In short, she ratified her acceptance, as a minor, of Pops's invitation to join his community at the age God, and not the state, had specified. Is the state right or is God right? Ironically, the world conflict now under way between political, fundamentalist Islam and the United States is a war between one religion and one state. Religions are not well suited to battle states; they are suited to compete with other religions, other ideas. So, too, Pops's creed could, and can, scarcely defy the state. It clearly succeeded on a personal basis inasmuch as no child who grew up in Pops's commune has risen up to complain. It succeeded as against the state only because it escaped the state's notice. But today state control is overwhelming and overweening. Pops won the battle and lost the war; and I think, on reflection, his death was timely, that his commune and his creed had outlasted their time. And this is true even if Pops was, as he said and as we believe, truly God's prophet. It is true because the State, with a capital S, is our new God and we are not any longer a Nation Under God but a Nation That Pretends To Be God, a State that intrudes upon our beliefs and on our bedrooms. Pops spoke in a sermon about that once, and he said that the day the state felt it had to add "under God" to the pledge of allegiance was the day it admitted its incompetence in matters of morals and of godliness. I like to think that the cause of Pops's commune's demise was not any defect of his creed but the end of an era. The end of the 1960s experimental communes, entities that had ceased to be viable in succeeding decades. But the big issue was that matter of party autonomy. After Pops, no leader had the charisma and the authority to dictate lifestyle, especially in matters of sex. Today only the state successfully asserts dictatorial power over the individual and denies at least some individuals the right either to choose for themselves, or to delegate that power to another: the essence of Pops's creed. Relevant to Pops's creed, the state acts in two matters: sex within the family and sex below the age that it arbitrarily may set from time to time. The definitions of disallowed relationship and of minimum age have both changed over time, which puts their integrity into doubt, as far as I am concerned. In this day and age, when nobody knows what are the limits of IVF, cloning, death by abortion and mechanical life support, I wonder what right the state has to define genetic danger, to define incest. One thinks of religions that encourage marriage of close relatives or require a boy to marry his brother's widow and those which allow polygamy. I ask: was Pops an outlaw because he was different? Was Pops a danger to women and children? Or was he just ahead of his time? Is attack upon him and his creed, an attack that he foresaw from time to time but which never occurred in his lifetime, a modern Crusade? A Crusade against a believing Christian? [If Jewish law allows uncle-niece marriage (I did some research on this and was referred by the county law librarian to Rhode Island Laws Sec. 15-1-4 (1958), General Laws 1896, Chap. 191 sec. 4 and to 305 N.Y. 486 (1953)) and if Muslim law allows cousin marriage and encourages polygamy, and if customary law throughout Africa permits polygamy and, in effect, free and easy sex of all kinds, where do the limits lie, and why? Does the civil law interference in family matters stem, really, from that Catholic impediment, that old canard, "affinity"? -- Carol] Pops always preached that state interference in matters of sex was a crime against nature, and that it was the state's artificial laws, not natural urges, that were repugnant to God. On the dais at a defloration ceremony he would point to the young girl's pubis, already illuminated by the spotlight, and assert it's natural beauty, perhaps stroking it as he did so. As he spread her legs to reveal her intimate parts he would say that nothing God has made could be less than beautiful and holy. His penis by then stiff and pulsating, still wet with the girl's saliva, he would mount her, he break through her hymen barrier, and the scene of beauty of his sliding penis in her wet vagina would become far greater than the sum of its parts. After finishing intercourse and with the girl deliriously happy and holy, Pops would always discourse upon urges, desires and God's law and remind us that we must repudiate the meddling interference and the artificial categorization of State and society. We must recall that the only distinctions known to God were gender and post-puberty adulthood. With that, he would consign the new female adult he had deflowered to the community of believers "for love of God and procreation". A parallel discourse would accompany Moms's introduction to sex of any boy, as to whom erection and ejaculation were cited as proof of God's involvement. The hugs and kisses that would ensue immediately afterwards at every defloration party were an implicit promise of intimacy soon, an expression of desire to experience sex with the new adult and to verify her (or his, as the case may be) sensuality: an acceptance of Pops's iconoclastic challenge. In other words, those hugs and kisses were a repudiation of the state's claim of authority. Is it pertinent to consider the problem of demographics in relation to the state's intervention in matters of religion and sex? Is it relevant to consider that believers of traditionalist religions have babies and those of modernist religions do not? Is it relevant to say that the state is not only itself deviant in its concept of sex and its prohibitions but that it is committing suicide? But what do I know: I am a house builder, not a philosopher and I rely on another to articulate my philosophy on my behalf. With my consent she has put "as told to" words in my mouth. I leave it to you to judge if she has edited well, if my words make sense. This has been my story. Thank you for reading. Jeremiah -- Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated. +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | alt.sex.stories.moderated ----- send stories to: | | FAQ: Moderator: | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Discuss this story and others in alt.sex.stories.d, look for subject {ASSD}| |Archive at Hosted by | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+