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In Reply to: code language posted by Karmageddon on March 09, 2005 at 11:15:05:
"I don't subscribe to the theory that the sexual ethos of the Family was different in the early days."
I agree with that statement in one sense. Berg's perverse sexuality was always there from the begining. Stephen Kent's article "The psychosexual history of David Berg" makes that very clear. That sexual ethos gradually made its way down from the top, first confined to leadership, and eventually filtered down to all.
But in those early years in certain places, such as the region where I joined in 1972, there was no sexual ethos to speak of, at least not that I was aware of. During my first year, celibacy was the order of the day, "dating" was forbidden, and anyone wishing to get mated had to get approval from leadership.
I am certain, now, that leadership was probably already imitating some of Berg's sexual behaviour, but for a lowly member like me things didn't really begin to change until "Revolutionary Sex" came out. Until then I thought even masturbation was wrong, and I still remember Charan (sp? Job's wife) reading that letter to us at the Burlington camp at the end of 1972. I remember thinking that Job must have been too embarrassed to read it, as he was the one who usually read the new letters. And right after that session was done, all the single guys made a rush for the bathrooms.
Even then, for people like me, sexual sharing didn't happen for years after that. In fact, I was on the road in Japan when the Flirty Fishing letter came out. The guy I was with, Brother Sun, decided to put it into action and had sex with a woman who had paid for our hotel room. He had left the door unlocked for her, and they had sex right in the bed next to me. Of course, he reported it to leadership, thinking that he was just obeying the letters. He got severely rebuked for that and was told to apologize to me. Several years later, he wrote a testimony in one of TF pubs about how he had met his wife, Deborah, on a train. I was with him then, we were coming back to Tokyo from Sendai. What struck me about his published testimony though, was that he claimed he was a virgin when he met her. I was really shocked by that because I knew different. I guess getting rebuked by leadership had altered his memory.
More evidence that shows that the sexual ethos depended on where you were is the fact that many years later I was in a home in Japan with Cedar Wood/Ben Carpenter. He told me that he had been at the reporting office in England (Bromely?) when he and others heard about that ffing adventure I described. He said that everyone there thought Brother Sun had done the right thing, and they didn't understand why the Japan leadership had rebuked him. I had also reported another sexual episode with a non-member I had while on a different road trip, and Ben said that when they heard reports like these, everyone was excited to go to Japan. By the way, I also got rebuked by leadership for that second incident. I guess they thought only they were allowed to have sexual adventures.
