JESUS NATION SEX REBEL: Mini-chapter 2

Yesterday we met Adam White, who's sitting in NYC's Central Park with a crowd of onlookers, waiting to view a burning at the stake of a terrorist. It seem that America has changed: a few decades after 9/11, there's been another big attack and Christian evangelists are running the country now. Here's chapter 2, when we meet Eve Trent.

2. THE BODY

Was this a body any man could want?

Eve blushed. Was this a question any self-respecting Christian woman should ask?

She looked past the slogan on her mirror -- no mirror was sold without this slogan, which had to be engraved across the top, the full width, so it would always register, no matter how often one looked.

SODOMY CAUSES TERRORISM.

Everything that invited a look – mirrors, TV screens, computer screens, movie screens, doors, windows, teashirts, baseball caps, billboards, car windows, traffic lights, book covers, writing paper, schoolbooks – bore the slogans of the Reformation, of which the stricture against sodomy was a mainstay. Sodomy was the foremost sin in Jesusland, the most heinous, worse than murder. God had punished Sodom and Gomorrah back in Biblical times with total destruction because of this sin, and He had punished America with the Great Attack and the death of hundreds and thousands for this same sin.

Eve’s body looked back at her, its nakedness querying the blush in her face: is it Christian to ask whether a man would want your body?

Of course it was, she replied, still blushing. She was God’s vessel. He had chosen this body to bear children. He had decreed the wanting of men to be the cause of childbirth: He made men’s retinas connect to their loins like strings -- their eyes, plucked by the sight of female breasts, bottoms and thighs, reverberated in the singing of their sex organs.

So.

What did she have in the way of pertinent fleshliness to make the centers of men stand to attention? How sexy was her body? Did it have the power to drive men up the wall, crazed with lust, eager to abandon all scruple in a mad quest to possess her?

It was not a question she’d thought to ask herself in years. But today was her thirty-fifth birthday. She had shed more than half the finite number of eggs she possessed. Now her glass was half-empty. That was why she stood naked in front of a mirror -- to study her appearance with the same scientific detachment she exercised to observe the ebb and flow of desire in one of her sexually disturbed patients. A matter of personal science: objectifying herself so she could observe her body through men’s eyes.

She gazed at the past, from when she was pre-menstrual and flat-chested, to when her breasts sprouted and new tufts of hair thickened between her legs, to her full frame of the present. She glanced at the years ahead, to when her vagina would dry up and her pubes turn gray with age. Lest the thought depress her, she gave both past and future a mischievous wink.

So, what were her present assets? She smiled. Her breasts. Still remarkably firm. Inviting, in the argot of romance books from her teenage reading. Anyone who didn’t know her might think she was the sensuous type – some experienced voluptuary, ripe and dangerous. A classic femme fatale as familiar with the arts of love as Einstein was with the secrets of the universe.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Eve Trent was as strait-laced a character as any devout Beloved. Her breasts might say she carried a lifetime of sexual lore at her fingertips. But when she opened her mouth, the authentically socialized Eve was heard. Proper and well-mannered. The refined lady. Churched. A veritable bride of Christ.

Eve weighed her breasts in her hands, scientifically, two lumps of flesh bemythed by the chimera of suckling so beloved by infants and so marked in the fantasies of men. She asked herself that on-the-nose question again – was this a body any man would want?

Her breasts answered for her. Yes, they said, it was.

Cheeky lumps.