I like to look at the photos of Davidito in the book, curious to know what he is like. In one picture, he is in bed with Auntie Sara, naked with her hand on his thigh next to his penis. There are also bare-breasted pictures of Sue, another of Davidito’s nannies, with my young uncle.
Grandpa teaches that sex is pure and Godly and that it has been corrupted as something dirty and shameful by the Devil, who is deceiving God’s people. He says that if sex is pure and Godly, then why shouldn’t children engage in sex play with each other or with adults? “It’s all perfectly innocent after all if it is done with love,” he says. While fondling is fine, adult men should wait to have full sex until a girl has entered puberty, at least twelve, because an adult penis might physically damage a young girl if they are too small. It’s not loving to act in a way that can cause lasting or severe physical damage. But a boy can engage in sex earlier if he wishes.
It’s not a big deal to walk in on my parents having sex, though normally my father will growl, “Get out!” and I run, giggling. I never hear my father talk about sex, but my mother has no problem openly discussing it with any of us.
As a former free-love hippie, my mother readily accepts Grandpa’s teachings. When she was growing up in the early 1960s, wife-swapping and nudism were becoming popular. Though no one laid a hand on her as a child, she remembers how, at thirteen, when she was living in Hawaii, her friend’s parents walked around their house naked, following a Swedish trend gaining traction in the US. “It was perfectly natural,” she recalls. At fifteen, she had a secretarial job at Goodyear and was routinely pushed into closets by men trying to have sex with her. “No one thought anything of it,” she tells me.
With sex so casual and open, Patrick and I make up silly sex games when we’re supposed to be napping in the middle of the day. (“Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun!” my father says with a laugh when we ask to go outside to play instead of staying in during the hottest hours.) We do Rock, Paper, Scissors to see who will go first. When I win, as I usually do, I lie on my back and stare intently at the diamond shape I make with my fingers in front of my face. It is very important not to look at the other person during this game or it will be too embarrassing to play. Given how open my family is about sex, I don’t understand why I still feel embarrassed, like sex should be a secret. If the adults caught us, they’d just chuckle about “how cute that is!” and make fun of us until we are even more embarrassed.
Patrick pulls down my panties and his pants and puts his “pee pee” against my “pum pum” (which are what Mama Maria calls a penis and vagina in the Mo Letters) and bounces up and down like we’ve seen the adults do. Then we switch places to keep it fair.
I can’t see what all the excitement is about for the adults, but it is something to do at naptime and makes us giggle. Us kids are encouraged to experiment with sex as normal behavior. We are told all the time in the Mo Letters and their illustrated version for children, Kidz True Komics, that sex is good, normal, and healthy, and that Godly people have lots of it.
In a Mo Letter called Hooker for Jesus, there is a picture of a fisherman, who looks a bit like my father, holding a fishing rod with a long line and a large fishhook at the end. A naked woman is stabbed through the chest with his fishing hook. It’s her job to wiggle seductively and lure the Fish to bite the hook.
This is Flirty Fishing, which the Family women have been practicing for nearly ten years now. Grandpa says having sex with the Fish demonstrates your ultimate commitment to God and to Jesus: “HOOK THEM THROUGH HER FLESH! Crucify her flesh, Lord, on the Barb of Thy Spirit! O God, even if it penetrates, and crucify her flesh, impale her on the point of Thy Spirit that she may die, that those that feed of her flesh may be caught to live!”
The only trick is that the Fisherman must keep a good hold on his pole, or a big Fish might grab the female bait and swim away with her. That can happen if a woman who is FFing falls in love with her Fish and leaves the Family for him rather than the other way around.
Sometimes a Fish might join the Family, but they don’t have to; they are fulfilling God’s will by providing support and protection that they may not be able to do as effectively if they joined full-time. If we need a piece of equipment or something we can’t afford or get donated to us, the women will ask one of their Fish to buy it or give us the money.
On the weekends, my father takes the Family women, including my mothers, to the bar at the Mandarin Hotel in Macau, where Portuguese government officials and wealthy men hang out. They talk to the Systemite men to see if there are any Sheep willing to listen to God’s Word and dance with these sexy women. The women are very popular and get approached a lot. If the woman thinks a man is “Sheepy” and would listen about Jesus, she might invite him to have sex. She always tells him that she is spending time with him to save his soul, and the men are usually willing to be saved.
Men can Flirty Fish as well, but Grandpa says it doesn’t work as well. While male Fish are usually happy with just sex, female Fish often fall in love and want marriage. Some Family men FF their wives into the Family, but in general, men FFing doesn’t fulfill the Family’s goals of generating Kings, or wealthy supporters. In his Letters, Grandpa sympathizes with men struggling with jealousy because their wives are FFing, but he is harsh with women who don’t want to FF.
While women can’t refuse to FF, they can usually choose who they want to FF, unless leadership tells a woman to FF a particular Fish they think is important for the cause. If a leader asks, you don’t dare refuse, or you might get publicly rebuked in a Mo Letter.
Before we moved to Hac Sa, I didn’t like when my mother went out FFing in the evenings and left me behind at home. When I protested, she would read me the Kidz True Komics on FFing to explain why she had to go away and why I needed to be a good soldier and not cry, so she could do her job of winning souls for Jesus. But now I’m old enough to sit quietly when she is with her Fish, so sometimes she takes me with her. We ride in a fancy car with leather seats and all kinds of buttons for the windows and eat at a nice restaurant, where everything is clean and yummy. Then we go back to the man’s apartment, and I amuse myself in the living room while they go in the bedroom. I have to be very good on these trips or my mother won’t take me with her again.