The following excerpt is from a Question and Answer article in Evangelical Michael Pearl’s No Greater Joy magazine (March-April 2019 edition):
Mike Pearl,
I know you don’t care who you make mad, so you are my last hope. Us guys need a voice.
I am 18. My church ministry is to teach eight guys, ages 13–15, guitar lessons on Sunday evening. We discuss the Bible and pray at each lesson. Here is our problem:
We have a fun youth group and a great youth pastor. At the youth meetings, one girl always wears a dress and usually during the meeting she opens her legs about five inches and creates the “shaft.” When she sits on the swivel stool it is really bad. Don’t laugh.
I talked to my mom and asked her to talk to the girl. Mom (divorced) just reasoned with me that you can’t really see anything but a flash of white, but mom just didn’t get it. It is like the most private thing of a girl and suddenly it is there in my face and it is REALLY distracting. I make an effort to avoid the girl, but I always forget and get shot with the shaft. Then my mind goes nuts and my body does its thing so I am freaked if suddenly called to stand up front. It is not that particular girl—it is just the shaft. Any female that spreads her legs would get the same unwelcome response. I am sick of the guys having to bear the pain. Girls need to know that guys don’t WANT every guy in the room to gawk at their girl’s shaft. It seems lowlife.
The guys in my class talked about how to avoid looking down the shaft. The 13-year-olds really struggle. They never participate in games due to the possibility of the bulge. I went to the youth pastor and then to pastor, but they each said they were sorry but their position was delicate because one word and the girl or her mother would probably get offended and accuse them of lusting and they would lose their job and maybe marriage. Us guys have prayed for an open ear from someone in authority, but so far we have not found how to fix the problem.
Now this girl wants to join our guitar class, and us guys are like, NO. No way. I took a stand, told WHY, and it did not come out the way I thought. I have been told all kinds of stupid nonsense about submitting to authority and how we should not be this or that against females. Heck, I like females. It’s just that church is not the place to be turned on. I don’t like being manipulated. Everyone says she doesn’t understand how guys are and thinks that when guys look at her it means they like her. Then all I have to say is SOMEONE in authority is failing to do their job in explaining things to her.
Everybody complains about cigarette smoke being blown in their face; well we are having something blown in our face. Just one girl controls all us guys. It’s wrong.
If the church doesn’t let me keep my guys’ guitar class, I am considering starting a church in my house so we can do it without the shaft!
It is hard being a young man nowadays with porn everywhere. It is even more discouraging when it sits across from you on a high stool and spreads wide just as you get ready to pray for the meal.
Tell them.
I won’t print Pearl’s answer, but he does side with the man, If you are interested in reading his answer, you can find it here.
Let’s all stop and pity this poor, helpless horn dog of a man. FEAR THE SHAFT! This girl evidently revs this guy up sexually and he doesn’t know what to do. So, he blames everyone but himself for his stiff penis. Still think religious indoctrination doesn’t cause harm? This man is a textbook example of someone whose mind has been filled with Evangelical nonsense, rendering him unable to think or act normally.
I actually feel sorry for the guy. He feels guilt over his sexuality, which, of course, is the goal of quite a bit of the indoctrination he’s been bombarded with his entire life.
And I’m adding this usage of shaft to my lexicon, at least among friends.
I probably shouldn’t find it humorous… but I really do.
This poor guy isn’t going to ever have a normal sex life.
:::sigh:::
Perhaps he will one day when he sees organized/ institutionalized religion for the bunch of shit it really is, and finds the exit.
I never heard it called that before.
I am sixty-one years old, and I thought I had heard every possible euphemism for male and female genitalia, but this is a new one on me too. 🙂
It’s not even female genitalia, it’s the five-inch or so opening when a girl doesn’t sit with her knees pressed tightly together. It’s not like she’s trying to turn the kid on, she’s just sitting there, wearing a skirt.
It seems to be a common Evangelical failing: when everything about sex is forbidden, everything reminds the kid of sex. I agree with the comments upthread. Unless he gets away from that atmosphere, he’s never going to have a normal sex life. He’ll be consumed with sex, but always feel guilty about it. Somebody needs to tell him it’s not the girl’s fault, it’s the fault of his church’s teachings.
Yeah. When I think of “the shaft” it ain’t in reference to female bits. Just sayin’.
My thought exactly. 🙂
This is one of those linguistic problems where one word can be used with two different and often opposite meanings. Makes for good double entendre jokes because of the confusion. And who decided to call the gap area between the legs a shaft, anyway? Was the confusion deliberate on the part of the church? Or am I reading too much into this?
This is what turns them into pervs. Because they’re to guilty to get some “shaft” when he gets older he’ll realize what he missed out on and start preying on teenagers to relive his youth. That’s my theory anyway of why evangelical men have such a bad record with molesting teenagers.
If the black collar crime series is any indicator it would probably be easier to count the number of teenage girls who haven’t been molested. If the cream of the crop pastors are that bad can you imagine what the average evangelical jamoke guy is like.
This “letter” has to be written by Pearl himself, just as I suspect a lot of Debi’s letters are, too. Michael is wanting to let out one of his pet peeves, and a letter is the way to do this. It’s like saying, “I’ve got a friend…”, when you are too embarrassed to ask for advice yourself.
I kept expecting to get to a punch line, like a blog written by Matthew Pierce, or even a College Humor piece.
If it’s real, then there are some steps you can take. It’s easy enough to look away. Does he look away when he watches the reporterettes on Fox News? If that doesn’t work, change seating arrangements.
Maybe this poor girl has no clue that she’s spreading her legs and showing off her underwear. Let her know. I find it hard to believe that a pastor, deacon and a female member can’t go to her mother and speak about this. No parent in their right mind would think someone is being a pervert……unless there are other perverted things going on. The parent may not agree and think you are nuts, but I don’t think pervert is going to be the first thought. Adults know how young boys are.
This is a screwed up letter and Pearl’s response was even worse.
“The Shaft” sounds like the title of a really bad 70s porn movie.
It’s funny/not funny how fundies are obsessed with making females wear skirts but no matter what females wear the males are still going to be horn dogs because everything sexual is hyped up to be hypersexual.
I guess this is why in middle school at the fundy Christian school all the girls (forced to wear skirts) were instructed on proper sitting while wearing said skirts. I am 49 years old, and in the 31 years since graduating from that school I avoid dresses and skirts. It’s mostly because I associate skirts with imposed gender based dress codes and behaviors, and I really don’t take well to being g told what to do when the rules don’t make a kick of sense to me. But I also feel physically restricted by skirts.
I do feel sorry for the poor horn dog boy. Being attracted to other people is normal – being told it’s a sin is not normal.
I agree with Ian that this is a made-up letter. This is a 73-yr-old trying desperately to sound like a teenager and, to my ear, failing.
So what do we make of the letter? It’s an example of how the patriarchal church leaders think teenage men and women think and act, a projection of their own misogyny, and a lesson on how the fundies try to pass their guilt-ridden, anti-female mentality down through the generations.
I find it hard to imagine how screwed up a young man would be who would take Pearl’s words seriously. The letter and the reply remind my of the bizarre ramblings of the incel movement, and the incipient violence that festers at the core of their misogyny.
So let me get this straight. In the Fundamentalist world it is wrong for girls to wear pants because they are too revealing. Yet it is also not good for girls to wear a skirt / dress because they might reveal their “shaft”? I’m not sure what in the world they are supposed to wear then?
Good point. If girls wore pants, like loose “Mom jeans,” not leggings, that would completely cover the taboo subject and eliminate the problem of boys feeling guilty about sexual arousal over the “shaft.” But the church does not want to eliminate the problem. The church encourages the problem of boys feeling guilty, then getting upset about girls. Right?
I really believe Mikey has dementia or something that has surfaced recently. His rantings have gotten worse and even weirder. This “letter” and his response are a whole new level of messed up.
I feel so sorry for the girl, whether fictional or not, because she represents all females in fundieland. It’s a messed up way to live. I’m so happy to be out of it.
OH Lordy! This letter and Michael Pearl’s answer are just nuts!
I clicked on the link to “Pearl’s” answer, and—although I have heard of Debbie and Michael Pearl—I didn’t immediately connect that it was their website that had this supposed letter and Micheal’s reply.
Anyhow, I read the answer to the young man’s dilemma as a parody, and thought, HA, HA, this guy is just mocking the letter writer’s crazy panic about a woman being is the same proximity to him. And isn’t it really funny when he advises the guy: “Only castration would diminish your drive. It is your responsibility to be an overcomer. Flee, and again I say, flee.”
But I guess the joke is on me—Micahel Pearl is dead serious. What a kook.
But, on the other hand, Michael advising that the guy has to be the one to run away at least isn’t insisting that the woman has to be the one to leave the group or dress differently in order to fix the problem of this guys crazy sexual anxiety *problem*. Maybe it’s progress, in that even Michael Pearl is not advocating for that.