All The Women He Didn’t Want to Have Sex With

Once upon a time there was a man named Joseph Smith, who absolutely, positively did NOT want to have sex with anyone other than his wife, Emma.

He certainly did not want to have sex with their hot sixteen-year-old housemaid, Fanny Alger, and in absolutely no way did he want to have sex with his teenage wards, sisters Emily and Eliza Partridge. Anyone who says that he did is an anti-Mormon propagandist who is trying to destroy your faith because they’re jealous that you’re a member of God’s One True Church.

In fact, there may have been as many as forty women, including one fourteen-year-old girl, whom Joseph Smith did not want to put his penis into.

But Heavenly Father had other plans for that very sacred dick.

Several times, beginning around 1834, Joseph was doing a very normal, non-sex prayer, and then Heavenly Father showed up with some unsolicited directives.

“Joseph,” the Creator of the Universe probably said, “I’m pretty upset that you only have that one wife, who, let’s be real, is not getting any younger. I command you to marry an additional wife, and she better be young, supple, and gorgeous.”

“Oh please, I beg of you, no,” Joseph probably said. “Heavenly Father, I plead with you. Don’t make me do this monstrous thing. Emma can be kind of a bitch sometimes, and you’re not wrong about the getting older thing, but she’s the only woman for me.”

It was like Heavenly Father wasn’t even listening. “I’m thinking maybe your housemaid, Fanny Alger. She’s pretty fine.”

“Father, please, I cannot bear it,” Joseph pleaded. “I can’t bear thinking about peeling Fanny’s clothes off of her, slowly, tantalizingly, one at a time, stroking my fingers along her collarbone and kissing the hollow of her neck. I am repulsed by the thought of how it might feel to cup the luscious globes of her perfect breasts in my hands. It fills me with horror to imagine taking one of her pert, pink nipples in my mouth and teasing it with my teeth, as my hands explore her velvet flesh. It makes me want to vomit when I imagine parting her legs to find her sleek, wet nether lips, or feeling her body arch against mine in unbearable, exquisite, shattering pleasure.”

“I know I’m asking a lot,” Heavenly Father said, “but you’re my One True Prophet, so you really have to do what I say on this.”

Joseph probably bowed his head in humility, sorrow, and surrender. “Oh, Heavenly Father, I would sooner die. Nonetheless, thy will, not mine, be done.”

And thus it came to pass when Emma discovered her husband and her teenage maid getting their freak on in their marital house, Joseph told her that nailing Fanny was okay because he’d married her first.

“Come again?” Emma probably said. “Because it sounds like you just said you married her. But I’m your actual wife, and I’m standing right here.”

“Oh, yeah, I mean, of course you’re still my wife, too. Fanny’s my second wife.” Joseph probably jerked his head at Fanny so she could scoot out of the room before Emma started throwing things. “But seriously, I swear it was not my idea, it was God’s. He made me. You can’t be mad at me for following God’s commandments.”

“Oh, I’ll just bet I can, though.”

“Here.” Joseph went for his pants and hunted around in his pocket before producing a piece of paper, which held his record of the revelation from God, which made polygamy a thing. “Look, I’m not the one making this stuff up. It’s a divine commandment, and I have to obey because I’m the Prophet.”

Emma snatched the paper out of his hand. “Prophesy this,” she probably said, and threw it in the fire.

And this is why women can’t have the Priesthood, because we react irrationally to completely holy and normal things like your husband secretly marrying your teenage maid and fucking her in the next room.

[ASIDE: My junior year of college, my debate partner hooked up with my ex-boyfriend, who was also on the debate team. Cody and Tiffany seemed to enjoy having very loud sex in my personal space - by which I mean, the bathroom of my hotel room, where I was trying to get actual debate work done, or in one of the practice debate rooms, where I was also trying to get actual debate work done. Tiffany was being loud and ecstatic, I knew, solely to get under my skin. I was sure about this because I’d had a lot of sex with Cody, which meant my data set was large enough to know that there was no way those orgasms she was screaming through the hotel wall were anything but theatre.

Cody and I were all the way broken up when he and Tiffany started fucking each other ostentatiously. I had made the complete transition from desperate, broken-hearted longing to perpetually annoyed contempt. But it still pissed me off that they were fucking each other near me (although it might have pissed me off less if they’d been quiet and respectful instead of making it loudly impossible to go take a shit).

I can’t imagine the level of incandescent rage involved if it’s your HUSBAND, and you still love him, and not only does he have no plans to stop raping the teenager, but he insists that GOD MADE HIM DO IT. END OF ASIDE.]

Men who practice polygamy get such a bad rap. Everyone’s like, “OMG, it’s super predatory for a 40-year-old guy to pressure a 15-year-old into marrying him,” or, “Holy crap, what a shitty arrangement, all these women forced to wait on some decrepit creeper whose two hobbies are The Book of Mormon and viagra.”

Here’s the thing about polygamy, though, you doubters and heretics: these wonderful, Godly men did NOT want to do it.

These holy and sacred and very spiritual men were like, “Please, no.” If it had been up to them, they would have had missionary position sex with the same woman for the rest of their lives. They were all the way virtuous and would never have even looked at a woman lustfully without gouging out their own eyes, like Jesus commanded.

Brigham Young may have married fifty-six women - but this was really a huge sacrifice on his part, because this was the last thing on earth he wanted. In fact, he said, “. . . the introduction of the doctrine of polygamy was the first time in my life that I desired the grave, and I could hardly get over it for a long time. And when I saw a funeral, I felt to envy the corpse its situation.”

I mean, this guy was SUFFERING. You can just feel his anguish. How he must have closed his eyes and thought of the Celestial Kingdom every time a girl 30 years his junior stripped to her skivvies and stretched out on his sacred bed! How he must have prayed for the strength to continue servicing all of his wives, as their number grew, his age advanced, and treatments for erectile dysfunction remained more than a century in the future! There must have been so much fasting and prayer! (Well, prayer anyway. Photographs of Brigham Young indicate the first Utah prophet did not miss many meals.)

Brigham Young and a smattering of his wives, at various ages. It’s also possible this is Brigham Young and a random assortment of 19th-century women in old-timey clothes. It’s not like I put these pics together myself.

Somehow, in spite of all of his anguish and despair, Brigham Young steeled himself to this onerous chore. And it’s a good thing he did, because as it turns out Heavenly Father is a polygamist. This is probably why he was so pushy about making his Prophets do it.

“Oh, did you think I just had the one?” Heavenly Father probably said during one of his long conversations with Brigham Young. “Yeah, no, common misconception. Not only do I have more wives than I can count - and this is literal, I’m not great with numbers - but Bible Adam was a polygamist, too. Eve was just one of his wives. Come on, think about it. Could I populate an entire planet with the babies from a single wife? That would take forever.”

“But surely, time is merely a construct to you,” Brigham Young probably said. “You are the Creator of the Universe - couldn’t you merely advance the pregnancy to the relevant point in, like, five seconds or something?”

“Excuse me, which of us here is God?” God said, probably. “Because last time I checked, it wasn’t you.”

So Brigham Young came back to the Mormon community with the revelatory insight that not only was God Himself in a polygamous relationship, polygamy would be the only kind of marriage that existed in the Celestial Kingdom, which probably came as a nasty shock to the men and women who were doing the monogamy thing.

“Seriously?” said the faithful Latter-day Saint men who were hoping, like all the other virtuous men, to keep the number of wives at one. “We all have to do this? Oh, no! Anything but this! Also, how are we feeling about 15 as the age of consent? How about 14?”

So the large Mormon families grew and grew, filling multiple houses and creating scenarios in which men introduced themselves to their own children as if they were meeting for the first time every time they connected because the census was getting too large to keep up with, much in the way that Ronald Reagan once introduced himself to his own teenage son.

It was a difficult life to live, but finally Brigham Young managed to fight his way through all the pussy to get to a point of acceptance. In fact, polygamy was so righteously important, Brigham said, that nobody could get to the Celestial Kingdom unless they were polygamists.

And then - the worst happened. A catastrophe of epic proportions.

The Mormon leadership of Utah territory decided that they wanted to become the state of Utah, and the Federal Government said, “Okay, cool, you can be a state, but only if you stop doing the polygamy thing. It’s weirding everybody out.”

At first it seemed like this was an intractable problem. If Utah wanted to be part of the Union, every adult Mormon in the territory would have to condemn themselves to eternal damnation, because polygamy was the only way to get a seat in The Good Place.

Fortunately for the Mormons, Heavenly Father one-hundred percent changed his mind about polygamy at the EXACT SAME TIME. It was almost like He’d planned for this exact scenario.

“Okay, listen,” Heavenly Father probably said to Wilford Woodruff, who was the Prophet at the time. “I know I said that you could only go to heaven if you were a polygamist. But I’ve been giving it some thought, and I’m thinking about walking back that policy.”

Wilford Woodruff was upset, of course. I mean, he’d spent all those years slaving away in the beds of a dozen nubile young women, and now he was discovering that he’d suffered for nothing. “Hang on,” he probably said. “You’re walking it back? How can you walk it back? I thought it was holy immutable law!”

“I’m Heavenly Father,” Heavenly Father said. “I can do whatever I want. Also, it’s super important to me that Utah becomes a state because reasons.”

Of course, all of the men were really, really relieved. They weren’t concerned about the vast number of unwed mothers who would populate the streets of Salt Lake City once ninety percent of their marriages were annulled. They were just like, “Yay! From here on out, I get to only have sex with that first wife, that one I’ve been married to for 35 years! No more hot 15-year-olds!”

And we know this is true because once Mormon men were allowed to only have sex with one wife and nobody else, that’s exactly what they did. No Mormon Church leader was ever involved in horrifying sex crimes against minors, and no leaders in the Mormon Church have ever been involved in covering it up, assuming that it happened, which it totally didn’t.

Which is good, because I have a long list of people I totally do NOT want to throat punch, not even a little. I absolutely, positively do not want to jab my fingers into a LDS church leader’s eye sockets, and I certainly in no way want to reach out and trip one of those prophetic male nonagenarians so they stumble into a koi pond, except the koi have been replaced by piranhas. I want to not do that SO HARD.

Boy, am I hoping that Heavenly Father doesn’t have other plans.