661: But That's What Happened

Ira Glass

Whoa.

Ira Glass

Yeah, that seems pretty blatant. That seems like hard to make a mistake about.

Ira Glass

And so that is going to be our show today, two stories that, I have to say, are eye-opening. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act 1-- "The Old Man on My Shoulder." This first story, when the producers were working on it, started doing interviews for the story, it seemed like every single interview they came back so surprised at what they were learning. They really set out having no idea what they would find. A warning-- this story has sexual content. It's probably not right for children. And it begins with something that happened to our producer, Elna Baker.

Elna Baker

A few months ago I was talking to a guy I know, Rory, when Mormonism came up. "You grew up Mormon? You have to meet my fiancee, Reagan," he told me. "She was Mormon, too. You guys will have so much in common." I know that's like saying, you're black, meet my other black friend. But in this case, he was right.

Within an hour of meeting Reagan, we were singing church songs together, like (SINGING) When I grow up, I want to be a mother and have a family. One little, two little, three little babies of my own. Of all the jobs for me, I'll choose no other. I'll have a family. Four little, five little, six little babies in my home.

All this while Rory looked on in horror. Reagan says that Rory is constantly bowled over by the things she tells him.

Elna Baker

Reagan's referring to the Mormon practice of confessing your sexual sins to the bishop. This usually starts when you're 12, for boys and girls. Reagan told Rory about a time she was confessing, and the bishop rose from his desk and put his hand on her knee. Even as an adult in her 30s telling the story, she didn't totally understand how shocking this was, but Rory did.

Elna Baker

It was nice to talk to someone else about this. From the ages of 12 to 27, I was supposed to walk into my bishop's office and confess anytime I did anything sexual. But unlike old-fashioned Catholic confession, there was no curtain or anonymity. And Mormon bishops, they're not paid or trained clergy. They don't wear robes.

They are men who are chosen by the church to volunteer their time and serve as basically pastors for a two-to-five-year period. They keep their regular jobs. One of my bishops, a good one, was a food scientist who helped invent Pop Rocks. Another was an investment banker named Chad.

I'd sit across from Chad in a little office at church and admit to a sexual encounter. And Chad would ask follow-up questions. "Did you go to first base or second? He put his hands where? Was it under the bra, or over the bra? Did you like it?"

To be forgiven of sexual sin, I was required to tell the bishop. So while I often felt ashamed or humiliated in the room, I never questioned the process itself. It was routine, like going to the dentist. You turned yourself in whenever there was anything to report. And on top of that, once or twice a year, you were required to go to this thing called a worthiness interview.

Everyone did this, no exception, from the ages of 12 to 18. These were like checkups for your spirituality. The bishop would ask you a series of questions like, do you believe in God? Are you a full tithe payer? Are you honest in your dealings with your fellow man? In the midst of these questions about your faith, he'd ask if you obey the law of chastity. Reagan's first worthiness interview was pretty confusing.

Elna Baker

When Reagan was 16, she said she finally got a boyfriend to experiment with. And she did neck and pet with him. But whatever fun she had was gone the second it was over.

Elna Baker

This is the story she told her fiancee, Rory.

Elna Baker

For penance you put together a plan that requires frequent check-ins, and you do assignments, like reading church literature about not having sex. For a while you can't take the sacrament, our version of communion. This can feel like public shaming, like everyone notices. It's incredibly embarrassing because if you're a young woman, the assumption is it's sex related. Reagan's bishop set up more meetings with her.

Elna Baker

One morning last December, I opened up Facebook and saw this petition going around by a Mormon named Sam Young. He used to be a bishop, and he was calling on the church to stop these sexually explicit interviews. This was the first time I'd ever heard them referred to as sexually explicit.

He posted a list of 29 questions different church members said that they'd been asked in their interviews with their bishops. As I read down the list, I realized that I had been asked 13 of them. Questions like, do you masturbate? Where and how did your boyfriend touch you? Where were his fingers? Were your nipples hard? Were you wet?

It took seeing them all together for me to realize how bad it actually was. There were stories of abuse on Sam's website. Some are extreme, like bishops who convinced children that if they masturbated with them, the desire to do it would go away. I was never physically abused, just asked questions.

As a bishop, Sam said he never asked these questions, and he was never asked them as a kid. He found out about them from a friend whose son was asked about masturbation. Sam couldn't believe it. He posted about it on Facebook, and the stories came flooding in.

Of his six daughters, four told him that they'd been asked if they masturbated. One of his youngest said she didn't know what the word meant. She was 12. So she looked it up on the internet, and this introduced her to porn. Sam thought if he brought all this to the attention of the church, they'd stop these explicit questions.

The church response was that bishops are not supposed to be, quote, "unnecessarily probing or invasive in their questions." But what's necessary and unnecessary is left up to each individual bishop to decide. The church doesn't define exactly where the line is. As the story got more heat, the church issued new guidelines this spring, saying kids could have a parent or an adult in the room when meeting with the bishop.

The church claims this had nothing to do with Sam's petition, but clearly he had touched a nerve. He was excommunicated from the church in September for acting, quote "in clear, open, and deliberate public opposition to the church." And a lot of Mormons online resisted his claims.

They defended their bishops, saying they hadn't been asked inappropriate or disturbing questions. That these incidents were isolated and unusual, or that Sam was making these stories up. That they hadn't happened at all. But I knew they'd happened, because they'd happened to me. And they stuck with me. I had rarely talked about it with any friends, and never my family.

Even all these years later, I feel like it's my fault. That I somehow deserved these humiliating encounters. And talking to Reagan and reading the stories on Sam's website, I wondered, how widespread is this? It just so happens that we have another person on staff who grew up Mormon. So together, we just started calling people, some we knew, some we didn't, some were practicing Mormons, others had left the church. And people definitely remembered their bishop interviews.

Elna Baker

We reached 10 people. And to our surprise, all 10 said that they had had at least one experience with a bishop where they felt the line of questioning went too far, or became overly explicit. These interactions left them feeling deeply uncomfortable and ashamed, to the point that most of them had never shared their stories with anyone. This led me to ask my siblings, and of the five of us, four had had bad experiences.

I don't want to say every Mormon feels this way about their bishops. The therapist I contacted, who specializes in sex and relationships, and works with current and former church members, estimated that bishop interviews only come up with one out of eight of her clients. And talking about chastity is just a small part of what bishops do. Lots of people have positive experiences with their bishops, including me, and the people we talked to.

Yes, some bishops went too far, but we had others who didn't. You get a new one every few years. But bishop interviews can be hugely consequential for your life. To attend any Mormon-run college, you need your bishop to give you what's called an ecclesiastical endorsement, which is basically a letter stating that you're a faithful Mormon obeying the church's teachings.

I talked to a woman named Alisha. She's from Utah in her early 40s. When she was 20, she went to get her ecclesiastical endorsement to go to BYU, Brigham Young University. Alisha had previously had sex with her boyfriend, but says she stopped, and had been abstinent for a while. She hadn't confessed it yet, though.

And her feeling was that if she was going to a church school, she wanted to do it the right way. She wanted to be on the up and up. She figured the interview would go OK if she just told the truth because she'd only had positive experiences with bishops before. And so she made an appointment with her bishop.

Elna Baker

He asked her a bunch of other sexual questions. She said yes to all of them, and confessed she had sex with her boyfriend.

Elna Baker

And eventually got it, but not without paying a price. She was too scared to report him. She thought it could backfire. And she had to keep meeting with him once a week. She said she always felt sick beforehand, and tried to think of excuses not to go.

Elna Baker

I grew up watching this church video that primed me for the role I was supposed to play in the bishop's office. It's called "Godly Sorrow Leads to Repentance." And our teachers would show it to us when they slacked on preparing a lesson. In the video, a young woman named Kim visits her bishop because she's going to get married, and in order to enter the temple, she needs a signed document. A temple recommend, that says she's worthy. Kim sits across the desk from her bishop and he asks--

Elna Baker

The bishop waits for her to say more. When Kim doesn't, he nods his head and gestures.

Elna Baker

The screen fades and cuts back to the bishop, implying that time has passed, and Kim has spilled her story.

Elna Baker

The bishop tells her that this is much more severe than she thinks.

Elna Baker

We saw this film a lot, and the cutaway really made an impression. My classmates and I would be like, what do you think she said? So when my bishop first asked me about masturbating when I was 14, it seemed appropriate for us to have an explicit conversation. We were just living in the cutaway.

So I told all. I couldn't lie to the bishop. That would be like lying to God. And I was taught that any sexual act I committed before marriage was the second most serious sin next to murder. It was terrifying. I masturbated once when I was 12. I wasn't even aware of what I was doing. I just knew something unusual happened.

Two years later, I learned the church's position on masturbation, which is that it's almost as bad as sex. And I knew sex was almost as bad as murder. When I connected the dots, I was devastated. Unless I repented, I was told I'd be separated from my family in the afterlife, because no unclean thing is allowed in heaven.

So I go tell the bishop. But, of course, I'd masturbate again. And each time, I'd immediately be hit with the thought that I was being so selfish. Why would I choose this feeling over my family? The only way to undo it, to get my family back, was to confess.

My dad was a bishop for five years. When I told him recently about the questions my siblings and I were asked, it upset him. He told me he'd never asked anyone those questions, and didn't remember being asked them as a kid. So when exactly did bishops start asking these detailed and embarrassing questions?

I talked to three different historians, all Mormon, but independent of the church. And they said the answer was simple. The shift started happening in the '70s. It was the church's reaction to the sexual revolution. They were worried about promiscuity. Someone at MormonLeaks, our version of WikiLeaks, put me in touch with a historian who has a collection of old church manuals that are written specifically for bishops.

Before the 1970s, the manuals told bishops to search for, quote, "immoral or un-Christianlike practices." They don't spell it out with a lot of details. But then in 1975, explicit questions first appear in a bishop's guide which tells bishops to ask prospective missionaries and other young adults whether they've been involved in, quote, "any of the following-- pre or extramarital sexual intercourse, homosexual practices, sexual deviations, petting--" then in parentheses, "the fondling of another's body, and masturbation. Hesitation or uneasiness may suggests that a question needs to be pursued further." End quote.

When I read this, I was blown away. I felt like, here it is, the blueprint for the system I grew up in. That was 1975. Worthiness interviews with young people officially began in the 1980s. And in the '90s, a pamphlet came out which bishops were told to use in those interviews.

It was called "For the Strength of Youth." On the cover there was a black and white drawing of a bunch of teenagers, girls with perms and shoulder pads, boys who looked popular. You got one when you turned 12. I loved mine.

Anyway, the pamphlet included a list of forbidden sexual acts like petting, masturbation, and also just thinking too much about sex. The church encouraged bishops to discuss the specific acts listed in the pamphlet during their interviews with young people. And they were free to ask whatever follow-ups they felt they needed to. This is how the system still works today.

I had a feeling of love for my bishops. I still do. They were seen as the father of our congregation. You felt like you knew them and they knew you. They'd ask about your classes at college or follow up on your daily life. When my father was a bishop, I watched him volunteer his time in between a hectic work schedule and home life to help people find apartments, pay for groceries, be their grief counselor, visit them when they were sick.

He genuinely loved and helped these people because he cared about them. And my bishops cared about me. I felt relieved when I left the office. Repenting to them lifted the weight of the guilt I'd been carrying. And often, it felt like they were just as uncomfortable asking the questions as I was answering them.

But regardless of the intention or behavior of any one bishop, bishop interviews followed me into every sexual encounter. All the women I spoke to had this same problem. For example, I learned that my bishops were more lenient if I wasn't the person initiating. So when I was with guys, I'd strategically make sure they made every move, which meant I was constantly leaning against walls, pressing my boobs out and telepathically communicating, please sir, just touch one boob.

But even now in my 30s, I have a really hard time with sex. Shocker. I'm no longer Mormon. I haven't been for eight years. And still, when I fool around with someone, there's a voice in my head that keeps track of what I'm doing, like a ref docking points for each progressive move.

The only way to get this voice to shut up is to leave my body. So I'm there, but not there. The following morning, I wake up to this voice telling me all the things I've done wrong. This leads to panic and anxiety.

And it's not like I just feel bad for a minute. The feeling lingers for days. Writing this story, I've realized something I never put together until now. I still feel bad for losing my virginity before I got married. I was 28. I wanted to do it the right way.

I'd made promises to God, and to the people in my life that I'd wait for marriage. I wanted so badly to live up to their expectations. And when I made the choice to have sex, I knew what it meant. I made it knowing I would lose my family for eternity, my community, and my religion. And in spite of all that, I still did it.

And what kind of a person does that make me? This is what I feel every time I have sex. I've wondered how much of this is related to these bishop interviews. And I asked a few people how they thought it impacted them. A couple women said it was easier to have sex if they didn't feel pleasure. The guilt was directly linked to enjoying it. This woman, Courtney, said something I related to a lot.

Elna Baker

This has consequences. Dr. Jennifer Finlayson-Fife is the sex therapist I talked to. She's a practicing Mormon and has had hundreds of patients who are current or former members of the church. She said some Mormon women, not all, learned from their bishop interviews to defer to an authority figure when it comes to sex.

Of course, other parts of the religion reinforce that lesson, too. And these women, during sex, they think about what the man they're with wants or what their bishop would think. They don't think about what they want. This shuts their sexuality down.

Elna Baker

Of course, shutting down means different things. A lot of the women I talked to said that during sex, they leave their bodies, can't even tell what they want. Rebecca was one of the women who told me she enjoys sex. But she still feels held back. She's a practicing Mormon, and she did it the right way. Married a Mormon, waited till marriage to have sex.

Elna Baker

Right, they didn't plan to give us these hangups. But they did plan to scare the bejesus out of children about sex, in a way that gave us huge hang ups. I wanted to talk to the church about this to understand how it views the bishop interviews today, after the Sam Young controversy. To see if officials really grasp how much their policies had impacted us, and if the church is rethinking these practices.

LDS officials haven't given interviews on this in the past. But the director of Media Relations for the church, Eric Hawkins, agreed to talk. I told him what I'd learned from my interviewees, that these bishop interviews had stayed with us.

Elna Baker

Eric says the church strongly believes that these bishop interviews with kids are a crucial part of its mission to help young people develop a close relationship with God by teaching them the standards for living a good and moral life. I pointed out to him that under the church's current guidelines, a bishop is still free to ask whatever explicit questions he wants. And inappropriate questions still seem to be happening.

Elna Baker

In other words, bishops need the flexibility to ask whatever they think is needed. He pointed out the church did revise its guidelines for bishop interviews this year to allow parents to be in the room and to share with the parents the basic topics that they'll cover beforehand.

Elna Baker

Before I was baptized at the age of eight, I had to meet with the bishop. He said that I was going to be accountable for my sins from this moment on. He explained this using a dry erase board. You'll commit sins. He drew big black blobs across the white backdrop. But you can repent. He took an eraser and wiped the board until it was white again.

This was a speech a lot of Mormon kids got. Back when I was in the church, I was hooked on the feeling I got when my bishops told me I was forgiven, and clean again. I could never sit with the discomfort I felt over my sexuality. And look, I no longer believe that these men speak for God or have any authority over me. But I can't shake the feeling of wanting to be clean, to have someone else who knows tell me I'm OK.

I probably should accept that there is no way that board is going to stay white. Why would I even want it to? What's so bad about drawing on it? Isn't that what it's for? But then, the second I think this, I hear another voice, "such is the way of an adulterous woman-- she eateth and wipeth her mouth and sayeth, I have done no wickedness." That's what my bishops taught me.

Ira Glass

Elna Baker is one of the producers of our show. Coming up, something that might happen to you in the hospital that you would probably be unhappy about, and you would never know that it happened. Details in a minute from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program-- "But That's What Happened," stories of women in situations where something unsettling happens. And sometimes, it is even hard to explain what felt wrong. And it takes a while to sort out the truth. We've arrived at Act 2 of our program, Act 2-- "While You Were Out." Lilly Sullivan has this story of something that happens to women without their consent. And they usually never find out that it happened. Here's Lilly.

Lilly Sullivan

About 10 years ago, Dan Wainberg was a medical student in Canada. It was his first year working in a hospital shadowing doctors. One day he goes to his first gynecological surgery. He had never been in a gynecological operating room before.

Lilly Sullivan

That's routine. The patient is usually under by the time the surgeon arrives. So the lead surgeon did a pelvic exam on her, also routine, and then turned to Dan and said, now you try.

Lilly Sullivan

Dan had done a couple pelvic exams before, but never on somebody who was unconscious. To do a pelvic exam, a doctor inserts their fingers into a patient's vagina to examine the cervix and uterus. The doctor places another hand on the abdomen and presses down trying to catch the ovaries between the hand on the abdomen and the hand in the vagina to check for abnormalities. And while Dan was doing all this, the surgeon walked away.

Lilly Sullivan

As soon as this thought hit him, he stopped, walked away.

Lilly Sullivan

The night after that first surgery, Dan was still really upset. So he called his older sister, Sarah. She was in med school, too, a year ahead. And she was like, yeah, so?

Lilly Sullivan

It was kind of normal. Pelvic exams are hard to learn. Frankly, under the best of circumstances, they're uncomfortable, awkward. So for years in teaching hospitals, a common way to train students was that when someone was unconscious during a gynecological surgery, the head surgeon would do the exam and then a student would repeat the exam for practice.

As far as consent goes, whenever anyone goes to a hospital, they sign an overall release form. At a teaching hospital, which lots of hospitals are, there's a part on the form that says something like, I acknowledge that medical students may be part of my treatment team. That's what a teaching hospital is, teaching people how to do stuff.

These kinds of exams aren't just a thing in Canada. They're common in the US, too. Rectal exams happen the same way for men while they're unconscious during prostate surgery. And the more Sara thought about it, she started to feel weird, too.

Lilly Sullivan

After they hung up, Sara kept thinking about it, obsessing over the women, the patients getting these pelvic exams. Do they know that this might happen under anesthesia? And if not, how they feel about it? Sarah had to do a research project for school that year. And she wanted to look at this.

Lilly Sullivan

He never came around on that one. Sara found that most of her classmates had done exams like this, practice exams on anesthetized women. And lots of them had never really thought about it either until Sara pointed it out to them.

Lilly Sullivan

The next year, she decided to survey a bunch of female patients at her teaching hospital and see what they said. Did they know that medical students might do exams? How did the women feel about it? Do patients want to be asked for consent beforehand? No one had ever studied that before.

Lilly Sullivan

Here's what Sara and her research partners found. They polled 102 female surgery patients at their teaching hospital's pelvic floor disorder center. So that's women who are likely to have had pelvic surgery or who were likely to have it in the near future. The vast majority, 81% of them, had no idea that a med student might do a pelvic exam on them while they were asleep. And most said, yeah, they wanted to be asked.

And here's the most surprising thing they found. 53% of women said they actually wouldn't mind being examined by a student while unconscious as long as someone asked them for permission beforehand. So a real find-- women would say yes. All you had to do was ask. So just ask, right? Problem solved.

After Sara and her co-authors published their research, people flipped out. The Globe and Mail wrote an article about it. People were shocked to learn that this was something that went on at all. Soon afterward, the medical guidelines in Canada changed. The Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, also the Association of Professors of Obstetrics and Gynecology revised their positions. They said that doctor should always ask for specific consent for this kind of exam.

In the US, the American Medical Association, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the Association of American Medical Colleges, they've also condemned this kind of pelvic exam. It's illegal in five states, Virginia, California, Hawaii, Illinois, and Oregon. A lot of teaching hospitals say they don't do it anymore, that it's a thing of the past.

But medical students say it still happens. A couple of years ago, a biomedical ethicist named Phoebe Friesen had just started teaching medical ethics at Mount Sinai Medical School in New York. The students who were following doctors in hospitals had to talk about ethical dilemmas in medicine.

Lilly Sullivan

They were doing these pelvic exams at a bunch of different hospitals around New York City. Phoebe had never heard anything about these kinds of exams. She was horrified. She started asking everyone, random students she'd meet at conferences, parties.

And she found that students had experienced it everywhere, at hospitals all over the country. Because teaching hospitals take a lot of patients without insurance or who are on Medicaid, these practice exams end up being done disproportionately on poor women, women of color, homeless women. Phoebe was surprised to learn there are a lot of people who are still in favor of it.

Lilly Sullivan

So she decided to dissect the ethics of it and put together an article for the Journal of Bioethics. It's one of the leading journals in the field. She parsed out five common arguments in support of examining unconscious patients, evaluated each of them, and concluded that the practice is unethical. The response from doctors? Not so good.

Some said these exams are necessary for teaching. Some said these exams never happen, which, of course, can't both be true. One argument Phoebe has heard a lot, the vagina is just a body part. . Be a professional. Don't be a prude. She calls this the "is the vagina different from the mouth" objection. Sara heard this one a lot when she was doing her research. Here's Sara.

Lilly Sullivan

Sara has had gynecological surgery under anesthesia. After a miscarriage.

Lilly Sullivan

For this story, I wanted to talk to women who have been examined under anesthesia without their consent. But I couldn't find anyone. These exams don't become part of a woman's medical records. They don't go into their charts at the hospital. And of course, this happens while they're unconscious. So pretty much, by definition, anyone who's gone through this will probably never know.

Ira Glass

Lilly Sullivan.

[MUSIC -- "SISTERS UNARMED" BY 79.5]

(SINGING) Why should I change 'cause the world is evil? Why rearrange the way that I am?

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Lilly Sullivan. The people who put together today's show includes Elna Baker, Ben Calhoun, Dana Chivvis, Sean Cole, Neil Drumming, Jarrett Floyd, Stephanie Foo, Damien Grave, Michelle Harris, David Kestenbaum, Anna Martin, Miki Meek, Stowe Nelson, Catherine Raimondo, Nadia Reiman, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu.

Our senior producer is Brian Reed. Our managing editor is Susan Burton. Special thanks today to Greg Prince, Matt Bowman, Taylor Petrey, Peggy Fletcher Stack, Louise Seamster, Alexandra Duncan, and Sue Ross. Our website-- thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our archive of over 650 episodes for absolutely free.

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he and I ended up at this fancy party at the Kardashians' last week. Some of his cocktail banter, I don't know, it was so awkward.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.