CHASTITY ESSAY

ABOUT AUTISTIC CHASTITY

This essay will discuss practicing chastity from the viewpoint of autism.

The topic is important because I am an autistic lay celibate practicing Catholic and agree that our bodies are created for service to others and through that, service to God. The current understanding of chastity is thus: chastity is defined as ‘the moral virtue whereby a person tries to control sexual impulses according to the dictates of right reason’ (New American Bible). It is required of all lay Catholics, whether married or single. It is incorporated into the solemn vows of priests and nuns - poverty, chastity and obedience. A young Dominican priest once told me that in secular society, that removing Judeo-Christian teachings, controversially yet understandably gives rise to individualism and rationalism. Due to individualism, the individual layman or woman decides how and when to exercise their sexual impulses. My approach to this topic will be based upon personal experience of autism, and that my openly sexual impulses were confined to puberty.

My early experiences with chastity, were unwittingly influenced by the behaviour of the adults I grew up with. Yes, you read that correctly. As I’m autistic, when I was a child I regarded myself as a little adult. Young children interacting with one another requires them to be able to take other people’s perspectives. They do this through pretend play, otherwise known in psychology as metarepresentation. Mostly, this involves children role-playing or imitating the tasks that are performed in various occupations. The children pretend to be the workers – by doing so they take on the viewpoints of others. Conversely, the brains of autistics are wired differently. Autistic children prefer to be around adults because adults tend to be a lot more understanding and patient with the autistics’ special interests. Autistics normalise the behaviour of adults. I must concede that some children develop relatively earlier or relatively later. Some autistic boys, especially, may become aware of sexual impulses at an earlier or later stage – perhaps as early as eight or nine years old. In my experience, I became aware of sexual impulses at age fourteen. I realised at that age that the daughter of people I have known for a very long time was kind-hearted and very attractive. This can happen when the autistic child gets to know their peers through knowing the other childrens’ parents. Autistic children interacting with adults also have not been able to take the perspective of others before primary (elementary) school. This means they become teenagers full of raging hormones with the social skills and maturity of 11- or 12-year-old kids. Although perspective taking can be taught, it is beyond the scope of this essay to do so, other than memorization of the phrase I AM YOU, AT THE SAME TIME, YOU ARE ME.

I need to distinguish between autistic and allistic children, for the purpose of this essay. Allistic simply means people who are not autistic and therefore whose brains are conventionally wired. This is 99% of the population. Due to a stroke at birth (I was born at 26 weeks), my brain was rewired and I was diagnosed as autistic aged 25 and taught Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to manage my anxiety and the Barnes-Holmes Protocol to enable me to take the perspectives of others. I was 29 years old when I was able to do so. Normally 4-year-old allistic children have theory of mind. They know that others have different beliefs, desires and intentions to themselves. However, autistic children do not know this. They tend to assume that everybody else is thinking the same things as they are. For example, when I started elementary school in 1989, I did not have theory of mind. I was baptised in 1984 although did not start attending Mass of my own accord until 2006. As a frightened, socially inept small boy, I learned the Our Father with my classmates. I thought ‘we call God Father and He looks after us’. At that moment I realised that faith helps my anxiety. As St Thomas Aquinas taught, God is subsistent existence, the first cause and that nothing causes itself. So God the Father to me is a loving immaterial or spiritual parent. When Christ called His Father Abba – that indicates more closeness – like saying ‘Daddy’. Trust in God should help the autistic child manage his or her anxiety over social situations. Because of this, learning perspective taking is to be viewed as providential. I certainly viewed it as such back in 2013.

Chastity for an autistic is also both important and challenging in Catholic secondary schools. As you may know, a lot of secondary schools are segregated – all boys and all girls. For a long time, especially when I was younger, I wondered about this segregation. By the time I reached the tenth grade, the deputy headmaster, a good man who taught my classmates and I religious education and sexual education, explained that teenage boys and girls are separated so each can concentrate on studying without the distractions of the other. I thought he was a wise man. Unfortunately, tenth grade (age 15 or 16) is, as we know, the age when the hormones hit the adolescent like a proverbial freight train. Sexual maturation brings with it often uncontrollable sexual urges. Entirely due to my surging testosterone, I became infatuated with a teenage girl and the infatuation lasted for seven years.

Unfortunately raging hormones combined with less than mature social skills will mean that an autistic teenage boy will likely have great difficulty managing his impulses. He may be unable to socialise with teenage girls because he is more accustomed to interacting with adults. Because of this he may be confused about his sexual orientation because the hormones are seemingly uncontrollable and due to the difficulty socializing with females. An autistic teenage boy may well have trouble controlling his impulses much to his shame and embarrassment. I can only suggest that every male goes through this. Mercifully, the testosterone seems to settle around twelfth grade (age 17 or 18). In my experience, by twelfth grade the autistic teenage boy more strongly identifies with adults because he is physically mature. He might well no longer have any interest in sexual behaviour and identify as celibate.

I argue that an autistic young man may well identify as celibate because of his past profound embarrassment managing his sexual impulses. The young man can still find females attractive yet I think would view them in a different way to how his peers view them. He will view them like how the men he knows view their wives – for who they are as people. As I have said, the inability of young autistic children to socialise with their peers no doubt draws them to interact with adults. As clinical psychologist Professor Tony Attwood said, autistic children learn their values from adults and not other children. This seems to account for autistic boys, especially, being a lot more socially conservative than their peers. They have grown up with those at least 25 to 30 years older than they are and consider it completely normal to have done so. They understand children to be born to husbands and wives. Children being born out of wedlock are not understood by someone who has inherited parental social conservatism. They think ‘this is how I understand it has always been done – you get married then you have children’.

I believe the issue of chastity is not as relevant to sons and daughters as it is when they become adolescents. I would like to illustrate this with my own adolescent experience. I became infatuated aged 15 with a teenage girl who was a family friend's daughter. My not having theory of mind or the ability to take others’ viewpoints until age 29 meant that I thought the teenage girl could impersonate her mother because I knew I was copying the way her parents behaved in marriage, as I have grown up with adults.  I could not realise that the daughter grew up with her peers and did not see the situation the same way I did.

Lastly, I would like to discuss arguably the greatest individual obstacle to chastity – the raw sexual urge. We were created with the sexual urge to enable us to procreate. Therefore, the urge is, as I see it, is a gift from God to be used only under the appropriate circumstances. The autistic teenage boy, having grown up with adults, will have witnessed long marriages of maybe 20 to 25 years. In these marriages, the husband and wife act as selfless best friends. The adolescent boy witnesses profound friendship in the marriages of the adults he knows. Friendship is the basis for a marriage. Any sexual behaviour between married couples is private and conducted behind closed doors. This is in stark contrast to adolescent sexual behaviour which can in my experience involve public kisses on the mouth and open discussion of the desire for sexual intercourse. Adolescents are less mature than adults, of course and the autistic adolescent might only experience the uncontrollable desire to copulate as a result of puberty. This is more controllable for them in adulthood.

Considering what Pope St John Paul II wrote in ‘Love and Responsibility’, (1981:51) ‘the existence of the whole species depends directly on it. The species could not exist if it were not for the sexual urge and its natural results’. Clearly, the purpose of the urge is to generate new life and male and female genitals and the reproductive system have the anatomy and physiology to do just that – that is their function. In terms of procreation, 1 Corinthians 3:6 states ‘I planted, Apollos watered, but God caused the growth.’ Since the form of something or someone does not bring about their existence, God must.  The sexual urge must be understood in terms of willingness and acceptance to be parents. People are human beings and never to be objectified!

In conclusion, I have written about the implementation and practice of chastity from the viewpoint of having lived experience as an autistic lay celibate. The body is created for service to others, and through that, service to God. The definition of chastity, as we have seen, is the control of sexual impulses according to the dictates of right reason. I have contrasted my adolescent experiences as an autistic trying to observe chastity, basing my behaviour on that of adults, with the more individualistic and immature openly sexual impulses of allistic teenagers. The sexual urge is necessary to generate new life and was given to us for that purpose. Chastity is easy to observe once physical and sexual maturity has enabled once uncontrollable sexual urges to be controlled.