00:03:38.240Because today I am going to tell you about something that came across my in bed with the right radar when I saw this headline that was, you know, one of these little delightful bits of Internet ephemera that sort of like goes on to the feed and then and then fades away.
00:03:55.560enemy lesbian nuns quit convent and marry each other that was in pink news last month in june
00:04:02.7402026 because these two young women met as nuns in the convent when they were very young they
00:04:10.880apparently didn't like each other very much in the convent but they both left the convent wound up
00:04:17.400living near each other i think they were actually roommates for a while and then they fell in love
00:04:56.800And today we're devoting our entire episode to lesbian nuns in history, in popular imagination, in myth, and in reality.
00:05:07.300And we're going to talk about some of the contradictions that these women expose, both within our ideas of Catholicism, of chastity, but also of women's sexuality more broadly.
00:05:21.940Catholicism and women's sexuality, things I have very little background in, so I'm excited to learn.
00:05:29.020So, Adrian, what do you know about lesbian nuns in general?
00:05:32.280Do you have any kind of baggage or ideas that you're coming into this?
00:05:35.200I don't know if this is the kind of thing that occurs to other people or if this is just something that I thought of immediately at a very young age and have never let go of.
00:05:43.900But, like, do you have any kind of preconceptions about what this sort of world of lesbian nuns is?
00:05:50.880I would say I don't have much of a background.
00:05:54.420I was in a Catholic kindergarten that was run partly by nuns.
00:05:58.300And so I do remember a few growing up.
00:06:01.600And at the time, I did not consider whether or not they were gay or straight.
00:06:05.040I have over the years interacted with a couple of gay priests, mostly Jesuits.
00:06:11.180And I think I've had interactions with lesbian nuns, though not as many.
00:06:15.240As someone who knows history, the thought that there might be a couple of things drawing women into a setting where they can hang out with other women without anyone raising any weird questions about it had occurred to me.
00:06:27.700It's like, you're only human. You're like, oh, this would be an amazing place to be queer.
00:06:33.100And then when you get to medieval nuns who had evidently very vivid erotic imaginations, you're like, okay, so what is this schooled on?
00:06:42.700And maybe you're sneaking out through one of those famous tunnels going over to the monastery across the valley or whatever.
00:06:49.340Or did you guys try this out after Vespers?
00:06:53.180Yeah, so this is an interesting contradiction.
00:06:56.240One of the things that is at the core of Catholicism is that Catholicism is a religion with all very strict sexual prohibitions for everybody, really, but in particular for its clergy, all of whom take vows of chastity, both the clergy proper, the priests and the sort of devoted, consecrated, quote unquote, sisters, which are the nuns.
00:07:22.060everybody takes a celibacy vow and also it is an intensely sexual religion with very erotic
00:07:28.780imagery, right? We've all seen St. Teresa of Avila. Yeah, exactly. And a lot of women's mysticism
00:07:34.940from the medieval period that we're going to talk about is very, very sexual. And there's this kind
00:07:40.440of tension between the sexual prohibition and the intensity of the eroticism that like is begging
00:07:45.480for a little bit of an explanation, right?
00:08:27.360But Richard Seip estimated, and he had some empirical data to back this up, he did surveys,
00:08:33.140that only about 50% of Catholic priests were actually celibate.
00:08:36.900Surveys of former Catholic priests and nuns conducted in the 1970s found that about 30% of those ex-Catholic clergy had been sexually active while they were enrolled.
00:08:55.600There's a bit of a methodological problem, right?
00:08:58.960Because, you know, the only real way to get data on sexual behavior is through surveys, right?
00:09:05.080And people are incentivized to lie about sex.
00:09:08.640People who have made a formal vow to not have sex are maybe more incentivized than others, right?
00:09:16.400Although I've heard that the Catholic Church has a really good survey mechanism.
00:09:21.140They even have its own box for it and there's a whole secret around it.
00:09:30.920But there is a lot of anecdotal evidence and a degree of empirical evidence that celibacy is discarded by Catholic clergy with some regularity, right?
00:09:42.660And Richard Seip, that guy who died in 2018 who testified at all these clerical sex abuse trials, his theory of the case, and this is kind of like a popular one, was that the celibacy rule sort of, like, ensured sexual misbehavior, right?
00:09:54.940Because it makes everything unsayable and therefore whether or not you're sleeping with just like a person in your congregation who's of age or whether you're committing child sexual abuse almost falls under the same blanket of silence.
00:10:09.480Right. His idea was like, well, look, all the guys who are, you know, simply having consensual affairs with like adult widows in their parish or with nuns or with other consenting adult priests, those guys can't say anything about their colleague who is molesting the altar boys.
00:10:31.040Right. That was his theory of the case. There's also, I think, a compelling argument to be said that like, OK, if you have sexual impulses that disturb you, either for like reasons that we might find kind of sad, like your impulse is homosexual and you live in a homophobic environment, you might be drawn to a celibate life for that reason.
00:10:53.220right a way to be honorable in spite of your proclivities and the social sanction against
00:10:58.040them and if you have sexual impulses that you find disturbing for reasons we might agree with
00:11:03.680like say you're attracted to children you might also seek out celibacy as a means to try and
00:11:12.220exclude sexuality from their lives if sex scares them and i'm talking about like pedophiles right
00:11:18.220People who might have desires that they rightly find disturbing, right?0.80
00:11:23.540I don't think that's the only reason why there's a lot of sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church.
00:11:28.980But I do think that the celibacy requirement does tend to attract people who, for reasons that might be good or bad,
00:11:39.440find sex kind of disturbing and don't want to be dealing with it.
00:11:48.220Am I right to think that celibacy also is kind of a malleable concept
00:12:01.120and we're not entirely sure whether the church has always meant the same thing by that?
00:12:05.200Because initially it was that you weren't supposed to have a family, right?
00:12:08.340Where the church was your family and you weren't supposed to be preferring your blood relatives over others.
00:12:15.400Am I correct to think that the idea that this means no sexual activity at all had to develop over time?
00:12:22.220Well, there was some indications that the celibacy requirement for priests and nuns was introduced later than you might think.
00:12:31.300The early church did not have this requirement.
00:12:33.480Yeah. The Catholic Church's idea of celibacy as encompassing not just procreative family life or prohibitions thereof, but even things like masturbation, that's pretty thorough.
00:12:49.360It's basically the concupiscence is the root problem and the fall into sin and you have to keep yourself free of that.
00:12:58.160So who do we mean exactly by nuns is one question that we could start with.
00:13:03.480So for our purposes, we're talking about Roman Catholics.
00:13:07.000There are other sects that have consecrated women who we might call nuns who are not exactly in like pastoral roles, but have a sort of gendered, ordained role.
00:13:22.560Buddhists have nuns and they also take chastity vows and are very interestingly implicated in the sexual politics of places like Vietnam and Thailand.
00:13:31.600There are like a bunch of different kinds of Protestant nuns.
00:13:35.880The Episcopalians have some nuns because they do,0.78
00:13:38.840they're like kind of Catholic drag a little bit for the Protestants.0.69
00:14:22.320Sometimes they're called like contemplative nuns.
00:14:24.480Like they are not locked up usually, but they are secured away, far away, spending their days in the physical confines of their community, praying.
00:14:37.240The nuns we see, the nuns who you might see walking down the street, the nuns who run a school or a hospice or who act in like social worker functions.
00:15:36.640But that distinction between a co-ed world and a single-sex world, that is going to come up a little when we talk about particularly the medieval period, when there were a lot more cloistered nuns than there are now.
00:15:46.280And when we talk about like cultural narratives and fantasies about non-sexuality and what happens exactly in these all-women environments.0.73
00:15:54.400Right. It's hard to do non-sploitation about a person who runs an old folks home and like goes shopping.1.00
00:16:00.220Yes, exactly. It's like way less sexy, frankly.1.00
00:16:03.680She's living what looks like just kind of a middle-aged woman's life because indeed that's what she's doing.0.73
00:16:08.840She's like a bridge club member, but in a habit.0.93
00:17:02.280She's terrific, and I wish we could get more of that show
00:17:04.820so we can find out what her whole deal is.
00:17:07.700I think, like, this idea of the nun as
00:17:11.800either she's a like a disciplinarian teacher often in pop culture she might be very sarcastic
00:17:20.160and like grumpy played to comedic effect right they are often depicted as figures of female
00:17:27.640severity yeah right they are not matronly by which i mean like asexual right they're not cuddly
00:17:34.800A nun is judgmental. A nun is angry. A nun is not maternal, right?1.00
00:17:42.380Not maternal, not especially easy on the eyes, not gentle.
00:17:45.820They are severe, and that is a function of the nun's status outside heterosexuality.0.87
00:17:51.700There is not a lot of ways to sort of code female virtue in pop culture that are not about making women paradigms of either like motherhood or sexuality, right?
00:18:12.020She is this figure that stands in for rejection or refusal of those things, at least to some degree.
00:18:20.120And that is, I think, the source of a lot of the tension in our cultural depictions of nuns, right? Because it's a way to work out what you want to do with womanhood that is beyond or refusing or in defiance of those regimes, right?
00:18:35.700I think that to say that the nun stands outside of heterosexuality, and that's why she has this kind of astringent quality, that makes a lot of sense to me.
00:18:44.340At the same time, there are also, of course, figures that, because they do so much of the educating within the Catholic Church, are very busy telling young people that they can't be sexual, right?
00:19:00.840There are also figures of prohibition quite pragmatically, right?
00:19:04.160But I guess I see a point that that's not always been the case.
00:19:07.140If you were a medieval peasant, you were not someone whose first memory of a nun was getting their knuckles wrapped because of something, right?
00:19:13.940But if you were, I don't know, growing up in a majority Irish neighborhood in Chicago,
00:19:19.580any time in the 20th century, that might well be your first association with a nun, right?
00:19:25.100I'm glad you bring up this sort of evolving context of the nun's relationship to sexuality and pop culture.
00:19:32.880because there's actually a long history of non-sex jokes,
00:19:38.140which are almost entirely in the medieval period heterosexual.
00:19:42.860So I'm going to turn to our good friend, friend of the pod, Giovanni Boccaccio and the Decameron.
00:19:48.320Do you want a glass of the Decameron for our listeners?
00:19:50.460So the Decameron is a 14th century collection of, as the title says, 100 short stories
00:19:55.840framed by a story of the plague years and of these various characters telling stories,
00:20:01.380which are more or less humorous, more or less bawdy, more or less sexual.
00:20:07.280Yeah, it is a famous book from, as Adrian said, the Italian 14th century.
00:20:14.840It's a collection of secular writing from the late medieval and early modern period
00:20:20.340that sort of collects a lot of folktales and like jokes that would have been popular, right?
00:20:26.400The frame story is that these 10 young people,
00:20:29.060I believe it's seven men and three women,
00:20:31.060so a lot of the narrators are women in the Decameron,
00:20:33.240which is also fun, have, like, fled Florence
00:20:36.280because they're trying to get away from the plague.
00:20:38.860And they are, like, holed up at a country house
00:24:12.740It's not that funny, but I mean, that one's interesting, given that the misogyny you're pointing to, I think this movie tries to sidestep a little bit by pointing out that none of these nuns have come to the order voluntarily.0.98
00:24:28.120They've all been put there by their families, and they're all these smart, well-read young women who think all this devil shit is kind of ridiculous.0.78
00:24:36.240It's not that they make these lofty promises, they just look at those lofty promises with, I mean, it's starring Aubrey Plaza.0.99
00:24:45.420Meanwhile, sort of the Fred Armisen character is totally overwhelmed with the task of getting these women to care about something that they just obviously don't care about.0.51
00:24:52.940Yeah, this is actually, I think, good context for the medieval early modern period, which is that not all the nuns were brought to the convent by an overwhelm of religious conviction, right?0.92
00:25:03.300A lot of people wound up in the clergy for various other circumstances and not entirely their own volition.0.54
00:25:09.880But I think what's really interesting about the Decameron is that those are all heterosexual jokes, right?
00:25:17.220Boccaccio's whole bit is that people have sexual weaknesses or habits that sort of undermine their self-seriousness.
00:26:05.140The fact that only male homosexuality was technically legally barred under the Nazi regime.
00:26:11.660That was also true of, I think it was like a 1559 law in England that made sodomy punishable by death, had no mention of female homosexuality at all.0.61
00:26:23.120It's a function of massagist accounts that sort of like take women's sexuality as less consequential, particularly when it doesn't have like a reproductive effect.
00:26:33.180And it's also a function of sort of structural misogyny, not just cultural attitudes, but structural forces that marginalize women and keep them out of the public sphere, but also keep them dependent on men and sort of like limit their opportunities for a homosexual life, right?
00:26:50.700Like a lesbian is somebody who doesn't have men in her life, not intimately.
00:26:55.460And that was something that has only really become possible in a fulsome way because of recent historical developments that have allowed women to be like financially independent from men.
00:27:05.160But that's not to say that nobody had the thought, right?
00:27:09.320Later in like the modern era, particularly during the Reformation era and in the subsequent like religious wars through Europe, lesbian nuns were frequently the butt of jokes by Protestants.
00:27:20.780And allegations about lesbianism in the convent was the butt of jokes by Protestants who were looking to undermine the moral authority of the church, right?
00:27:31.000It's like, okay, you guys think you're so special, but look what's going on in your convents.
00:27:36.480We have all these dittering little jokes.
00:27:37.940That was also frequently something that was gestured at and assumed rather than, like, cited in specific instances.0.99
00:27:44.080The degree to which this impression, this joke, this sort of dig on nuns, that they were all a bunch of dykes in their cloisters.
00:27:50.940It's hard to know the degree to which that was, like, an impression people had because they knew specific instances of it happening.
00:27:58.240And to what degree it's just a smear that they were lobbing at their political enemies.
00:28:03.420You've got to say, Protestantism is just a pitch I do not get.0.99
00:28:06.600It's like, oh, the other side has fucking rad churches and everyone's just gay for each other.0.99
00:28:12.740You're like, that sounds really good.0.99
00:28:17.000Let's make Christianity less pretty and more punishing.0.84
00:28:22.420But, you know, like men have long tended to assume lesbianism or like in Victorian terms inversion on the part of like shy or studious girls.0.98
00:28:32.620And this is what sort of starts to emerge as we move out of the, like, early modern period into, like, the Victorian period, right?
00:28:39.700Right, which is its own form of anti-intellectualism and saying there's no way these women are, in fact, just contemplating and studying and writing.
00:28:48.420They must be finger-banging or something, right?1.00
00:28:51.100Like, it's just a way to deny the possibility that women could just sequester and do exactly what they say they're going to do.1.00
00:28:58.240Right. There's like sort of an anti-intellectual smear that you see applied to male intellectuals as well.
00:29:04.440That idea that like studying and reading too much or like being too serious about what we would broadly code an intellectual pursuit, among which I would include religion, implies a kind of like gender deficiency or deviance, right?0.60
00:29:18.900Well, we've talked about that a bunch of times, that the jokes that the priest is kind of gay is also kind of the joke that the priest is a nerd, right?
00:29:25.400Because, like, he sits down and begs forgiveness half the day instead of, like, doing manly things like, I don't know, fights and spousal abuse.0.90
00:29:34.360But then, like, there's also a way in which, like, oh, I bet she's just a dyke is also how men justify all women who don't appear interested in them, right?0.97
00:29:43.940Like, this is, like, an ego protective mechanism.0.98
00:29:47.160But also, like, this is around the time when single-sex environments come in for this kind of speculation, right?
00:30:11.520Something that people like to fantasize about going on in these spaces where there's like not heterosexual sociality, they imagine there's homosexual sexuality.
00:30:21.720And that's basically the pretext of a genre of film that you alluded to earlier, Adrian, non-sploitation.
00:30:29.700What do you know about non-sploitation?
00:30:32.540Yeah, so it's a genre I'm only marginally aware of, but super excited to learn more about.
00:30:40.200My associations are all from the early to mid-70s,
00:32:08.700They're like, quote-unquote, erotic thrillers at best, right, if they're not just actual pornography.
00:32:14.540And the premise is that an outsider enters the convent and he discovers there this darkly ritualistic, orgiastic society where sexual repression and isolation have led the sexual impulse, the repressed sexual impulse, to become, like, perverted and nefarious, right?0.69
00:32:33.720And lesbianism is kind of the start.0.62
00:33:35.820But also the idea of like women alone makes an enticing notion for men, not just out of the opportunistic sexuality idea, like the gardener pretending to be mute so that he can get into the convent and put a camera on.
00:33:51.980But also in this idea that what happens when women are not domesticated into heterosexuality or when they're not like allowed to or corrected with the sexual impulse, right?
00:34:04.280I like the fact that you say domesticated. I don't want to veer too far away from the theme here, but it's also the question of women not domesticated, right? They're not cleaning up after the family at all times. Like they have time. What the hell do women get up to when they have time? And it's like, oh no, having time feels real lesbian to me. If she's not constantly cooking for him and cleaning after him, she might develop notions, right?
00:34:28.100There is that too, that women in a convent are women with time.
00:34:31.220They're women with a kind of autonomy and autarchy that in a patriarchal society they don't usually get.
00:34:37.080And there's something really interesting about this notion that women not getting disciplined with heterosexuality, like disciplined with penetration, which is really how this genre understands heterosexual sex as like a disciplining mechanism, will get dark and creepy and weird, right?
00:34:56.220And that is where I want to turn to what I think is kind of the paradigmatic example or like the pinnacle of the non-sploitation genre.
00:35:04.340There's some that I like more than others.
00:35:05.700I really like Miss 45, which is a shockingly violent rape, revenge, non-sploitation fantasy.
00:35:10.860But I think for our purposes, we want to look at Ken Russell's The Devils, which is from 1971.
00:38:28.180In 20th century church euphemism, convents referred to this as quote unquote particular
00:38:33.020friendship, which I love as a euphemism.
00:38:36.580It's like a joke about historians being like, wow, they were really good friends.
00:38:40.200It's like they were particular friends.
00:38:42.540But we have mentions of this from the church fathers.
00:38:46.240No less a figure than St. Augustine warned about the dangers of lesbianism among nuns.
00:38:51.400He wrote a letter to his sister, who was an abbess, and he was giving her all this advice on how to run a convent, which advice she had not asked for, by the way.0.98
00:38:59.840But he's like, well, you have to make sure that they're not fucking each other because, of course, nuns do that.0.97
00:39:05.200We also know that it happens—well, for one thing, it's in the Bible.0.99
00:39:08.440There is a direct prohibition on lesbian sex in the Bible, in St. Paul's epistles to the Romans.
00:44:10.320And because of that miracle that both his wife and his child survived, her father, who was like a, I think he was some sort of like merchant.
00:44:16.800He was a fairly rich guy in Tuscany in 1590.
00:44:20.620He's like, okay, I'm going to dedicate this newborn baby to Christ, right?
00:44:23.900I'm going to dedicate this child to the church, which wasn't like a wild thing to do.
00:44:28.600People, particularly wealthy people tended to do this.
00:44:31.000You actually kind of had to be a little bit rich to be a nun in the early modern era.0.94
00:45:10.660Isn't that also something that happened to St. Francis of Assisi?
00:45:12.640Yes, Francis of Assisi is clearly inspiration. One of the things, okay, like this is a spoiler alert. It is difficult to judge from our position as readers and scholars sitting in the 20th and 21st centuries and looking back at the 14th, 15th, 16th centuries.
00:45:31.720it's difficult to assess how serious these people were about their claims of faith.
00:45:37.460A lot of people who are like professionalists will tell you like,
00:45:41.220no, you really have to take all of this stuff very seriously.
00:46:27.960They will often bleed, like, along their forehead in the place where, like, the crown of thorns would have been on Christ's head.
00:46:34.180One of the interviews conducted by the papal inquest featured a nun who walked into Benedetta's room and found her stabbing her own palm with needles.
00:46:57.300She gets to the convent and is praying in the chapel there and the statue of the Virgin Mary, she says, comes to life, reaches towards her and she gets scared and jumps up and the statue of the Virgin Mary like falls down and shatters.
00:47:12.300And that seems to have been something that was documented that the statue fell down.
00:47:15.460But she says that she's having these visions in which angels, particularly an angel named Splenditello, a male angel, comes to her and delivers these messages from God.
00:47:28.340And in the medieval period, if you were a woman having mystical visions, it was a requirement of the foreman of the genre that you had to present these to a male religious authority and say that you thought you were being deceived by the devil.