1. Let the manhunt begin!
2. Doomed unrequited love was something we could definitely relate to in the Mia Maids class
3. Sexual Purity
4. Another great year at Youth Conference

• (character chart)

1. Young Women's
2. Youth Conference
3. Saturday's Warrior
4. Brigham Young University
• Gratuitous Love Scene
5. Polygamist
6. Temple Wedding
7. Orem High
8. Bordeaux Mission
9. Exmo Conference

Then he moved on to a concrete example: masturbation. This froze me because I had never heard it mentioned by name at a church function before. He explained that just because masturbation is not mentioned explicitly in the scriptures, that doesn't mean that it's not a sin. It is a sin, he told us emphatically, a terrible sin. He backed this up with the verse from the New Testament (Matthew 5:28) where Jesus says "whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart." And he explained that the same goes for fornication. So if you lustfully imagine committing adultery or fornication, to Heavenly Father it's as if you had done it for real. And he reminded us that adultery and fornication are the worst sins you can commit short of murder and apostasy (Alma 39:5).

Listening to this lecture, I felt like I was maybe starting to turn a bit red. I glanced over at the other girls to see what kind of a reaction they were having, but they looked completely blase. It was as if this message meant nothing to them and was meant for someone else. I started thinking that maybe it's not normal for a girl to be imagining these sorts of dirty things. Maybe I was the only perverted one. I tried to look as casual as possible in hopes that no one would see that this message was making me nervous.

The teacher then shifted the discussion to the evils of homosexuality. Only then did I relax completely. Whew, no problems there! The teacher mentioned Sodom and Gomorrah and lusting after "strange flesh" and such like that, but it rolled right over me. You could put me in a room full of naked women and girls (like at the locker room at the pool, for example), and my thoughts would be as pure as an angel's.

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But then he started moving back into dangerous territory. He started telling us a story about a teenage boy and girl who had to go to their bishop to repent because they had committed the grave sin of fornication. When asked to explain, the teenagers said that it just happened all of the sudden. But as the bishop started posing them more questions, he found that they had deliberately gone to a secluded place where they would not be disturbed or discovered. And then they proceeded to cross more lines that you aren't supposed to cross by deep kissing and heavy petting. So when they ended up committing fornication, it wasn't really "all of the sudden." He used this story as an illustration for why unmarried people shouldn't be making out and for why they certainly shouldn't be petting.

I hated it when teachers used the word "petting." It made it sound like something you would do with a dog. Maybe there wasn't really any dignified way of saying "don't touch each other's naughty parts." On the other hand, maybe they deliberately wanted us to feel embarrassed and repulsed by the whole thing.

At the end of his discussion of petting, the teacher told us that now we were allowed to eat our Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

"See, aren't you glad you waited?" he said. "It's a little like waiting for marriage." Then he told us that we were free to go.

April turned to the rest of us and said "What? Waiting until the end of class is like waiting for marriage? That doesn't make any sense at all! If I had eaten my candy at the beginning of class I'd have been glad I was eating it then, and by the same token, if I save it for another ten minutes after class is over, then while I'm eating it I'll be glad that I waited another ten minutes so I could enjoy it right then."

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