Interesting and controversial perspective of why women become nuns, sexual abuse in the convents and why some leave.

Excerpts of article by Joanna Moorhead, an interview of Dr. Fran Fisher, formerly Sister Jane.

From nun to sex therapist isn’t an obvious career path but, says the former Sister Jane Frances de Chantal, ”when you’ve been starved for a while, you certainly appreciate the feast”.

Today, Sister Jane is Dr Fran Fisher, a California ”sexologist”. But she was born in north-east England and entered a Franciscan convent in the East Midlands aged 18. She left two years later, met and married an academic, and moved to the US. It wasn’t until her 40s, she says, that she began to understand how much her Catholic upbringing, and experience as a nun, had damaged her sexual instincts.

She saw a course in sex therapy advertised and her interest was immediately piqued. ”I enrolled, and what happened next blew my head off. One day, the tutor said we were going to discuss our masturbation history and I thought, can I really do this? Somewhere inside, I was still a nun even after all these years … I was still sexually naive. I realised that the legacy of my time in the convent was the cause of most of the problems in my marriage. It had been drummed into me as a novice that I didn’t really have ownership over anything, even my own body.”…

The convent had the allure of a place where women were pure and mysterious and – most importantly – safe. But once inside its walls, her sexuality began to surface. Fisher became increasingly unhappy, lost a lot of weight, and eventually left the convent one Saturday morning while all the other sisters were at Mass. She was, she says, still as naive about sex as she was when she arrived. But that wasn’t the case with all the women she interviewed. ”Those who spent decades in a convent had usually experienced a sexual awakening. Some had relationships with other nuns, some with priests, some with laypeople.”…

Read entire article: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/nuns-story-50-shades-of-black-and-white-20121016-27ozu.html