Another excerpt from my book:
"To access the visiting room all the inmates had to strip down stark naked. We awkwardly faced away from the Hack. Then, as unthinkable as it may seem to you sitting there in your civilized world, we were forced to bend forward and grab the cheeks of our ass and spread them so that the lucky guard could walk by and peer into our bowels for god-knows-what. The theory behind this is that we might smuggle something to our visitor by keeping it in our lower bowel. Sure, what visitor wouldn’t look forward to such a gift? I pray no guard ever really took the trouble to look.
After the visit was over it was worse.
If a wife or girlfriend happened to visit you could only kiss and embrace once upon arrival and once before the end of the visit.
Men who have not even looked at a real woman for months on end have a predictable reaction to being able to embrace and kiss one. Mae West said it best, “Are you glad to see me or is that a gun in your pocket?” I can assure you it was not a gun.
Back in the strip-down all the erections that wouldn’t go away saluted the Hack who now had to contend with rude penises and gaping assholes. It takes a special kind of person to take on a job like that.
Those of us who were innocent Jehovah’s Witness boys did not find it amusing or natural. We found it humiliating and degrading and excruciating to experience the betrayal of our body to forces beyond prayer or self-control. Now, with the passage of time, I can see how prudish and cloistered we were and how funny it is that we were impractical and squeamish as all that. I can’t imagine what the sweet sister from the Kingdom Hall must have been thinking when all these fine Christian brothers stood up to leave with a baseball bat in their pants! You can make anything nasty in your own mind if you are taught to do so. Unfortunately, that is exactly what we learned from our Watchtower studies.
In the real world young men can relieve themselves with masturbation. Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t live in that world. They aren’t allowed. So, the pressure of such guilt mixed with torment was simply unnecessarily worse.
A rational person would look at what we were and what was required of us and wonder why our own religion seemed out of touch with compassion."