Purity Culture and Recovery
Most years, I try to read something new for Lent. For 2020, my boyfriend, J., suggested a book on atonement. He's got a tiny head start on me, and said he thinks it's excellent so far. We'll see what my verdict is.
This weekend, we stuck to our usual Saturday night routine of watching SNL. Afterward, a local late-night preacher came on. J. likes him -- despite his very Evangelical Protestant outlook. I most decidedly do not.
The sermon was on love and dating. I cringed. I grew up in Evangelical culture, and I know pretty much what to expect from these kinds of sermons. Sure enough, by the fifth minute in, I was screaming at the flat-screen. (Hey ladies, guess what? Men will try to get away with whatever we let them get away with. So it's up to us to set the boundaries. ... Same predictable, gender-essentializing bullshit I've been gritting my teeth at since middle school.)
J. didn't get why the advice was enraging. We wound up arguing into the wee hours.
I told him he didn't understand because he hasn't spent a lifetime living under the exhausting weight of this expectation: that as a girl or woman, you are the one who has to manage both people's urges, because ultimately, men are not expected or required to be very good at it. "This isn't just my experience -- although it is my experience," I told him. "This is textbook sexism. Hundred of books and articles have been written about this very thing."
By the end of the conversation, J. had decided that I think he's some sort of sexist dinosaur. The reality is that he simply doesn't understand the profoundly damaging impact of Evangelical purity culture on women because he has never lived it.
People have blind spots. That doesn't make them bad; it just makes them human.
* * *
Lent is a season that calls for self-examination, among other things. When I look in the mirror, I realize that at 43, I am still recovering from my Evangelical Christian childhood. It's hard to overstate how badly the purity culture surrounding church warps parts of your self-concept, if you are born a girl. I resisted the messaging in spells -- at one point in late teen/early adulthood, I recall erupting at my father in the car: "so I guess God just wants me to sit in a back-row pew, shut up, and hang a baby off my tit? That's the entirety of what I was created for? Because if that's Christianity, I'm probably not Christian. Fuck Paul."
Dad was flabbergasted at my outburst.
He didn't say much, after that.
Still, inwardly, I struggled with shame and self-loathing. The fact that I had sexual urges -- something I had been advised that girls didn't experience (at least strongly) if they were normal -- made things doubly hard. I wanted sex as badly as most of the boys I dated did, and yet it was my job to stave things off, so that I wasn't "ruined" or compromised or damaged in some way ... with absolutely no help from them.
My junior and senior years of high school, the True Love Waits movement had begun to take off. Classmates bought "purity" rings, or were gifted them by their fathers. There was pressure from Baptist and Evangelical friends to sign cards pledging to "save" ourselves until marriage. For those who hadn't waited, there was a lot of talk about the need to cleanse one's past -- which was automatically assumed to be shameful and poisonous, if it had included any form of sexuality.
Girls who had already been branded "sluts," thanks to high school gossip, were admonished about their "pasts," and how it meant they would have no gift to give to their future husbands. We all knew who the "sluts" were, and there was much whispering and sideeyed scorn cast in their direction, whenever the purity talks happened -- even if nobody said anything out loud.
They knew.
We knew.
I certainly knew. I'd been a "slut" since middle school, thanks to the unfortunate combination of early chest development and targeted sexual harassment in the hallway. Boys' reactions to me were widely perceived as something I was somehow inviting. (Back in seventh grade, I only had one female friend as a result.)
Senior year, however, in the midst of True Love Waits mania, I fell in love -- hard -- with a boy I'll call Shane. He was a Southern Baptist, one of the popular kids at our small Texas high school -- and he experienced a lot of peer disapproval when we started dating. (Maybe he blew them off temporarily because he thought getting with me would be a wild adventure. Who knows?)
To Shane's surprise, I wasn't comfortable "going all the way," despite my storied reputation, so we settled for oral sex. A lot of oral sex. He was very enthusiastic about it while we were together.
Then, in February, we broke up.
The Baptist kids welcomed Shane back into the fold, and ostracized me even more markedly. I spent the rest of the year -- and part of my first year of community college, since I stayed in town for my associate's degree -- being called "slut" and "blowjob queen" on the street. Sometimes, Baptist boys shouted these slurs at me from across the school parking lot, their smirks set and their eyes hard as they passed.
I remember Shane himself yelling "Slut!" at me one afternoon at school, as I returned from lunch.
He didn't know that I had tried to kill myself, some weeks before.
A coach and an assistant principal -- both pillars of the local Christian community -- were standing 10 feet away, on lunch duty. Both men heard. Neither did anything to intervene.
* * *
When I developed serious feelings for the boy after Shane, my mother -- eager to reclaim her daughter's virtue in some public way -- began pressuring me to marry him, particularly if sex was a possibility. Otherwise, she claimed, I would just be letting him "use" me, and "everybody knows boys can just go off to college without having to worry about the girls they've ruined back in their hometowns."
She didn't know that I'd been the one to initiate sex, the first time. Or how enthusiastically I'd pursued our physical relationship, stunned at the fact that consensual sex was actually as physically pleasurable as I'd dared to imagine -- since I'd been hearing from church women my entire life that it was a chore that women don't naturally enjoy, but were obligated to do for their husbands' sakes.
Evangelical purity culture blinded my mother to all of this; all she could see was her compromised 18-year-old daughter. The day I told her I had been intimate with B., she kept crying and hugging me, as if I were an injured pet. Now, I had to marry him, she warned me, or I would have failed.
This is how I wound up eloping at 19 with B. -- in a desperate, anxious attempt to prove to both his parents and mine that I was good enough, that I wasn't "damaged," that I was still "wife material," by God's standards.
We divorced two years later. B. was sleeping with multiple women. After two decades of hearing in church that I was responsible for regulating (and, within marriage, satisfying) men's God-given urges, I thought the affairs were my fault. I starved myself, in an attempt to tame and punish my body for its failures. I prayed and wept. I began cutting my arms and breasts, in frustration, when my figure still didn't look like the ones my husband had lusted after. I became suicidal once more.
Most of the scars have faded, with time -- although I still see the silvery ghosts of at least two on my right forearm.
* * *
Purity culture did not begin and end with the True Love Waits movement. My mother, and the multiple generations of women in our church who attempted to mentor me, had all been raised with this sort of messaging well before the 1990s. What's more, I know Protestant and Evangelical adults my age who are raising their daughters now to attend "Purity Balls" with their fathers and wear pledge rings. Who perpetuate the "boys will be boys -- it's your job to regulate things" commonplace.
It grieves my spirit. And it angers me.
I haven't thought much about any of this in years. (Thank you, therapy!) I'm not sure why I dragged it all out again tonight. I have an early class to teach in the morning, and I should be in bed.
During Lent, we prepare ourselves for Easter, to mark Christ's resurrection once more. Perhaps remembering my psychological recovery from that early, terrible religious training helps me do that, this time around. God didn't just resurrect me; God worked through therapists and friends and priests -- even secular feminist authors, who I'll probably never get to thank -- to re-form me, so that I could accept/reflect his love, and reject all the sexist, Evangelical bullshit that kept it from reaching me, all those years before.
That process was such a gift. My life now is a gift.
J. is a gift, too. Even though he may not understand why the lingering vestiges of purity-culture ideology in sermons are so upsetting, given my history and proximity to Evangelicism. I know the damage it can do -- and continues to do -- in women's lives. (Think the silence surrounding the sexual-abuse epidemic among Protestants and Evangelicals is a coincidence or weird fluke? Sheesh, what else is bound to happen in a culture in which girls and women internalize responsibility for men's sexual advances? FFS.)
I also know a little something about its staying power, thanks to my training and research. And what it means when it shows up in a pastor's televised talk that pays lip service to egalitarianism, but is undergirded by gender essentialism. (Incidentally, a proposition ["Ladies, you need to set boundaries, because men will get away with whatever you let them get away with"] that relies on pre-existing, communally affirmed endoxa, such as the relative sexual "weakness" of men and their need to be regulated by virtuous women, is called a topos in rhetoric: it's an argumentative template that is reliable and effective, because most audience members reflexively accept the underlying "conventional wisdom"/premise.)
Learning these things about each other, appreciating each other's stories and insights ... this is perhaps one more Lenten task in 2020. And, with that thought, I think it's finally bedtime.
This weekend, we stuck to our usual Saturday night routine of watching SNL. Afterward, a local late-night preacher came on. J. likes him -- despite his very Evangelical Protestant outlook. I most decidedly do not.
The sermon was on love and dating. I cringed. I grew up in Evangelical culture, and I know pretty much what to expect from these kinds of sermons. Sure enough, by the fifth minute in, I was screaming at the flat-screen. (Hey ladies, guess what? Men will try to get away with whatever we let them get away with. So it's up to us to set the boundaries. ... Same predictable, gender-essentializing bullshit I've been gritting my teeth at since middle school.)
J. didn't get why the advice was enraging. We wound up arguing into the wee hours.
I told him he didn't understand because he hasn't spent a lifetime living under the exhausting weight of this expectation: that as a girl or woman, you are the one who has to manage both people's urges, because ultimately, men are not expected or required to be very good at it. "This isn't just my experience -- although it is my experience," I told him. "This is textbook sexism. Hundred of books and articles have been written about this very thing."
By the end of the conversation, J. had decided that I think he's some sort of sexist dinosaur. The reality is that he simply doesn't understand the profoundly damaging impact of Evangelical purity culture on women because he has never lived it.
People have blind spots. That doesn't make them bad; it just makes them human.
* * *
Lent is a season that calls for self-examination, among other things. When I look in the mirror, I realize that at 43, I am still recovering from my Evangelical Christian childhood. It's hard to overstate how badly the purity culture surrounding church warps parts of your self-concept, if you are born a girl. I resisted the messaging in spells -- at one point in late teen/early adulthood, I recall erupting at my father in the car: "so I guess God just wants me to sit in a back-row pew, shut up, and hang a baby off my tit? That's the entirety of what I was created for? Because if that's Christianity, I'm probably not Christian. Fuck Paul."
Dad was flabbergasted at my outburst.
He didn't say much, after that.
Still, inwardly, I struggled with shame and self-loathing. The fact that I had sexual urges -- something I had been advised that girls didn't experience (at least strongly) if they were normal -- made things doubly hard. I wanted sex as badly as most of the boys I dated did, and yet it was my job to stave things off, so that I wasn't "ruined" or compromised or damaged in some way ... with absolutely no help from them.
My junior and senior years of high school, the True Love Waits movement had begun to take off. Classmates bought "purity" rings, or were gifted them by their fathers. There was pressure from Baptist and Evangelical friends to sign cards pledging to "save" ourselves until marriage. For those who hadn't waited, there was a lot of talk about the need to cleanse one's past -- which was automatically assumed to be shameful and poisonous, if it had included any form of sexuality.
Girls who had already been branded "sluts," thanks to high school gossip, were admonished about their "pasts," and how it meant they would have no gift to give to their future husbands. We all knew who the "sluts" were, and there was much whispering and sideeyed scorn cast in their direction, whenever the purity talks happened -- even if nobody said anything out loud.
They knew.
We knew.
I certainly knew. I'd been a "slut" since middle school, thanks to the unfortunate combination of early chest development and targeted sexual harassment in the hallway. Boys' reactions to me were widely perceived as something I was somehow inviting. (Back in seventh grade, I only had one female friend as a result.)
Senior year, however, in the midst of True Love Waits mania, I fell in love -- hard -- with a boy I'll call Shane. He was a Southern Baptist, one of the popular kids at our small Texas high school -- and he experienced a lot of peer disapproval when we started dating. (Maybe he blew them off temporarily because he thought getting with me would be a wild adventure. Who knows?)
To Shane's surprise, I wasn't comfortable "going all the way," despite my storied reputation, so we settled for oral sex. A lot of oral sex. He was very enthusiastic about it while we were together.
Then, in February, we broke up.
The Baptist kids welcomed Shane back into the fold, and ostracized me even more markedly. I spent the rest of the year -- and part of my first year of community college, since I stayed in town for my associate's degree -- being called "slut" and "blowjob queen" on the street. Sometimes, Baptist boys shouted these slurs at me from across the school parking lot, their smirks set and their eyes hard as they passed.
I remember Shane himself yelling "Slut!" at me one afternoon at school, as I returned from lunch.
He didn't know that I had tried to kill myself, some weeks before.
A coach and an assistant principal -- both pillars of the local Christian community -- were standing 10 feet away, on lunch duty. Both men heard. Neither did anything to intervene.
* * *
When I developed serious feelings for the boy after Shane, my mother -- eager to reclaim her daughter's virtue in some public way -- began pressuring me to marry him, particularly if sex was a possibility. Otherwise, she claimed, I would just be letting him "use" me, and "everybody knows boys can just go off to college without having to worry about the girls they've ruined back in their hometowns."
She didn't know that I'd been the one to initiate sex, the first time. Or how enthusiastically I'd pursued our physical relationship, stunned at the fact that consensual sex was actually as physically pleasurable as I'd dared to imagine -- since I'd been hearing from church women my entire life that it was a chore that women don't naturally enjoy, but were obligated to do for their husbands' sakes.
Evangelical purity culture blinded my mother to all of this; all she could see was her compromised 18-year-old daughter. The day I told her I had been intimate with B., she kept crying and hugging me, as if I were an injured pet. Now, I had to marry him, she warned me, or I would have failed.
This is how I wound up eloping at 19 with B. -- in a desperate, anxious attempt to prove to both his parents and mine that I was good enough, that I wasn't "damaged," that I was still "wife material," by God's standards.
We divorced two years later. B. was sleeping with multiple women. After two decades of hearing in church that I was responsible for regulating (and, within marriage, satisfying) men's God-given urges, I thought the affairs were my fault. I starved myself, in an attempt to tame and punish my body for its failures. I prayed and wept. I began cutting my arms and breasts, in frustration, when my figure still didn't look like the ones my husband had lusted after. I became suicidal once more.
Most of the scars have faded, with time -- although I still see the silvery ghosts of at least two on my right forearm.
* * *
Purity culture did not begin and end with the True Love Waits movement. My mother, and the multiple generations of women in our church who attempted to mentor me, had all been raised with this sort of messaging well before the 1990s. What's more, I know Protestant and Evangelical adults my age who are raising their daughters now to attend "Purity Balls" with their fathers and wear pledge rings. Who perpetuate the "boys will be boys -- it's your job to regulate things" commonplace.
It grieves my spirit. And it angers me.
I haven't thought much about any of this in years. (Thank you, therapy!) I'm not sure why I dragged it all out again tonight. I have an early class to teach in the morning, and I should be in bed.
During Lent, we prepare ourselves for Easter, to mark Christ's resurrection once more. Perhaps remembering my psychological recovery from that early, terrible religious training helps me do that, this time around. God didn't just resurrect me; God worked through therapists and friends and priests -- even secular feminist authors, who I'll probably never get to thank -- to re-form me, so that I could accept/reflect his love, and reject all the sexist, Evangelical bullshit that kept it from reaching me, all those years before.
That process was such a gift. My life now is a gift.
J. is a gift, too. Even though he may not understand why the lingering vestiges of purity-culture ideology in sermons are so upsetting, given my history and proximity to Evangelicism. I know the damage it can do -- and continues to do -- in women's lives. (Think the silence surrounding the sexual-abuse epidemic among Protestants and Evangelicals is a coincidence or weird fluke? Sheesh, what else is bound to happen in a culture in which girls and women internalize responsibility for men's sexual advances? FFS.)
I also know a little something about its staying power, thanks to my training and research. And what it means when it shows up in a pastor's televised talk that pays lip service to egalitarianism, but is undergirded by gender essentialism. (Incidentally, a proposition ["Ladies, you need to set boundaries, because men will get away with whatever you let them get away with"] that relies on pre-existing, communally affirmed endoxa, such as the relative sexual "weakness" of men and their need to be regulated by virtuous women, is called a topos in rhetoric: it's an argumentative template that is reliable and effective, because most audience members reflexively accept the underlying "conventional wisdom"/premise.)
Learning these things about each other, appreciating each other's stories and insights ... this is perhaps one more Lenten task in 2020. And, with that thought, I think it's finally bedtime.
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