purity culture

This is what’s waiting on the other side of purity (sex + shame, an ending)

October 11, 2017 by Lyndsey 2 Comments

God prefers bad marriages to Sexual Sin; or at least that’s what I thought for twenty years.

The very institution of marriage, they said, had redemptive powers that could sanctify two people’s relationship simply by the fact of their participation in it. By fulfilling your role, you could force the pieces of yourself and your spouse into congruence, your life into harmony with God’s Plan.

Sexual Sin, on the other hand, would irrevocably break you; it would poison your future; it would fester inside you; it would make you a second-rate home for the Holy Spirit and unfit to worship God or serve the church. Sure, you could repent, but you’d still be a patched-up wreck. If you really understood the gravity of your sin, you’d be repenting forever.

Maintaining this purity for the sake of my future husband and God Almighty would be, I understood, extremely difficult but ultimately rather simple. Reaching the goal consisted of two steps: controlling my own desires, and dating only people who shared all of my views on sexuality and boundaries.

These steps had the convenient side effect of neatly excising the other party in a dating relationship from the whole purity enterprise. He would either share my utter terror of Sexual Sin—so there would be no need to talk much about it—or he’d demonstrate his unsuitability by disrespecting me, violating my boundaries, burning Bibles, or some similarly blasphemous and repulsive behavior.

That is how I ended up an adult in a relationship where we could talk about philosophy, our prayer lives, and our hypothetical future marriage, but not about our daily make-out (OK, dry-humping) sessions.

That is how I carried secret shame for months over a kiss I neither consented to nor participated in.

That is how I hid, from every friend I ever had, the same secret they, without exception, were hiding from me: that I’d Gone Too Far and I could only hope to be forgiven.

That is how I nearly broke up with a man who reads history and watches soccer, who really listens to the homeless, really listens to me, works hard, loves Jesus, and just happened to not have heard about how Jesus is obsessed with everyone’s sex life. Who neither violated my boundaries nor blasphemed the Good Lord, but asked quite a few questions that I could only half answer. It made me grumpy; I had nothing without the Right Answers.

There is an ending to that story where I go on regarding my own body and everyone else’s with suspicion; where I go on clutching my Answers, placing them between me and everyone outside my tribe; where I keep my purity and my certainty and my fear, and I lose this man who insists we discuss these things, this petulant match of mine, my husband.

The threat of shame is the very definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Now I have become a story gatherer. I look for quiet moments to read the stories. I think they deserve that—and I need the time and space to pray. Every ping of my inbox represents a person on a journey, one completely unique and as familiar as my own alien skin.

Some of us write raw; some of us stuff decades of pain into little summaries so neat, only our fellow travelers might recognize the landmarks and know what scars we bear.

Often the telling of the journey is a landmark of its own; for me, the hearing is another. It’s not easy or, exactly, fun to gather these tales, but I am full of gratitude for this inbox of healing hearts. They are not pretty stories, but they are our stories, and we are claiming them for ourselves. It is not the pretty stories that turn you fierce and brilliant, not the easy answer that draws you in to God.

There’s a rumor that the only alternative to purity culture is an orgiastic free-for-all, devoid of respect and unconcerned with human connection or human dignity.

I think that belief represents a lack of imagination that’s scandalous in a group of people so enamored with a book of stories and poems.

See, when I talk about escaping purity culture, I don’t mean I want to break free of all constraints on sexual behavior. In fact, I’m asking the church to place higher expectations on all of us.

I’m asking that we learn to pray, read, think, and navigate relationships for ourselves, instead of pretending the world fits into a neat framework that will do those things for us.

I’m asking for a conversation that respects teenagers, includes single people, takes unmarried couples seriously, and encourages and challenges married people.

We’ve hammered out weapons of fear where the world is begging to know how to love. We’ve continued to objectify instead of cultivating wonder at the beauty of others. We’ve repressed and hated bodies that God invites us to celebrate and enjoy. We could be the freedom-teachers, the wound-healers, the bearers of Good News; we could be so at home in our bodies, so careful of and open to one another, so creative in our uses of the wholesomeness that is sexuality lived in the light, that people would see Jesus in us. But we trade all that for a false sense of safety.

I don’t want a sexual ethic based on threats, lies, rigid roles or ideal scenarios. I want a theology of bodies full of wonder at the image of God; located entirely in the messy spaces of relationships with God, ourselves, and others; crystal-clear about responsibility and consent; with room for the mistakes and the surprising discoveries every single one of us has made.

I’m begging us to stop pushing young men and women into a daily-changing world armed only with a set of flimsy assumptions. We have got to get over ourselves and our embarrassment long enough to talk about how to make respectful and responsible sexual choices with a partner; how to enjoy your own sexuality without objectifying others; how to cultivate self-respect; how to encounter sexual diversity in love.

We have got to do our own work to understand where we’ve been shamed, abused, confused, lied to, or controlled.

I will not pass down my own shame to a single person more.

I will find in sexuality an invitation to the hard and holy work of being human, being a body that needs other bodies, and taking responsibility for my own place in the many ways our bodies interact. I will not fail to see the transcendent dwelling in the very yuckiest muck of our world.

I will be one calling out to others: you are a miracle of a place.

If we really believed that, maybe we could let go of purity, and trade it in, finally, for love.

The sex + shame series is on pause for a bit, but if you are still interested in contributing, do let me know. I expect to either sprinkle these in over the coming months or revive the series sometime in the future.

Whether you share with us or not, if you’ve had the thought of telling your story, I’d encourage you to do it. Taking a pen and writing it out can be so healing—even if it requires more of you than you expected.

The rest of the series is here.

Zoloft Stole my Sex Drive: a brief history of my libido (sex + shame part eight)

September 18, 2017 by Lyndsey 1 Comment

YOU GUYS. I am so excited to introduce you to my friend Meredith Bazzoli, who is a kickass writer and mama and improviser near Chicago. Her piece made me laugh, it made me cry. OK I didn’t quite cry, but I did sigh with relief several times at not being alone—both in having a sex life disrupted by medical issues, and in my previous belief that nothing could possibly disrupt the married sex lives of the virtuous. I do hope you’ll follow her on Twitter or Instagram for more hilarity and also sometimes seriousness.

I saved myself for marriage.

Or however you want to say it. That particular turn of phrase reminds me of the soggy blueberry pancake and remnants of chorizo omelette I scraped off my plate and into a foil container last week at a breakfast restaurant in town. Carefully pinching the foil rim over the cardboard lid, I knew we’d never eat our scraps, and yet, as a rule, I always make sure to take home a doggy bag if we have at least a fistful of food leftover.

Maybe the wording works better than I give it credit for. I certainly felt like a soggy, forgotten pancake in the back of the fridge for most of my adolescence. In my spot towards the back of the shelf, saving myself remained a predominantly passive activity since I got asked out exactly five times from birth to age twenty five.

Two of the five asks were the same person at different ages, one was a guy who recently married a man, and number five is my husband Drew. But the point is, I waited, I saved myself, I protected my flower, I kept my virginity, remained pure, kept my legs closed, or however you want to word it.

The purity movement presented a fairly uncomplicated formula for sexual bliss: two people who shelved themselves until marriage would come together on their wedding night and receive their prize. I watched this promise propel friends down the aisle, accelerating towards the marriage bed after years of being pulled back from the genitals of the opposite sex. While creating a firm boundary at the zipper of their jeans, these couples seemed attached by every other limb, twining around each other, their horniness flowing out of their hands, hands whose digits never stopped moving around one another’s bodies.

But soon enough, the first down the aisle came back with reports of the wedding night. They told us not to get our hopes up. The process of two virgins coming together as one flesh for the first time in a Marriott hotel room paid for by their grandparents was perhaps something we could wait a little longer for.

“It can be too big!” One friend exclaimed of her elder sister’s wedding night. We stared wide eyed wondering if our own vaginas could support the girth of our future spouses.

Other friends in the know topped their Victoria’s Secret boxes at lingerie showers with bottles of lubricant sloshing back and forth under a gold curly cued ribbon. “You’ll need this,” their eyes seemed to say, “trust me.”

But what no one told me was that after years of waiting, I might not want “it” at all. Not as some purified call to celibacy, but as a side effect of a pill that was otherwise keeping me sane and alive.

————————-

I remember my sex drive. It was all fire and magnetism, a pull towards belt loops and back pockets, a sense of urgency to get closer, faster before the moment or the world ended. It was the jackal in an American Indian trickster tale darting into consciousness when least convenient around parents and grandparents and conservative Christians. It was an appetite with eyes bigger than it’s stomach, constantly convincing me that there was room for more, that the belt loop could move over a rung or two without too much guilt. And I’d take a little more, steal kisses in the next room or stop the truck to tumble into my lover’s arms, greedy for more of him.

It had me flipping through books like Every Young Woman’s Battle to see what God said about my urge to chase that certain feeling between my legs. Most of the purity materials for girls focused on the defense actions of chastity: guarding, covering, waiting. With a lack of information on having desires, let alone how to wield them, I came to understand myself as disordered for my gender.

But these instances are all memories, pre-antidepressant.

Many who suffer from anxiety and depression swallow a few SSRI’s each day (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors). I often forget the chemistry of what my Zoloft is doing; I know only that it raises rock bottom, that it creates small margins in my mind to think separately from the well-worn anxious paths. But nonetheless, to create this reality, my hormones get taken along for a ride.

While I’m tempted to spend a few thousand words justifying why I needed the SSRI’s in the first place and my journey to getting them and the sort of stigmas attached to such medication and mental illness, I will merely say that at times, my ability to live and function in the world was so inhibited by the misheard messages that very few options remained for me.

And so, the month I got engaged, my general practitioner wrote out my first prescription for an anti-depressant alongside my birth control pills. In passing, she mentioned my new pills might affect my sex drive. Increased Serotonin decreases your desire—not your sexual performance necessarily, like the men riding on boats with their golden retrievers in Viagra commercials—but it takes sex off my brain and gives me a neutral-leaning-to-negative feeling about it. Sex finally on the horizon, I had none of my primal fires burning, none of nature’s urgings to keep the species alive. After years of learning how to contain the flames, I barely had a smoldering match.

We talked about the medicated shift in my libido at our premarital counseling. At the time, we assumed the pills were temporary. I had a lot going against me depression/anxiety wise: an overly detailed wedding, a mother with cancer, a recent attack by a family dog. As a couple, we planned on doing it till our hips and knees and hearts gave out, so we took this blip on our sex timeline in stride.

But three years later, I still take one and half of the yellow tablets every morning; and with them, I swallow the bigger pill of shame, that I couldn’t fix myself with sun lamps, or exercise, or counseling, or that one kind of therapy where my counselor ushered me down the path of my memory with two little vibrating orbs alternating in my left and right hands. And most of all, the deep shame that, married to the good, good man I am—a 6’4” dreamboat who will text with me about my poop and never lets a day go by that he doesn’t express his love and desire for me—I don’t have a sex drive.

While we’ve rewritten the script for intimacy in our own marriage, the original version still sneaks through, a palimpsest layered with early 2000’s purity culture, sex talks with sassy married millennials at coffee shops, and a deep feeling down in my gut that I am defective, that I deserve this for some misstep of lust or pleasure in my past.

I keep silent on a walk with friends, one sharing how she decided against birth control pills since they curbed her sister in law’s sex drive, and again when friends sit around and give advice on the night before another friend’s wedding. They talk about pushing past tiredness and how many times a week they put out—men do really want sex all the time they say. I can’t help but hear a long-ago line about men looking for sex elsewhere if you don’t give it to them, if you don’t perform your wifely role and duty as God intended.

And I am sad for Drew. But I am also proud of him. For navigating this road with me, for never once entertaining any of my talk of sexual karma or my own grossness, for going above and beyond to ensure not only consent in our love making, but also volition, comfort and agency. For discovering intimacy where it can be found but still expressing desire for me—body, mind, soul.

And in all of this, we are both grateful to my Zoloft, because while I saved myself for marriage, my Zoloft saved me after that.

Hey, I told you you’d want to find Meredith on Twitter and Instagram!

What kinds of if…then promises did you grow up expecting to operate in your romantic life?

What messages have you encountered about women’s sex drives? How do they compare with your experience?

Who else gets excluded when we make sex the barometer for marital bliss?

catch up on the sex + shame series here:

what it’s like to hide your sexuality in church (sex + shame part six)

September 7, 2017 by Lyndsey Leave a Comment

Part six of a series beginning here.

I had been hoping to hear from some men, as their experiences with purity culture are, by and large, very different but potentially as damaging as women’s. I had not been hoping to hear a story as difficult as this one, but I am so grateful for the author’s candor and wisdom. These are the stories that get lost (or worst, dismissed outright) in the debates I wrote about last week. Thank you for taking time for this one.

I have a male assigned body, and as a young child I was sexually abused by an older, male cousin. This is the same cousin who called me a “fag” for being more sensitive and interested in books that little boys ought to be. The same cousin who worked very hard to fit within the mold of masculinity, degrading women and other men to prove his position within society.

During middle school I transferred schools, and I would not shake the outsider status until late in high school. Because I was different, I was treated poorly and called “gay.” When I found that it was difficult to look directly at some boys too long without blushing or feeling warm, I felt as though I could not admit to myself that I was in fact gay because then maybe all of their anger and resentment towards me had legitimacy. Their poor treatment of me would be justified.

In high school I became fairly involved with a Baptist Youth group. I was the first to be inducted into a secret group called “Men of Honor.” In this group we heard stories about how men’s sexual, fleshly desires ruined their marriages or lives. We discussed all sexual release out of heterosexual marriage not only as sinful but as spiritual violence—if not against another, then against yourself. Married, opposite-gendered sex was sanctified as one of the most spiritually pure acts. Sex within any other context, even masturbation, was spiritually damaging. Of all the sexual acts, however, gay or lesbian sex was the most corrupt, destroying whole families in the wake of lustful passions.

Being a survivor of sexual violence, the idea of all sex as inherently violent (spiritually at the very least) made me nauseous and uninterested all together. I did not want to hurt anyone the way I had been hurt. And I viewed my own sexuality as a destructive force that I had to protect others from—especially since I was tempted by the most violent and devastating variation. The shame was crippling, and I did not start dating until I was 23.

My journey towards healing included reconciling my past abuse and my sexuality as two separate things—one as a traumatic event in my life and the other an irrepressible part of how I naturally receive and express intimacy, and who I share that with. Healing meant understanding sex as not an act of violence being acted out by either myself or my partner. An act of sex is instead one of many ways to express full bodied, intimate affection for someone else as another bodied creation of God. Healing also meant accepting that being gay is not all about sex, but who I want to watch science fiction anime with, who I want to share my crossword puzzle while we sip coffee, and who I want to unload to after a difficult day of class or work. Intimacy does reach beyond the physical into the mental and spiritual, but the health of that union does not hinge on gender or marriage. A healthy relationship is built on flexibility, love and trust. And healthy sex is empowering, safe, and consensual.

Is there something you’ve learned to separate from sex?

Have you heard male sexuality described as a violent force? What do we think we gain by viewing it this way?

What did you learn being gay is “about”?

How purity culture feeds rape culture (sex and shame part five)

August 31, 2017 by Lyndsey Leave a Comment

Fifth in a series, explained here.

A common theme among people I’ve talked with is the understanding that parents or teachers meant to protect them for safe and fulfilling intimacy, though the lessons unwittingly barred them from it in one way or another. I’m grateful to all our authors for contributing to a conversation that doesn’t seek to condemn or blame, but to heal and to empower.

TW: brief description of assault

My parents were raised conservative Baptists. From the time I was a small child, my parents made sure I knew that they had only ever had sex with each other. My cousin got married when I was seven, and though I personally saw no reason for the outrage, my mom assured me that their marriage did not erase the fact they were living together beforehand. When I asked why it mattered, she said you could never be too sure that the person you were marrying wasn’t going to change their mind, and it was best to be certain before you got too close.

When I was thirteen or fourteen my dad told me that his high school girlfriend had wanted to have sex with him but he’d been strong enough to deny her, and that nice girls didn’t tempt people they cared about. Shortly thereafter Mom gave me the “boys only want one thing” discussion, where it became my responsibility to circumscribe my behaviors lest I unwittingly cause the downfall of some weak boy. They were my parents. I believed them. I wanted to do what they told me was right. So I became very careful about how and if I touched people, just in case I touched them in the wrong ways or got too close. I still struggle with this.

After high school (during which time I didn’t date) I went to a small college just far enough away that my parents weren’t involved in my day-to-day decisions. I made friends who drank and went to fraternity parties and I felt young for the first time. The parties were fun, and on those evenings, for a short while, I didn’t have to be the person who carried the entire weight of the world on her shoulders.

One evening my sophomore year I was standing in an alley between two of the fraternity houses when a group of young men came up to me. I was wearing something moderately low cut and was a little drunk. They liked the way I looked and wanted to kiss me. I clearly told them no. It didn’t matter. They kissed me and touched me for a while, and I was so afraid. In my mind it was confirmation that everything my parents said was true. While I know it could have been much worse, I remember feeling like I deserved what I got because for one evening I had felt pretty. I told some friends about it the next day. They laughed. I felt so foolish. I waited a decade to mention it to anyone else.

I was 30 years old before I allowed someone else to touch me, and before I allowed myself to touch him. I was 30 years old before someone I wanted kissed me. I was 30 years old before I found someone who made me feel safe, someone who saw me and wanted nothing from me, other than to make me feel good. It was an incredible gift while it lasted.

Now, as a single person trying to figure out the world of online dating, I often feel as if it’s too late—that there was some kind of learning curve that I missed out on. While I know that isn’t strictly true, it’s something I confront every single time I go out with someone new. Will he understand? Will he interpret my inability to touch as disinterest? How do I be me while still giving off the appropriate signals? Do I know someone who will let me practice touching them? Oh god, how would I explain the need to practice? And I still feel like damaged goods. Every. Single. Time.

I know my parents did the best they knew for me, and in many ways my upbringing was wonderful. I’m a functional member of society and I’ve had lots of great opportunities. But I wish they hadn’t pushed (what I now know is) their body stuff off onto me. I wish they’d have let me be me, and, more importantly, I wish they’d have used something more than fear and shame to teach me about sexuality and intimacy.

Sexual violence is pervasive in American life (and throughout the world): half of women and at least one in five men in the U.S. will be victims at some point in their lives. Sadly, sexual violence is also becoming a theme of this series. If you’ve experienced sexual violence, know that you are not alone and that you deserve respect, autonomy, and safety. The people at the National Sexual Assault Hotline (1-800-656-4673) can direct you to those who can help you on your journey.

Today’s questions, in light of this crisis:

How does purity culture diverge from rape culture?
How does it intersect?

What does an emphasis on boundaries communicate about the way the world works?

What qualities (joy, courage, anger, empowerment) or experiences have helped you replace fear or shame in your life?

Decent Women, Sex, and Shame

August 8, 2017 by Lyndsey 2 Comments

The grass is not as soft as it looks, but cuddling in it seems to make my boyfriend happy. He is my first boyfriend, we are freshmen, and his affection for me is thrilling and overwhelming. I am certain he would do anything for me, so I am cuddling in this grass for him—though if I were to choose a scratchy patch of grass for this activity, it also wouldn’t be the university quad. In fact, when we sat down here, I hadn’t anticipated nearly this level of PDA. But my highest priority as a girlfriend is to be low-maintenance, and we’re certainly not making out like couples in movies about college, or couples I’ve seen in public parks in Atlanta and San Francisco; besides, Christian college is supposed to be a place where you have adventures, just safer and more moral ones than at other colleges. Having a boyfriend is an adventure. Spooning in public is an adventure. I put my discomfort aside. Sideways, I watch the frisbee game across the lawn; people trickle out of the dining hall; from my perspective, ants join up to follow in their wake, everyone busy. Maybe no one I know will even notice us.

Then a pair of boots blocks my view.

We scramble to a seated position and squint up at the Campus Safety officer who’s been dispatched to protect the campus from our obscenity. It is my nightmare. All the voices nagging that I was embarrassing myself are suddenly, solidly before me in this irritated young man and in the finger-wagging of the anonymous professor he says sent him. I cannot look at the officer or at my boyfriend; all I want is to scurry away like an ant and hide, maybe under a bush, the scratchier the better. I should have known better. I should have found some way to say no. Decent women do not even lay down in public, let alone with a boy. Decent women know how to make their boyfriends happy without scandalizing their professors. My face is flaring. People will gossip later, and I know I deserve it.

I don’t let on that I am this upset; pretending is something I’m good at. I make some jokes about the threat we pose to campus safety, and we take some aimless walk, as freshmen do. In the future, though, we won’t cuddle on campus. We’ve learned our relationship doesn’t belong there. We will make out in his car in dark parking lots because it seems to make my boyfriend happy. We still won’t be alone, though; a choir of voices will pull me farther and farther from my body, and I will learn every word to the single CD in his car, until the kissing involves him and a policeman and a professor and a pastor and Chris Carrabba, but not me. I will be hiding in shame.

When I was 18 I was not under the impression that making out in cars with boys you aren’t sure about is part of normal human development. My friends and I were raised in various strains of what has come to be called evangelical purity culture. We were generally under the impression that it would be, if not easy, at least fairly straightforward to arrive at our wedding days not only with our virginity, but with a record of very little physical interaction between ourselves and anyone other than our husbands. It had been impressed upon us that all physical contact beyond hand-holding had consequences for all of our future relationships, that “going too far” with the wrong boy could curse our marriages for years—and if we didn’t have good marriages, what would we have?

Now I’ve learned that making out in cars is, in fact, part of normal human development; but for me and my purity-seeking friends, what’s even more normal is feeling extreme shame about it. Whether we shut down our sexuality like we were told to, basically refusing to kiss before marriage, or we drew our lines elsewhere, we have all carried the weight of deep shock at ourselves, believing we’ve done far more than the respectable people around us. We have all sat in a church service feeling that if anyone knew, they would stage an intervention to rescue our integrity, our relationships, and potentially our salvation from the terrible things we hadn’t had the courage to refuse. But no one must find out. We might confess the sins of gossip, envy, cheating in school or spending too much, but sexual sin was another realm entirely. To do it was forbidden. To talk about it was impossible.

Now I’ve learned that the guilt we felt was not a healthy sense of regret at a genuinely bad choice. It was the inevitable consequence of a system that told women to be demure and compliant in every arena—including marriage—then made us the sole responsible guardians of that nebulous object, the “purity” of our bodies and souls. Shame was the inevitable consequence of encouraging dissociation from and fear of our bodies. It inevitably swelled like a cancer, replicating itself on all sides, feeding on itself, on the silence and fear and self-hatred it created.

Now I’ve learned that every single one of us has sat somewhere being torn apart by shame—and believing we were utterly alone.

This series has inspired me to invite you to share your stories about sex and shame, anonymously if you choose. It’s not because it’s sensationalist or cathartic to sit around and complain about our childhoods. It’s because I am coming to believe that in every place we can name our shame and fear, and then say something anyway, we are doing something to cauterize the cancer. We are learning that speaking the unspeakable is not nearly as catastrophic as we thought. We are inviting others out into the light. We might even find ways to grieve, or rebuild, or at least to laugh.

Beginning next week, I’ll publish stories about sex and shame, completely anonymously (or with your name and links if you specify). I’m hoping to hear from women and men, Christian and not-Christian, straight and not-straight. Tell us the thing you wish your 15-year-old self could hear. Tell us the thing you’re afraid of. Tell us where you’ve found healing or discovered a new sexual ethic. Tell us we are not alone.

Send your story to me at lyndseymedford[at]gmail.com, using the contact page of the website, or through a Facebook direct message. If you’re not sure where to start, grab one of the prompts below. Be prepared: I’ll probably have to edit for length or clarity. I’ll do everything I can to honor both your story and our readers.

Share a story like the one above of a specific time when a cultural norm about sex “happened” to you. What aspect of that culture does it illustrate?
How did you relate to your body as a child, teenager, or now? Tell about an event that changed this relationship for better or for worse.
Talk about a message about sexuality that has been particularly powerful in your life.
What embarrassing questions do you have about sex and sexuality? Or if you’re not Christian or evangelical, do you have questions you’re afraid to ask about purity culture?
If you met your 15-year-old self, what’s one specific thing you would tell him/her about sex? Or more generally, tell us about one thing you’ve learned as an adult about the ethics/responsibility of sex.

Thanks for being big and bright and brave with anything you want to share. I hope this conversation can be a sigh of relief, a lightened load, and a space for respectful disagreement; I can’t wait to share it with you!