“I haven’t ever cheated on Michael, but I’ve come close twice. I’m really glad that in both of those cases I had enough of my senses to be like, ‘I’m sorry; I need to get out of here.’ I always picture people cheating because of something they feel like they’re not getting. It was very much not that. It didn’t happen because I was looking for something better than him. Certainly not because I was looking for something better than him.
“In both of those cases, I told Michael about it,” Piper continued. “I remember Michael saying I was aiming for some sort of climactic end to things, right? That somehow, somewhere I thought we’re just going to have to break up and it’s going to have to be terrible. I’m looking for the melodramatic end, and by God, I’m going to make that melodramatic end.”
Piper picked up her espresso, took a sip thoughtfully, and set it back down.
“There’s absolutely no way that I would have been able to be a healthy person without all of the amazing people in my life. My parents weren’t raised in the church,” she said, though they both identified as evangelicals by the time they raised her. “I don’t think they realized how much of a struggle it was for me, so I don’t think they knew how much I needed it to be actively counteracted.
“But still, I was engaging intellectually with my father on the gender topic from an extremely young age, and the fact that he took an eight-year-old seriously is pretty ridiculous. And what I observed from my mother was someone who was so perfectly confident and sure of herself. She would say that she needs to submit to my father, but then she would laugh and make a joke about it being really easy to submit to someone who does whatever you tell them. Something like that. And I had other strong women in my life during the right periods to help me work through things. I had absolutely every opportunity to be fully okay. I had every opportunity. And it’s still something that, every once in a while, leaves me at the doorstep of destruction. That causes me to behave in such a way that makes me feel that I want to cheat on my husband, right? I don’t know how people who don’t have great parents even survive.”
Another interviewee seemed to agree with Piper on this count. During our interview, she brought up Piper’s name, saying Piper was the one person from our youth group who she could think of who she assumed was unaffected by purity culture.
So much for that.
“So, how has all of this affected your relationship with God?” I asked Piper, who now loosely identifies as Episcopal.
“It’s hard,” she said. “Until I could really affirm the way that God had created me, both as a physical being and an intellectual being, I was basically saying that God messed up. And theologically, what does that mean for God as a good creator?”
“Mm-hmm. I think what I’m hearing you say is, if you believe all the ‘shoulds’ that purity culture taught us, then . . . God is not cool if he has instilled in you deep parts of your personality that feel unchangeable—such as your strong opinions and your sense of competition—things that the church says aren’t in a good woman . . . but are in you.”
Piper began nodding vigorously.
“So either you’re bad, or God is,” I continued. Piper was still nodding. “Or . . .” I smiled, “the ‘shoulds’ are the problem. The shame is the problem.”
“Yes,” she said with a final nod. “Exactly!” She threw her hands up in the air. “This is energizing! Putting it in a context—this is what it looks like—I feel like, I don’t know, I’m not totally fucked. It’s a the-emperor-has-no-clothes moment. Somebody has got to stand up and say, ‘actually wait a second,’ and then all of a sudden you realize that there’s a lot of people out there that were just waiting for you to say it!” Her smile widened.
“That’s the idea,” I smiled back.
* * *
I. It is important to acknowledge that some evangelical churches are much more embracing of women’s leadership than others. In these churches, you can sometimes even find head pastors who are women. However, I have been assured by many of these pastors, this does not mean they do not experience gender discrimination in the church.
II. It appears this lesson was replaced by a different lesson in the latest version of the curriculum. In the new lesson, the princess is engaged to a prince who prefers jousting with the other knights and buying the princess gifts to talking with her about their future life together. The princess proceeds to fall in love with a blacksmith, who does talk with her, and leaves the prince for him.
III. As an example of what happens when this thinking is taken to its extreme, more than one of my interviewees report having been told (sometimes by men and women in leadership) that the most Christ-like thing a woman can do is submit to being raped.
IV. Piper contacted Lucy after our interview and asked if Lucy would feel comfortable with her story being shared in this book. Lucy enthusiastically agreed, expressing her belief that it was important for others to hear her story.
3
* * *
Pure Destruction
The sun was setting when Chloe suggested we move from the outdoor table where I had been oohing and aahing over her wedding book to the restaurant’s dimly lit basement bar heavy with the dank scent of a microbrewery. I watched as Chloe, now in her midtwenties, lifted her floor-length floral skirt to reveal a pair of stocky brown boots as she headed toward the winding stairwell. She looked just the way I remembered her from youth group: thin and petite with a pixie-like turned-up nose, the same stick-straight strawberry blonde hair falling all the way to her behind, and her arms and legs thick with freckles that thinned on her face, where they scattered across her nose and cheeks like a warm blush.
“I’m so glad that you want to talk to people about sex,” Chloe said looking back at me as she descended the stairs. I paused on the edge of a step. I had never heard Chloe say the word sex before and, knowing she was still an active member of the evangelical church, I wasn’t sure how comfortable she would be talking about it tonight.
“Why’s that?” I asked before continuing behind her.
“We never talked about it enough,” she said.
Chloe was right. We talked about sexual purity all the time, but sex? Never.
“We need to be better equipped to function in the world, you know?” Chloe continued as she approached a small bar table at the bottom of the stairwell. “Did you know that I didn’t even know what testicles were until I was in my twenties?”
“Really?” I asked, taking my jacket off and hanging it over the back of my chair.
“I once asked my mom what they were. I must’ve been sixteen or seventeen at the time. I’d heard them mentioned in a movie. She said, ‘I don’t know.’ ”
“Do you think that was true?”
“Well, when I asked her again when I was twenty-four, she said she knew. I told her, ‘You said you didn’t know what they were when I was seventeen, and I needed to know then.’ These days, when people make sex jokes, I ask them to explain them to me so I can learn something,” she laughed. “Linda, I didn’t even know what sex was until I was in my twenties. I mean, I thought I understood what it was, but I didn’t figure out that the penis goes in and out of the vagina and doesn’t just go in and, sort of . . . sit there, until I was a senior in college.”
“Believe it or not,” I told her, “you are not the first person to tell me that.”
“And the whole time, I was having oral sex with girls,” she shook her head.
“Wait. What?” I asked.
Chloe nodded. “Since I was eight.”
“Hold on,” I said.
I hadn’t heard this one before.
The waitress approached our table and stood over us impatiently until we both ordered a beer.
“Um, before you go,” I stopped the waitress as she started to walk away, “do you have a notebook I could use? And a pen?”
I hadn’t planned to interview Chloe that night, as it was our first time seeing one another in a few years, but I’ve learned that you n
ever know when someone is going to open up.
The waitress raised her pen into the air. “I need this,” she announced. But she handed me an empty order pad from the half apron tied around her waist before hurrying to the next table.
“Thank you!” I called after her. “I’m sorry,” I said, turning to Chloe then. “I know we haven’t seen each other in a while and we hadn’t really talked about this being an interview, but do you mind if I write this down?”
“That’s why I’m telling you,” Chloe said, handing me a pen out of her bag. “I want you to know. What you said on the phone, you’re right. We need to start talking about these things.”
* * *
The third stumbling block those raised as girls in the purity movement must overcome is the destruction of what author and cofounder of the popular online community Feministing, Jessica Valenti, refers to as “the purity myth.” In her book, The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women, Valenti defines this term as the myth that girls’ “only real worth is their virginity and ability to remain ‘pure.’ ” Valenti argues this myth is as present in religious sexual shaming as it is in secular sexual exploitation:
Abstinence-only education during the day and Girls Gone Wild commercials at night! Whether its delivered through a virginity pledge or by a barely dressed tween pop singer writhing across the television screen, the message is the same: A woman’s worth lies in her ability—or her refusal—to be sexual. And we’re teaching American girls that, one way or another, their bodies and their sexuality are what make them valuable.1
Valenti goes on to describe the cultural, legislative, and other ramifications of this “virginity fetishism,” saying: “It’s time to teach our daughters that their ability to be good people depends on their being good people, not on whether or not they’re sexually active.”2
The cornerstone of the purity myth is the expectation that girls and women, in particular, will be utterly and absolutely nonsexual until the day they marry a man, at which point they will naturally and easily become his sexual satisfier, ensuring the couple will have children and never divorce: one man, one woman, in marriage, forever.
For this formula to work, my girlfriends and I knew we had to follow a slew of rules. Unfortunately, none of us knew what they were. Sex was such a shameful topic that we never got straight talk on what we were and were not allowed to do. It was assumed that if no one ever talked to us about sex, it would just sort of go away until we needed it. So our “sex talks” were all generic metaphors and warnings about what would happen to us if we crossed a line, which was defined differently by so many people that we were left guessing all the same. Meanwhile, we knew we would be shamed if we asked sexual questions; shamed if we discussed sexual decisions; shamed if we shared our confusing sexual feelings and thoughts; and shamed worst of all if we admitted we had already done anything sexual. So each of us guessed at what the rules might be, hoped we were right, and didn’t tell anyone about our sexual lives just in case we weren’t.
For her book, Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campuses, Donna Freitas tracked evangelical college students’ understanding of just how far one could go and still be sexually pure. Unsurprisingly, she found a great deal of variation among them. They defined purity as:
• Waiting till the wedding ceremony for the first kiss.
• Waiting till the engagement for the first kiss.
• Trying to avoid all lustful thoughts or feelings of sexual desire prior to marriage.
• Dressing modestly (especially for women).
• Restricting kissing to public places as a way of preventing further sexual intimacy.
• Kissing only while standing up.
• Kissing while lying down but avoiding any other “sexual contact.”
• Kissing and touching but never achieving orgasm.
• Engaging in “everything but” intercourse, including oral and anal sex.3
You get the picture.
It is worth remembering that “purity” is a proxy for “sameness.” Whether we are talking about sexual purity, gender purity, racial purity, ethnic purity, or religious purity, we use the term purity to refer to “keeping out” or even “cleansing” humanity of diversity. To be “pure” in someone else’s eyes is to be like them—absent of the elements that make you difficult for them to understand or accept. Of course, the reality is there is no such thing as purity, as we are all different! And so, when we try to be the same, or “pure” as defined by one person’s or group’s concept of normality, we are set up for failure.
The lack of sexual knowledge and wisdom among young people extends beyond evangelicalism as well. As Mark RegnerusI writes in his book Forbidden Fruit: Sex & Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers: “It is widely believed that today’s adolescents typically know more about sex than their parents did at their age. When researchers probe their knowledge, however, what is often uncovered is a hodgepodge of facts and fictions, myths and truths.”4 Regnerus references the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a nationally representative study of seventh–twelfth graders with four waves of research beginning in 1995 and ending in 2008. It is considered “the largest, most comprehensive longitudinal survey of adolescents ever undertaken.”5 The study asks five questions about sex and pregnancy risk. Adolescents’ scores are around 50 percent. Yet as Regnerus points out: “Unfortunately scoring 50 percent on a true/false quiz does not indicate that teens know the correct answer to half of the questions. Flipping a coin would produce the same score, on average. Until a category of adolescents scores reliably better than 50 percent, we cannot have confidence that they know any of the correct answers.” Meanwhile, adolescents who attended church weekly and said that “religion was ‘very important’ to them” score even lower than the unchurched kids, despite the purity movement’s surplus of vague “sex” talks.6
And so we wander into the forest of sexuality without a compass, grabbing hold of whatever trinkets we can find to guide us. Yet if our natural curiosity leads us into an off-limits section of that forest, we are told we should have known—or worse yet, we did know—just what we were doing.
* * *
As we waited for our beers to arrive, Chloe told me it was a girl she knew from a church program who’d first introduced her to oral sex.
“She and I prayed about it afterward,” Chloe explained. “ ‘What does God think about this?’ ” she said, turning her head to the right, miming a conversation between her eight-year-old self and the other little girl. “ ‘I don’t know. Let’s ask,’ ” she said turning to the left. “In the Bible, Gideon put a sheepskin out when he was seeking God. So I said, ‘I have a rabbit skin,’ a tourist thing. I thought I’d put the rabbit skin out in the yard for God. But then I pulled it back because I didn’t want to wreck the rabbit skin in case it got wet. I decided instead to ask God, ‘If there’s dew outside in the morning, you’re okay with this. If not, you’re not.’ ”
“You wanted a sign,” I suggested as the waitress dropped off our beers.
“Right,” she said. “There was dew. So I thought, ‘What a great thing to share with my friends!’ And I did—with a neighbor, some of my homeschooling friends, about three, one of whom, we did it constantly. Another, we took baths together and there were sexual overtones to all of our conversations. Another I told about it and we did it once.
“When I was turning ten, I had a party with five or six people, two of whom I’d shown it to,” Chloe continued. “I told everyone, but there was one homeschooler who wouldn’t participate.” Chloe had begun to speak faster and I was having trouble keeping up on the waitress pad.
“Pause for a second,” I said. “I want to get all this down.”
Chloe took a long swig of beer before continuing.
“She told her mom. And her mom told my mom.
“Mom asked me if this was true.
“I said ‘yes.’
“She told Dad. I knew I was in big trouble. Dad cried,” Chloe continued without pausing. “He said, ‘Get down on your knees and ask God for forgiveness.’
“ ‘I didn’t know what I was doing,’ I told him.
“ ‘Yes you did,’ he told me.
“But I didn’t,” Chloe looked right at me and stopped speaking, her light brown eyes pleading with me to believe her.
“I got down on my knees in front of them and asked for forgiveness,” she went on. “It was horrible. So humiliating. Then every morning for five or six days, I went into my mom’s room and told her bit by bit every sexual exploration I’d ever done. She made me listen to Frog and Toad books on tape. There was one on self-control and Mom said, ‘You need to listen to that one.’ It made me feel bad, like I was bad.”
I flipped past page after page in the waitress’s order pad, trying to get down each word Chloe said, but by now she was talking so fast I was missing whole paragraphs.
“Let me just catch up,” I said again, and for a moment, the music blared overhead as I wrote and our table was silent. When I looked up, I saw Chloe had torn the paper coaster her beer had arrived on into nervous scraps.
“After the little girl tattled on me,” Chloe continued more slowly now, “my mom divulged the whole oral sex thing to twenty-five or thirty moms at once at a homeschoolers meeting,” Chloe said, explaining that she and her mom had been attending support groups for Christian homeschooling moms since she could remember. The mothers exchanged ideas for teaching math, science, and English from a religious perspective while the kids played together.
“None of them were even mothers of girls I’d been with,” she continued. “The kids were off on the other side that day, but I was hanging out near the moms, I think, because I heard her blabber it to everyone. One of the ladies was a social worker. She went and talked to the little girl who taught me—they pulled her out of class at school—but she denied everything. So they thought I must have learned it from my parents. And meanwhile, my parents were getting counseling for their marriage, which didn’t look good. So the social worker said it was her job to ‘report it’ to Child Protective Services, that she was legally bound to report suspicious acts like this in case adults were involved.
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