“After that, when the phone rang during school hours, we were never allowed to answer it. And when the doorbell rang, we had to run to the basement. My parents didn’t want anyone to know that we were homeschooled. They told us that Child Services was anti-Christian and took four kids away from their parents because they were homeschooling.”
Though “adult-like” sexual experimentation among children can be a sign that a child is a victim of sexual abuse and so should be taken seriously, sexual experimentation among children and adolescents of the same gender and age can also be quite normal.7 And yet, Chloe was immediately shamed by her parents for it, and her parents were immediately shamed by the larger community.
“Did anyone know any of this was happening?” I asked Chloe with concern.
“The pastor once called and I accidentally answered. Mom screamed at me and, I remember, the pastor reprimanded her. That was the closest anyone ever got to coming inside our home and seeing what was really going on. Being homeschooled, being in this environment constantly, was very damaging. Mom was volatile and depressed. My job was to save my family—protect everyone from Mom. I remember I used to look at Scott Ryan, the epitome of cool,” she said referring to the coolest kid in our youth group. “He and I had a normal conversation once and I was terrified the whole time because I was so uncomfortable with myself. I didn’t know how to talk to anyone. I felt so stupid all the time. I was lonely. I needed intimacy so badly. Every paper I ever wrote was about loneliness. Youth group was my only outlet because I was homeschooled. My whole socialization was youth group. Can you imagine that?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head, closing the now full waitress pad and grabbing a stack of napkins from the plastic container on the table so I could continue writing.
“I remember I thought, ‘If people in youth group knew what all went on in my life, I’d at least get kudos for having a great testimony.’ I pictured myself sitting on the stool that the singers and speakers sat on in youth group and telling everyone what had gone on so they’d get me, notice me, give me attention. I imagined them saying, ‘Wow! God really worked through your life!’
“But I couldn’t actually tell anyone about this stuff. It was too bad . . . or not bad enough. I wasn’t going through the ‘right’ kind of hard times. It wasn’t drugs or any of the other ‘right’ struggles. I couldn’t get up in front of youth group and say, ‘Hey, I had oral sex with a lot of my girlfriends. You don’t want to hear about that? You don’t want to talk about that? I think we should talk about it!’
“I was ten . . . nine. . . eight when I first started thinking I was a lesbian,” Chloe continued. “I remember thinking that the ultimate rebellion would be to move in with my girlfriend and become a fabulous, haunting, piano-playing artist.”
I smiled.
“Going to a liberal evangelical college later was great because I had only ever known conservative Christians. There were signs up that said ‘Gay and Lesbian Discussion Group’ and I had some good conversations with my hall director. My freshman year I really began to question my own sexual orientation.” But in the end, Chloe married a man, as evidenced by the ornate wedding book still sticking out from her bag.
“When I got out of college, I worked at a local bookstore. All of a sudden, it occurred to me that my coworkers weren’t Christians and were going to Hell according to my beliefs. I always thought that if people just got Christianity, then they would believe. But my coworkers did get it, and they didn’t believe. It made me think . . . what do I believe? All of a sudden I wondered if God even existed. And since then . . . I’ve never been able to get that belief in him back. I don’t have the peace I once had. It scares me. I’ve struggled with meaning in life ever since I first doubted God’s existence. I’ve plotted out my suicide to every detail. Suicide makes sense in a Christian framework, because isn’t Heaven better than earth?” she looked at me.
I looked up from the napkin I was writing on, my eyebrows furrowed.
“Honestly, I believe what I believe because I’m unwilling to part with the assurances that the faith gives me,” Chloe continued. “Even though my faith is nothing like it used to be, I can’t not believe these things. But I don’t really believe them anymore either. I mean, my beliefs make me crazy because they don’t all make sense, but I can’t not believe them,” she repeated. “I’m scared, Linda. I’m scared. I’m like, ‘Okay, Christianity is true enough. Do we have to harp on it? Can’t we just stop talking about it? Can’t I just say I believe and we leave well enough alone?!’ ”
Then she went silent.
I finished writing the sentence she had said, and then I put my pen down.
“I’ve come to believe in predestination though, because of all the times God has brought me back to Christianity,” she offered.
“I get it,” I answered her. “I mean, I’m still here too, right? I let go of everything. And yet, here I still am.”
“Here we still are,” Chloe repeated.
* * *
I. As I feature some of his work in this book, it is important for me to note that Mark Regnerus’s research on same-sex parenting—which is not included here—has been quite rightly critiqued as highly problematic.
4
* * *
Sexual Violence, Classified
“Do you mind if he stays?” Laura gestured toward her boyfriend as she opened the front door to her small Washington, DC, studio apartment. “Everything that happened to me,” she explained uncomfortably, “shows up in our relationship. And he and I were thinking, maybe it would help if he heard the whole story.”
This isn’t usually something I recommend. My interviewees tend to talk about sensitive matters, and the pressure that an extended audience puts on them can be difficult. But looking into Laura’s pleading eyes I thought, What do I really know about what Laura—whose story I was already aware was more sensitive than most—needs at the end of the day?
“I can offer Concord grapes,” her boyfriend said sheepishly.
I laughed. “I do love Concord grapes.”
Laura sat down on the edge of a folded futon in sweatpants and an oversized T-shirt; I sat facing her on the other end of the futon; and her boyfriend, whom Laura had instructed to be as unobtrusive as possible, sat across from us on a kitchen chair.
Laura, one of the few people who chose to use her real name—Laura L. Dunn, Esq.—is the youngest daughter of a midwestern preacher. She remembers watching older siblings face consequences around the issue of sexuality and determining early on that she would avoid a similar fate by remaining “pure” until the day she married. “I have this memory of playing in the playground when I was eleven and being like, ‘If I die, I want to be this age in Heaven’ . . .” Laura took a deep breath as her voice began to crack. “Somehow I knew, even as a child, that everything would get a lot harder with puberty.”
And it did.
“My mother constantly implied to me that my body was inherently sinful,” Laura said of her adolescent years. “She would describe me to people as a Barbie doll because of my figure. I had big breasts and was otherwise really thin. When I was a freshman in high school, my mom said, ‘The way that you’re dressing—your clothes are too tight, and you’re making all your brothers-in-law uncomfortable.’ It disgusted me. It made me feel sick. If that’s what they’re thinking, isn’t that their problem? I was just wearing the clothes that I had, clothing that my parents bought me. If I was developing and they didn’t fit anymore, she could have just helped buy me clothes, rather than shame me.
“I got the idea that I was inherently sexual so it mattered even more that I committed my virginity to God. It was going to be this beautiful gift that I would give to my husband, to connect over. I would become my husband’s sexual fantasy.
“When I was eleven or twelve, my middle sister won a radio competition and got five golden rings for Christmas. She gave them to us sisters. I got a sapphire one, which was my birthstone. I remember knowing
it was under the tree and looking forward to opening it on Christmas Day. Everyone was in bed one night and I was sitting under the tree and promised my virginity to God. I did it privately. It wasn’t anything my parents asked me to do, though I knew it was ‘a thing’ in the Christian community. That some people had purity rings and stuff—but I just did it privately and personally with God.”
Laura began to cry. “I had that ring,” she continued, tears streaming down her face. “I used to wear it every day. Not everyone knew what it was. But I knew what it was.”
“Do you want to talk about why this feels emotional?” I asked gently.
“Because,” she confided, “I actually meant all of it.”
* * *
Rolling Stone magazine, June 19, 2014:
April 4th, 2004, is a date Laura Dunn has never forgotten. That was the day the Midwestern preacher’s daughter who didn’t believe in sex before marriage says she lost her virginity to not one but two University of Wisconsin–Madison athletes. Dunn was a freshman member of the crew team, attending a boozy frat bash, and she lost count of her intake after seven raspberry-vodka shots. She remembers two older teammates led her out, guys she knew. She was stumbling drunk, but one of them helped her walk, and they headed, she thought, toward another campus party. Instead, they led her to one of their apartments, where she found herself on a bed with both of them on top of her, as she drifted in and out of consciousness. When she started to get sick, one of them led her to the bathroom, where he penetrated her from behind while she was throwing up.
The next morning, she went back to her apartment, tossed her bloody underwear in the hamper and took a shower. “It was awful. I was trying to get it off my skin.” In the afternoon, one of the teammates called. “He said, ‘I felt bad for you, are you OK?’ ” recalls the petite brunette, a recently graduated law student. “I was like, ‘Why did I find blood in my underwear?’ He was like, ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ ” They agreed to meet later, off campus. Both young men showed up. “I said, ‘What did you do?’ And then one said, ‘I raped you.’ But the other teammate was like, ‘No, it was a threesome. It was great.’ ”
It took Dunn more than a year to come to terms with the truth of the first assessment.1
* * *
Laura pushed her body against the arm of the futon as though hoping she could disappear into it. Tears streamed freely down her face as they had been for nearly an hour as she told her story. And they would continue to fall that way for the entirety of our time together.
“Do you want a hand to hold?” I asked at one point, reaching toward her.
She shook her head vigorously.
“I’m not very emotional,” she said. Her words didn’t match her face, but I thought I understood what she meant: She wanted to push through, to let the tears come, fine, but not to give into them, not allow them to stop her. I looked over at her boyfriend. He was watching Laura intently but didn’t make a move. I pulled my hand back.
“Afterward, I remember being in my parents’ kitchen,” Laura continued. “I have an image of Mom behind the cupboards. I remember preparing for it, because I knew telling my parents was going to be horrible. I already knew. I was like, ‘Mom, I need to tell you something.’ I said, ‘I’ve been raped.’ The minute I said it, my mom gasped then walked out of the house. There’s a sliding door there, and she just left. Then I have just flashes of memories. At some point, she was back and my father was there. Again, I don’t really have linear memories of this. But the first thing my father said to me was, ‘What were you wearing?’ I just screamed, ‘Does it matter?!’ I was very angry that he did that. That was the second time I ever yelled at my father in my life.
“I left a few days later and went on a road trip with a girlfriend. When I came back, the first thing my parents did was sit me down. My dad said, ‘You have an option. You can either come home and submit to us’—meaning leave the university, move home, and go to a smaller campus nearby—‘or go on a mission trip.’ I just had to ‘submit.’ Come home and live by their rules and whatever they decided for my future. I was supposed to do that, or they would cut me off because I had sinned by drinking and brought shame on my father. My parents said that my father’s a pastor and, according to the Bible, a pastor is judged by his children, and so my having done this reflected badly on him, which . . . I don’t think I can do justice to the feeling I had then in that moment . . . but obviously, it was horrible.
“I was crying, but I didn’t protest.
“I just said, ‘You’re right. I did drink. That was wrong. But I’m not coming home. If you want to cut me off, you can cut me off.’
“And I left.
“I think that was more hurtful than anything else,” she said, her voice barely audible through the tears. “It’s the only thing that I just can’t wrap my brain around, trauma-wise.
“I was hysterical by the time I got to my college apartment. My parents owned my car and my work required me to have a car. If I couldn’t get to my job, I didn’t know how I was going to pay for my apartment, how I was going to pay for school. I didn’t know how I was going to pay for anything. I was hysterically crying.
“Then I got a call on my cell phone from a number I didn’t recognize. I answered and it was my father. He had left the house and walked all the way to the Christian school where he taught when he wasn’t pastoring. He called me from that phone and said that he was proud of me, ‘You handled yourself well and I’m going to make sure that you get financial support’ or something to that effect. Apparently, my accepting their criticism of my drinking and still standing up for myself without fighting against their judgment saved me,” Laura told me, shaking her head.
Still, Laura said, “my mom decided I was responsible for the rape. I worked at Victoria’s Secret at the time, so she thought I got drawn into that kind of culture that’s sexualizing women and celebrating sexual beauty and things like that. I was drinking so I was sinning. I was breaking the law. I was giving in to drunkenness. And the night that it happened, I was being more sexual than—” she caught herself midsentence, stopped, and corrected herself. “I was being a normal fucking college student. But according to the old framework, I was being ‘too sexual.’ Like many other victims, I still struggle with self-blame. I don’t have everything figured out. I still hurt a lot. And I guess I’ve sometimes wondered . . . if me promising my virginity to God is not . . . ‘why’ it happened, but . . .” Laura trailed off.
“I don’t understand,” I told her.
“It was something my mom said: ‘You bragged about your virginity.’ I don’t think that’s true. I know a lot of people assumed that I wasn’t a virgin because I dated someone much older than me in high school and because I had a certain type of body. So a lot of people suggested I was sexually evolved and I would have to defend myself—‘I really am a virgin.’ I even bought a shirt from the Virgin record store that said ‘Virgin’ on it during a mission trip. I thought it was kind of funny. It was one of those things my mom threw in my face after the rape.”
“Because you were too prideful about your virginity?”
“Yes,” Laura said. “You can’t win. That’s why I want to try to talk about the religious stuff and the family stuff that still haunts me. I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know what anyone does with that. The shame that religion puts on it, just religion’s general hostility toward sex, sexuality, the human body in its sexual form—it created the environment for me to be mistreated by my family.”
“Are you—?” I began as Laura’s crying intensified again.
“I’m okay,” she answered quickly. “I felt like I needed to get the truth out for a minute.”
“Do you want to keep going? We could pause—”
“Yes,” she finally gave in. “Sure.”
And I turned the recorder off.
* * *
The fourth stumbling block girls raised in the purity movement must overcome is the
wrongful classification of rape and other forms of sexual violence. By this I mean both that the purity movement classifies sexual violence by systematically silencing and hiding it, and that if and when it is exposed, the purity movement then misclassifies sexual violence as “sex” rather than “violence.” Long-indoctrinated in this illegitimate logic, Laura’s parents did not consider her solely a survivor, but also a sinner, and were more focused on their daughter’s sins and how they led to the loss of her “purity” than on the violence that was perpetrated against her. And they followed through on that logic when she told them she was raped—by controlling Laura to protect her from her own sinfulness rather than comforting and defending Laura to protect her from the sins of others. Equating survivors’ actions, such as drinking in Laura’s case, and perpetrators’ actions, such as assault, is called sin-leveling, and is often categorized as a form of spiritual abuse.
Having been raised with this messaging herself, Laura began having anxiety about the effect her body would have on people long before college. “One time, I remember just trying on clothes over and over and feeling that all of them were really tight on all my curves and I was getting really upset,” she told me. “I remember my high school boyfriend getting really mad at me because we were going to be late to a graduation party, but I was so upset that I couldn’t find an outfit that didn’t make me look really curvy. I just started crying at some point. Another time when it happened, I explained to my boyfriend why I was getting upset. He kind of laughed, ‘You’re supposed to be curvy, there’s nothing wrong with that.’ I said, ‘No, my mom will say something to me. You just wait.’ ”
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