I settled into Muriel’s oversized La-Z-Boy, and she across from me on the couch. She had met me at the door, able to walk that far, but otherwise stayed on the couch for the remainder of our interview as it didn’t take much to overexert herself. For almost an hour, we talked about her childhood in the evangelical church—years before her disease surfaced in her early twenties. Finally, the now-thirty-something-year-old broke into her first big smile.
It was her first day of Bible college, Muriel’s eyes brightened as she remembered, and she met a guy. “Super handsome, but so nerdy,” she laughed. “He had glasses that were huge and just sat on his face. And he would wear this Michael W. Smith—you know Michael W. Smith, the Christian singer, right? It was this white T-shirt with Michael W. Smith’s super faded-out face on it with the ’80s hair. It had torn and he had sewn it up with black thread. And then he would tuck it into black denim jeans that were tapered. That was Dmitri!” her smile widened. “By the end of the first week of college, I knew, he was the man God had for me to marry.
“That whole semester, we would just walk and talk—look at architecture, go to the lake, explore. We were just kids falling in love. We would hold hands, but that was all, obviously. We were on a Bible college campus where you couldn’t do anything more than hold hands anyway, and I was terrified of getting anywhere near that slippery slope of sexual temptation.
“Growing up, there was a teenage girl who got pregnant and she and the guy both had to go up in front of the congregation and apologize tearfully and confess their sins,” Muriel told me. “I remember thinking, ‘Of course. Just another one. It’s a slippery slope. It just keeps happening. It’s just everywhere.’ Sex just seemed inevitable if you even inched toward it. So I said to Dmitri, ‘How about we don’t even kiss until we’re married? That’s what I want.’ And hubby-to-be, who’d never had a girlfriend before, said ‘yes.’ ”
Like stumbling block the term slippery slope is used in reference to any number of things that might draw one away from God, but in the evangelical church it is so commonly used in reference to sexual sin that it’s practically become shorthand for it. Many feel that engaging in even a “hint” of sexual immorality—such as kissing or hugging if done in a sexual way—is a slippery slope. And in the words of one interviewee, the sexual “slippery slope leads straight to Hell. It leads to flames and desecration.”
I remember thinking about this message when reading evangelical Christian Dr. James Dobson’s book Life on the Edge: The Next Generation’s Guide to a Meaningful Future as a teenager. Dobson cites zoologist Dr. Desmond Morris’s twelve stages of intimacy as described in his book Intimate Behaviour. The first stage of intimacy, Dobson summarizes Morris’s findings, is eye to body. The couple sees one another from afar. The second stage is eye to eye. Then voice to voice, hand to hand, hand to shoulder, hand to waist, face to face, hand to head, hand to body. However, the tenth stage suddenly becomes decidedly more intense, at least to the ear of a teenager like me: Mouth to breast. Now there are just two stages left: touching below the waist and sexual intercourse.1 So you see? Although those first stages all seem to be safe, when a couple indulges in them, they find themselves just three stages away from having sex, and as it is often said among purity movement authors, speakers, youth pastors, and small group leaders, those last three stages fly by: Eye to eye, hand to waist, and the next thing you know, boy howdy, you’re in bed.
By the middle of her first year of Bible college, Muriel and Dmitri were engaged. “I got a book, The Joy of . . . whatever . . . by Tim LaHaye and his wife, about sex,” she told me.
“Okay, that’s The Act of Marriage,” I answered, referring to the Christian sex manual that came out in the mid-1970s.
“The Act of Marriage, yes,” Muriel nodded. “And Dmitri explained sex to me some and I was like, ‘You mean you have to move back and forth?’ I didn’t realize there was a friction aspect, I thought you just . . . stuck it in.”
“Dmitri had some sexual experience?” I asked.
“No. He bought pornos to learn.”
Desperate to have sex, Muriel and Dmitri’s engagement was short.
“We got married at 9:30 in the morning so that we could have sex early. No lie, that’s why we got married early! I was excited about sex! I thought, ‘I don’t want to wait all day,’ because sex was this huge thing! It was what everybody talked about, in the negative. But then supposedly once it was in marriage it was supposed to be this amazing celebration. This was the flip side, right? Supposedly. But during our ceremony up there, the pastor says ‘you may kiss the bride,’ and we kiss. Our teeth clanked. I was like, ‘What is going on?’ We, like, sort of used tongue. It was the weirdest thing in the world.
“There had been this whole promise: If you wait, then this kiss will be magical and divine. But oh my gosh, total opposite. I whispered in Dmitri’s ear, ‘Let’s not do that again until we’re alone.’
“There was a small reception and by noon we’re in a hotel room. So we start stripping off. I see a naked man for the first time. I hadn’t even seen naked pictures. I’d never seen any pornography or anything. So, naked man. And then I got to strip off. And now we’re naked and this is weird and we start kissing or whatever and then I just bust up crying because this has all been way too much and I hadn’t slept much the night before.
“So I take a nap. We take a nap. Then we wake up and we start trying it again. And I have no idea what hole or where anything is. We try that and Dmitri tries touching and he doesn’t know. At this point I’ve read about the clitoris in The Act of Marriage. I know it exists, but I have no idea where it is, neither does Dmitri, and so he’s, ‘Does this feel good?’ I have no idea. I’ve never let anything down there try to feel good before. So he keeps trying and I’m like, ‘Is that an orgasm? I don’t know.’ So then he starts trying to stick it in. Again, I have no idea where. He’s trying to direct. We don’t get it in and then he’s like, ‘Well I’m kind of moved all the way here. Can you help me out?’ So I start to do that, and then I’m just, like, left there. Not having done ‘the sex.’
“We don’t figure out sex for four months. We don’t actually get it in. We keep trying. I mean, we’re discouraged, but he does keep trying. Sometimes it hurts. We didn’t get the idea about wetness or lubrication or any of that. I eventually figured out I had to stretch out beforehand, manually. I figured out where the hole was and I would stretch it out manually and then he would go in. It never felt sexy. Sex was never sexy. I never got off while he was in there, and even on his end, it was more like, if we did it, good, that’s something we’re supposed to do. But it was never ‘this is so sexy, I want you.’ It was just a check mark for us. I’m not sure when he gave up on trying as often.”
“Did you ever talk about what you were experiencing with anybody?”
“No! Because it’s embarrassing! I mean, that’s just something you just don’t talk about. We’re married now. It’s supposed to be a slippery, slippery, easy-to-fall-off-of slope. ‘Where’s the easiness? How’s anybody accidentally having sex? How are teenagers accidentally getting pregnant? I don’t know. How are they even getting it in?!’ ”
* * *
The purity movement teaches us that a “pure” woman comes to her husband an untouched virgin who has hardly (if ever) thought about sex before. And then, naturally and beautifully, the woman’s new husband introduces his wife to sexuality for the first time and years of pent-up sexual energy which she was not even aware of come pouring out of her, allowing her to meet her new husband’s every sexual want, which is also her every want, and together they live happily ever after. Both the repressed sexuality of the virgin and the fully surrendered sexuality of the wife are requirements in purity culture—one being fabled to lead to the other.
The Act of Marriage: A Christian Guide to Sexual Love,I the book that Muriel was given in preparation for her wedding night, insists that God wants everyone to experience sexual pleasure within the marriage
bed. This was a breakthrough concept when the book entered Christian bookstores in 1976! Even today, this concept is controversial in some evangelical circles. Though most have embraced it, some still insist female sexual pleasure, in particular, is simply beside the point.
Attempting to ease the Christian couple’s transition into sex, The Act of Marriage includes diagrams of male and female sexual organs, advice on how to bring a woman to orgasm, and what I consider to be some really healthy relational perspectives around mutual care and mutual pleasure. But as bold as it is in shamelessly talking about sex in the (heterosexual) marriage bed, the book is still based in purity culture and thus follows a very gendered pattern—too often excusing men for sexual misbehavior and blaming women for sexual displeasure. For example, at one point the following story is related:
A young mother of three came in to ask me to recommend a psychiatrist. When I inquired why she needed one, she hesitatingly explained that her husband felt she must be harboring some deep-rooted psychological problem about sex. She had never experienced an orgasm, could not relax during lovemaking, and felt guilty about it all. When asked when she first felt these guilt feelings, she admitted to heavy petting before marriage that violated her Christian principles and the warnings of her parents. She finally conceded, “Our whole four-year courtship seemed to be a continuous scene of Tom trying to seduce me and my fighting him off. I made too many compromises and am honestly amazed that we didn’t go the whole route before our wedding. After we were married, it just seemed to be more of the same. Why did God include this sex business in marriage anyway?”
That young woman did not require a battery of psychological tests and years of counseling therapy. She simply needed to confess her premarital sins and then learn what the Bible teaches about marital love.2
There is no mention of the possibility that the woman may not enjoy sex with her husband because he had not respected her sexual boundaries before marriage, forcing her to fight him off (in her words) for years. And no mention that perhaps the woman might have felt guilty about having sex because the church had embedded the notion that sex was shameful so deeply into her brain that she couldn’t shake it now that she was married and it was suddenly supposed to be okay. No. It was the woman’s premarital sexual activity (not even the couple’s premarital sexual activity, though the activity took place between the two of them) that was blamed for the couple’s sexual problems. LaHaye’s happy conclusion to this story is as follows: After the woman confessed her sin, “she became a new wife,” and her husband’s “spiritual growth since then has been exciting to watch—all because a wife caught the big picture that God planned lovemaking to be mutually enjoyable.”3 This illustration is picture-perfect purity culture. In short, women’s sexuality must be just right, so that men can spiritually thrive.
I was about fifteen years old when I first heard a pastor say from the pulpit: “Every man wants a woman who is a lamb in the day, and a tiger at night.” The congregation laughed. A few people clapped. My face turned red. I hadn’t even had my first kiss, and already I felt myself on a tightrope strung between two opposing sexual expectations. I have heard the tiger/lamb language many times since. Interviewees share about it being said from pulpits, in Bible studies, and in Christian counseling sessions. Somehow, purity culture has turned a pornographic fantasy about a virgin turned vamp into “morality,” so that now both a woman’s nonsexuality before marriage and her hypersexuality after marriage are required for her to be considered good.
There are two messages happening. Somehow you have to be a lamb—chaste and pure as the driven snow until you are married. And then you have to be a tigress in bed. The vows make that instant transformation somehow. Then, if you don’t satisfy him, he will have an affair, or he has a right to chastise you for not being amazing in bed or whatever, because you are responsible for his sexual satisfaction and whether his eyes wander. I remember Johnnie and I experienced some problems after we were married. I read the book, Every Woman’s Marriage, which basically implies that if you are not satisfying your husband sexually, you are responsible for his having an affair and watching porn. I shudder looking back at it now, but at the time I really was being sincere in trying to be a good wife. (Jo)
Muriel had mastered being a lamb.
Growing up, she explained, “I was just absolute, one hundred percent nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. I would watch a movie that might make something tingle and I would just slap”—she pointed at her lap—“down there. Until I could feel nothing.”
“Literally slap yourself?”
“Literally slap myself. Until I numbed it. That would make the feelings stop.”
It was the tigress part Muriel had trouble with.
“There was just this anxiety and a general feeling of disappointment,” she said sadly. “ ‘We’re doing this wrong and why can’t we do it right? There’s something wrong with me obviously. I’m not working down there.’ Or maybe there was something wrong with Dmitri. I wasn’t desirable enough or he wasn’t big enough or we’re paying for his having masturbated before we got married. There were all of these messages about, ‘If you wait, it will be perfect; it will be like a magical unicorn.’ But it wasn’t. Going straight from holding hands to having sex, I hadn’t been able to develop sexual desire toward him in the normal way. Because I’d never let myself feel, I had no idea how to develop sexual attraction.”
“You’d been slapping it down your entire life,” I suggested.
“Yes. I’d been slapping it down my entire life.”
Dr. Marlene Winell, a human development specialist and author of Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion, regularly counsels couples whose sexual difficulties are rooted in Christian purity culture.
“I’ve heard about numerous tragic wedding nights that often don’t get any better,” she told me in an interview. “Inability to be sexual is a big problem for both men and women coming out of the church. They’ve practiced turning themselves off so much that when they have a sexual occasion, they can’t turn themselves back on again. Human beings don’t have a switch.”4II
For some, the issue extends beyond emotional blocks to physical ones. Some females experience what is called vaginismus—an involuntary physical tightening of the vagina that makes sex painful and sometimes even impossible. According to a sex therapist and an obstetrician/gynecologist interviewed by The Sydney Morning Herald, vaginismus is “more common among women who are saving themselves for marriage” and “women, who due to religious or cultural reasons, have developed an overriding fear of penetrative sex,” though it is also experienced by sexual abuse survivors and those with a fear of childbirth.5 Vaginismus can last days, or decades.
The first time I ever had penetrative sex with a man, I actually thought that there was something . . . that I had an excessively small vagina. I went to the doctor about it, and she was like, “I don’t think so.” It feels related to all the things that I was taught and not taught growing up. It’s just like, you guard that shit with your life because it’s everything. It’s just a muscle thing. (Biz)
I heard rain begin to trickle on the windows behind Muriel’s drawn curtains. The room had gotten darker, which meant the sky was growing darker too, and the storm was beginning.
“Go on,” I urged Muriel.
“The first year as newlyweds was just hard,” she sighed. “All the stuff that was supposed to be fun and great, it was just so hard and miserable. Three years after we got married, I wanted to have a baby. But having a baby required sex, which we weren’t that great at. But we tried the sex again.”
“How many times had you had sex at this point?”
“A handful of times. I don’t know. Five? So then there was ‘the week of sex.’ We tried to have sex every day while I was ovulating and it was so awkward but we got it done. We managed it four or five times, which put our total average up to almost ten. But it was enough to eke out a kid. Then we h
ad barely any sex for ten years.
“At one point in the middle of those years, I laid down for a three-hour nap. I thought I had the flu and then I just kept sleeping. I went to doctors; they didn’t see anything wrong and I felt complete condescension from certain doctors. And the church wasn’t helping either. The church that was supposed to support and listen. I was so confused that it wasn’t doing what it was supposed to be doing. I was this sane, rational person saying that something was wrong with me, but nobody—not the doctors, not the church—would believe me. The only person who believed me was Dmitri. He was the only one who I felt really understood. He was always, ‘This is happening to us. It’s happening to us. You’re mine. So if this happens to you, it happens to me.’
“Dmitri and I would leave church crying some weeks because the sermon would be about church community and family and fellowship and stuff and I realized nobody is actually doing this; none of this is actually real. I was so sick. I was getting angry at everything in life, at God. I was in a wheelchair now, and I didn’t mind when I accidentally ran into people’s ankles. My son was small but I couldn’t take care of him, because I didn’t have the energy, so my mom was doing most of his caretaking. And Dmitri and I were thinking that we may not believe in God anymore. I repeatedly tried to go to the church elders. I was like, ‘I’m having such difficulty with this, please help,’ you know, ‘help us with knowing how to deal with these issues of faith and illness.’ They tried, but they didn’t help. I even had some people tell me that they prayed I would get worse.”
I looked at Muriel in shock.
“Oh yes. Because obviously getting this sick didn’t do it, didn’t make me a good Christian. They prayed that I would get worse and hit rock bottom because maybe that would bring me back to Christ. They told me that to my face. Just like my mom has told me she’s prayed for my brother to lose his job. They pray for bad things to happen to people, so they might see their need for God. That will only happen if they hit rock bottom. If they are broken.”
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