Browsing Tag

purity culture

Feminism

that "dating your dad" thing

purity balls

If you’ve been hanging around here for a little while,  you’ve probably heard me talk about purity culture a time or two. And, if you grew up in evangelical Christianity, you’re also probably a little more than familiar with it. If you’ve read Joshua Harris’ I Kissed Dating Goodbye, raise your hand.

What’s interesting to me is how purity culture is becoming a “thing” outside of Christian culture. I recently read The Purity Myth by Jessica Valenti, and while she focuses on abstinence-only education in the US, she does more than casually allude to evangelical purity culture. There’s been a number of documentaries come out about it recently, and ABC’s Nightline Prime is doing a special on it tonight (I have it set to record). I’ve seen a few articles show up in newspapers and newsblogs, and I have to admit to some amusement when I see reactions to these pieces.

Yesterday afternoon, Cosmopolitan writer Frank Kobola wrote a very short piece: “Teen Girls are Dating their Dads to Save their Virginity.” It was short on substance and long on incredulity, and I think that reflects an attitude I’d like to address.

Most of the reactions I’ve seen mirror Kobola’s. Disgust. Disbelief. Then, usually, mockery. To many people, it just seems so obvious that this entire “purity ball” concept is pretty dang creepy. The fact that there’s many thousands of people in this country who don’t find it creepy at all just seems a little impossible.

So, when they hear someone say something along the lines of “I’m going to take my daughter out on a date, show her how a man should be treating her,” it’s a little hard for them not to immediately start talking about it in pedophilic terms. And when someone like Ron Johnson says:

You keep this [ring] on your finger and at this point you are married to the Lord and your father is your boyfriend . . .

Kobola says lol wut? and then writes an article about it mocking the entire idea. Predictably, the evangelical response is along the lines of “it’s not like that! You’re twisting it into something it’s not! You just don’t understand what we’re trying to do!

And, I think the evangelicals in this case are probably right. Kobola probably doesn’t understand what it is he’s seeing in the slightest. So it makes it difficult for people like me– people who actually do understand — to talk about purity culture. Because I know better than to mock it.

Something that dangerous shouldn’t be mocked.

Purity balls are not a “prom for your hymen.” They are an incredibly public event about something that should be intimate and private. They force fragile girls into taking a vow– in a room full of old men– of chastity, to keep themselves pure for God. This extremely public event, disguised as a celebration, is a tool used to cajole girls into keeping their virginity. It is an annual reminder that their cultural value is predicated on whether or not they’ve had sex.

And yes, this is the kind of thing that “grown-up daughters discuss in therapy,” but not because their father was a pedophile or molested them, but because they have been ripped apart from the inside out when they were shamed by their entire communities, ostracized by their families, for not being able to keep a promise that the vast majority of people can’t possibly keep.

Sometimes, we end up in therapy because we were raped and we have no idea that’s what happened to us until we’re sobbing in an office when someone for the very first time says what happened to you is not your fault and we can’t believe it because, no, it is our fault. We’re the daughters of Eve. We are the temptress, the seductress, the succubus. We were dressed immodestly. We gave our heart away. We didn’t keep ourselves pure, like we swore to our fathers and before God that we would.

Purity culture needs to be exposed for everything that it is, everything it teaches, and everything that it does to the women and men growing up in it. I understand the you have GOT to be kidding me reaction, but this is not something that can be so easily dismissed.

It’s not a joke. It’s an ideology that destroys lives.

Feminism

Pensacola Christian College and Sexual Violence

crowne centre 2

It’s been almost a month since I asked for your help in exposing at least one of the problems at Pensacola Christian College: how they respond to and treat victims of sexual violence. Thank you, everyone– without you I could do nothing, and your help means everything to me. We worked together on this one.

Since then, I’ve been interviewing dozens of people and drafting articles, and I’m incredibly proud of all the brave, fierce, wonderful, magnificent people who told me their stories. Every single last one of you has my gratitude.

While I wasn’t able to find a major news source willing to publish it, Fred Clarke at the Slacktivist allowed me to do a guest post for him. I am excited that Clarke was willing to be a part of this project, and I think his platform will help get the story out. As Mr. Universe would say, “You can’t stop the signal.”

You can read the post here.

Now that it’s out, I want to ask you all for yet another thing: to help get this story out. If you’re the kind that uses social media, please think about sharing it. Talk about with people you know. If you hear someone considering to attend a college like this, please let them know about it. I couldn’t have a blog without you, and this story can’t go anywhere without you, either.

As a part of this process, I was extremely honored to be interviewed by Grace Wyler for her article at Vice, which I am proud to be a part of.

Again, thank you.

Feminism

virginity is a myth

madonna
[art by ninebreaker]

Virginity doesn’t exist.

There are men, women, trans* people, who have not had sex, and there are all sorts of people who have had sex, but the difference between the two is entirely socially constructed and is based not on physical changes, but on culture, tradition, and religion. All of that is a little bit beside the point for today’s post, though– there’s books to be written on that subject, and I don’t really want to get into that discussion today.

What I do want to talk about today is the physical reality that virginity is entirely made up. And this is awesome for one spectacularly fantastic reason:

There’s no earthly reason why having sex the first time should hurt.

Growing up, in a home where my parents were not exactly prudish and my mother was comfortable talking about how fantastic sex was, I was still simultaneously receiving messages from the evangelical purity culture and American culture in general. The universal consensus that I heard repeated from every single mouth that ever talked about it was that losing your virginity hurts. I even knew why– it was because virgins have a hymen, and non-virgins don’t. Any one who has a vagina (woman and trans persons) and who has had some form of penetrative sex had their “cherry popped.” Their hymen was “broken,” and therefore gone.

Most of the teenagers I talked to, when we talked about our “wedding nights,” would focus on how much it was going to hurt, and how we would have to decide with our betrothed if we even had sex on the first night, or put it off for days, weeks– even months, in some cases. We were all terrified of having sex. We were scared of the pain, we were scared of being sore and having to “walk funny”– cluing people in to the fact that we’d lost our virginity in the night. We were scared of the blood. We were scared of how people’s perceptions would change once we were no longer a virgin. It was a monumental change– a drastic transformation that would render us unrecognizable.

I didn’t realize that all of that nonsense is categorically false.

The hymen doesn’t “break.” It is not “popped.” If you experience anything besides an slightly uncomfortable stretching sensation, you and your partner have not done enough to prepare you, or there is something wrong and you may need to see a doctor– you could have something like vaginisimus.

The hymen is a coronal membrane located a few inches inside the vagina. Depending on the person, the “hole” in the hymen will have different shapes. The best thing about the hymen is that it is designed to stretch.

Take your time. Build up slowly. Don’t rush. Use lube.

I believe that this is information that everyone should have access to. There are many reasons for why “losing your virginity” is described in violent, graphic, painful terms and it’s not to help women, that’s for sure. These concepts are even more exacerbated in fundamentalist and evangelical circles, where teachers and leaders will seize upon anything to convince people why having sex is the worst thing ever and you should never ever do it– until you’re married, then it’s awesome. But all of that prevents girls like me and like the ones I knew from having any understanding of how our bodies actually work.

It’s not only scare tactics, it’s a lie.

Feminism

First Kiss: why rape myths are so dangerous

silenced

Trigger warning for child abuse, sexual assault, and victim blaming.

Alena wrote her story in a comment on my post future husbands: your future wife does not belong to you.” Reading it moved me to tears, because her story is very much like my own– and it is very much like the countless stories I’ve heard in the past four years. For women raised in the conservative evangelical “purity culture,” our stories have similar patterns. I hope that Aletha’s story can bring comfort, understanding, and healing to women who carry the same stories inside their hearts.

A few weeks into my relationship with my now-husband, he shared a funny story about our first kiss, commenting on how sweet and special he thought it was that we had each been privileged to share our first kisses with each other. I was confused, at first, wondering how he got that idea — and then remembered back to the kiss: we kissed, and he smiled at me and asked if I had enjoyed my first kiss. I had said yes, and he said, “Me, too!” It was a very sweet moment – and one I had misunderstood. I thought he was asking if I enjoyed our first kiss, when he was actually asking if I had enjoyed my first kiss—ever.

It shouldn’t have been a big deal to fix the misunderstanding, but I was eaten up by guilt. One of my girlfriends, who was with us at the time and knew that not only was my kiss with Nick not my first, but that there were a lot of other “firsts” he didn’t know about—“firsts” I’d had with my previous boyfriend, R*. She took several opportunities in the months that followed to tell me that I owed it to Nick to be honest and come clean about my sins, and that he deserved to get to choose whether or not to forgive me before he actually married me. If he didn’t want to marry a woman with a “sexual history,” he needed to know so he wouldn’t be “stuck with me forever.”

I already carried a great deal of regret about not coming to my marriage a virgin—since I was sexually abused as a child—but Nick knew all about that and repeatedly assured me that I had nothing to be ashamed of, and he had nothing to forgive. I had trouble accepting that, because many people, including my girlfriend, said that I was guilty because I did not “fight back” enough. It didn’t matter that I was 3, or 12, and that I had tried to tell my mother what had happened . . . I was responsible because I hadn’t fought ‘til my dying breath. Nick telling me something different was difficult to believe. The fact that he didn’t know about what I’d done with R* made it all so much worse.

Months passed, and guilt was practically eating me alive. Despite our mutual goal of virginity on our wedding night, we messed around more than we wished we had (although, to be clear, we don’t beat ourselves up about it). Every time we did something, however, I had intrusive and vivid flashbacks to my time with R*, my ex . . . but rarely did I have flashbacks about my childhood abuse. Finally, a month before our marriage, I couldn’t stand the guilt. Nick seemed so happy with all of our “shared firsts” . . . so I confessed to him about R*, in the middle of his mom’s front yard, at one in the morning, in the rain. I was sobbing, he was shocked and confused. When I told him he didn’t have to marry me, he became angry and took me in his arms, and told me that he loved me, that he still wanted to marry me, and that he forgave me. I went home and then we entered the madhouse of the last three weeks before our wedding in another state and all that entailed.

We got married, and everything seemed like it was going to be ok.

Six years later this whole thing came back to us again.

Over the first six years of our marriage, I was repeatedly assaulted by intrusive and vivid flashbacks of my time with R*, to the point that more than once I broke down crying in the middle of sex. I frequently felt dirty and unworthy of the love of my husband. Never once did Nick ever give me reason to feel this way, and since I refused to talk about any of it most of the time, he rarely even knew who the flashbacks were about, and assumed they were about my father, who had abused me as a child. But . . . I was having flashbacks about both. Sometimes they were mixed, and that was frightening.

One day, I started seeing a new counselor, and for some reason I brought up my relationship with R*. She asked me a lot of questions that were very baffling and scary at the time, and then shocked me to my core by telling me that she believed that I had been a victim of sexual assault in that relationship.

What? What the– ? Could it? No – wait, but . . .

I started remembering.

I thought back to our first kiss, which began as a romantic moment. It was the first and only time I’d ever seen the Northern Lights, and I can’t even describe how beautiful they were. But his kiss quickly turned confusing and scary when he deepened it to a full French kiss that lasted for several minutes, despite my attempts to step back. It was . . .exciting . . . but I had only known him for a couple of days, and earlier that evening had told him I was saving my kisses for when I got married. I was afraid—excited, but afraid– but he took control, ultimately, because he was a bigger than me, and I was more afraid of making a guy mad than I was of being kissed against my will.

I told him, the next morning, that I was not okay with being physically intimate before marriage, and that I was sorry that we had kissed. He was quick to assure me that kisses weren’t that big of a deal. From there, it escalated quickly. I won’t go in to detail, but I will say that he initiated every single physically intimate thing we did, and overrode my protestations each time with charm, insistence—or just by sheer size. He did what he wanted, because he could.

I never saw anything that happened as anything more than me being incredibly weak willed, until I spoke with my counselor about it.

After all, I didn’t scream. I didn’t call him names. I didn’t claw his face, or kick him where he’d hurt so I could get away.

He never verbally assaulted me, ordered me around, or physically abused me.

When he held me down, I was confused, even cried and begged him to stop, but. he would keep going, He would try to coerce me, saying things like “don’t you like this?” I was weak in my protestations, speaking softly, trying to explain why I wasn’t okay with his actions even as he ignored me and did whatever he wanted. He drew reactions from me I couldn’t control, and that robbed me of the ability to think clearly. I judged myself weak and wanton, because he made me feel things against my will. . .

It was very healing to talk and cry about it, especially after my session with my counselor. I spoke with my husband about it, too, and that was an eye opening conversation! You see, it turns out that all those years ago, when he held me in his arms, assured me he still wanted to get married, and forgave me…? He was only forgiving me for lying by omission. When I told him what the counselor had said, and for the first time elaborated a little bit on what had happened with R*, and my actions in those moments, he agreed with her completely that it had been sexual assault, and six months of abuse.

Those conversations took place less than six months ago. I am still processing things, though a family crisis this summer superseded everything to the point that I haven’t really thought about it for months, until reading this post. I haven’t had any flashbacks since then, though I can feel them lurking in this moment, after writing all this.

Until reading this, I didn’t realize that it all went back to the patriarchal attitudes with which I was raised, but it makes so much sense. Had my friend not applied so much pressure and condemnation to confess my sins to Nick, had not brought up what had happened to me when I was a child and insisted that I was not “sexually pure” because of it, had not tried to convince me that I had sinned against Nick because of what my father had done and what happened later– I would have likely told him right away that there had been a misunderstanding, though I know that I would have still felt a lot of misplaced shame over my relationship with R*, because of the unresolved issues there. I certainly wouldn’t have considered calling off my engagement at the last second because I felt that he deserved a virgin, had I not been heavily influenced by the concept of “future-husband ownership,” or by the teaching that “losing” my virginity—however it was “taken,” consensual or not—makes me less valuable as a woman, as a person.

Feminism

how I learned to stop worrying and love the Pill, part two

pill

Put in incredibly simple terms, hormonal birth control works thusly:

Step 1 : it prevents ovulation.

“Ovulation,” for the uninitiated, is when a mature egg is released from the ovary and become available for fertilization. “Prevents,” in this case, does not mean that the pill stops the egg from peaking its little head out of the ovary. It prevents because no egg develops to maturity. Simply put, there is no egg to come out of the ovary in the first place. This is one of the most important parts about hormonal birth control options, and something no one seems to pay attention to.

This is also the most important part for me. PCOS means that I get too many cysts developing at the same time, or they never stop developing, and I never experience a menstrual cycle. Ovarian cysts are normal– an ovarian cyst is where the egg matures. Hormonal birth control works to treat PCOS because it does not allow ovarian cysts to develop. An additional part of this process is that even if an ovarian cyst develops, there’s another chemical block in place that stops an egg from forming inside of it.

No ovarian cyst, no egg, nothing mature enough to be fertilized.

But, in the exceedingly rare case (if it wasn’t rare, it would be useless as a treatment for PCOS) where there is a cyst and an egg is developed, we move on to–

Step 2:  eliminate the possibility of fertilization

This is pretty straightforward, and it comes in two steps. The progesterone in hormonal birth control options thickens the cervical mucus– makes it insanely more difficult for the sperm to reach the egg, which is already difficult– and it makes the egg harder to fertilize. So, even if a cyst develops, and if an egg develops inside of the cyst, and IF the sperm makes it up through the thickened mucus and all the way up the fallopian tube, when it reaches the egg, it’s going to have a hard time fertilizing it.

At this point in the process, the possibility of an egg being fertilized is so vanishingly small it’s not even really worth talking about, but I’m a-gonna, because it’s where the pro-life movement starts lying their little tooshies off.

“Supposed” Step 3: prevent implantation

At this point, the egg is a zygote, which is just the technical term for “fertilized egg.” For a lot of people this is where “conception” happens (which, problems), so this is where people start thinking that hormonal birth control is Just the Most Evil Thing those Evil Doctors have Ever Invented.

The most frequent term you’ll find in information about how this works is that the uterine wall is “hostile” for the egg. This is a misnomer. The uterine wall is exactly the same as it ever was, just  thinner (hence, lighter periods). There’s no study that shows that the uterus becomes “hostile”– in fact, the scientific studies show that hormonal birth control options do not alter the uterine lining in any significant way except for making it slightly thinner, and are incapable of contributing to zygote failure (which I’ll explain).

This is the part where the pro-life movement lies. Because, at this point, they claim that this where the Pill murders babies. Literally starves them to death. Because it takes a baby (zygote), and then refuses it the opportunity to grow. It never grows, the woman’s body never receives the signal that she’s pregnant, and then the uterus expels the zygote and the uterine lining: therefore, MURDER.

Ok, folks, this is where I have All the Problems.

Let’s talk about the zygote, the supposed “great red herring” of the pro-choice movement.

The zygote is a single-celled organism, which through mitosis goes through stages (blastocyst, then embryo). Over fourteen days, it has to develop into an embryo, and the embryo has to develop the conceptus in order to attach to the uterine lining. The uterine lining, at this point, must transform from the decidua to the placenta.

Hormonal birth control methods are incapable of terminating a viable pregnancy. They are designed, in an unbelievable number of unnecessary steps, to prevent fertilization from ever occurring. Not by turning the uterus into a baby-killing machine. That’s patently false, and a bald-faced lie. If a woman’s body develops an egg, the uterine lining is unchanged. If there aren’t enough of the synthetic hormones present to prevent ovulation, there’s not enough of the hormones present to affect the uterine lining. If there’s no egg, then the uterine lining is thinner, possibly, and that’s the only real difference.

It’s a complete misunderstanding that in the case of supposed “breakthrough ovulation” that the uterine lining is still thinner. It’s not.

Here’s what the pro-life movement also refused to discuss:

All the medical studies I could scrounge up reveal that 60, 70, maybe 80% of all zygotes fail to implant on the uterine wall, when the woman is trying to conceive and is not on hormonal birth control.

Let me say that again: as many as 80% of all “babies” never implant in the uterus completely on their own.

For those that do manage to make it, another 30% don’t survive the first few weeks.

Let’s do the math again: 72% to 86% of all zygotes, which the pro-life movement refers to as babies,diewithout any outside interference whatsoever. When a woman is not on the Pill, zygotes fail.

When a woman is on the Pill, there’s rarely ever a zygote, and when there is one, it faces the exact same rate of zygote failure as a woman who isn’t on the Pill. The upside? When a woman is using hormonal birth control, there are less zygotes. Somewhere in the ballpark of 98% less zygotes.

Let me make this more clear: if zygote failure is “murder,” and hormonal birth control options drastically reduces the number of zygotes, the number of failed zygotes (i.e.: “murder”) is also drastically reduced.

Tell me again how the Pill is evil?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*Edit*

I wanted to include some information I have that might clarify my basic argument in this post: that hormonal birth control options don’t interfere with implantation. I’ve already made it clear that hormonal birth control doesn’t make the uterus as “hostile” place for the zygote, but I thought it might be helpful to explain why, biologically, this is so.

A menstrual cycle is just that: a cycle. It goes through three steps, or stages. The first is the follicular phase, where the uterine lining is thin. Thin, in the same sense that it is thin while a woman is on hormonal birth control. It is not capable of of allowing the conceptus to attach.

However, part of the ovulation phase is that ovulation releases a trigger for the uterus to begin the luteal phase, where the lining becomes thicker and the conceptus is able to attach.

If a woman on the Pill ovulates, this releases the hormonal trigger, and the uterine lining thickens because it enters the luteal phase. If she does not ovulate, the uterus does not receive the trigger, and the uterine lining remains exactly the same as it ever was.

You can read about this on wiki. Seriously.

Feminism

how I learned to stop worrying and love the Pill, part one

pill

When I was fourteen, I was diagnosed with Poly Cystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS). To cut a very long, and a very awkward, story short, hormonal birth control (also known as “the Pill”) is the only known treatment for it. It’s not a cure, but it works to mitigate the suffering for a lot of women who suffer with PCOS. But it’s the only treatment [edit: occasionally, blood sugar problems can be a part of PCOS, but not always, in my case it is not], because of how it works and what it does, but I’ll get to that in a bit tomorrow.

I had to start taking it at fourteen– the doctor said that if I wanted any chance of ever having children, I would need to take the Pill. And even then, she warned me, I’d probably still need to have a full-blown hysterectomy before I was thirty. If I didn’t take the Pill, everything would get continually worse and I’d need to have multiple surgeries just to keep it under control.

So, I went on the Pill, and I took it faithfully for the next three years. It got my hemorrhagic cysts under control, even though it continued to cause persistent nausea and daily headaches that could blow up into migraines at a moment’s notice.

I also didn’t tell anyone, not even my best friend, that I was taking it.

When I started college, I was faced with a pretty significant dilemma: how was I going to hide taking the Pill everyday from roommates and suite mates? My solution was to put the pills into a regular prescription bottle, but that only worked for about a month, until I got my prescription in the mail. Then I had to figure out ways to get the Pills into the bottle and then hide the packaging– it had my name all over it, so I couldn’t just throw it away anywhere. I got pretty creative, coming up with means to hide what it was.

The fact that I was worried about people finding out about me taking the Pill every day should tell you something. What in the world was I expecting them to think?

Well, for one thing, I was absolutely positive that if someone who didn’t know me very well found out about it, they’d just assume that I was a slut. And secondly, if the administration found out about it (which was not outside possibility, they cared an awful lot about intimate details concerning their students), if something happened, my character would automatically be in question. They’d be suspicious about me.

Because I had PCOS, and was taking the Pill to treat it.

But, I knew that having a “legitimate” medical reason for taking the Pill wasn’t going to change the way anyone had already decided to perceive me. If they found out I was taking it, I knew they would label me a slut, and there would be nothing I could do about it. I was on the Pill– it would be all the proof they needed.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A whole bunch of years later, when I’d figured out that I didn’t give a damn about idiots who would judge me for taking the Pill, I was talking to a woman about some of the pain she’d been suffering. During the course of our conversation, I realized that she probably had PCOS, and when I asked her about it, she agreed– that’s what the doctor had diagnosed her with. For her, it had caused her to lose her job, and she’d been hospitalized several times because of cysts rupturing. The pain had caused her to miss church, to constrain her to her bed for days on end.

I asked her what the doctor had suggested for treatment, and her response was that he’d given her pain killers, but she was trying not to depend on them too much.

“You aren’t on any medication?”

“There’s not any real medication for this, though.”

“There’s the Pill,” I blurted out. “It can help.”

She stared at me, her eyes widening in horror. She leaned in close, and dropped her voice to a whisper, even though we were in my house and the only people around were friends. “You mean, the birth control pill?”

I nodded. “Yes. I’ve been on it for years.”

Again, silence, and her wild eyes boring into me. I watched her think about what I’d said, and I watched terror form. She was completely horrified by my suggestion. “Oh my goodness, no, I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. That would just be so . . . wrong.”

It was my turn to be horrified.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I should make it clear that this wasn’t in my fundamentalist church-cult. This was from a woman who had grown up in “regular” Christianity. There was nothing extreme about the religion she’d been surrounded by. It was all pretty typical, run-of-the-mill Baptist stuff. And she was still so horrified at the very idea of taking the Pill that she refused to even consider it as an option, even though it is the only medical recourse for her condition.

This is One of the Many Reasons why I have a Serious Problem with the Pro-Life Movement.

Because, and not to put too fine a point on it, they lie to people, especially women. They have spread so many lies for so many years that when a woman could take the Pill to treat a medical condition, she won’t, because the only thing she knows about the Pill is poppycock and hogwash.

So, I present a Crash Course in What the Pill is, For Realsies.

First, the Pill is a really limited concept of birth control. There are so many different kinds of birth control, including Natural Family Planning (NFP), barrier methods (condoms, sponges, vaginal condoms, diaphragms), vasectomy,  tubal litigation. For hormonal birth control, there’s oral contraception (the Pill), hormonal and copper IUDs (intrauterine device), Depo-Provera (the “shot”), OrthoEvra (the “patch”), and now things like the NuvaRing.

Some of these are long-term, like the shot or an IUD, lasting from a few months to a few years. The patch and the NuvaRing last for the month, usually. You leave it on or in, and take it off/out for a week to have your period. The Pill you have to take every day, which is a bit of a nuisance.

All of these methods work a little differently, but the one that the pro-life movement has spread the most lies about is hormonal birth control, so I’m going to focus on that tomorrow.

Feminism

future husbands: your future wife does not belong to you

virgin with lamp

So, I keep swearing to myself that I won’t keep writing reactionary posts. I do. I really do. I make all these beautiful promises about keeping my head down, not getting involved when someone says something unintelligent . . .

And then this happens.

And, after ranting about it a little bit, and stomping around on twitter (only two tweets for this one! two! I did so good), I decide that hey, this is an issue that actually needs addressing. Because, yes, I’m reacting to something that got published on the internet– but I’m also reacting to the place where these ideas come from. And these ideas come from a very scary, very dark place. A place I lived most of my life in.

So, to get us started, here’s the significant portions of the young man’s letter I’m going to address:

. . . I’ve been checking off the various boxes over the years to become a better mate, yet I cannot seem to find any girls of marriage potential.

I have not been able to find any Christian girls who are virgins. If I successfully get a date, as it moves along I am constantly disappointed to find out they have had sex with numerous men before. Each makes the typical statement that they were mistakes and they’ve asked God for forgiveness and moved on. Unfortunately, as a potential husband, there is no option for me to “move on” beyond the infidelity . . .

My female friends keep telling me, “It’s not that big of a deal, and no girls over 20 are virgins. The fact they’ve had sex doesn’t change much.” But not only do I not believe them, there’s lots of scientific as well as biblical evidence for it being a big deal! And that’s on top of the human feelings of betrayal, shame and dishonor of knowing your girl didn’t love you enough to not sleep with other men, as well as the mental images you’ll have for a lifetime of her being sexually active with her lovers.

Feel free to go vomit into a bucket, or go scream into a pillow. I had to go furiously clean my kitchen after I read this. I’ll wait for you.

Ready? Ok.

Honestly, though, the first thing that clues me in to this young man’s attitude is in the words “checking off the boxes.” He talks about all the things he’s done to ready himself for marriage– getting a job, settling down, all that. Those are all fantastically good things. I encourage anyone who asks that waiting to seriously think about long-term relationships until you’re established can be a very good, healthy thing. Doesn’t make it the right circumstances for everyone, but it can help. So yay. He’s waited until he’s more established to start looking.

But, when I think back to all the men I knew growing up, men who declared they’d follow this same formula, men who ascribed to all those kissed-dating-goodbye ideas, I think I know where this man is coming from. And he’s coming from a place where men are The Supreme Commander over All Things– in the church, in the home, in the workplace. In a word, that’s called patriarchy, which will be important in just a sec.

So, his entire letter is dedicated to asking for some guy on Boundless.org to give him justification. He’s not really interested in advice– he’s interested in having Scott Croft affirm his belief that “finding a virgin” is some sort of biblical mandate, that he’s right in believing that he shouldn’t marry anything ‘less’ than a virgin. That, because he’s a virgin, and he’s “checked off all the right boxes,” that he deserves a virgin. That he deserves to feel “betrayed” and “sinned against” by any unmarried woman having sex with someone who isn’t him.

After he opens with not finding women who meet his standards as a “potential,” he then labels the act of a woman having pre-marital sex as infidelity.

Infidelity.

Let’s let that sink in for a moment.

Because, ladies, having sex before you’ve even met your future husband is cheating. And, in this frame of reference, it’s cheating because, guess what– you belong to him already. You’ve belonged to him from the moment you were born (because, of course, any suitable husband will be older than you). Because God made you for each other. God knew who you were going to marry when he formed you in your mother’s womb. Behaving like you’re not already married? Not possible. Because you are, before you’ve even sworn that vow. Your body, your vagina, isn’t yours. It’s his, your future husband’s. Always.

And because your vagina belongs to him, if you let anyone else in there, he deserves to feel betrayed, and shamed, and dishonored by what you’ve done with your body.

I’d like to highlight the words he chose to use– betrayal, shame, and dishonor. That’s the language of patriarchy. He can be betrayed if you’ve broken a vow to him– a vow you’ve never even made. He can feel shamed by you, because he has the right to control what you do before you’ve met him. He can be dishonored by you, because you belong to him. Your honor, your choices, are his. You don’t get to make decisions based on what betrays and dishonors yourself.

And to top it all off, you just don’t love him enough. A man you’ve never met. And he’s going to continuously feel threatened by your previous sexual partners, because he has always owned your body. It’s his possession, and someone else dared to touch it. No, you dared to let someone else touch it.

That being said, I think that even with those who in general agree with the emotional and physical virginity idea thought this letter-writer was an unmitigated ass.

So, moving on to the response, where everyone shouted a great big cry of “here, here!” Because it has its own problems.

This is the second sentence of Scott Croft’s response:

To begin with — especially in light of what I am about to write below — I want to affirm you in your belief that premarital sex is everywhere and always a sin, and that it is a sin not only against God, but against one’s eventual spouse. I deeply wish that more single people — especially those who profess to be Christian — lived out that conviction.

And then he goes to the Bible to back up this point.

Matthew 15:19– doesn’t say that pre-marital sex is a sin against your spouse.
Mark 7:21– doesn’t say that pre-marital sex is a sin against your spouse.
I Corinithians 6:18– this explicitly states that sexual immorality is a “sin against your own body.”
1 Timothy 5:2– includes the word “purity” which means “clean,” but it’s a stretch to make that about sex.
Galations 5:19-21– doesn’t say that pre-marital sex is a sin against your spouse.
Song of Solomon 2:7– “don’t awaken love until it pleases.” Ok. Maybe that’s about sex. Maybe.
Hebrews 13:4– is specifically talking about already married people, so, no particular relevance here.

Interesting thing about all those passages– they are references to “sexual immorality,” which is a vague enough term, but we can assume (at least for the moment) that they’re not talking about prostitution or pedophilia, but pre-marital sex. Even if we accept that assumption, none of these passages say pre-marital sex is a sin against your future spouse. None. Not one. One of them even says, quite clearly, that “sexual immorality” (whatever it is) is a sin against your own body.

Scott does go on to say some things that I agree with– that all of these principles affect men and women equally, which doesn’t really get said very often in our patriarchal culture when men own a woman’s vagina. He also goes on to say that issues like pornography are more damaging than pre-marital sex, so kudos to Scott for that.

But then . . .

In other words . . .  you are right to be frustrated at the sexual immorality you see, and it’s quite understandable for you to feel hurt at the notion of marrying a woman who has sinned against you by having sex before her marriage to you.

Heavens. I don’t know how to make this more clear, but there is no evidence, from the Bible, that pre-marital sex is a sin against anyone. If it is a sin, which is not what I’m addressing in this post, it’s only a sin for you, personally. It only becomes something that can be “against” someone when that someone is a man, and he owns your vagina, and because he owns it, deserves to be upset about what happens to it.

Going to use a ridiculous example here, but it’s like my car– if someone came along and took my car for a test drive without my permission, I’d have a right to be pretty dang upset. Because it’s my car. I paid for it so that I would have exclusive rights to it, and no one could use it but me.

But guess what? My vagina isn’t a car. It’s not anybody’s property– not even after I get married. If I decide to commit adultery, it’s not a betrayal because I’ve done something with my husband’s property that I didn’t have the right to do. It’s a betrayal because, as a human being who made a promise to stay faithful to my husband, I would have broken that promise by having an affair. Vow breaking, in my opinion, is a serious issue.

Back to the article– Scott does affirm that just because a man or a woman has pre-marital sex it doesn’t mean they can’t get married. Yay. But then he just goes back to the same tired line– that this man is justified in being upset that a woman who’s had sex has “betrayed him” and “sinned against him.” Scott tells the man to ponder grace and forgivness, after just making that task extraordinarily difficult by saying “y’know what, women who’ve had sex did betray you, and they did sin against you.” He’s said exactly what this man wanted him to say. This man wrote that letter asking for justification in believing that a woman having sex is a betrayal against his ownership– and he got it.

To round this out, I’d just like to remind everyone that Rahab was a זָנָה, which is usually translated as “prostitute.” And she is in the lineage of Jesus Christ.

Edit: I’d also like to note that Scott doesn’t say that it’s only a sin against a man when a woman has sex, and that it’s not equally as much as a sin against a woman when a man has sex. However, the idea in both the letter and the response is based on the patriarchal notion that a woman’s virginity belongs to a man. It’s an “update” to say that a man’s virginity also belongs to a woman, but it’s the same idea. This idea is wrong because it completely ignores concepts like individual autonomy and personal agency. No one’s decisions belongs to anyone else. Male or female.

Feminism

the bikini and the chocolate cake

chocolate cake
[trigger warning for rape culture]

I’m going to take a break from the series, for today, because I feel that we need to sit down with a cup of coffee or tea and just chat about something. If you move in the same circles I do, you’ve probably heard about this post from Made in his Image. There’s a lot of good things being said about how destructive the modesty culture can be, so I’m not going to rehash a lot of that here. I wanted to shine some light on the biggest problem with this specific post.

I got sunburned on my ass a few weeks ago, when nothing else on me got sunburned at all. We were only at the beach for an hour, and I ended up having to spread aloe vera all over my butt for a week and sit down funny for a few days. Why did I only get sunburned on my bottom?

Because it’s the only part of me that’s never, ever, seen the light of day.

I grew up in Northwest Florida– the part of Florida known as the Emerald Coast. It is a stunningly, breathtakingly beautiful beach. We rarely ever went– only when family came to visit, usually, and those visits were sparse– because it was considered ungodly to go the beach. And if we went, I wore a t-shirt and culottes. My mother made swim-culotes out of a really light, swimsuit-type material.

Even in college, when I’d left a lot of those childhood beliefs behind, I couldn’t bring myself to wear a swimsuit to the beach. I bought an amazingly cute tankini– I still think it’s cute, even today– and it generously covered my badonk-adonk, but I still felt incredibly nervous wearing it. I ended up wearing cute-off shorts on top of it when I went to the beach with some friends, and faked being asleep when I overheard them making fun of me for that choice.

Yup. “Modesty” is a sacrifice. It’s a sacrifice I made for most of my life, and paid for my standards with humiliation and embarrassment.

But, when I went to the beach with my husband a few weeks ago, I wore a bikini for the first time. It wasn’t “skimpy,” not that it matters, and I was able to take off my cover-up without shame, without the sharp knife in my gut telling me that I was dressing as the “strange woman” from Proverbs. It was a victory for me– a small triumph over the shame and oppression I’d known for over half my life.

That’s the only thing the modesty culture does.

It hasn’t stopped a lot of men from ogling me– not even Christian men. I’ve gotten cat calls, jeers, shouts, obscene gestures, propositions, and whistles all while “modestly” dressed. I’m talking full-blown “modesty.” High-necked t-shirts, a-line and loose knee-length skirts. Sometimes I looked cute, sometimes I looked dumpy. It doesn’t matter. How I’ve been dressed has never made a difference whatsoever in how many men have treated me. I was raped while wearing a knee-length skirt and a long-sleeved, loose and flowing top that covered my collar bone. Modesty has never, in my experience, stopped a man from doing whatever he wanted to do with my body– whether it was physically manhandle it, goosing me or grabbing my vagina through my skirt in the middle of chapel, or simply objectify it.

Let me say it again: men who do not see women as human beings could not give a flying f*** how a woman is dressed. She’s a woman. She has boobs and a vagina, and that makes her public property in a world where I’ve been screamed at, cursed at, for refusing to even acknowledge a cat call from a car.

When I started dressing however I wanted, modesty be damned– when I started wearing shorts and tank tops, for example, none of that sort of behavior increased. It stayed exactly the same.

But, this article, like every other article I’ve read on modesty, emphasizes that it a woman’s obligation to help protect men from our bodies. It’s our duty to make sure that we make it possible for men to forget that we’re a woman– which is, frankly, impossible. I don’t care how loose your clothes are– if you have T&A, there’s no getting rid of it, there’s no hiding it.

So what happens?

We have articles where the author has to stubbornly insist that she’s not “insecure about her body,” and clarify that she is “independent in her swimwear choices.”

We have articles where the author compares women to an ooey-gooey chocolate cake.

And let’s look at that for a second. Rachel has this to say about her metaphor:

Now, let’s pretend that someone picked up that chocolate cake and followed us around all the time, 24/7. We can never get away from the chocolate, it’s always right there, tempting us and even smelling all ooey gooey and chocolate-y. Most of us, myself included, would find it easy to break down and eat the cake. And we would probably continue to break down and eat cake, because it would always be there. Our exercise goals would be long gone in no time.

I’m going to try to be fair here: Rachel was probably, in her head, only referencing masculine lust here. When she wrote out this dandy little metaphor, she was probably only thinking that “breaking down” didn’t mean anything besides a man thinking less-than-platonic thoughts about the woman in the bikini.

However, regardless of what I’m positive were the best of intentions, Rachel has just contributed to rape culture.

Because, in this metaphor where a woman is a chocolate cake, the woman has no choice. A woman, plain and simple, just is a chocolate cake, and the fact is that, as a woman, there’s nothing she can do to change that.* She doesn’t have a say in the matter. She’s a woman. She’s ooey-gooey and smells like heaven, and so she gets eaten. No one asks her if that would be ok. No one asks her if that’s what she wants.

Because she’s a cake.

She exists to be eaten.

*I would like to point out that gender and sexuality are a sliding scale– I’m not trying to exclude transgender people, just dealing with the essentialist and gender binary nature of the article.

*edit: I have changed some of my wording (9/6/13) based on reader response.

Feminism, Theology

learning the words: safe

father and daughter

Today’s guest post is from Claire Jones, who blogs about feminism, theology, and the intersection of faith and everyday life at The Art of Uncertainty. “Learning the Words” is a series on the words many of us didn’t have in fundamentalism or overly conservative evangelicalism– and how we got them back. If you would like to be a part of this series, you can find my contact information at the top.

I was never really aware as a teenager that the church I grew up in was far down the conservative end of the evangelical spectrum. I just knew that we what we believed was right, and that most people who called themselves Christians were really only liberals, those people with compromised theology and a diluted gospel. I was sure I’d never end up as one of them.

Mine was certainly not an abusive church, and almost all of my experience of it was as a loving and supportive community. I still consider them my friends, my family. But no matter how warm and genuine the people, the ultra-conservative theology took its toll on me. It’s only now that I’m sorting through the messages I was taught, with the freedom to choose between them. And while I’m doing my sorting, my wondering, my puzzling, I’m claiming back the word safe.

It’s a strange word to me, because safe is exactly what that theology was supposed to make me feel. The formula was easy– if you’ve said your salvation prayer/invited Jesus into your life/given your life to Christ, if you’ve made that step– then you’re safe. I was on the inside. I’d said those prayers at multiple Christian conferences and festivals, just to make sure I really meant it each time. I grew in theological understanding quickly as a teenager, I read the Bible one-on-one with mentors, and went to group studies with older university students while I was still at school. I could articulate all the right doctrine, and argue well over difficult questions. I could share the gospel clearly and boldly, and annoyed my friends at school no end in my attempts to convert them. I knew all the right things and I did all the right things.

But there were two reasons why I could never feel really safe:

Firstly, I was troubled by the people who “fell away.” If Christians who’d said their salvation prayer were really safe for eternity, what happened to the ones who threw in the towel and stopped believing? It’s an age-old question, and I was usually given the age-old answers. If they stopped believing, they couldn’t really have been saved in the first place. If they were saved, they’ll come back. But only God knows the heart.

That answer satisfied me until I saw it happen to my friends, ones who I knew really believed at the time. Ones who were just like me. If they hadn’t been safe, how could I be sure I was? I sometimes wondered what life would look like if I stopped believing and concluded that I’d lose everything I ever knew; the idea terrified me. The only answer was to struggle really hard to make sure I kept believing all the right things and never let my curiosity and questioning look like doubt. I had to keep myself safe.

Secondly, there was the big issue of sin. And when I say sin, I mean sex. Because while I was good at evangelism and leading Christian meetings,  wasn’t too selfish or gossipy, didn’t drink or smoke, and was generally well behaved – my relationships with boys were the one area of my life that I was constantly confessing, repenting of, and feeling suitably guilty about. Sometimes I’d sit in church and be genuinely sorry I’d kissed so many boys that week. Sometimes I’d be having such a great time with a boyfriend that I couldn’t be bothered to feel guilty. Sometimes a youth minister or an older friend would sit me down seriously and get all the details out of me until I was as repentant as I should have been. It was such a running theme for so long that even now, whenever I hear of sin, repentance, or “parts of our lives that we’re holding back from God,” I can’t think of anything but my sex life.

In the context of the ups and downs of my teenage exploration and relationships, I could never feel really safe, because I could never be totally sure I was saved. In the language I knew at church, I was in “persistent sin” and had not truly repented of because I kept doing it. My life wasn’t showing the “fruit” it should have been, and I was warned a number of times over the years that I couldn’t be sure of my salvation if I wasn’t living a sexually pure life.

As I say, that takes its toll. But I’m claiming back safe. Safe, not because I believe the right doctrine and can articulate the five points of Calvinism. Safe, not because I’m sharing the gospel or leading people to Christ. Safe, not because I draw the right physical boundaries, keep my underwear on, or stop after only one drink.

None of those things are particularly true, and yet I’m claiming my safety in the God I believe in, who loves me whatever I do, whatever I say, whatever I believe. I’m claiming my safety in the love of my family and friends, who seem pretty determined to share life with me whatever direction it wanders in. I’m claiming safety in the community of so many others who are also questioning, exploring, working out who God might be, if anyone at all, and who they are and who they want to be. I’m safe in myself, starting at last to trust my own decision making, my own sense of right and wrong, and my instincts about my boundaries.

Safe in being me.

Feminism

a fate worse than death

goblin market

[trigger warning for sexual assault, rape, and rape culture]

I was raped.

There are many days when I have to stop and admit the truth of that sentence all over again. Days when all the voices come back and ask me what in the world it is that I think I’m doing– why are you talking about this? You know what you did. You know you’re responsibleYou’re doing all of this, saying all these terrible things about an innocent man to get attention.

And, when I start thinking these things, sometimes I ask myself– why? Where do all these thoughts come from? And the answer echoes back– you wouldn’t have to deny these things so hard if you knew they were false. There’s a part of you that knows that it’s true. If you really were raped, you wouldn’t have a problem talking about it. Your conscience would be clear. You wouldn’t be second-guessing yourself, worrying about John* coming after you for making ‘false’ accusations. He could, you know– you’ve shared your blog on facebook. You still have mutual friends. You even have a page now. What’s to stop him from coming here?

This is The Lie.

It’s the biggest lie I know, and I believe it– sometimes. Because I grew up knowing about a fate worse than death.

We’re all familiar with this myth– it shows up in our books, our television shows, our comic books, and our movies. We read it in our histories, like Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, when Roman women were “exposed to injuries more dreadful, in the apprehension of chastity, than death itself.” It’s used as suspense in pretty much any Damsel in Distress Trope that appears in video games and film. We see it in almost any movie or book that has a love interest that gets kidnapped. The hero must save her before she suffers a fate worse than death.

It’s a euphemism for rape.

It’s our society’s method of cloaking what it knows is a horrifying assault on the agency of a human being. Some could argue that it’s an apt euphemism– they could say it accurately describes the long-term consequences and damage that result from rape. That rape, especially the rape of children, can result in a harm to the soul that is so deep, some are never capable of a full recovery. They might suffer from PTSD, from depression, for the rest of their lives. Which is all hideously true. Rape can do all those things. Because, instead of killing a person, what rape does is tell a woman or man that what they want doesn’t matter, that they cannot control what happens to their own bodies. It’s a violation so deep, so profound, that I have a hard time communicating the extent of how awful it is to someone who’s never been there. That’s why this euphemism exists– and it exists, some could say, for good reason. It’s apropos.

I wish this euphemism, this phrase, would die a horrible, screaming death by fire and torment, because that’s the only thing it deserves. Because this phrase doesn’t really tell rape survivors that our society sympathizes with us. It doesn’t tell us that our culture has a deeply buried rhetoric that acknowledges the pain of rape and sexual assault. It doesn’t tell us that we have a culture that will stand with us and help us face the long-term fallout of what happened to us.

No, it tells us, especially women, that what happened was our fault.

I know that seems like a leap, but hopefully you can feel the intuitive, natural connection. Because rape is so horrible, so horrific, so violent, that if we walked away from it in once piece– well, it must not have been rape, then. It’s a fate worse than death, how in the world could a woman have survived it? Either the rape itself was horrible enough to cause visible, permanent, physical and lasting damage, or the woman fought back against her rapist and gained bullet wounds or knife slashes– or at least a bruise or a black eye. It’s worse than death— the rapist should have needed to subdue her (or him). It’s the fight or flight instinct, which clearly shows that if you’re only facing death, you fight back. If you’re facing something worse than death itself ? . . .

What this Lie does is tell those whose rape weren’t at gun point, under threat of death, after we’ve been beaten into submission–that we weren’t actually raped. I was already on the floor when he raped me. I had already supposedly “consented” (under coercion and threat of physical and emotional harm, although I was incapable of seeing it that way at the time) to other sexual activities, so when he raped me, even though I was whispering, terrified, begging him, please, no, I can’t, please stop, don’t do this, don’t make me and it was over so quickly it took me hours to even figure out what had happened, after he climbed off of me and called me a bitch and a whore, I couldn‘t see it as rape.

Rape only happens when it is worse than death. I survived. I picked myself off of the thirty-year-old blue shag carpet, dragged myself to the bathroom to clean myself, and then pulled myself to the living room to wait for his parents to get home. It wasn’t rape. Not really. He’d done something to me that I didn’t want to happen– but it wasn’t rape. Because, with the exception of a deep gouge in my knee, I wasn’t bloodied or beaten. I walked away, supposedly in “one piece.”

This, I believe, is one of the most damaging rape myths our culture tells us. This narrative exists, and it’s why we don’t believe that one quarter of the women in this country are raped. It’s why 97% of rapists will never go to prison. Because we know what “legitimate” rape is, and it’s worse than death itself.