What is it like to have grown up in purity culture?
This is a guest post. The story provided here is not my own and does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of Weiler Counseling.
I can picture the room so vividly. The lights were off, but vibrant blues and greens of the worship song lyrics rolling up the screens lit the room just enough to make it feel bright. It set an ambiance for the more than one hundred young, impressionable girls. Maybe there were boys? I don’t remember this. What I do remember is hundreds of hands raised, the blonde girl sitting next to me with tears streaming down her face. I remember feeling so out of place. I didn’t really feel like I belonged anywhere, but at this particular event, I was more concerned that people could see the skin tags on the back of my neck. It was so hot in the room, and I wanted my hair off my neck desperately. But what if people saw my ugly skin tags? I had spent the last three days learning some very specific things:
My body was the source of my value
I must not show my body to anyone. If someone sees or touches my body, it loses its value.
Nakedness and sex are inherently shameful, and nakedness is always sexual.
My value is directly related to the potentiality of sexuality, not its existence.
Naturally, I had never been more concerned about people looking at my body than had during this worship service.
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“Do you think it’s weird that people are just walking around as naked bodies under their clothes and that everyone has sex?” I asked my husband one night. “No.” He replied. The concern was palpable. There are a lot of things that I could point to as potentially being a result of the purity culture I was raised in. This, however, is the most prominent impact it has had on my life.
I didn’t grow up getting purity messaging from all angles. In fact, I only grew up getting purity messaging through my church. I lived in a very sex-positive family. Naturally, I was confused.
I was taught by people who I believed to be trustworthy that my inherent value as a person was directly related to the purity of my body and both the absence of and potential of my sexuality. From what I’ve learned from Linda Kay Klein’s book Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free, I am far from alone.
This duality, the absence of sexuality with the potential of a ravenous sexual appetite that makes itself known only after marriage caused… Issues. For instance, I’m a 30-year-old woman with a daughter of my own, and I’m only now realizing that sexuality and nakedness are not inherently shameful. And, indeed, nakedness is not always sexual. It took nurses placing the tiny, naked body of my newborn on my fully exposed, newly-deflated body. Only then, with two women stitching up my torn vagina did I realize that nakedness is nothing to be ashamed of. Our bodies are beautiful and perfect. Her body is beautiful and perfect, and there is nothing sexual about it. My body, my imperfect, exposed body made her.
Even today, almost two years later, I don’t struggle with nakedness. I spent three days fully naked in the hospital, realizing that the comfort of those around me was, in fact, not my problem. I was healing, and my daughter and I were learning how to breastfeed. Our comfort was the priority, and I didn’t care who saw what. Suddenly, my naked body was decidedly not sexual, and it made me feel free.
Though I’m slowly separating nakedness and sexuality, or, to be clearer, the potential of sexuality and its relation to my body, I have not yet figured out how to chip away at the absence of sexuality and replace it with the fulfilled potential of sexuality. Essentially, I’ve come to terms with the fact that my body is not inherently sexual, but I have not yet convinced myself that sex is not inherently shameful.
To be clear, I do not believe that everyone who has sex should feel shame. In fact, I do not believe that anyone other than me should feel shame.
I’m a little bit jealous. How do you all do it? Is it… all it’s cracked up to be? Does the potential of a ravenous sexual appetite not actually exist within me? Am I… sexually broken?
I believe that sex and sexuality are fundamental parts of the human experience, but I can’t seem to crack it for myself. I can’t seem to access this part of me that craves sex. My value lies in the potential of my sexuality, not its existence. For me, it feels like the only way my sexuality exists is in the context of my partner’s, as if my sexuality exists as an extension of theirs and not a being of its own.
I don’t know how to break that barrier down. I don’t know how to let go of whatever it is that continues to tell me that the existence of a sexuality will make me a shameful, disgusting person. I don’t know how to become like the rest of the people who… as I said before “walk around having sex,” but perhaps even more curious to me, the people who walk around wanting sex. I have a daughter. It’s not the having of the sex that troubles me; it’s the wanting.
Maybe one day I’ll be able to square the fact that it’s also okay for me to have a sexuality that has actually come into existence.