Sexuality and Purity

This blog is a response to an article http://theotherjournal.com/2014/03/03/naked-and-ashamed-women-and-evangelical-purity-culture/ about the residual effects of purity culture. A Christian sub-culture designed to help teens wait until marriage to have sex.

Writing about sexuality is difficult. Sex is personal. We are all products of sexuality. But what kind of sexuality? When we start talking about sex some eyes glaze over and others light up. Its simultaneously a topic we greatly desire to talk about, and a topic we avoid talking about altogether. Talking about sex means taking risks. We risk exposing ourselves: our thoughts, fears, anxieties, pains, scars, hopes, joys, desires for the present and desire for the future. We risk a core part of ourselves when we honestly talk about sex. And we should. We should risk, and we should honestly talk.

This blog will be my honest thoughts and experiences about sex. About purity culture. About the sex industry. About what I believe it means to be human. For in talking about sexuality we should be engaging our entire person, all of our facilities, not just our private parts. Where the culture of purity and the surrounding culture of sexuality both fail is in the engagement of the whole self in the process. We like to divide bodies and minds from each other, we like to compartmentalize our actions. This is wrong, so wrong. It's why people from both sides of the debate have scars. It's why we both need healing.

As a middle schooler, I discovered the world of self stimulation. Without anyone telling me otherwise, I felt like something was missing. But being my logical middle school self I didn't care, self stimulation was fun, at least for a while. What I began to hear at church was that self stimulation had long lasting ramifications: it would later impact my sex life in marriage, it had the power to taint my friendships. The only way to prevent all of this was to stop.

That was the message. Stop. Don't. Focus your mind on something else, don't allow yourself to look at a woman with lust in your heart. Too simple and too complex words of wisdom for a middle school kid. Yet somehow, a middle schooler pulled it off. In the transition between 8th grade and high school I said no. Without external intervention. I didn't have an accountability partner. All I had was the desire to have pure friendships that weren't going to be tainted by my sexuality getting out of control. I took personal responsibility and made it happen. It wasn't easy. I watched a lot of friends fail. I felt for them, because I knew how difficult the fight is; no one faults an athlete for coming up short. I didn't fault their mistakes. I faulted them for hiding the truth.

I completed high school and college without self stimulation. Without having had sex. Without having my first kiss. Looking back at the photos and the memories, they were truly blessed. I have no regrets about the decision I made to keep my body and my mind pure. Looking back at high school, I did not date. I'm glad I spent time in co-ed groups creating memories I will cherish for the rest of my life. I stepped into the dating scene in college, this is where I have regrets.

One doesn't make it through multiple years of purity without having formed a few habits. The most notable habit I had was not liking being touched. I hated it. Even as I say that, I was also the kind of person you could get a big enthusiastic hello hug from. Only my church friends got to see that side of me, I didn't trust the outside world with that kind of familiarity. I was also a wrestler. This is where we encounter our first form of division, and its the most important division to understand. Touches, although physically experienced the same way, are not the same.

From a physical standpoint, our bodies have one nervous system. This system reports pleasure and pain in exactly the same way: electrical signals. The brain interprets the signal to determine whether or not the touch was pleasurable or painful. Culturally, we have areas we do not often touch and when we touch these areas we often interpret these signals as sexual. As a wrestler I turned off the culture. You touched what you had to in order to win. It wasn't dirty or gross, you just had to do what you had to do within the acceptable movements to win. I carried this mentality with me when I became a cheer leading base. You touched what you had to touch and looked where you needed to look in order to keep your flyer safe. It wasn't about where your hands went. I knew this, and most of my flyers knew this. Some of the time they forgot and were weirded out. It happens. My focus was always the team, it was always success, it was always safety. When I wrestled and when I cheered I didn't have issues with touch. Outside of those arenas it was a different story. Unless I turned it off.

For example: senior year of high school we had a spirit assembly, and as all seniors know, spirit assemblies mean competition. Being the competition person I am, I volunteered to compete and was dead set on winning, despite not knowing the game. This assembly's game? Pass the orange. From under your chin to under the next person's chin, without touching the orange with your hands. They spaced us out male, female, male, female with eight participants per grade. I was third in the order. As soon as they said go, we all watched to see how best to pass the orange. This game is about awkwardness, especially because you don't know what to do with your hands. I became impatient watching. I thought, "there has got to be a better way to do this" When the orange passed to the girl beside me it was game on! I was six feet plus. She was five foot nothing. Three seconds passed as we tried without touching each other to pass the orange. Bending down was awkward and we weren't making good progress. She almost dropped the orange. My instincts kicked in. I wrapped my arms around her, got a secure hold on the orange with my chin and let go. The crowd went wild. I, who didn't like touching, had figured out the secret and the awkwardness to the game. Passing the orange makes it look like you're making out with the other person. I didn't have a clue and I didn't care. I wanted to win. Winning was more important than touching. My brain only saw what I needed to do to win. Nothing else mattered.

This is how the sex industry runs. Winning means making money. Making money means surviving, no matter the cost or the touching involved. I visited a ministry that reaches out to prostitutes on the streets of Seattle, they put together a video to help us understand the mentality of street walkers. this video had a clip from a doctor asking a prostitute if she was having sex after being treated for STDs. Obviously, this is paraphrased.

Doctor: Are you having sex?
Girl: No, my boyfriend and I aren't having sex.
Doctor: You're having no forms of sexual contact?
Girl: Nope, my boyfriend and I are waiting it out.
Doctor: How's business?
Girl: I've turned a couple of tricks to make a few bucks to make ends meet while my boyfriend and I explore alternatives.

The girl did not consider turning tricks, sex with strangers, as the same thing as having sex with her boyfriend. They were two different and unrelated categories in her mind. Like me, she had figured out how to turn parts of her self off in order to do what she needed to do. The stranger would have had no clue. Everything she does while turning a trick is an elaborate façade to win. She might take some pleasure out of it, but when these cards are played day after day, the end result is a shutting down of the self. This is the sex industry, a world that projects an outward image but inwardly shuts something else down to win. It's an unhealthy division of self that everyone faces. It's not just a problem for sex workers.

This division of self is the damaging component of purity culture, not just repression of feeling, but the total denial of it. The resulting struggle of anyone adhering to purity culture? How do we turn it back on? There's no quick and easy solution, the only way out is through retraining and breaking down the barriers we've built up.

How do we choose when to breakthrough? What methods do we use to restore what's been lost?

This is partly why the sex industry claims to exist: to help us overcome our fears and barriers, to give us tools to make better sex. This is wrong. If we've naturally learned to shut down our bodies down, we can naturally learn to turn them back on. No props, fantasies, or sex industry workers needed.

But how? And when?

These are the questions I've asked myself as I am months away from being married. This is the process I've been going through once I asked her to marry me. There's not a chronologically right time, only being in a right relationship that's not built on sex, even though their is plenty of physical attraction. Our major method of therapy? Talking. We're on opposite sides of the planet. We're talking through our fears and learning to trust each other with this part of ourselves, even though there's already other levels of trust in our relationship. We're talking. And its helping. And the relationship is deepening. And I'm learning that sexuality is much more than physical desire and physical touch. There's another side of it that has been left out of the books, and has been left out of the articles. Its the side that gets forfeited when we turn ourselves off. It's the side people go searching for but can't find because no amount of explicit material, magazines or paid sex industry workers can turn it back on. The sex industry can't turn it back on because the nature of their work requires them to turn it off. Their desire to win and survive forfeits what should be rightfully theirs.

This tension between, how does it turn on and when, are where I've actually found real answers from my faith. From the Bible. The book is called Song of Songs, or the Songs of Solomon. What it is, is the love poetry between a lover and his beloved.

Before they get married.

For those who pay close attention to the details and descriptions, and not just the parts about fruit, deer, grass and streams of flowing water, is the evolution of a relationship. A relationship that is about to be consummated. In other words, there's a lot of passion and desire between the lover and his beloved. It's obviously grown and been kept in check, but even in few days remaining before their weddings its a struggle. The struggle? How to let the feelings grow while not letting the feelings overwhelm and control. The answer? Good friends and community support. Oh, and to let the feelings grow. Because they are supposed to be growing.

Like fruit on a tree, sexual feelings are supposed to be growing; they should be ready for picking on the day of the wedding. With that encouragement, that's exactly what my fiancé and I are practicing. And that's the standard we're holding ourselves accountable towards. To let the feelings grow at a slow and stable pace. Which takes a lot of patience.

This is where my physical training is helping me the most. I know strength and endurance take time to build. I know there are shortcuts, but none that will produce the longevity I desire. Like my physical training, I have to take the time by communicating with my fiancé to build what it is we want. It's more than physical intimacy. It's being intimate with each other's souls. We're taking efforts to keep our pace slow, to keep ourselves from speeding ahead, yet moving towards our goal.

It's not perfect. We don't have a formula. At this point it comes down to deciding what's pure and what's right each and every day. That's all we can do.

For those who want to know what's right and what's not, I suggest reading and discussing the materials from purity culture. Some of the books are bad arguments for good things. No author is perfect. Take the principles and find out how to apply them. You'll need to learn how to focus your mind, and you'll need to learn how that's different from shutting your body down. It's an art form of living, its not something you only achieve by learning how to say "No, I won't," its something you learn how to live by saying, "Yes, I will."

There's more I could say and there's more that needs to be said. There are terms that need to be defined and probably some of my experiences that need to be clarified. Being silent won't create the change we want in our world. We have to take risks. We have to talk about what's happened, what's happening. We need to open up the dark closets of fear, or we will find ourselves incapable of changing. I want to live in a world where we are unafraid of wholeness. I want to live in a world where we encourage one another to live undivided lives. Amen.