Worth Reading This Week

In a completely unexpected way, the blogging world exploded this week with a discussion of virginity, purity, and the sexism and damage it contains. Thank. God.

For me, these things that are new discussions for a lot of the mainstream blogging world have been the background radiation of this blog for a while. And when I got a comment a couple weeks ago asking why I seemed so okay with premarital sex if this is a faith based blog, I realized it may be time to revisit the topic, which I’ll be doing over the next few weeks.

To kick it off, Worth Reading This Week are a couple barn-burner posts from my friends Sarah Bessey and Emily  Maynard, just in case you missed them.

First, Sarah wrote about shame over at A Deeper Story and broke the internet (emphasis original):

Over the years the messages melded together into the common refrain: “Sarah, your virginity was a gift and you gave it away. You threw away your virtue for a moment of pleasure. You have twisted God’s ideal of sex and love and marriage. You will never be free of your former partners, the boys of your past will haunt your marriage like soul-ties. Your virginity belonged to your future husband. You stole from him. If – if! – you ever get married, you’ll have tremendous baggage to overcome in your marriage, you’ve ruined everything. No one honourable or godly wants to marry you. You are damaged goods, Sarah.”

If true love waits, I heard, then I have been disqualified from true love.

And then Emily posted at Prodigal about losing her v-card and made me yeah “HELL YEAH”:

I’m done standing apart from my brothers and sisters who have been abused or manipulated or coerced or had their ability to choose taken away from them. I’m done adding to a culture that humiliates victims who are walking out healing in their own way. We’re quick to offer platitudes of grace, but oh so slow to engage the individuals or social structures that perpetuate abuse.

I’m done blanketing all sexual experience outside of marriage as sin and never acknowledging that abuse can happen within a marriage. I’m done with Christians enforcing oppression in the name of purity.

I’m unbelievably glad that the mainstream blogging world is beginning to pick up the torch on this topic, not just because it’s a major part of my book project, but because moving toward a conversation about healthy sexuality is massively important if the church really wants to make justice a part of their agenda.

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The Case For Early Marriage?: Confusing Is and Ought

In doing some research this past week, I came across an old article from Christianity Today. I remember reading it when it came out and being frustrated by the poor argument – and that was before I had my feminist framework in place. Reading it again as a nearly 27 year old still single person with years of research into feminist ideology and theory under my belt, I’m even more incensed by the proposals and ideas within the article. I thought it might be good to examine some of the ideas which undergird the framework for this piece. The piece is "The Case for Early Marriage," written by Mark Regnerus, for a 2009 issue of Christianity Today. It’s the cover story for that particular issue, and therefore is quite long.

But the article can be summed up in a few points:

  1. Good family structure is good for society. Family, in the Biblical sense, consists of a mother, father, and kids (multiple, of course).
  2. Secular society is delaying marriage further in people’s twenties, which turns the abstinence only dictate from evangelicalism into hogwash.
  3. The problem, however, is not that abstinence only is a fundamentally bad idea, but that we haven’t done enough to promote marriage at younger ages – ages which would skirt that troublesome mid-20s sex drive and fertility push.
  4. Delayed marriage is bad because people are having sex before marriage because of it (why this is bad is never fully explained). Delayed marriage also, evidently, encourages extended adolescence in men, resulting in women having to “marry down” if they want to marry at all.
  5. Solution: we encourage people to marry young and work out their problems within a marriage relationship, rather than dating around. This way we can encourage the family structure as well, keep people from having premarital sex, and bolster society because … family’s the cornerstone and stuff.

There are several premises that go unquestioned throughout this piece. The first is that a family structure consists of man, woman, kids. The second is that extramarital or premarital sex is a society-destroying problem. The third is that marriage is less about right people than about right practices and hard work. And the fourth is that marriage is, of course, for the sole purpose of procreation.

All of these are tied up in a concept of marriage as a salvation tool, as The Thing that the church needs to be relevant and helpful to a dying society.

There’s a lot of hoopla that Regnerus makes here about women waiting to marry until they are past their prime years of fertility. Technically, prime years of fertility are a woman’s teens, but since that’s not socially acceptable (despite its undisputed place as the Biblical model), Regnerus has given a little ground and now advises that a good age for marriage is in the early 20s. 20-22, that range.

Now, before I get angry comments about how “I married at 20 and we’re 11 years strong!” (good for you!), I am not talking about your marriages or the marriages of those who decided to marry young and it’s still working. What I am discussing is the harmful teaching from the church that says people should marry at that age. It’s the universal rule that I’m challenging, not the individual cases.

Regnerus’ advice is harmful precisely because he imposes an “ought” onto a “maybe.” He makes the mistake of moving from the specific (in many examples, his own young marriage) into the general. This is an incredibly common error in logic, and unbelievably common when it comes to church relationship/dating teachings. I see people who made mistakes in their dating relationships – having sex before they were ready for it, to take one very common example – take that personal error and turn it into a rule, a black and white comment about when other people should or ought to do something.

This is most clear when he discusses objections to early marriage. He says of the idea of poor matches in early marriages:

There is no right answer to such questions, because successful marriages are less about the right personalities than about the right practices, like persistent communication and conflict resolution, along with the ability to handle the cyclical nature of so much about marriage, and a bedrock commitment to its sacred unity. Indeed, marriage research confirms that couples who view their marriages as sacred covenants are far better off than those who don't. [emphasis mine]

Oof.

While it’s true that couples who view their marriage in a way that takes divorce off the table will probably not get divorced, I hesitate to use the language the author does in calling this “better off," because that's an unquantifiable, vague idea. However, that’s small potatoes compared to the idea that a marriage is less about “right personalities” and more about “right practices.”

This is legalism. This is rules-based Christianity. This is blaming the problem not on the actual causes but on the victims of those problems. You’re encouraged by the church to marry your first boyfriend and to do so quickly and you discover the relationship was a bad idea because of fundamental personality clashes? You’re just not doing marriage right – there’s nothing wrong with the institution or with the push to marry early – it’s all on YOU, the person on the ground, for not performing it right.

It’s a version of the No True Scotsman logical fallacy – it conveniently pushes off the failure of numerous early marriages on those who divorced, conveniently implying that they just didn’t have the right practices for their marriage, rather than admitting a fault in the doctrine of early marriage itself. It's the "if your [x thing you were praying for] didn't work, you're just not right with God" approach.

But "right" practices mean nothing if you don’t have a person you’re willing to invest time and energy in. And while day to day feelings change and fade, there’s always a basis of love for the other person. If you don’t have the right person in your match, all of your "right" practices are going to mean diddly squat.

And this is the ultimate problem – Regnerus refuses to recognize the diversity of human beings and human relationships and seems to think that if a couple is having problems in their marriage because they married before realizing fundamental personality differences (differences that may only arise after both people have had chances and time to discover who they really are, which happens at different ages for literally everyone), then the problem is with them simply not trying hard enough. He doesn’t realize that it’s like trying to shove an elephant into a sweater meant for a cat – sometimes there is no right solution and no right way to fix a marriage that shouldn’t have happened in the first place. But instead of acknowledging that, yeah, people need time to mature and know themselves outside of a relationship and on their own, he proposes that people simply need to work harder – as though pushing really hard will somehow make the elephant's head fit into the sweater's neck.

Life doesn’t work that way. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for marriage. Marrying at 20 works for some people. Marrying at 40 works for others. We all mature in different ways and the opening up of choices for women in terms of careers and who they have the ability to say “yes” to has shifted the demographics and that is not de facto bad.

This doesn’t even touch on the extremely utilitarian view of marriage that Regnerus is pushing – early marriage is necessary because of fertility and Christians marrying earlier gives them the chance to have more kids, giving them a demographic advantage. This view, in fact, devalues marriage (and women) because it turns marriage into a means by which the next generation of (hopefully Christian conservatives!) is produced, rather than a glorious celebration of love and hope for renewal and desire to dedicate a life to working with a partner.

Perhaps it is not society’s view that is dishonoring marriage, but Regnerus’ utilitarian, baby factory one that erases the beautiful bright diversity of love within humanity in favor of brutal, cold demographic sustenance. I’d rather never get married than experience a marriage that has all the right practices but none of the right person.

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Same Stuff, Different Day

I wanted to agree with Carolyn Curtis James' Huffington Post piece entitled, "Why Virginity Is Not the Gospel." I really did. As a feminist Christian blogger who spends a lot of time talking about the problematic nature of the purity movement, I by all accounts should support this article. But James' framing of the issue is so gendered, so confusing, and so ultimately NOT the argument that needs to be made that I simply cannot get behind it. She ends up in a somewhat good place, but the route she takes to get there is so filled with problems that it erases all good things she may have said.

James' discussion begins with Olympian Lolo Jones' proclamation that she's a 29 year old virgin, and how she wants to save that gift for her husband because she is a Christian. James laments that Jones has so much more to give her husband, and if you cut out the middle few paragraphs of her piece, it would have worked simply as a lament about how a woman's self-worth is boiled down to an untouched vagina. Those are the points I do agree with - your self-worth and what you bring to the table in a marriage relationship have nothing to do with whether or not another person has managed to get their hands on your bits.

But that's where my agreement with James ends, because she wrote this:

A message of purity and abstinence, as important as this is for young women (young men too) comes too late for huge numbers of young American girls, including those in church pews. It is utterly devastating to the one-in-four girls who is sexually abused before she reaches her 18th birthday. We live in a world where by the age of 18 an estimated 70 percent of girls have had sex at least once and not always by choice, where globally countless women and girls are in the grips of sex traffickers, where an appalling 48 women are raped every hour in the Congo, where within our own borders sexual freedom has opened the door for young women to be as sexually promiscuous as men, and where some girls with the very best of intentions succumb to temptation. I grieve all of this, but do not for a second imagine that any of this means a woman has less to offer a husband or that in any sense it diminishes her worth.

Let me draw your attention to that first sentence again. The message of purity is important, she says, but should not be the center of the Gospel because it's already too late for many women.

This is a terrible argument, not because it's true, but because it neglects both the damage that rape does to a woman's self-worth, and how a purity message compounds that damage by leaps and bounds. There is a distinct lack of concern that we live in a patriarchal culture in which men and women are raped at extraordinary rates and that rape is used as a weapon in war. She barely acknowledges that the purity movement may actually compound their pain, or actually helped in her rape by failing to teach her about what healthy sexuality looks like.

Her parenthetical about young men is the only note we get in the entire article that this teaching might possibly apply to men, which, given her framing, I have to think was added in by an editor as an afterthought to avoid claims of sexism (too late!).

And we learn why she doesn't attack the purity message itself and still wants to prize it as important when we get to the end of her list: "...here within our own borders sexual freedom has opened the door for young women to be as sexually promiscuous as men, and where some girls with the very best of intentions succumb to temptation." Ah, it's already too late for the abstinence message because women are already choosing to have sex - indeed, choosing to have as much sex as men (which is a confusing statement in of itself, because who are these men having sex with if not the women, assuming James' heteronormative framing is right?).

And she grieves women consensually deciding to have sex (notice, though, that this is framed as "falling to temptation") just as much as she grieves women and children being raped in the Congo.

This is James' way of sounding like she affirms progressive sexual ethics concerning women's sexuality while still holding on to archaic, women-as-property based social mores. The virginity may not be the Gospel for James, but it is certainly a part of it. Women are worth more than their virginity, she says, but she'll still grieve your loss of purity if you choose to do it outside the confines of marriage.

This is an exemplification of the lack of distinction between rape and consensual sex that happens all the time in evangelical conservative culture. Consenting to sex out of one's own free will is just as bad as being raped. By placing consensual virginity loss in the same list as horrific crimes of a sexual nature, she is still removing female agency from the picture.

Again, notice the framing - women succumb to temptation because of what "the world" is teaching them - they couldn't possibly be choosing it of their own free will. In her mind, it's not possible for a woman to be enthusiastically consenting to sex outside of marriage. There must be some sort of outside force working upon her.

But, sentences before, when she could have argued rightly about this outside force (ie, rapists) and pointed out the link between a patriarchal culture bent on controlling female sexuality/purity and  the practice of rape (esp. as a weapon of war!), everything is passive - no outside actors are identified. In her mind, it's essentially all the same.

And that's why I cannot, ultimately, get behind this piece. It still misses the major framework of the purity movement, which is that it is about controlling the sexuality of young women as though they are still property. It refuses to be critical of that which begs for criticism. To put it bluntly, it's trying to polish a turd. And crappy theology is crappy theology, no matter how nice the package.

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Giving In And Giving Up

[trigger warning: sexual assault] “No,” I said as I pushed the boy off of me in the backseat of a car. I held up my ring finger on my right hand, “You won’t get to do that until I have a different ring from this.” The boy stared back at me, dejected and shamed. “Well, then, I guess that settles it. Let me drive you home.”

You may have guessed – based on the fact that I was single well into my 20s – that this never actually happened. But that doesn’t mean this scene didn’t play in most of my ideas of future relationships from the time I first donned a purity ring and made that pledge to stay a virgin until I was married.

Whenever I thought about what it would take to keep myself pure, I never imagined fighting for my own self-control – after all, I was a girl, and all I had to do was wait. I would not be the one who wanted to have sex. No, instead, I imagined that the “fight” for my purity would be a literal one – a boy would be pressuring me, would be trying to convince me to help him satisfy his urges, and I would have to be the one to say no. I would have to push him off me because chances are, he wouldn’t want to take no for an answer. My purity ring would be my weapon, a tangible thing I could point to, in order to remind him of my commitment and what being with me meant.

I only recently realized how completely – excuse my French - fucked up that entire narrative is.

It’s extremely telling that the type of romantic relationship I pictured, in relation to my pledge to purity, was an abusive one. And it’s also extremely telling that I did not have the tools at my disposal in order to identify that relationship as abusive.

In my faux-narrative, I would be wresting my purity back from his prying hands, I would have to be on guard to protect myself from his wandering penis, and if I gave in – there was no question that I would be the one wanting it; I was only ever giving in to his desires – then I would be considered impure, a broken shell of a person who could no longer wear white on her wedding day.

Today, while reading this, it was like gears clicking into place in my head. The situation Copeland depicts is exactly the type of situation I imagined – because that’s how it is almost always depicted. The pure, angelic, righteous girl gets into a relationship with the wrong dude, and after months of pressure, she gives in, she gives it up, she gives “everything” away.  And thereafter, she’s sullied, she’s no longer “pure.” She will have to beg forgiveness from God and from her future husband in order to be an acceptable bride.

The equation was simple. Guys wants sex, needs girl to have sex. Guy pressures girl to have sex. Girl has one of two choices: “give in,” or “stand up for Jesus.” Girls who “gave in” were bad people. Girls who kept pure were good people.

Simple. Simple.

There was, of course, better language and better phrasing in each of the stories and narratives, but that’s how it was always sold to me. The testimonies told by crying women in church were ones in which they felt pressured by the world and by their boyfriends and so they gave in and gave up.

Even the language surrounding virginity reflected this abusive and coercive narrative – a girl was always “giving up” her virginity, or “losing it.” She was never actively choosing to have sex, and if she was, there was something deeply, inherently wrong with her.

And if you “gave in” to one boy, then other boys had no reason to respect you. You’d become that girl in the school, the one all the boys came to because they knew you were “easy.” And since you were already sullied, you’d figure why not, and let them, one after the other, have you. Before you knew it, you had no sense of your personal identity and were just a vessel passed around among the boys for pleasure.

That was the narrative. That was the story. No nuance. No deviation. Because if you allowed for nuance and deviation – if you allowed for a story in which both people in the relationship wanted to have sex, in which one wasn’t coercing the other but both were active participants, then the narrative of the brave hero standing up for purity was totally lost. You can’t be a brave hero standing up against pressure if you desperately desire the thing that you’re being pressured to do.

Because, let’s face it, the “she gave in, she was coerced” narrative is so much easier to paint – it’s so easy to point to where the girl went wrong. Well, if she hadn’t gotten involved with a boy like that…. If she had just had more strength to cling to Jesus… If she’d just been more righteous…

Consent doesn’t enter into the picture, because if enthusiastic, positive consent is discussed, it might end up teaching people that healthy sexual relationships can and do happen outside of a marriage relationship. And then all hell breaks loose!

It truly amazes me that this is the narrative I bought into for years. It stuns me to realize that I pictured an abusive, coercive relationship as “the norm” because that was how “standing up for my purity” was presented. And that is hugely problematic – in this way, in this kind of narrative that is supposed to be encouraging, we are normalizing victim blaming. We are normalizing abuse and assault. We are not only failing to give women tools to recognize abuse and coercion, but we are actively instructing them that it is their fault if they get themselves into that situation.

And that is wrong, wrong, wrong. We need to take a better, positive approach, one in which both parties in a relationship are active, emotionally healthy people who approach it as equals, not as one passive and one active who is engaging in coercion. We need to teach men and women what a “yes” looks like, and when to give that “yes.” We need to teach men and women that no one – no one! – is allowed to touch them without their enthusiastic consent, and not because they need to hold to some standard of purity, but because they are human beings who deserve to have their “no” heard and respected.

And we need to teach that a person who survives an abusive, coercive relationship is not to blame for the relationship, no matter what “bad decisions” he or she made. Rather than forcing them to ask for our forgiveness, we need to offer love and grace freely and unconditionally. Then, only then, will we give people the tools to create healthy, stable relationships free of abuse and coercion.

Men are not slobbering libidos in human form. Women are not passive angels who need to say no. Let’s do the human race the respect it deserves and allow grace and love to rule the day, instead of shame and coercion.

____________

If you or someone you know is experiencing pressure to do things in a relationship (especially sexually) that you are not comfortable with, it is not normal and it is not healthy. I would strongly urge contacting RAINN.org. They have phone and instant messaging options available.

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