Rejecting the Premise: Questions of Sex and Sin

When I was in high school, I attended a Bible camp out in the Black Hills every summer. It was always a good, fulfilling, fun time for me. Every year – like in many Bible camps across the country – there’d be one night set aside for the “sex talk.” The content varied from year to year, but the message was the same each time: “sex outside of a marriage is a sin and you must show utmost remorse for it. Forever. And it’ll probably ruin you for life. So don’t do it. Also, you will get pregnant and die.” Okay, that last part is from the movie Mean Girls, but you get the picture.

The narrative never shifted. There was always testimony from someone who had “done it” or come close and regretted it deeply. Usually, it was a guy or girl who got drunk and slept with someone at a party (consent issues were, of course, never addressed). But one year, one of the youth pastors took the mic.

This man was probably twice our age. He had been married since his early 20s. We settled in for his tale of woe, sure that he’d committed some too-early action with a high school girlfriend – that’s usually how these stories go.

But, no. He’d only ever dated his wife, he tearfully told us, and they had gotten engaged a few months into their relationship. After their engagement, they began to struggle with physical boundaries, and, a couple of months before the wedding, committed “the ultimate sin.” They both had been living with guilt and regret and shame for years.

Even at the time – I was in the midst of my purity craze, proudly wearing my ring every day and proclaiming to any who would listen that I was saving myself for my future husband – I thought this was a little weird. They were engaged at the time. They were in love. They’d only ever been with each other and had never strayed.

Surely, all this guilt and shame and regret were…disproportionate? Was sex before marriage seriously that powerful?

It challenged my prefabricated narrative about sex before marriage. These two had had done it – while engaged – and had spent much of their marriage feeling guilty about it. But they hadn’t caught an STD, they hadn’t developed totally unhinged sexual morals (eg, they didn’t start sleeping with everything with a pulse, which we’d been warned was a consequence of premarital sex), and their marriage hadn’t fallen apart.

It seemed like they were beating themselves up over nothing.

Of course, I didn’t allow myself to ask these questions until years later. At the time, I felt a sort of vague discomfort at the story, but didn’t connect it to the disproportionate shame or guilt. I simply didn’t have the tools before me to recognize that my narrative of “how things work” might not reflect reality, even in the face of a story that challenged my ideas of what would happen. I simply didn’t have the tools to recognize that shame and guilt were wreaking havoc, and unnecessarily so.

I have a feeling that the men at The Gospel Coalition are like the teenaged me. They simply don’t have the understanding or the vocabulary to grasp the difference between criticism of shame-filled rhetoric and the green lighting of (what they consider) heresy.

That’s the only explanation I can think of for this piece.

You see, a couple of weeks ago, writers Sarah Bessey and Elizabeth Esther kicked off an impromptu sex week in blogging that started up a firestorm. They discussed the shame that purity teachings had heaped on their heads – one for having sex before marriage, the other for idolizing virginity to the point that crushes were bad. Rachel Held Evans jumped into this and asked “Do we idolize virginity in modern evangelicalism?” Preston Yancey wrote a couple of posts about shame and grace. Emily Maynard discussed how virgin and non-virgin are insufficient categories for whether or not someone is a faithful Christian. Joy Bennett addressed the idea that “marrying a virgin” is probably not going to happen in this world of shifting demographics and "delayed" marriage. Leigh Kramer discussed the problematic nature of sexuality teachings for singles being determined by married folk. Sarah Markley talked about the difference between virginity and purity. Jake Meador talked about virginity as product. And Tony Jones hopped in with a confusing piece that had a provocative title but didn’t necessarily say anything more than a call for a new and different sexual ethic.

This is the narrative of what happened. This is the reality of what they were saying: a big, giant discussion starting with a call to stop shaming people regarding sex and evolving into a multitude of voices, all contributing variations on the theme of “what is a healthy sexual ethic?”

But, The Gospel Coalition decided to invent its own narrative. The piece, written by Bart Gingerich, refers to this collective diversity of voices as “commitment free critics,” and says, “The underlying complaint seems to demand that we accept different decisions without critique or even regret.”

Soon after this was posted, the comment section and Twitter erupted. And I began to see a common refrain from people supporting The Gospel Coalition’s piece: “If you believe that premarital sex is a sin, then why don’t you just say it?” As though one could possibly sum up these issues in a 200-word comment or a 140 character tweet.

The problem here is that the Gospel Coalition is trying to simultaneously cede our point – that the shaming of purity culture is a problem – and hold onto it. They are saying, “sexual ethics aren’t a salvation issue,” while also demanding that we meet their expectations of orthodox.

And that’s the wrong conversation, the wrong questions, the wrong discussion.

Asking “do you believe this is a sin?” is fundamentally the wrong approach. I refuse to answer the question (and I suspect the other authors cited in the piece would agree, though I do not speak for them) because defining whether or not something is a sin is not a conversation I’m interested in having. I reject the premise out of hand. Drawing rules and lines and definitions is not the way one moves toward a healthy sexual ethic.

Now, the Gospel Coalition’s piece also linked (subtly) to a post I made well over a year ago, in which I attempted to address (rather poorly) this question. It didn’t occur to me at the time of writing that the post would be so misread and galvanizing. Do I say in the post that I don’t think premarital sex is a sin? Yes, I do. But my larger point is that the portions of the Bible from which we draw conclusions about modern dating and “fornication” are so steeped in patriarchal and cultural mores that we have to have much more discernment in how we approach the topic.

Basically: I didn’t have the language then that I do now to realize that I was trying to have the wrong conversation.

The damage wreaked by the purity movement is the constant background radiation of my blog. Developing a healthy approach to sexual ethics is my goal. What that means for me, personally and professionally, is that I simply, fundamentally don’t care about the questions The Gospel Coalition is asking. Because when someone is having sex does not matter to me as much as whether or not they are doing so in a manner that is healthy, respectful, consensual, and gracious.

I told my mom on the phone the other day something I think succinctly sums up the issue: We spend so much effort and energy telling people to say “no” that we’ve not equipped them with how to say “yes.”

That is my concern; that is my wheelhouse. Healthy approaches and attitudes to sex first. Then we can talk about whether or not marriage is the ideal (it might just be).

We don’t achieve a healthy conversation by creating lines and drawing rules about what is or is not a sin – despite the Gospel Coalition’s professions, every time they tell us the Scriptures are clear, they are drawing a line in the sand.

We don’t help people by condemning them and saying they should feel shame – despite the professions of Mr. Gingerich, this is the theology of the body he propounds when he says, “For the longing singles among us, we have heard it said that love is patient. So go out there, date, and maybe get married. Just do not make allowance for lustful flesh.”

We don’t move the theology of the body forward when we invoke Gnostic imagery by implying that the flesh is something to be subsumed and tightly controlled.

We don’t create a healthy sexual ethic when we ask the wrong questions about sin.

__________

Graphic by the astoundingly awesome Dani Kelley. You can see more of her portfolio here.

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.

Account and Countenance: My Own Story

Before we get into the deeper theological waters of examining the image of God as presented to us in American evangelical Christianity, we must examine what our individual images of God are. So today, mine is on display. When I sat down to think about what my image of God had been through my formative years, I realized that the picture of God I had was not one of love and grace, but a God who keeps records of all my sins, who sits back and judges, and who is waiting for me to screw up. Luckily, through intentional study and relationship, that image has shifted in the past few years, but it still influences a lot of what I see in various theologies and beliefs. Growing up, my God – the God of my Baptist church – was white, and American. I remember when I was five or six years old, the preacher talked about the Rapture, and I was very concerned that Jesus would forget about the United States, his “natural” home. How could go cover the whole world and still be here?

My father patiently explained that everything would be okay if I just asked Jesus into my heart. So I did. That was the first of many times I prayed that prayer.

But by the time I hit twelve, my God had shifted. He was now intimately concerned with my development as a woman – I knew I shouldn’t be wearing v-neck shirts before I even had discernible cleavage and that men were different, alien. My task was to guard them and myself from an as yet unknown threat.

This God – the all powerful, all knowing, all sovereign God – was infinitely concerned with not only the state of my soul, but the state of my dress. I read the Left Behind series around this time, and the God who knew my soul was just as concerned with how women tempted men (I mean, Rayford wouldn’t have been thinking about cheating on his wife if that flight attendant didn’t wear such short skirts, right? Maybe he could have gone to heaven if she’d been a better steward).

I could still be considered a strong, brave woman if I kept myself pure, though. I took a pledge at 14 and was given a diamond ring my parents bought for me at WalMart the day before. I pledged before my entire congregation and before God that I’d wait to do anything until marriage – despite never having considered kissing anyone at that point in my life.

I would wear loose fitting clothing that could tempt no one, because I didn’t want anyone else to get left behind, as I was sure I was going to be because I was too much of a sinner. I yelled at my debate partners in high school, I had crushes on boys, I swore, out loud, when I got angry.

These were the sins that would keep me from Jesus.

So I prayed. A lot. I prayed that Jesus could forgive me for thinking about wanting to kiss that boy I liked. I prayed Jesus would forgive me for saying “shit” when I dropped that portfolio full of research. I prayed that He would cleanse my mind of liking that one song by Eminem my debate partner forced me to listen to when he gave me a ride to the tournament that one time.

I prayed without ceasing, but every Sunday, I’d sit in church and be scared that I wasn’t doing enough. My best friend was still an atheist, after all, and I made her my personal project for evangelism. I remember spending an agonizing night trying to fall asleep, racked by guilt over neglecting my eternal duty to bring her soul to God. When I got to school the next morning, I told my mom to pray for me during the day because I was finally going to talk to her about Jesus. I went straight to her locker and nervously explained that I was concerned about her soul and that if I didn’t say something then I was guilty too. Through the day, I kept pushing, eventually shutting up when she turned to me and yelled, “No, fuck you, I don’t want to hear it!”

I was devastated. Not only had I failed in what God wanted me to do, but I had alienated my best friend.

This was my life. Sunday and Wednesday, I’d feel close to God during worship at youth group, and then do something during the week – forget to read my Bible, forget to take that opportunity to witness, not be careful about how I sat down when hanging out with my guy friends, think about kissing my crush of the week for a moment too long – these were the things my spiritual walk was made of.

God, to me, was someone who I could push away with my sin at any moment. Because Paul had told us that free grace didn’t mean we could keep on sinning, I thought that I had to do my best not to sin so that I could be with God. Everything came back to whether or not I was sinning.

What’s more, God was especially concerned about potential sexual sin.

I literally had none aside from my own thoughts. In an effort to keep pure, I avoided movies with sex scenes, and wore the most modest clothing I could find without appearing Hutterite – though I still had the sense to avoid the denim skirts that would have been social suicide at my high school. But, I was, for all intents and purposes asexual and androgynous. I shopped in the men’s section at Old Navy and wore clothing that hid my shape.

And it was in this place that I lived for years – fearful of a God who watched my every thought, who judged my femaleness and my treatment of the men in my life, who would, at the end of my life, play back all these moments of sin for an audience of my peers and regard the state of my soul.

This judgmental, vengeful God and the loving, glorious Jesus were one and the same, of course. It was the face of the white, European Jesus, sadden and burdened by my sin that I pictured alongside an amorphous Father God in heaven – God the Father was merely two large hands in my imagination, nothing more.

Putting my nose to the grindstone was the only way out, the only way through. I had to at least show that I was putting forth effort in keeping myself from sin or God would not consider me – I never would and never had done enough.

In my freshman year of college, Calvinism became very attractive to me – not because of the depravity and sin, but because of the doctrine of perseverance of the saints. Here, finally, was something that said I was always and would always be saved. Here was an element of comfort that I didn’t have to keep trying, that I could try being womanly for once.

But this doctrine came with a God who elected some to heaven and some to hell. The idea that I could be one of the non-elect needled at me, until I rejected Calvinism altogether. Surely, I was too depraved, too sinful, too much for the sovereign God of the Calvinists – surely, if I was Elect, this whole spiritual walk would be easier?

Relief would not come for years yet.

We’ll return in two weeks with how I began to see God in a new light, in a new way, when the Account and Countenance series continues.

Friends With Kids, Love Stories, and Rape Culture

(spoiler alert for Friends with Kids and trigger warning for rape). One of the few things I like about international flights (besides, you know, getting to my destination) is the abundance of entertainment on board. I usually have a chance to see a movie I’d wanted to see but hadn’t been able to catch in theaters and isn’t on DVD yet. Sure, it’s not the ideal environment, but usually the movies are good enough to pass the time (I don’t really sleep on planes) and it works for me.

This time around, I got to watch several flicks I hadn’t been willing to pay to see – The Amazing Spider-man, Men in Black 3, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World – and was, for the most part, pretty entertained. But one that I chose simply based on the cast ended up leaving such a sour taste in my mouth the rest of the flight. That movie? Friends With Kids.

Now, I love Adam Scott. And what I’ve seen of Jennifer Westfeldt, I like. And Maya Rudolph, Kristen Wiig, Jon Hamm and Chris O’Dowd? Count me in. But, with the last line of the movie, you’re going to have to count me out.

Friends with Kids follows Jason (Scott) and Jewel (Westfeldt) over a 3-4 year period in their lives. They have been best friends since college, and share everything – they know each other as well as two people can know each other. As their married friends begin having children, they watch the stress having kids bring to a relationship and decide (illogically so) that the answer is to have children without being married (because that makes sense). So they have a kid. They figure, they’re in their late 30s, why not have a readymade family for when they finally meet The Guy or The Girl that they’re supposed to be with forever?

Naturally, things get complicated. Now, I called the end result of the movie from the moment they said “let’s have a kid,” because it’s a romantic dramedy that is fairly predictable and relies on a lot of Rom-Com tropes (though, it thinks it clearly thinks it’s a clever subversion of said tropes, but more on that later). Mainly – sarcastic spoiler alert! – you know that Jason and Jewel are going to end up together. It’s now just a question of how, because of course men and women can’t just be friends.

Jewel falls first. And hard. She realizes how sexy it is that Jason is a good dad and all her pantsfeelings and heartsfeelings get all mixed up. Groan. And meanwhile, Jason is completely oblivious and happily going on about how the girl he’s currently with is probably The Girl because she’s really hot, has big boobs, and is a FLEXIBLE DANCER. (In short, Jason is an asshole to women. This is important information.)

But best friends in an opposite sex relationship? IT CAN’T BE. So Jewel spends most of the movie pining after Jason, who sees her as nothing more than a friend he impregnated once upon a time. All of this culminates in an uncomfortable, awkward birthday celebration where she surprises him by having a dinner for just the two of them. She explains that she’s in love with him and can’t deny it anymore, and he responds by explaining that he doesn’t see her in that way.

Fast forward to almost exactly a year later, when Jason breaks up with the one he thought was The Girl because he got bored with her (quelle surprise!) and realizes, “OH MY GOD IT’S BEEN JEWEL ALL ALONG! SHE HAD ME AT HELLO!” and other clichés.

Here’s where an awkward yet interesting movie begins to get uncomfortable. He decides that, now that he feels the way she did a full year ago, he can just tell her and it’ll all be sex and rainbows and babies.

Not so. You see, they haven’t really spoken in a year, except awkward exchanges when dropping off and picking up the kid. He hasn’t even seen all of her new home in Brooklyn (he still lives in Manhattan – three train rides or a $70 taxi ride away!). But nonetheless, on the night he decides he loves her, the kid insists on both Daddy and Mommy putting him to bed, so they do. Cue Jason saying something about wanting to stay at the house – IN FRONT OF THE KID – and Jewel’s shock and dismay.

Everything through this interaction goes in a realistic and pretty damn great manner – she yells at him for giving the kid false hope, for not thinking of her and having a conversation before saying such a thing, for thinking he can just barge in and proclaim his love. She even refuses to let him kiss her and kicks him out of her house. Yay! A woman asserting her right to make her own choices about her love life and her right to her own physical space! You never see that in supposedly romantic movies!

Had the movie ended there, it would have been good. Bittersweet, but good. A nice lesson about how it takes two people to decide to be in love and when one person sets boundaries, you cannot make them see your side. That sort of moral bites into and subverts all romantic comedy tropes that say a guy’s only obstacle to love is the free will of the woman he’s trying to date, and if he can just make her see how much he loves her, then it’ll all be peachy-keen! (Seriously, guy-persists-until-girl-gives-in is a well-defined trope).

Yet my hopes were raised and dashed almost instantly. As Jason is driving away, he realizes that he absolutely cannot let Jewel go. This is The Girl to End All Girls and they already have a kid and even though she said no there must be still something there that likes him enough to try if he can just convince her!

So he drives back to her house in a Big Romantic Gesture, tells her that he’s changed! He’s not that asshole he used to be (though, by all indications, he totally is – keep in mind, he just dumped a girl for being “too boring.”). And eventually, he pushes (literally, pushes) her into the bedroom, onto the bed, and says, “Let me fuck the shit out of you.”

I literally shuddered in my seat on the plane.

This is his big, grand gesture: begging her for sex she clearly does not want to have, in order that she may come (pun intended) to see his side. But, at this point, he’s ignored every single no she’s given tonight. She asked him to leave when the kid came home; he didn’t. She asked him to stop talking; he didn’t. She emphatically told him not to kiss her; he tried anyway. She wanted him to go away; he came back.

What reason do we, as an audience, have to believe that she felt like she could tell him no? He was “asking permission,” sure, but how enthusiastic is this consent?

If this were a real life situation, and I was that woman, I would be afraid of saying no. Even if he was my best friend. Even if I’d known him for years and years. With the behavior he’d shown that night and the way he’d treated his romantic interests/sexual conquests throughout the story, what reason do we have to believe that he’d accept a no here, and just leave?

Rather than subverting the trope, Friends With Kids buys right into it, in a way that is more starkly rape-y than any movie before it. “Let me fuck the shit out of you” isn’t exactly the most romantic way to pledge love, but it speaks to a societal norm of the idea that sex is the end-all-be-all of All the Feels and if a guy can just get the girl he likes to have sex with him, then she’ll feel the same way too! It makes the obstacle, the central conflict in a love story, that of the woman herself. The guy’s only obstacle to getting the girl he wants is the girl herself and the way he can convince her that what she really wants is him is to, well, have sex with her.

This story of "guy persists until girl gives in" is always kind of rapey, but comes across even more clearly in this movie, with the very last line being “let me fuck the shit out of you.” We’re led to believe that she says yes because she finally kisses him back, but we get no more of the story. This is our happily ever after: “let me fuck the shit out of you.”

If this is the happily ever after that Hollywood has to offer, then I’ll be quite happy being single, thank you very much.

Slutty Sluts Vote Sluttily

(Note: I wrote the majority of this in the Amsterdam International Airport waiting for a flight on three hours of sleep, so my apologies for typos/incoherence.) So, apparently, I’m a slut. I’m a single, suburban, Planned Parenthood using, serial-dating white girl who voted for Obama. According to BSkillet of the “Christian Men’s Defense League,” I am a slut.

There have been a lot of jokes made about this now-pulled (though still available via Google Cache) post, and it is, indeed, an exercise in absurdity. While a friend got all ragey over it, I had issues stifling laughter as I read the post in the middle of a meeting (sorry, guys!). Illogical to the point of absurdity, BSkillet is hardly worth responding to.

Hardly, but not entirely useless. BSkillet expresses some extreme views, to be sure and commits numerous logical fallacies – straw man, generalization, ad homeniem, red herrings…pick your poison. It’s very easy to respond to such absurdity with equal absurdity (and some Hipster Sexism to boot, which is so fun*).

But BSkillet’s absurd misogyny serves to mask some views he actually shares with many evangelical Christians in America. Defense of sexually active women and “sluts” was actually a large factor in the election. To some extent, BSkillet is, well, right. I mean that, of course, in the most qualified sense of the term – his point, that women – particularly women of color – have made a large impact in the electoral process and changed the face of this election is undeniable.

How he arrives at his point, however, is reprehensible, misogynistic, and racist. That goes without saying.

But, as a woman with a lifetime of experience in the evangelical American church, his views on women did not surprise me. His thoughts, indeed, resemble in a more bald-faced fashion, teachings I absorbed as a member of the church. Whether it is black or white women, sexual purity is the end-all-be-all, and women as a whole are not highly regarded even if they do remain pure (BSkillet proclaims as much when he opens by saying “this is why women shouldn’t be in government” before he ever reaches the “slut vote” point).

BSkillet’s extreme point is in fact symptomatic of a larger culture that thinks women’s sexual choices and agencies are/should be up for a popular vote. It is unsurprising, then, that a culture in which the purity of women is everything would give rise to a man and a movement (The Christian Men’s Defense Network) in which women are discounted and even reviled for failing to live up to a man’s definition of pure.

Keep in mind that BSkillet is not just one extreme outlier, but is actually part of a larger movement in society. His writing is shocking only in the baldness of the misogyny, not in its views. The larger evangelical culture as a whole does, in fact, believe that a woman’s sexual activities are reason enough to discount her opinion in the public sphere.

The larger evangelical culture does, in fact, think that my dating life is reason enough to discount my work and my opinions in entire. I cannot tell you how much criticism has been levied at me simply for the fact that I am unmarried and childfree. Simply existing as a woman in the world of the church makes our opinions dependent upon the choices we make with our bodies, rather than independent of them. My decision not to change my name if/when I get married is, because I exist as a woman in the church, a political and declarative one.

It is not hard to leap from the evangelical church’s teachings to “the slut vote” and “what are those slutty women thinking.” In fact, I would say they make quite the bridge.

*Sarcasm font.

Feminism is Not the Enemy

I have a love hate relationship with Christianity Today’s Hermenutics blog. They post some good stuff, but they also post some real tripe. And some of the stuff they post is outright hurtful to women and a poor portrayal of Christianity. This last is my complaint with Her.menutics’ latest post about hook up culture. Ever since Wendy Shalitt published the definitive reactionary Christian guide to hook up culture, the phrase has become a dog whistle for sanctimonious pearl clutching about women who *gasp* have sex! WITH MEN! And do so without commitment!

OH MY GIDDY AUNT!

Here’s the thing: complaints about hook up culture from conservative Christianity usually follow two lines, both of which we see in the Her.menutics article. The first is that “hooking up” is not God’s plan for sex. That might have some meat to it, and I’ll get to that in a minute. The second, however, is the devastatingly off base “hook up culture and the sexual revolution is about making women act like men.”

That’s not a new argument. “Feminism is about turning women into men” is about as old as it gets. While hook up culture is not synonymous with feminism (there are all sorts of reasons a girl may “hook up,” and plenty of them have to do with reinforcement of patriarchal expectations of women as sexually available public property), feminism – or the movement for women to be seen as human beings with their own desires and agency to act on those desires – enabled the normalization of such a hook up culture.

The culture itself, however, is not anything new. There’s a reason prostitution is called the oldest profession. If you look at the newsletters of The Advocate For Moral Reform from the 1830s, you see early feminists decrying the idea that men can “hook up” (or be libertines, in their parlance) without consequence, but women cannot. Indeed, one of the first issues tells a fictional story about a woman who had been employed in a house of ill repute who finally managed to work her way out of that life and get a respectable job as a servant in a kitchen. The woman had to hide her past as a prostitute in order to maintain her employment and her job could be in jeopardy if a former customer happened to recognize her. The customer – the libertine man – would face no consequences while the woman would likely be back out on the street.

Yes, even in 1834, women were complaining about the sexual double standard. And these were church going Methodist women, to boot.

The sexual revolution of the 20^th century, then, was not about “making women act like men.” Rather, it was about removing the double standard that surrounds sexual activity – the double standard we find replicated again and again in rules about sexual activity on private Christian campuses and on Sunday mornings from the pulpit (stories about this will be appearing in my upcoming book; they are too many to list here).

The removal of the double standard does not, in fact, make women act like men, but instead removes judgment for the use of their sexual agency. After all, in order for “men to act like men,” as these arguments presume, they kind of had to have women to sleep with, did they not?*

The sexual revolution, then, removes the stigma that these women faced, and normalizes the culture of uncommitted sexual activity.

And here, Christians of America, is where the first point about “God’s plan for sex” comes in. When you whine and lament hook up culture “turning women into men,” you ignore the much larger significance of sexual ethics. Complaining about women acting like men laments that women have agency to make sexual choices, which is a step way too far.

Instead, I think you have a better argument if you acknowledge that women have the agency to consent and will – quite often – make choices you disagree with. Removing female agency or lamenting the presence of it is not going to make a lot of people happy about your sexual ethic.

I propose a different tactic: acknowledge that women have the same sexual agency that men have. That women have just as much right as men to consent to sex and to experience and explore their sexuality. And then examine why women AND MEN are “hooking up.” Why do we have a culture that prizes unfettered sexual encounters? Have we placed too much baggage on the idea of sex that we created a false dichotomy of unattached or totally married (yes, church, you have)? What role do we play in both minimizing and elevating a biological function?

I think much of the fear and pearl clutching about “hook up culture” and the sexual revolution of women – it’s always lamenting over the women hooking up, always – comes from a desire to have a spectre to blame. If we can simply say the problem is women being encouraged to be “independent” and “act like men,” we have a villain – those “anti-Christian feminazis.” And if we have a ready, available villain at which to hurl our accusations, we don’t have to consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, we got it wrong, maybe, just maybe, our scare tactics and strict God Forbids-God Allows sexual ethic isn’t translating and never really has. If we have something else, something outward, to blame, we don't have to look at how we might be doing things wrong.

Because God forbid we figure out how to present sexuality as healthy, consensual, AND committed, rather than just saying women who express agency are sluts and virgins are totes better.

God forbid we actually think about how our rhetoric makes women think about themselves and how our current elevation of virginity and purity isn’t translating to a culture that doesn’t get married until their late twenties and faces patriarchal sexualization and objectification day in, day out.

God forbid we actually examine how to make our own sexual ethic work without shame or guilt heaped on the party who expresses sexual agency.

God forbid we actually look inside, rather than just blaming the Enemy.

_____

*Note: This is in heteronormative terms because this is how the original article sees sex, so I'm going off of that. Naturally, there exists an entire realm of sexuality that is not man-woman relationships.

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.

Lies, Lies, and Sex Ed

Friendly Atheist and Christian Nightmares blogged the same thing today (such is the circular nature of the internet blogosphere), and I was so taken aback by it that I had to say something about it. The Catholic “sex education” website 1Flesh put up a friendly, silly cartoon proposing that the only proper use for a condom is as a water balloon, because they are just not that effective.

Which is a complete and utter lie. [PDF]

Condoms, when used properly, are nearly 100% effective at not only preventing pregnancy, but preventing the transmission of STDs and the HIV/AIDS virus. This is not to say that they does not have risks (especially if used improperly, which is why education is important!), but that they are one of the best ways to protect yourself if you are having sex.

This means, in very practical terms, that condoms are one of the answers to some of the major social justice issues of our times. Condoms are one of the cheapest and most effective forms of birth control that is available, and in areas where HIV/AIDS happen in high rates, the use of condoms has been proven to reduce such rates – saving lives.

Look, I’m fine if you have a personal ideological objection to the use of condoms. That’s fine – just don’t use them, then (though, if you have a tendency to sleep around, I would hope that you would use them for your partner’s sake – no one likes an STD!).

But I will never, ever understand using that ideological objection as a justification to spread outright lies. If you have to lie to make your argument effective, then you seriously need to reconsider your argument.

Here’s the thing:

People have sex and people use birth control. Even in the Catholic church, most women have used some form of birth control while sexually active (crazy, I know!). Spreading misinformation and not giving people information on how to have sex safely does not stop them from having sex. Study after study after study has proven this to be a total falsehood.

Instead, the misinformation and lies create situations where consent is fuzzy, where STDs are transmitted, and unwanted pregnancies occur. There is an argument to be made for abstinence. Planned Parenthood even covers it as a birth control method on their website. But we should not have to lie about the things we oppose in order to support our beliefs. That's not how logic works. That's not how good debates work. And that's how you ramp up to disastrous consequences.

If you don’t know how to use a condom properly, here’s a helpful video [don't worry, it's SFW, unless your work objects to a demonstrative wooden dildo].

If you are having sex with multiple partners, are in a non-monogamous or open relationship, or have reason to suspect that your long term partner may have an STD: don't be a fool! Wrap your tool!

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.

Not Your Fault

http://youtu.be/eKzqvllXVO0 Jessica Valenti tweeted the above video earlier, calling it “fantastically hilarious.” And in the right light, I agree with her. A bunch of decontextualized “I wish” statements, cobbled together with poor lighting and dramatic music, is just begging to be parodied.

“I wish…someone had told me those pants didn’t actually look good on me.”

“I wish…I had eaten the last cookie before my brother did.”

“I wish…I’d bought that Ben and Jerry’s limited flavor when it was still in stock.”

And on and on.

I totally see why this appears ridiculous to a lot of people. But there was a line in the video that made me stop in my tracks.

A teenager girl comments, “I wish he’d stop texting me like that.”

That, right there, is a huge problem with purity culture.

I’ve addressed this problem before, but it deserves highlight yet again: when the emphasis is solely on keeping pure, no matter the circumstances, it opens the door for blaming the victim, for erasing the idea of consent, and making women feel guilty and ashamed for something that was outside of her control.

The fact that this statement comes in the midst of statements of “I wish we hadn’t gone that far,” or “I wish he didn’t know me like that,” it equates unwanted sexual advances with willing consent to sexual activity. There is no line between “I don’t want him to be texting me sexual things” (as can be assumed from context) and “I had sex with him willingly and now I regret doing that.”

The fact that, maybe, possibly, the guy who is sexting her is just an asshole who is ignoring her boundaries is not even acknowledged or considered. The statement is thrown in, without nuance, without consideration.

What’s more is that it (along with every other line in this two minute video) is said with an air of resigned regret, a “this is my fault but I can’t change it.” So when it gets to the “I wish he’d stop texting me like that,” the viewer has no choice but to read it as “It’s my fault that he’s sexting me without my consent because I did something with him.”

And that makes me want to yell, “NO. NO NO NO.”

To clarify for the people in the back: Unwanted sexual advances are NEVER your fault, regardless of your history with the person doing the advancing. Even if he is your boyfriend of two years. Even if she is your fiancé. Even if you’ve been married to them for most of your life.

They do not have a right to use your body without your consent.

They do not have a right to send you things that make you uncomfortable.

Just because you had sex with them once, or even multiple times, or even have an ongoing sexual relationship, it does not give them any kind of a right to do things to you without your prior consent or willing participation.

It is not your fault.

And this, this right here, is what infuriates me about purity culture and the purity movement: there is no concept of consent, of healthy sexuality in which people are willing participants. When it is a culture of no, saying yes once is read as saying yes every time. When you live in a culture of no, figuring out the line between consent and lack of it can be extremely hard to delineate.

By placing this statement about sexual harassment alongside the regrets of those who willingly participated in sexual activity and now regret it, Lifeway (the producer of the video) is sending the message that sexual harassment can make you impure, that your consent does not matter, that you don’t even have to be a willing participant to feel bad about being impure. It reinforces victim blaming. It creates an unhealthy culture unable to recognize harassment, assault, and rape. And it is wrong.