![]() ![]() In the church we learn that you are either "pure" or "impure" but in society we hear about "good girls" and "bad girls." The purity message that I was raised with in the evangelical church is not very different than the message that we learned in society. And if either the man or the woman or the girl or the boy strays from their gender expectation, for example, if the woman leads too much or the man becomes her follower, the idea is that the whole picture topples. So women and girls are expected to be hyper-feminine, supportive followers of men and boys who are expected to be hyper-masculine leaders, supportive and loving leaders, but leaders nonetheless. You aren't just supposed to be sexually pure, but you are supposed to be pure in your gender expression. Gender and sexuality are deeply intertwined in the purity movement. The first exposure I had to the purity message was actually about gender. On how gender roles are important in the purity movement The reality that I've learned from my interviews in particular is that, "If A, then A." If you learn to shut down your sexuality, if you learn to train your body to experience shame to protect you from the consequences of your sexuality, in your community, "then A" - after you get married you often still struggle with turning your sexuality on. He will never cheat on you, because you will be such a sexual delight for him.Īuthor Interviews As Marriage Standards Change, A Therapist Recommends 'Rethinking Infidelity'Īnd it's fascinating, because this teaching doesn't really work. If you are pure - non-sexual to whatever extent is the requirement - before marriage, then you will have a perfect, blissful highly sexual life after marriage. On the belief that if you maintained purity before marriage you would have a very active marital sex life this was so physicalized that they were having panic attacks - literal panic attacks - and they were going to the hospital. Whereas some of the people I was interviewing. For me that meant my eczema that comes out when I get stressed, would come out when I would have sexual thoughts or feelings or make sexual choices, because I had this sort of association of deep anxiety around my sexuality. A lot of us also had these this anxiety that lived in our bodies. It was common for me, but it's also something I hear a lot about from folks who I interview about this. ![]() It started with nightmares, and that's incredibly common. That year was such an "a-ha" for me because I kept hearing the same stories that mirrored the pain of my own life, this, again fear and shame and anxiety that for many of us was manifesting physically in ways that even mimicked classic PTSD.Įducation Memoirist Retraces Her Journey From Survivalist Childhood To Cambridge Ph.D. I spent a year sitting down with people in coffee shops and in living rooms and in bars and talking to them about their adult experiences with sex and gender and sexuality, having also been raised in the purity movement. It wasn't until I started to call up my girlfriends from back home in the evangelical church in which I was raised and started telling them what I was experiencing - and then sat with my jaw just dropped to the floor as they told me very similar stories from their own lives I started to realize that I wasn't alone. On leaving her evangelical church and realizing that other women who had been a part of the sexual purity movement had experiences similar to hers Your purchase helps support NPR programming. But in practice, she says, the movement is most effective at stifling women's sexuality and creating a "deep, long-lasting shame" among its practitioners.Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title Pure Subtitle Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free Author Linda Kay Klein Klein says the central tenet of the purity movement is to delay the age at which young people first have sex. Looking back now, Klein says, "It was all about how needed to be a good Christian by protecting them from the threat that is you - the threat that is your body. When Linda Kay Klein was 13, she joined an evangelical church that prized sexual "purity" and taught that men and boys were sexually weak.Īccording to Klein's faith, girls and women were responsible for keeping male sexual desire in check by wearing modest clothing, maintaining a sexless mind and body and taking a "purity pledge," in which they promised to remain virgins until marriage. Jami Saunders Photography/Simon & Schuster She recounts her experiences in the memoir Pure. When she was 13, Linda Kay Klein joined an evangelical church that valued sexual purity. ![]()
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