She's Writing a Novel

Today I became aware of a new and scary trend in fundamentalist Christianity. As if there were other kinds of trends among fundamentalist Christians.
First, they kissed dating goodbye. Then, they rounded up teenagers and made them pledge to wait for their true love (because of course people with no dating experience are going to be able to know true love when they see it. who needs practical experience or rational thought when you have revelation? From God?) Now we have Purity Balls.

As a woman raised in America, and raised as a Christian, I have come away remarkably sane and intact. By intact I do not mean that my hymen has survived. No, I mean that by all accounts I have been able to sustain a healthy and realistic sexual attitude, despite the efforts of so many to rob me of that.

I was taught the biology of sex at a young age. At the same time, it was emphasized to me that sex was for people who were married. I remember sitting alone in a bath at about the age of 7 and thinking, How can this be? I lay there and thought and thought as hard as I could about the reason WHY sex was just for the people who were married. My child mind could not come up with any reasons. This is because I was thinking rationally, and from a rational persepctive this whole paradigm is nonsense; even a child's mind could understand that. I decided then and there that I would make up my own mind about when and where and with whom I would have sex, and that "sex is for marriage because God said so" was not a sufficiently peruasive argument.

Of course, this was before my reason had been hijacked by religion. By the time I was an adolescent, the fear of sex had been fully instilled in me. Sexual play was "a slippery slope;" presumeably with a cliff at the end; therefore, any kind of sexual exploration was to be discouraged. Intercourse could just sneak up on you and get you, and then you would have committed the worst of sins, with murder maybe being a little bit worse but probably not.

As a teenager I discovered orgasm quite by accident, by following a slippery slope of my own alone in my bed. It was the second most exciting discovery of my life; the first having been learning to read. I enjoyed years of innocent self-gratification before the purity people in this country rallied in full force and started to get into my head, thanks to youth groups and youth conventions and special assemblies at my religious school. Suddenly, what had once been as lovely and enjoyable as a good book on a warm afternoon had become...a thing to feel bad about, a thing to try my hardest not to do, a thing to not even think about. Instead of associating orgasm with curious delight, it was now associated with a wave of shame. Instead of loving my body and the pleasureable tricks it could perform, I began to hate it for being the source of my temptation.

I did not have a boyfriend until college; partly because I was shy, partly because I didn't have the adolescent charms to attract adolescent boys, partly because I always fell in love with boys who would never reciprocate (my gaydar is working much better these days). By this time my sexuality had all but gone into hibernation; my mind being unable to support both a thriving libido and a paradigm in which a libido was a liability, the former was burried. So the boyfriend's sexual advances were terrifying and mystifying and altogether exhilerating, awakening things in me I didn't know were there. In my innocence of experience, I was torn between my eagerness to explore and the awareness that exploration was dangerous.

It was about this time that the paradigm started to crumble. I learned that my boyfriend was not "sexually pure" and I had been so steeped in the purity culture that I had never considered the possibility that a man I could be serious with - a man I could even marry - would not be a virgin. I felt betrayed by the man, but more and more by all the people who had told me to "save myself."

Save myself for what? I began to wonder. And what was the point of my saving myself if that act was not reciprocated? How was that good? The facade started to crack with that first intrusion of reality, and became further weakened when the people who had pushed the purity lie started to ammend their approach. In particular, my mother had done her best to perpetuate the myth of two wedding night virgins, and I had adapted this as my expectation. And now, as I lamented de-virginized boys, my mother admitted that it was unrealistic to expect that my future husband would be a virgin as I would be.

Excuse me?

I could not have been more outraged - at the lie, and my own naive place in it. For years I had squashed my own desires for the good of some future man, and now I must accept that he had gotten out and around at will?

So I allowed myself the freedom of exploration with the boyfriend, and no longer tried to thwart his seduction but actively encouraged it. I would be a woman with knowledge and experience, not a frigid and timid girl. Unfortunately, the purity cuture had gotten to the boyfriend and warped his mind. He was so guilt-wracked by his previous "transgressions" that he could not engage in sexual activity without berating himself (and therefore by proxy, me) afterwords. Instead of having the pleasures of my new sexual awareness validated, they were rebuked. Each time my sexual ecstacy reached a new height, it was met with a new condemnation. "Wrong, bad, no, stop, shouldn't" was the vocabulary of my first experiences with sex. I was told that sexual desire was like a "disease" he had "spread" to me; that he had given me a "taste" for sex, the way a dog gets a taste for blood (I'm not making this up) and now I was ruined. As if having sex and liking it was something that "ruined" a woman, instead of validating that she was healthy and normal.

That first awful relationship lit up for me the reality of the sickness in Christian attitudes toward sex. The poor boyfriend thought the sickness was in the sex; in him, in the desire for sex, and in the fulfillment of the desire for sex. The sickness was in the Christian suffocation of sex by the purity culture, which tried to control it and hide it, tuck it away in the narrow context of a Christian sacrament (marriage) and therefore not only have total control over the minds of the faithful, but their bodies as well.

Because this religion (as with all religions) is about control. Christianity tried to convince me that abstinence was about self-control, self-discipline; that starving off my sexuality was a personal choice and a good thing for me. The truth is that sexual abstinence is a good thing for Christianity, keeping me in the mind and body of a child as long as it can, and keeping me from finding any rival pleasures in life to that of religious ecstacy. And if I do transgress, the guilt I feel will keep me close to god's bosom seeking absolution.

As with all religions, Christianity seeks to create problems that it can create exclusive solutions to, so that I will become dependent on that security and that certain knowledge. It will try to place limits on the pleasures of life - not in the name of moderation, which any reasonable person will do - but in the name of keeping god's (and the religion's) rivals at bay. "Temptation" is frequently just another word for the impending realization that god might not be the answer; that there are things and experiences in life of intrinsic value and interest.

Now, back to the "Purity Ball." This is a more insidious evil than anything I've yet seen done with sexuality in the name of religion, and it smacks of the female "ownership" in Islam we are all busily decrying. There is really nothing to say about the father as the "high priest" of his house bit; if that doesn't disturb you, I'm afraid you are too far gone and there may be nothing left to do with you but put you down like a rabid animal.

No, what is awful about this is that it tells innocent little girls, in some cases too young to even know or understand the joys of their bodies in a sexual sense, that their sexuality does not belong to them. It belongs to a god, it belongs to their father, and some day it will belong to a man they call husband. But at no time is it theirs to do with as they wish; at no time is their body their own, and therefore, at no time do they belong to themselves. They will always be submissive chattel - from daddy's girl to chaste wife - they will always be defined, both sexually and existentially, in terms of a man's concern. They may never feel the exhilerating freedom of knowing your body to be your own, of knowing your mind to be your own. They may never understand the pleasure their body was made for was the pleasure they choose; they may in fact never find sexual pleasure at all. They may never find the joy of being cherished without being posessed, and that is perhaps the most heartbreaking of all.

What is angering is how blatantly misogynist this ceremony is; how it cages and crushes female sexuality before it can even bloom, and then portends to dictate whatever survives for the rest of the girls' life. Perhaps if there were a complimentary "mother/son" ceremony, I could see this for anything other than what it is; a binding of women's sexuality for the purposes of retaining power over them in the name of love and god. I gag as I write that; I had so hoped that this would not happen here. Soon enough we will be stoning adulteresses (but never male adulterers) again, I'm sure.

I suppose some people will think I protest too much; I think for all the fuss religion has made about sex, I should make an equal fuss in rebuttal. I cannot imagine why religions have decided that it is evil to allow girls to explore their bodies and their sexuality; in effect, to know themselves. To gain experience, and through experience, to gain knowledge. And through knowledge, to gain confidence and wisdom. And through confidence and wisdom, become capable and vocal agents in the world, able to stand on their feet and able to change the world. Maybe change the world in ways that involve ridding it of the excesses of religion.

Ah, now I see; this is what religion has feared all along - women who turn out like me.

If you take away our sexuality, you take away a fundamental claim and validation of self, and you take away a foundation of self-possession upon which so much can be built. I can only hope that some of these girls find their way and find their selves...and also find their clitorises.