purity culture

No Longer Wanted: Natalie’s Story

HA Editorial Team20 Comments

My parents meant well. They wanted the best for me. They were excited to find the perfect formula to raise a perfect daughter.

And somewhere along the line they stopped wanting the best for me and started needing me to be what they decided was best.

And when I wasn’t that picture they no longer wanted me. That’s the best way I can describe it.

I think like many people raised in the world of homeschoolers, I’ve had the gut feeling that it’d be inappropriate to share my story. Our 11th commandment was to never speak ill of our family or lifestyle. There was always a push to hide what we were doing and never cast any negative light on the angelic conditions of homeschoolers and our perfect families. I’ve only told a few people what happened with our relationship.

 

When I was five we moved to acreage in the middle of nowhere. We listened to programs that told us music with a beat was scientifically proven to kill your brain cells. We didn’t have cable because all the shows would make us worldly. We stocked up for Y2K. We supported groups like HSLDA that told us the evil government would take away our children if we didn’t fight with them by paying membership fees. We obsessively absorbed the wisdom of the Pearl’s.

My experiences with the outside world were limited to church activities and the library, but even this was enough to make me question if my parents were really raising me correctly. My parents couldn’t keep up with all the books that I read. I’d borrow big piles and hide the ones that wouldn’t pass inspection in the middle.

My parents told me that people who didn’t homeschool their kids didn’t really love them. That people who dated didn’t value their future spouse and would get divorced.

Purity and gender roles were everything.

My mother obviously wouldn’t work outside the home, even when my dad lost his job multiple times and money was tight. Respect was the most important thing to my dad. We were all to submit to him without question, to the point that we couldn’t ask something that ended with a question mark. We had to direct conversation as respectful statements that he could choose to respond to if he wanted.

My mom couldn’t explain anything past simple math and my dad would get frustrated at me when I didn’t immediately understand it. I faked the majority of my math work past 2nd grade. Science was a similar story. My parents made it clear that I only needed it because the state required I learn it. It wasn’t vital for a woman’s education. What was vital was understanding that my goal in life was to be a wife and mother. I needed to sew, cook, clean, and learn to be the best wife and mother. All of my life was focused on that aim and that meant everything was focused on getting married.

I’m still sorting my education into the facts and what was just an elaborate attempt to shape my worldview. The “mistakes” that my parents made were probably the only way my brain developed in the shape that it did. They regret letting me have part time jobs, taking classes with other Christian homeschoolers, and not monitoring me close enough. My friends were all very intellectual. They pushed me to excel when my parents didn’t necessarily care. I started to question their mandates. I didn’t want to solely be a stay at home daughter. I wanted to figure out what I believed for myself. I wanted to understand my father’s beliefs. He wouldn’t explain them to me. He said my questions were disrespectful and I should just accept that he knew what was best. My role was to serve his family until I got married and then I would serve my husband’s family.

I wanted to go on a mission’s trip after I graduated. They grudgingly agreed, assuming I wouldn’t be able to raise the funds. I worked all summer and then my brother told them that it wasn’t appropriate to let me leave their guidance. They postponed my trip for 6 months. They canceled it again. Then my dad borrowed $2000 from my account without asking. When I sheepishly mentioned it he said he needed it to pay bills for our family and was offended I had brought it up. Months later I saw that he had paid it back. Eventually I convinced them that I should go on a mission’s trip for 3 months with our church. My reasoning was that I should serve others some before I got married.

College wasn’t ever a choice for me.

Going into debt was sinful. My parents couldn’t afford to send me even if they approved of the choice. I knew I wasn’t educated enough in math and science to get a scholarship.

My sister had the perfect long distance courtship. They only wrote letters for months. They didn’t hold hands till they were engaged. They didn’t kiss till they were married. My dad gave an hour long sermon at her wedding and he cried from happiness. She was everything they wanted in a daughter. Since it all worked out so well for them, my parents insisted that it was the perfect method. When I didn’t act like her I was a disappointment. They had been (untrained) marriage counselors for years. They’d insist on telling me all the intimate details of people’s marriages. Sometimes they were my friend’s parents. When I didn’t want to hear it I was disrespectful. When I didn’t want to read another book about submission I was rebellious. When I didn’t want to watch another marriage DVD series I was selfish and disobedient. All the scenarios ended with the wife realizing that if she just respected her husband more he would love her and things would be fine.

When I got tired of my life only being focused on marriage, I asked them if I could focus more on pursuing God.

They told me the only way I could pursue God was to pursue marriage.

Single people were selfish. Pursuing independence was sinful. Living outside the protection of my spiritual authority was unthinkable. My dad told me whatever I was doing, I should think of what he would want me to do and then do that. If I didn’t I was sinning against him and God.

When I got back from my missions trip I wanted to move out and for some reason they complied. A couple months later it was a different story. I had a full time job, and I wanted to buy a car. It was a battle. I wanted to pay for my own car insurance, and they finally lost it. They gave me an ultimatum: quit my job, move back home, stop pursuing my selfish independent lifestyle and I could remain their daughter. They couldn’t bear to see me living in sin any longer.

My father told me that God would always forgive him if he strayed, but he was a human so he couldn’t promise that he would always forgive me and take me back.

I couldn’t agree to their terms. They told me the choices I was making would make me a horrible wife and would ruin my marriage and children. My dad wouldn’t bless my marriage. My mom started crying and told me that she shouldn’t have had such high expectations for me. Maybe if she had lower expectations for me this wouldn’t be so hard. I was 18 and on my own. A couple months later I tried to reconcile with them, and my dad clarified that we didn’t have a relationship unless I could come back to the biblical model. I couldn’t.

Six months later my dad shared that he still felt the same however cutting off relationship meant he was giving us responsibility for me and he couldn’t do that as he was still responsible for all my sinful choices. He said he was sorry if I was hurt by the things he said, but they were true. He said we needed to have a relationship again so he could show me how to be better.

It’s been a couple years since then. Things are still rocky between us. It took me over a year to come out of the depression that our broken relationship caused. I was suicidal and cried continuously.

They were my entire world.

The hardest part is that I was close to my family. I didn’t think they were capable of disowning me. They were all I had ever known, and I was relatively happy with my brainwashed life. I didn’t know how to function without them. I had to learn to support myself on my own. I had to figure out who I was without my family. I had to deal with my parents turning my whole family against me.

Since then I’ve found out that members of my family helped and supported an elder that molested his adopted daughter for years. They protected him because he was the head of his household and knew best. Now when stories surface of incest and abuse I don’t question them.

Of course this happens, we were all taught to blindly obey.

I still have to fight the guilt when they say I ruined our relationship. I still hear that I should just be like my older sister and things would be better. I still hear that I’m not what they want. I still deal with them poisoning my relationships. Counseling and time helps. But it’s still complicated and it still hurts.

Not a Nice Story

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Image copyright 2016, Darcy.

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Darcy’s blog Darcy’s Heart-Stirrings. It was originally published on February 19, 2016.

From babyhood they said “You are a dirty sinner, there is nothing good in you, you are destined for hell because of your nature.”

So we, small humans, awoke to a world where toddlers need the sin and foolishness beaten out of them with switches and wooden spoons and belts.

They said “Only with Jesus are you worth anything.”

So as small children we begged Jesus to come into our hearts and make the dirty clean.

They said “Because of your sin, God cannot look at you, Jesus had to die. You killed him.”

So we mourned that we were so sinful that God couldn’t look at us without someone else standing in our place.

They said “You are human, a sinner, you cannot help it, only Jesus can make you worth anything.”

So we felt that we were worthless, that no matter how hard we try, we will never be good enough, while some kept trying anyway and some completely gave up.

They said “If you fall in love with a boy, you are committing emotional fornication.”

So we guarded our hearts lest sin defile us with merely a thought, and when our hearts betrayed us and we fell in love with a boy, we hated ourselves and knew we were worth less than before, we had lost a piece of our hearts we would never get back.

They said “Your body needs to be hidden because it is dangerous and if a man lusts after you because of your clothing or movements, it is your fault”.

So we covered our bodies from head to toe, swathed our femininity in fabric hoping no one would notice the curves, and spent years of our life worrying that we may cause a man to stumble and thus defile our own hearts and his.

They said “Boys only want one thing, so be sure you don’t do anything that makes them think they can take it from you. They can’t help it, this is how God made them, we must help them.”

So we lived in fear of men who God made pigs then placed the responsibility for their pig-ness on us.

They said “If you kiss a boy, you’re like a lolly-pop that’s been licked, a paper heart that’s been torn, you are worth less than before, and you’ve given away a part of you that you can never get back.”

So we spent our days afraid, terrified we would lose our worth and have nothing to give a future spouse.

They said “Virginity and purity give you value, don’t give that away.”

So whether virginity was taken forcefully or given lovingly, we were left worthless, used goods, and told no godly man would want us now.

They said “You cannot hear God for yourself, you must obey your authorities. They know what is best for you.”

So we submitted to things that no human being deserves to suffer, because otherwise God would be angry and not bless our lives. Submitting to unjust treatment was what Jesus did, after all.

They said “You are rebellious. Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.”

So we begged God’s forgiveness for the ways we wanted something different than they wanted.

They said “You are a woman, emotional, incapable of leading, easily deceived. You must stay in your place, submit, and only then God will bless you.”

So we felt loathing for our womanhood, wondering why God would make us inferior, and feeling guilty that we dare question the Almighty’s plan, that we are not happy with his decree.

And now…..now we are told “Why are you depressed? Why do you have anxiety? Why the addictions, the anger, the rage, the self-loathing? Why can’t you just be happy and normal?”

As if no one can connect the dots. As if their actions did not have consequences. As if a child can be raised to hate themselves in the Name of God and suddenly grow into an adult that is healthy. As if a lifetime of emotional trauma and spiritual abuse suddenly vanishes because a person changes their mind about who they are and their place in the world.

That’s not how it works. That is only the beginning of a journey that could take the rest of our lives. A journey we are told not to speak of because it makes people uncomfortable, because they’d rather call us names like “bitter” and “unforgiving” than to look deep into the darkness of our hearts and hear tales of pain and see the rawness of souls taught to hate themselves. Because those stories aren’t nice ones. But we will not change them in order to make others comfortable.

Do not tell us to “forgive”. Forgiveness has nothing to do with it. Do not tell us to “get over it”. One does not “get over” years of trauma and brainwashing and brain-wiring from babyhood just by making a single choice. We do not choose the nightmares. We do not choose the triggers and the gut-level reactions and the panic attacks. We had 18+ years of being taught that we are worthless, that God cannot stand to look at us, that we killed Jesus, that our worth is in our virginity or how well we obey our parents, that who we are is dirty and sinful. Give us at least 18+ years to re-wire our brains and heal those festering wounds and to learn to love ourselves where before there was only self-loathing. Some wounds cannot be healed. They can only be lived with. And scars do not disappear on a whim. But they can tell our stories and make us strong.

And tell our stories we will, and get stronger for the telling. We heal a little more every time we speak out loud what was hidden and decide that we are worth loving and our stories worth the telling.

Ex-Homeschooler Fashion

HA Editorial Team2 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Latebloomer’s blog Past Tense Present Progressive. It was originally published on July 8, 2015.

As a former fundamentalist homeschooled kid, one of many aspects of life that I’ve had to do a lot of catch up in is fashion.  

I grew up choosing clothing based solely on modesty, which in my circles meant that I was shopping in clothing sections meant for the elderly and basically wearing fabric sacks.  Often, I had to make things for myself when even the grandmotherly clothing options failed me.  Everything I wore was at least 4 sizes too big and several inches too short, and I had no idea about choosing colors that complemented my skin tone, no idea about hair, no idea about makeup, no idea about skin and nail care.

There are many wonderful people in the world who spend their time/energy/money on more important and lasting concerns than on their appearance, and I have a lot of respect for them, but this wasn’t a choice that I had made for myself.  I had no choice in the matter, because my family and the fundamentalist homeschooling culture around me told me that trying to look attractive was vain, selfish, and worst of all, would cause men around me to sin.  So I continued to hide in my sacks, feeling like one of the least attractive people on earth, and feeling shame for caring about being unattractive.

During some particularly low times in my late teens, I felt that my hideousness was a punishment from God because my dad wasn’t a “godly” man according to the standards of the homeschooling church we attended in my teens.  I kept running into verses in the Old Testament (Job 42:15 as one example) about how God blessed godly men with beautiful daughters, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it was my dad’s fault that I was so ugly.

So, when I finally started to escape from these soul-crushing beliefs in my early twenties, one of the first hurdles to overcome was my belief that it was wrong to put effort into looking attractive.  As I spent less time with people in our homeschooling church and more time with “worldly” people, I started to realize the irony that my “modest” clothing was actually drawing far more attention to me than “wordly” clothes would.  Step by step, through practice, I started to get more comfortable wearing more fitted, age-appropriate clothes with more skin showing.  I started to feel more at home in my body instead of wishing I could jump out of it and run away screaming.  I started to feel a small mood and confidence boost when I made an effort to be pretty, instead of a constant sense of shame.

It just takes a few sentences to describe it, but this process took many years.  

And that was just to alter my perspective!  Over a decade later, through the body ups and downs of two pregnancies, I’m continuing to try to fill in the gaps and learn how to dress for my body and skin type, how to style my hair, how to apply makeup, and how to accessorize.

Something I never imagined that I’d do, but that I now absolutely love, is using a personal stylist through a service called StitchFix.  I’ve signed up to receive a box of 5 clothing items every few months, chosen for me by a stylist based on my size and tastes and needs.  I was very skeptical at first because I have so much trouble finding clothing that I like and that fits me well, but I decided to give it a try because the most I had to lose was a $20 styling fee if I decided to return everything.  I’m so glad I tried it, because every box I receive has hugely improved my wardrobe, helped me learn more about dressing my body type, and taught me more about what pieces pair well together.  I’m particularly impressed with the jeans my stylist has sent me–after many frustrating hours trying on probably over a hundred pairs of jeans in the last decade, I just pull these jeans out of the StitchFix box on my doorstep and OMG PERFECT FIT!!

I know there are many of you who have also had to learn so much very late in life about taking care of your appearance, and I wish we could high-five each other about how far we’ve come.  If there are some of you that think you might benefit from StitchFix as much as I have, so here’s my referral link if you are interested in trying it:  https://www.stitchfix.com/referral/4805456.  (Thank you in advance if you use my link to sign up–I’ll get a $25 referral credit to feed my new fashion habit).

Family was my Everything: Alida’s Story, Part One

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HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Alida” is a pseudonym.

Moving from Homeschool to College was a lot tougher than I expected. I’m currently in my final year of undergrad, and I think I’m still adjusting.

I was one of those homeschool kids that took college classes in high school, which made me assume I’d have college totally figured out. Of course I was wrong.

Seven years after my first college course, I’m still struggling to find where I make sense and figure out the process of growing up.

Freshman year, I went to a private Christian university, along with a handful of kids from my homeschool, speech-and-debate social circle. I hardly grew as a person at all that year.

Sometimes I can look back at experiences and point out something that started a trend in my life, or a particular moment that was eye-opening in a way that isn’t identifiable until I link it to other events that happened later. There are only two instances like that from freshman year I can look back at.

The first is when I chose not to sit next to these two students in math class. In all honestly, it was because I thought they both looked weird. Those two ended up becoming my best friends at that school. We’re still in touch, and one of them I still consider my best friend.

The second is when I made friends with a person who identified as lesbian at the time. I remember deliberately trying to integrate into a different friend group so I would have an excuse not to hang out with them. As The Bible had been paraphrased to me so many times, “you become like the people you surround yourself with.” The gay agenda was very evil and very real to me at the time. We somehow ended up staying friends, which I attribute wholly to their kindness, tolerance and understanding, not mine.

During this time, I also was suffering from anorexia and bulimia.

When I was growing up, modesty culture influenced nearly everything around me.

I remember all the rules about how I was supposed to dress, talk, behave, and have friends. My shorts had to be at least a certain length. No clothes could be too snug. I shouldn’t speak so loudly now that I was a young lady. I was always to keep a “pleasant countenance” by smiling. Once I turned 13, it was no longer appropriate to have boys as friends.

My mom and dad told me all of these rules were very important because “men function differently than women,” and I might “cause them to stumble by my conduct” if I wasn’t careful enough. I never had a sex ed, but I attended a purity class, went to one of those father-daughter dances where you sign a paper about staying pure, the whole shebang.

For sophomore year, I had to move home and go to Community College for a while. I lived at my parents’ house. Again, I didn’t see myself changing much. I couldn’t see it from there.

And aside from what some covert internet searches had told me, I still didn’t know what sex was, even as a second-year college student.

This was also the first time I joined a sport since Tee-ball.

One day I was stretching with my teammates before a race, and I asked to trade places in the circle with someone else so I could move to the opposite side. When the girls asked me why, I explained that my back had been facing the men’s team, and “I didn’t want them lusting after my body” as we bent over to stretch our hamstrings. All the girls laughed at me. The girl who switched places with me laughed too and said something about how the boys could lust all they wanted- her booty was on fire!

I remember going quiet as my face turned red; I had never been in a situation before where saying something like that was weird or abnormal. But I also remember feeling self-righteous, thinking about how much holier I was than them, how much better of a person I was. I wasn’t the same kind of girl they were, I told myself. I was saving my body in every way for the man it would one day belong to.

Being around those girls was good for me. I slowly recovered from my eating disorders. Looking back, I’ve been able to identify the reasons I developed them in the first place.

All the modesty and purity-related messages I heard for so many years had internalized into the theme that my body was something wrong, something negative, something to be covered, something to be ashamed of.

Something to be hated.

As I started to get more involved in the sport, I started to see my body as something amazing. I lifted weights for the first time, and my body was something strong, something capable. My team started winning races, and my body was something useful, something functional. My body, to me, was no longer something exclusively sexual and therefore inherently sinful. My body was now something I could command to be strong, to accomplish a task, to fight for my teammates every day during practice and during races. I had motivation now to take care of my body, to be the best athlete I could be.

I said I would only ever date Christian men.

Over the years, I had been told many times that it was wrong to be in any kind of emotional relationship with someone who wasn’t also a believer, whether it be romantic or just a friendship.

So I dated a Christian guy from my social circle. After a little while, my parents forbade me from socializing with him, pointing out his “flaws” and “undesirable character traits,” saying we weren’t a good enough match. At the time, I experienced sadness but still firmly believed that as an unmarried woman living under her father’s roof, it was my duty to obey him. It was “scriptural” that I allow him to be my authority, they said.

Looking back on the situation, I see three things. The first is that my parents ended up being right about this guy. The second is that my they felt the need to exercise absolute control over my relationship. The third is that even though they were right about him, they should not have controlled my relationship the way they did.

But at the time, I didn’t know any better.

The next year, I started dating a good friend from my academic program. Tyler was the first man I fell in love with. I knew that he wasn’t religious, so we went to great lengths to see each other at times when my parents wouldn’t find out about our relationship. I made up lies about having to stay late at work or lead a study group at the library. We kissed a lot but never had sex, even though he wanted to. I remember being very proud of myself for that.

The entire time though, I experienced crippling guilt, especially when my mom and dad started to ask questions.

I eventually told them the truth, and on the same day, amidst tears, promised I would break up with him.

But I didn’t break up with him. We talked about getting married one day. As an “informed agnostic,” as Tyler called himself, it was difficult for him to understand the emotional and psychological toll that deceiving my family had on me. He didn’t have 21 years of homeschooled Christian culture and expectations weighing down on him. Family was my everything.

That summer, I fought with my mom more than I could ever remember. Multiple times, she threatened to kick me out of the house. Finally, I couldn’t handle it anymore. It was him or my family. I chose my family and prayed it would be worth it. My brother went into my phone and Facebook, blocking Tyler on both. Even though I knew how to disable the block settings, I didn’t. I told myself that abiding by my family’s wishes would help me.

For my fourth year of college, I earned an athletic scholarship and was able to transfer to the university I currently attend.

I moved to the opposite coast, and it was my first time not living under my parents’ roof.

One day, about a month into the semester, I was messaging a classmate on Facebook about studying for a quiz together. We decided that he would come over to my dorm to study and then watch the Avengers. A few minutes later, I got a call from my mom. When I answered, she started asking me how the day was going, if I had any plans, etc. So I told her about my day, and said that “I was actually about to study for a quiz, so I can’t really talk for long.” I wanted to end the call so I could go let my friend in.

Mom kept pressing me for details. “Are you sure there’s not anything else you want to tell me?” Nope, there wasn’t anything else I wanted to tell her. I couldn’t identify why I didn’t want to tell her that I had a boy coming over. We weren’t planning to do anything ‘bad,’ but for some reason I still felt very uncomfortable. Facebook dinged again. He was waiting outside the building. I felt annoyed with both mom and myself that I had to rush her off the phone.

The next day, mom called me again. “I know that you were hanging out with a boy yesterday, and that you didn’t tell me about it when I asked you point-blank,” she said. She had the password to my Facebook? I’d changed it multiple times through the years since I made it when I was 16.

Even from 3,000 miles away, she still had to control my interpersonal interactions.

She told me that I had sinned by omission and that by hiding important details, had caused her to doubt my spiritual health. I didn’t know what to say. Half an hour later, I found myself sobbing uncontrollably to my roommate, not understanding why I felt the way I did, feeling embarrassed that a situation that felt so stupid had evoked such strong emotions. My roommate told me that I had a right to privacy and that it was ok to keep some things to myself. No one had ever told me that before. I changed my password later that day, hating that I had to do it.

Purity Culture and My Sexuality

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HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Cynthia Jeub’s blog CynthiaJeub.com. It was originally published on April 17, 2015. 

“I know that it’s a secret,
And that I gotta keep it,
But I want the lights on
Yeah, I want the lights on
And I don’t want to run away anymore
Leave the lights on, leave the lights on, leave the lights on
What would they say, what would they do?
Would it be trouble if they knew?” –Meiko

I had my heart broken twice before I realized I’d been in love. That might sound like an exaggeration or melodrama, but it’s actually possible thanks to the wonders of purity culture.

When I was a teenager, I read and re-read books like Sarah Mally’s Before You Meet Prince Charming, Eric and Leslie Ludy’s When God Writes Your Love Story, and Debi Pearl’s Preparing to be a Help Meet.

They kept me strong in my dedication to never think about sex, or to think about members of the opposite sex. I had my obsessions and celebrity crushes, but if the image of seeing someone naked ever entered my mind, I’d fight it out with quoting the Bible.

I knew I would only ever give my heart to one person – the man I would marry. He must show interest in me; women don’t initiate. The concept of mutual consent, mutual interest, was never introduced. If he didn’t reciprocate my feelings, it was a meaningless feeling, and feelings were worthless. I needed to control my very thoughts, so I could give my whole heart to my husband, along with my first kiss. Just toeing the line of saving sex for marriage was too low a standard for me.

Blame doesn’t fall on any one person for how I controlled my thoughts. It was a personal choice, something that was very important to me. The people around me reinforced the notion that I was doing the right thing. Some people were better at the game of self-thought-policing than I was, and they made me feel like I could never be good enough. Some people saw me as unapproachable because I was so sincere. Every failure looked like rebellion and felt like despair.

Surely I didn’t love my best friend when I started college. He didn’t love me, so I told myself to “guard my heart” and push away all emotions of attachment. At the same time, our late-night conversations kept me going through my darkest depression and most intense stress. I finally told him that I needed space to figure out why the sight of his name gave me such indecipherable pain.

It would take me months to unlearn what purity culture had taught me to do: conceal all desire, even from yourself.

So it was that I fell in love with a man, and didn’t realize what had happened until afterward. I just assumed I was straight because I was attracted to men. It never occurred to me that I might make the same mistake twice, equally blinded to my desires toward a girl.

It was similar – I had a crush on her, but didn’t know it. She once kissed another girl in front of me, and I desperately wanted to kiss her. Even that feeling was not enough to make me think I wasn’t totally straight. I figured I was just curious, having never been kissed. Giving gifts is something I rarely do and often feels like an obligatory chore, but I gave her thoughtful things that I knew she’d like.

When we had a fight that ended our friendship, I was devastated. Another friend asked if I’d been in love with her. I said no, of course I wasn’t.

A few months later I got an email, and was instantly interested – this person, who hadn’t revealed their gender or identity, matched me intellectually. I assumed the sender was male, and entertained thoughts of meeting, and we exchanged lengthy emails.

The person who wrote these intelligent, complex, and beautiful emails revealed that she was a girl, and I realized it made no difference to me.

I started asking my friends questions – you don’t see both the male and female body as equally attractive? I’d assumed that everyone appreciated the aesthetic differences between the genders.

In the world I grew up in, there were two kinds of people: straight, and broken. Nobody was born gay, the church and chapel services insisted. The idea of other identities on a spectrum was far outside our reality. The idea of romantic and sexual relationships other than marriage was blanketly labeled as “sin.”

Of course I’d think I was straight. If I could close off my feelings for men, I could certainly close off my feelings for women. It was only after I started to learn what attraction felt like, that I knew I liked girls. I always had liked girls. I just didn’t know that my experience was any different from anyone else’s, because we never talked about our feelings. We never defined our terms.

Humans are beautiful to me – whether they’re male, female, or non-binary.

You could call me sapiosexual, in that I love people for their intelligence, and my level of attraction depends on how smart and interesting the other person is. Many sapiosexuals, though, don’t find the human body sexually attractive, and I do. It’s also accurate to call me pansexual, because I’m open to dating non-binary or trans people, in addition to the binary genders. For me, the title I’ve chosen is bisexual.

I’m bisexual. There, I’ve come out, now you know.

My Life as an Unmarried Woman Among Fundamentalists: Katia’s Story

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CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde.

Scripture talks about the great sower sowing the seed of the word of God.

When I look at my journey away from fundamentalism, I see that same sower preparing the soil of my heart in preparation for that “lightbulb” event that set me free from fundamentalism.

The great sower began preparing the soil of my heart before I was born.

On Mom’s side, I am descended from Anabaptists, Quakers, and other free thinkers. Mom grew up in a Grace Brethren church that encouraged its members to study the Bible, and when she became an adult, she did. The more she studied scripture, the less she wanted to go to church.

On Dad’s side, most of the fathers were either absent, sick, or died young. Both his maternal grandparents were illegitimate, a fact his mother concealed. Eight years after her death, I learned the truth, and it helped set me free from the purity culture.

How could I breathe fire on fornication when I would not have been born had it not been for fornication?

In addition, the story of how my paternal grandmother’s paternal grandmother basically died of a broken heart after the father of her baby paid a fine and fled seized my heart and has not let go.

Mom and Dad were engaged the day Jim Jones murdered* hundreds of his followers in Guyana. In processing the tragedy, Mom noticed how Jim Jones’ followers had blindly followed him and decided that it was dangerous to blindly follow religious authority. Partially as a result, I grew up knowing that it was okay to question religious authority.

As I grew up, I began dislike religious authority aside from the knowledge that it was okay to question them. The pastors I knew were heartless, arrogant, lazy, fake, and distant. They only seemed to care for us if they wanted something. Dad is a genius with his hands, and the only time any of the “men” in the churches he attended took any notice of him was to get him to do something.

Growing up, my family never fit in church and the homeschool community because Dad is not a leader and was not involved with my brothers and I spiritually or educationally. I desperately wanted to fit in, to belong. Besides, the outside world scared me.

According to everything I heard and saw from the religious community, the only way for a woman to do that was to be a wife and mother.

And being a wife and mother would protect me from that scary world.

The year I turned 18, my older brother left the GARBC Baptist church my family was part of, and I followed him to his new church. Then Mom left the GARBC Baptist church, and Dad refused to attend without her. Several weeks later, a series of circumstances forced older brother to work on Sundays. Without a driver’s license, I had no way to attend church.

Even when I did get my driver’s license nearly a year later, I refused to attend church because I did not think organized religion was Biblical and I was hurting from previous bad church experiences. For three years, I refused to attend church.

In those three years, without me realizing it, an amazing thing happened.

My walk with Christ became something I wanted to do, vs something I was expected to do. My faith grew far more in those three years than the 18 before them.

A desire to be part of a community drove me back to church.

In the years that followed, I had one bad church experience after another.

In addition, I was struggling to find a career and live the unexpected life of autism, singleness and childlessness. During that time, without me realizing it, God was releasing fundamentalism’s grip on me.

Finally, in 2010, I asked God in desperation to either give me a husband or make me content to be single.

God gave me contentment to be single and much more. Via J Lee Grady’s books 10 Lies the Church Tells Women and 25 Tough Questions About Women and the Church I was introduced to the egalitarian truth along with some blogs God put into my path. Because of God’s careful preparation of my heart, it was truth I joyfully received.

Yet I was not fully convinced.

Every year, I read through my one year Bible. At the beginning of 2011, I decided to write down every reference I could find regarding women to see what the Bible really said about women. On July 29, 2011, I read Rom 11:29: “For the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable”. The verse hit me like a rock between the eyes. I had seen how some women had the gifts of teaching and leadership while some men did not.

That verse showed me that God would never give a woman gifts and callings he did not expect her to use.

I felt like a bird set free.

I was every bit as valuable to God as a single, childless woman as a married with children woman!

I had a voice in the church and could be a church leader! It was okay to be assertive and independent!

Later in 2011 I said my final goodbye to organized religion. I could not find it in scripture and could not endure feeling like a freak and misfit in church because of being single, childless, and autistic.

Today Christ and women’s equality are my top passions in life. I still suffer from the scars of fundamentalism, but they are nothing compared to what family members and others are suffering from it.

Despite the struggles, I have much to be grateful for.

One of those blessings is being set free from fundamentalism.

*Contrary to popular belief, most of those who died at Jonestown were murdered and did not deliberately commit suicide.

Lies Purity Culture Taught Me: Sam’s Story

HA Editorial Team3 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde.

HA Note: All names have been changed to ensure anonymity.

My lightbulb moment occurred in my sophomore year of college. I was 19 years old when I woke up half naked in my debate partner’s twin-sized bed with an astounding lack of regret. Using the word whirlwind to describe a romance is probably clichéd, but it definitely captures those first few months of that spring semester. Despite telling him that I was a firm believer in “waiting until marriage” and that “I wasn’t one of those girls who found loopholes – no sex, of any variety,” and despite him saying he would respect that belief, within a few days we were cuddling on his couch, toeing the line to second base. A few weeks in, I had come to campus on a Saturday – in popular homeschool fashion, I lived at home for the first few years of college – to do some homework. I had begun texting back and forth with Mark*, and he told me to get home before snow hit. I blew it off and went back to finishing up my paper. When I got to the parking lot, it had iced so badly my car started skidding before it even made it to the road. I tried calling a few girlfriends, but they had all gone back home for the weekend. I anxiously texted Mark, and he politely offered his couch. We spent the weekend in his dorm, and I lied to my mother saying I was at one of the out-of-town-girlfriends’ apartments.

I did not sleep on the couch once that weekend.

We did not have sex that weekend. However, we came close enough that I should have been racked with guilt. I wasn’t though. I was only worried about what consequences would come from me sleeping with (literally) Mark.

In the following weeks, Mark treated me the same as he always had – with respect, kindness and that playful banter people get when they’ve hung out for a while. This is not to say that we pretended the previous weekend hadn’t happened; we continued to have impromptu sleepovers.

You see, when I say that my now-boyfriend treated me the same way that he always had, I mean that in that moment I realized that the purity teachings my mother had drilled into me were wrong.

Purity culture obsesses over keeping your virginity until marriage. I won’t delve into the religious aspects of it, because keeping yourself pure for God, if you so choose to, is not something I like to denounce. However, purity culture has a number of almost “secular” reasons to exist. One of these is that if you remain pure before marriage, you won’t experience pain and heartbreak. (Because apparently, you can only have your heart broken if you’ve had sex with a person.)

Another secular reason to stay pure is that men supposedly don’t respect women who put out. I remember reading countless comments from teenage boys on the Rebelution Modesty Survey that said something to the effect that they had more respect for the girls who were saving themselves, for the girls who were modest. That girls who dressed immodestly and behaved indecently disgusted them. This was even said to be true for boys who weren’t Christian. (Dannah Gresh’s Secret Keeper had a little anecdote in it about how these two guys had a goal to sleep with a different girl every night, and yet these two guys still wanted “a different kind of girl” to settle down with.) So in my head, this atheist man who I was sharing a bed with was supposed to see me as less. All he was doing though, was seeking more of my company, asking my opinion on things, and letting me decide whether or not to initiate physical contact between ourselves. In a few words – respecting me. I even tearfully asked him one afternoon if he thought I was damaged goods, for I’d read many articles that day condemning what I was doing. His response was somewhere along the lines of “what the hell are you talking about?”

It was then that I realized that perhaps the things that I had been taught were not all-encompassing truths that could explain the universe.

And true, while before I had gotten involved with Mark, I was slowly warming up to the idea that homeschool teachings weren’t entirely true. I still operated under the framework of conservative Christian homeschooling – when arguing with my parents about letting me do certain things, I still used Biblical evidence, I still used homeschool teachings to finagle what I wanted from them. I was reading articles online, trying to find someone saying that you could be Christian and engage in premarital sex without losing some part of yourself. Forcing myself to adhere to this framework made me intensely unhappy – which was ironic to me, because my parents told me that in the end, I’d be happier for following these beliefs. It was only when I had my lightbulb moment, half-naked in Mark’s bed that I let myself build a new worldview for myself that was not based on what my parents had drilled into my head. It was then that I was free, and able to think for myself and create a new framework in my head that led to true happiness.

Sexual Purity and the Pool Battle Plan

HA Editorial Team11 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Georges Marchand.

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog Love Joy Feminism. It was originally published on Patheos on May 30, 2015.

A recent article by Heath Lambert, executive director of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors, got me thinking about the way purity culture harms men. The article was titled Pursuing Purity at the Pool and aimed at preparing men for going to the beach or pool this summer. Take a look at this paragraph, for instance:

During this time of year many show up to swim wearing very immodest swimming gear.  Such immodesty creates a struggle for many seeking sexual purity.  We may choose to decry immodest swimming apparel, but the reality is that outside of our own homes and families there is not much we can do about it.  That means that we will have to take responsibility for our own eyes and hearts as we venture out to  swim this summer.  Here are five suggestions to help us stay pure while many are wearing provocative attire near the water.

In order to understand what the author, Heath Lambert, is getting at, you have to understand that evangelicals and fundamentalists who enforce strict modesty standards and subscribe to what I call “purity culture” believe that even thinking about sex is sinful. To be more precise, thinking about sex with someone you are not married to is held to be sinful. But what this really boils down to is seeing sexual attraction as sinful.

When Heath talks about the difficulty of staying “pure” at the pool, he is not talking about how difficult it is to avoid having sex with sexually attractive women in swimming attire, he’s talking about how difficult it is to avoid having feelings of sexual attraction for attractive women in swimming attire.

Have you ever tried not thinking about something? It’s really hard, isn’t it? An ordinary guy is going to go to the pool and think “mmm, sexy” from time to time, and that’s about it. A guy who believes sexual thoughts are sinful is instead going to spend the entire time obsessing over sex in an attempt not to think about it. How sad is that?

(As a side note, while Heath does say that men should take responsibility for their own eyes, he also describes women’s swimwear as “provocative,” which generally implies an intention to provoke. I for one do not evaluate my swimming attire based on whether or not it will cause the men around me to think sexual thoughts.)

Heath offers several suggestions to help men avoid feelings of sexual attraction to women at the pool or beach.

1.  Don’t Go

One suggestion is not to go to the pool, lake, or beach where others will be dressed immodestly.  For some, the temptation to lust will be too overpowering and should be avoided.  The suggestion to avoid such temptation may sound ridiculous to some.  What is summer without the water?  The beach?  But this suggestion is not mine.  Jesus thought of it long before I did.  If your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away.  it is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire (Matt 18:9).  Jesus’ words here are very candid instruction indicating that it is better to be pure than to be by the pool.

And there it is—”the temptation to lust.” Evangelical author Josh Harris defines lust as “craving sexually what God has forbidden.” Evangelical theologian John Piper defines lust as “the realm of thought, imagination, and desire that leads to sexual misconduct,” and makes it very clear that he any sexual thought can lead to sexual misconduct and all of it is counts as lust.

2.  Pray

Many will not have to take such radical measures.  Such people will find it possible to be near the scantily-clad bodies of people near the water, but they will need to get ready before they do it.  This will at least mean that we need to pray.  Prayer should be part of our preparation of heading to the lake every bit as much as buying sunscreen.  We should pray for a heart of purity before we head out and we should be ready to depend on God in prayer while there.  The immediacy of prayer means that we can call out to God in the moment of temptation and receive his help right when we need it (Heb 4:16).

3.  Memorize and Meditate

In addition to prayer we can also prepare our hearts for the pool by memorizing and meditating on Scripture—I have hidden your Word in my heart that I might not sin against you (Pss 119:11).  The passages you select might be focused on purity, For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality (1 Thess 4:3).  Or the passage may be focused on some other glorious truth of Scripture that redirects your heart towards the things of God, Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.  For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible (Col 1:15-16).  It really doesn’t matter as long as you are taking your thoughts captive to Christ (2 Cor 10:5).

Most people can get ready to head for the pool without creating a spiritual battle plan. And perhaps, to me, that is what is most sad here. Articles like this, with their conflation of sexual attraction with sin, make visits to the pool a Huge Freaking Deal and in doing so create elevated levels of sexual tension.

If Heath and other guys like him would stop trying so very hard not to think about sex, they might actually find themselves thinking about it less. Ironic, isn’t it?

4.  Stay Focused

While you’re out swimming stay focused.  For me, I never have an occasion to be swimming without my wife and children, and so staying focused means two things.  First, I keep my gaze fixed on my family.  I look at my wife or my kids.  I work to avoid looking around at other people.  Second, I stay focused on my work as a husband and father and work to serve my family.  I focus on trying to play with my kids, talk with my wife, keep everyone safe, and do what I can to help everyone enjoy their time.  I find this helps keeps my eyes and heart focused where they should be.

I’m a parent of young children myself, and I’m trying to think of the last time I had the time to think “mmm, sexy” while at the pool. Ordinarily I spend the bulk of my time trying to make sure my children don’t, you know, drown. My older child is transitioning to swimming without a floaties, which is freaking me out, and while my younger child still wears a flotation device, he doesn’t always stay as close to me as I would like. If I switch off with my husband and take a break from the kids, I usually go to the hot tub, close my eyes, and enjoy a moment of relaxation.

I guess what I’m getting at is that most people spend the bulk of their time at the pool focused on themselves or their friends or family members, not checking out sexy people. But because of Heath’s conflation of sexual attraction with sin, and because of his obsession with not thinking about sex, what is ordinarily normal becomes difficult and a challenging and part of a battle plan.

5.  Sing

When all else fails . . . sing.  So many people I know find that when they are really tempted they can break the back of sin and temptation by singing songs that redirect their attention to the Lord.  In God’s world he causes music to be one of the main ways we treasure Christ and the Word (Col 3:16).  Songs like Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus, It Is Well with My Soul, and Before the Throne of God Above are all songs that I sing to help orient my heart to Jesus.  You don’t have to be live in concert in front of everyone at the beach. You can sing silently and it will still work.

If someone wants to maintain an internal soundtrack, that’s fine by me, but again I would point out that this wouldn’t be such an issue without Heath’s obsessive focus on not thinking about sex. How is it not obvious that trying not to think about something is only going to make one think about it more?

I am praying for you this summer.  My prayer is that in God’s kindness you would spend as much energy this summer fighting for purity as you do having a blast by the water.  I pray that these suggestions help you do that very thing.

So basically, going to the pool is one part fighting lust and one part having fun in the water. That does not sound so fun. I mean, there’s the whole battle plan aspect of it—you have to be always on your guard, on the alert, etc. How can you actually relax?

Purity culture doesn’t just hurt women, it hurts men, too. I honestly and truly feel sorry for Heath. He is obsessing over sex to the point that he can’t simply enjoy a trip to the pool—and yet he thinks that in doing so he is being virtuous and honorable and that it is everyone else who is obsessed with sex.

Gothard’s ATI and the Duggar Family’s Secrets

HA Editorial Team71 Comments

Jim Bob Duggar and Bill Gothard at an ATI conference. Source: http://www.duggarfamily.com/.

By Wende Benner, HA Editorial Team

Content Warning: Spiritual Victim Blaming

The recent revelation that Josh Duggar admittedly molested five young girls as a teenager has taken over social media for the last two days. There has been a wide array of reactions and speculations. But, for many who were raised in the same quiverfull and patriarchal homeschool world, this has been a time of reliving their own traumas brought about by that dysfunctional culture. Those who lived it know all too well how the teachings and attitudes that are part of the Duggar family’s life affect families, victims, and even offenders.

The Duggar family’s involvement in Bill Gothard’s Advanced Training Institute (ATI) homeschool program adds complexities to this story which are unknown to the average person. The underlying principles and beliefs the Duggars have built their lives around actually help groom and shame victims, help hide grievous abuse, and even keep offenders from receiving needed help.

The lessons learned from birth in homes like the Duggar’s strip children of their voice and agency. Starting with blanket training babies and toddlers understand quickly that disappointing a parent leads to swift and painful consequences. As they grow, it becomes clear that simply doing what is expected is not enough. It must be done instantly and cheerfully. Children are even forbidden to seek out the logic behind the request, as kids are prone to do, because that is seen a making excuses or delaying obedience. The consequences of failing to meet these expectations are severe. Gothard and the Duggars believe that spankings are necessary to save a child from their inborn nature to do evil, and these are not just any spankings. The Duggars endorse the child abuse methods taught by the Pearls. Growing up in an environment of fear, where questions are seen as rebellious, eventually makes children unable to speak up for themselves. They become unable to trust their own judgment of what is right and wrong. These children are the perfect targets for abuse; they do not know how to advocate for themselves.

Also, from a young age the children are instructed in God’s plan for their gender. Strict gender roles are the foundation of a patriarchal system. Girls learn their role is to be wives, mothers, and keepers at home. Most people know that for the Duggar family this includes the expectation of having as many children as possible.  Michelle Duggar is also outspoken about her beliefs on a wife’s subservient role and need to be sexually available to her husband. Children learn by watching their parents that men hold the power. This is detrimental for both boys and girls. Neither learns to have a healthy relationship without the power differential already in place.

All of this is accompanied by one of Bill Gothard’s 7 Basic Principles, Authority (these principles are the foundation to his Institute in Basic Life Principles seminar). This concept is taught with a diagram of umbrellas, which represent protection.

Umbrella of ProtectionNotice the man has authority over the entire household. The teaching claims that as long as the father has no holes in his umbrella-sin in his life, then nothing bad can happen to the rest of the family. However, any member of the family can step out from under the father’s protection if they sin. Then all manner of evil can happen to that person. Therefore, if something bad, like a sexual assault, happens to you and your father hasn’t done anything wrong, it must be your fault. Knowledge of this fact keeps many from even disclosing their abuse. They are aware that questions about sin in their life are likely to follow any revelation of their violation.

In Gothard’s world there are many other ways in which sexual abuse can be the victim’s fault. At the ATI student’s Counseling Seminar students are taught Gothard’s method of helping victims of sexual assault. The handout pictured here is part of the teaching material. Counseling SAStudents are taught to question the victim if they had any fault in the assault. The most obvious way they would be at fault is if they defrauded their attacker. Defraud is Gothard’s favorite word for any dress, actions, or manners that cause someone to lust. This teaching is further backed up by a handout on moral failure released in the 90s after an ATI boy was caught molesting his sisters.

ModestyWith this teaching a case can easily be made to blame the victim in some way. The feelings of arousal the offender felt must have been caused by some fault of the victim.

Defrauding is not the only way a victim can be at fault. Gothard also teaches that if a victim fails to “cry out” or be alert (one of the 49 required character traits everyone should have) enough to have anticipated the assault, then the victim bears responsibility. The story of Tamar, daughter of King David, is used to illustrate this point. It is easy to see how these teaching have set up a system where the victim bears the blame. Anyone raised with these beliefs is set up to struggle with a lifetime of shame and guilt while still bearing the scars of their abuse.

Before the victim has a chance to make sense of what has happened to them or deal with the chaos of emotions, they will also be reminded of another one of Gothard’s 7 Basic Principles-Suffering. This principle emphasizes the necessity of forgiveness and has dire warnings about the consequences of unforgiveness. If a victim fails to forgive, bitterness will take root in their heart, and bitterness causes pieces of your soul to be given to Satan. Satan will then build strongholds on this piece of your soul.

BitternessThis teaching is also echoed in the handout from the Counseling Seminar. Victims are to be reminded that their soul has more value than their bodies, so forgiving the offender must be the priority. Any suffering caused by the assault is then brushed aside.

The Duggars assured the public Josh’s victims have received counseling. Yet, the type of counseling taught in their world does not promote healing. It teaches shame. How can these young people be expected to heal from such a violation with these principles guiding the process?

The Duggars also claim that Josh received counseling. It is reported this counseling was done over three months at an old VA hospital in Little Rock, AK. While there he did construction work. The old hospital was donated to Bill Gothard for use as a training center. The Integrity Construction Institute was at that time a part of this facility. Evidence that manual labor is an effective treatment for sex offenders is hard to come by. Construction work alone would be a disservice to someone seeking help.

It is important to note that any counseling received from someone associated with ATI would be driven by the belief that mental disorders do not exist. This approach to counseling would be ineffective to address the very nature and needs of a serial molester.

Any counsel Josh did receive would probably be similar to the counsel noted earlier, in the handout on moral failure from the 90s.

Moral FailureWith close examination it becomes clear that the boy referenced learned a lesson on shifting blame. The victims were blamed for their lack of modesty. The parents were blamed for their lack of teaching. The offender learned to see how others have failed and have caused his problems. This approach would not bring any lasting change in someone needing serious help.

Josh Duggar’s situation as a teen was critical. Studies show that young offenders who are able to get the right kind of help reduce their probability of reoffending by more than 50%. Yet, as far as we can tell, that kind of help was not available to him. The ATI system of counseling not only fails the victims but the offenders as well.

This toxic system of beliefs originated with Bill Gothard, a man who had to resign from his own ministry last year when faced with dozens of allegations of sexual harassment and abuse. Even though Michelle and Jim Bob were aware of this, they still continued to use these teaching in their home and promote them using their fame. They also continued to speak and teach at the annual ATI family conferences. They have failed to see how their own system of belief has contributed to the devastation in their own family and in the ministry they promote.

The secrets the Duggar family hid all these years have tragic and devastating effects. The lives of five victims will be permanently altered. ATI only helped cover their abuse. ATI also was unable to provide the necessary counseling that Josh Duggar desperately needed at that time. The consequences of that failure could have changed to course of his life.

Bill Gothard’s cult creates a world in which abuse thrives in secret, and those that need help the most are silenced and shamed.

A Story about My Mom and Panties: Fidget’s Story

HA Editorial Team4 Comments
CC image courtesy of Flickr, Alex Proimos. Image links to source.
CC image courtesy of Flickr, Alex Proimos. Image links to source.

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Fidget” is a pseudonym.

How I Learned that My Mom Didn’t Maintain the Belief that She Owned My Body and the Way my Father Thought He Did

When I was fifteen, on a rare trip to Kohl’s with three of my four approved friends (yep, the only four girls I talked to when I was fifteen), I bought myself my first cute panties. Out for the five pairs I bought that day, the most memorable were black and had a butterfly composed of hearts (or a heart composed of butterflies) screen-printed on the back. None of them were thongs, and they weren’t particularly sexy or risqué or anything, they were just cute and feminine and fun, but I was nervous about owning them. Before, all I had ever worn was plain Hanes–  the ugly animal print granny panties with a waistband that cut into your skin no matter how big you bought them– that came in six and eight packs at Walmart, so lace waistbands seemed lavish and taboo to me. It felt like I was putting myself in danger when I bought them, and in reality I probably was on some level.

Like a lot of homeschooled girls I know, all of my clothes had to meet my father’s approval.

There were unspoken rules about how I was allowed to dress, rules that my father applied at random whenever I was about to go out, and that changed at his discretion. I wasn’t allowed to wear padded bras, because they were ‘too slutty’ (yeah, someone explain that one to me), I wasn’t allowed to wear bright red tights no matter how long the shorts or skirt was on top of them, because they ‘drew too much attention to me’. It wasn’t just about modesty, though that was often given as an excuse. My father didn’t want me to look like a ‘freak’: he demanded that the little mosquito bite marks on my legs and arms be covered (point of interest they never scared, they would fade before the summer ended), he wanted me to keep my hair long and naturally colored, my face naked, and my nails were never supposed to be painted black (they almost always were).

He believed that my image was really his image, and therefore his tastes were the only ones that mattered when it came to the way I dressed.

(Another side note: I’m now about the most goth looking girl I know and wear my hair cropped and dyed, and even then I had already chopped my hair for the first time and dipped my toes into the kiddie-pool of ‘emo fashion’, so there goes his image).

Naturally, I kept my new panties secret, wearing them on special days and washing them separately from the rest of the family’s laundry (this is a major perk of being entirely responsible for the whole family’s dirty clothes). They stayed secret until a family trip to a lake house in Virginia. The chore rotation that we followed at home didn’t apply on vacation, so I found myself folding laundry with my mom while my father and all of my brothers played in the lake (I could go on forever about how my four perfectly capable brothers weren’t required to help just because we were on vacation, but whatever). I had miscounted days and not packed enough, so my secret panties were in the pile of clean laundry, and disaster was looming. I was prepared to snatch all of them and shove them into the pockets of my cargo capris (so sexy) before my mom could see, but she beat me to it. She picked up the butterfly-heart-butt pair. I braced for her to run out and report to my father that I was a huge whore (despite only knowing three boys my age and almost never seeing them, and certainly never touching them, and despite not yet knowing the word ‘clitoris’ or even ‘orgasm’ and with the most clinical understanding of sex possible). My heart was in my throat, and I felt tears in my eyes already. I wondered if apologizing and throwing them out would make the shouting and threats that would surely follow any less awful. I seriously doubted it, so I decided I would fight for them, damn the cost.

I was already used to being told off for being rebellious and selfish and spoiled, so who cared if I was going to add whore-in-cute-underwear to the list of things wrong with me.

“Are these yours?” My mom didn’t sound mad, but then again she rarely did until she was shouting.

I nodded, mute with terror.

“They’re cute.” and she folded them and handed them to me.

“You like them?” I was blown away, this didn’t make any sense, I was prepared for a fight, I was prepared for shouting, and all she had to say was that they were cute?

She fished another pair out and smiled at me, “Yes, I think they’re all cute, nice choice.” No condemnation, no anger, no shame, just ‘cute’.

My mom and I almost never talked about clothes, and I can’t recall ever having a conversation with her about my image that was particularly empowering. She never talked about body positivity or treating myself well, and never commented on the way my father treated me about it.

With her approval of my panties, my mom very subtly taught me that she didn’t think she owned my body.

Without meaning to, I’m sure, she gave me approval to start exploring my image and developing a healthy relationship with my clothes and appearance. She didn’t comment on them ever again, but she didn’t need to. That stupid afternoon of extra housework was one of the most import ones all because she didn’t get mad at me. My father never found out and never called me a slut over them (he would have, no doubt). My mom was okay with them, she was okay with me. It was all okay.

As a side note: he did call me a slut over other things. Side-side note: NO UNDERWEAR IS EVER IMMODEST EVER. PERIOD. NO DISCUSSION. It’s UNDERWEAR for fucks sake, no one is going to see it, unless you want them too, and in that case ‘modesty’ is really not much of a concern