purity culture

Asexuality And Purity Teachings Can Be A Toxic Mix: Christine

HA Editorial Team23 Comments

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

I am an asexual. This means that I feel the same amount of sexual attraction for men that a straight man does, and the same amount of sexual attraction to women that a straight woman does. I remember that the conservative community denied the existence of asexuality, but I can’t remember the exact reason. I think it was something along the lines of ‘they’re just celibate’ or ‘they’re just abstinent’. However, many celibate or abstinent people feel sexual attraction, and many asexuals are not celibate or abstinent. To learn more about what asexuality is and is not, this is a great informative video:

I don’t know whether I was born this way or whether it has roots in my upbringing. All I know is that this is the way I am and the doctors say it has nothing to do with my hormones.

You’d think that asexuality would be a good fit for someone raised in a purity culture. However, due to the ignorance some are deliberately kept in about our own bodies, feelings, reproduction, and sexuality, asexuality and purity teachings can be a toxic mix.

Many homeschoolers try to ‘protect’ their children from knowledge about sex, sexuality, and reproduction. My parents fit into this category. As a result, I didn’t learn about human reproduction until I was in college, and didn’t learn that other people experience sexual attraction. Or rather, I misunderstood what sexual attraction was. I thought ‘being attracted’ to someone meant thinking they were smart, or good looking, or fun, because those were the kinds of attraction I experienced. As a teenager, I developed crushes based on those attractions. I did not know that other people experienced the world a different way, so I did not know that my experience was different or that I was asexual.

Due to the way my mother covered the TV screen when a couple would begin to lightly kiss in the 1940s comedies we were allowed to watch – and in the rare other shows and movies we were able to watch – I received the impression that all affectionate touching between a man and a woman was ‘sexual’. After all, sexual lust was supposed to be a desire that we all feel, and the desire I felt was one for affection. I wanted to be hugged, long and firmly. I wanted to lie with my head in my crush’s lap while he stroked my hair. I desired these things so badly it hurt, but I believed that they were obscenely sexual thoughts that I must, and did, repent of in tears. It wasn’t helped at all by the fact that our pastors and community leaders taught that the slightest amount of affectionate touch between a man and a woman was sin, must be avoided at all cost, would sully us for our future spouse, and would lead to procreational intercourse. “Don’t heat up the oven if you’re not going to put something inside” they said – and completely missing the sexual reference of that statement, I thought it meant ‘don’t touch someone if you’re not ready to procreate with them’.

There was also the problem that having a crush on someone was called, a la Josh Harris and his book ‘I kissed dating goodbye’, ‘giving away a piece of your heart’. Someone went further than this and said that having a crush on someone you weren’t married to was being an ’emotional whore’. So I had a huge amount of guilt about my crushes, even though they weren’t sexual (which I didn’t know). As a teenager, my best friend told me that ‘girls like us’ don’t have or respond to crushes on boys. My mother told me that homeschooled girls who talked to boys ‘are the ones they like now, but not the kind of girl they’ll marry.’

The long and the short of it is that a lack of information about sex and sexuality combined with the sexual-attraction-blindness of my asexuality led to many, many painful hours and tears over very innocent matters. It also led to ignorance of my orientation, which is not helpful when you hope to meet a compatible spouse, and which caused a lot of complications in my relationships.

There was another toxic teaching that reacted badly with my asexuality. There’s a letter in Paul’s epistles that was taught by our pastors and leaders as follows: A wife must allow her husband to have sex with her whenever he likes. This teaching is obviously toxic by itself. But for an asexual who doesn’t know she’s asexual and for whom this is the entirety of her sex-ed, this is what I thought sex was. Sex was something a man does to a woman. “It’s clear from nature, from very human biology” said Douglass Wilson, author of “Her Hand in Marriage” and the Credenda Agenda, “that men are for initiating and women are for responding.” (my paraphrasing) After leaving my family and starting into the world on my own, I decided that I didn’t think premarital sex was sinful, but that I personally didn’t want to have sex until after marriage (due to my desire for sex being tied very closely with reproduction). When my boyfriend raped me, I felt horrible but thought it was sex. I thought to complain about it to a friend would be to say that sex was wrong. So I stayed with my boyfriend and tried, futily, to convince him to ‘not have sex with me unless I wanted it.’

The above story wasn’t helped by the fact that I had not been taught about ‘good touch’ and ‘bad touch’. As a child, I was taught that I must always put my own interests and feelings aside and serve other people, and not argue. My body had never been my own – not when my parents coerced me to hug someone (‘to make them feel loved’) or when they’d told me to pull down my pants so that they could give me more spankings, or walked into the room while I was getting dressed, or had to go to a homeschool class when I had a 104 degree fever. So I was unused to being in touch with what my body told me, which made it even harder to recognize the full extent of what was happening to me. When touch felt bad to to me, I didn’t know to name it ‘uncomfortable’ or ‘undesirable’ or ‘repulsion’ or ‘fear’. I described the feelings to my boyfriend. He told me it was arousal and excitement. I didn’t know enough to know that he was wrong.

So, ironically, the teachings that my parents thought would keep me abstinent and make me a ‘good girl’ actually ended up putting me in unwanted sexual situations.

I sometimes wonder if some of the other things I was taught helped make me asexual. Not having a name for my vulva until college except for “pee pee thing’. Being taught that my vulva’s function was only for ejecting pee and babies (I was taught that pregnancy began when a man and a woman stood too close to each other.) Being taught that my ‘pee pee thing’ was very dirty and must never be touched. The close companionship each of my parents had with me instead of each other, called by some psychologists ’emotional incest’. As a young girl, I saw older girls mocked and derided by my parents, friends, and role models for being interested in boys. When I got my period, its function was not explained to me, but my mother cried and wished I wasn’t growing up. As my body began to develop, I was mocked and shamed. My breasts were a shame to me. My periods were a shame to me. Other maturing features of my body were a shame to me. The more I kept them hidden, the less I would be mocked. I never dared to mention a crush I might have on a boy because I could not bear the mockery and shame I knew was due to come.

Did this crazy upbringing ‘make’ me asexual? I don’t know. I do know that there was never a time when I felt sexual attraction, so if it’s due to my upbringing, that upbringing took affect before the time when sexual attraction would have normally developed. I’m still clueless about some things: As I’m writing this, I’m wondering when that time is for other people.

The Queer Elder’s Son: George

HA Editorial Team3 Comments

The Queer Elder’s Son: George

Trigger warnings: this story contains brief references to molestation.

Hi, I’m George, and I’m a queer man who was homeschooled.  And guess what?  For me, it wasn’t all that bad.  Yes, within the conservative Christian community I was raised in, complete with the requisite Bill Gothard character studies and HSLDA membership, I actually turned out okay.  How is this possible?  Let’s take a look.

I’ve never attended a public school.  I stayed at home and was taught by my mother from a self-created curriculum from kindergarten through senior year of high school.  During this period, my family attended a series of churches, trying to find the correct mix of the fundamentalism my mother sought and deism my father was attracted to.  Surprisingly, this meant a lot of different churches including one ill-fated and ill-advised attempt at creating our own.

We’ll start with some of the ugly stuff.  Like most in my situation, sexuality was always correlated directly with shame.  We never, ever spoke of sex.  I found out about it when I was ten years old and reading the encyclopedia article on vaginas.  The line “insertion of the penis into the vagina” was the most detail I got, later telling my parents who laughed, asked if I had questions, and never spoke of it again.  The secrecy and taboo nature of sex led to me being more than slightly obsessed with it.  However, the idea of purity had been ground into my mind, and I remember flagellating myself after masturbating for the first time, thinking I had left my purity behind.  No God could love someone like me.  But the confusion of sex as being ugly — after all, God struck down that man who ejaculated on the ground — and somehow ‘good’ was something my mind was unable to rectify.

I still hesitate when trying to find words for what happened next.  The simplest explanation is often the best.  While at a Christian summer camp, I was molested by a male counsellor over the course of a three-week session.  He was in his late teens and while what occurred between us wasn’t rape, it obviously wasn’t consensual sex either.  I came away from the experience with two major problems.

First, my purity was definitely gone now.  What I had done with that man meant I was officially damned to hell.  It was over.  Could I even go to heaven now that I’d lost that part of myself?  I figured the answer was no.

Second, I enjoyed it physically.  I found myself attracted to him.  Him, a man.  I was a homeschooled preteen, and thus the idea of homosexuality didn’t even make sense to me.  But it was obviously not normal and not something men were meant to feel for men.

For mostly the second reason, I kept it a secret.  And the next year?  I went back to the same camp, he was still there, and we picked back up where we had been.  This move I did regret afterwards, serving myself up to him so obviously.

So that year I decided to tell.

This is probably the lowest point of this tale, the part where things suddenly screech to a halt.  My mother told me she did not believe me, it was too ridiculous to think the person I was specifically singling out had done what I was saying.  So I slammed it back inside and did not speak of it again for years (this post is around the fourth time I’ve ‘said’ it in the last fifteen years).

Unfortunately this didn’t mean the attraction to boys went away.  Which was a problem, especially once I found the terms to label it.

Sitting through long discussions of purity?  Of how to remain like Timothy or Titus or some other short book of the Bible?  I had already committed the sin of Onan, with another man.  How on earth was I supposed to return to a time before that all happened?  So I settled for keeping it quiet.

Fast forward a few years, to my first same-age homosexual encounter.  In an extremely conservative Christian organization, I attended an annual ‘summit’ of sorts.  Boys and girls were kept very separate for propriety’s sake.  I am unsure how the organizers didn’t see how this would backfire, as it led to me and several others initiating activity which was just a ‘joke’ and ‘so gay lol’.  I do wonder about those men, some of them now married with children being raised in the heart of southern baptist ministries.

This was when I decided to embrace my sexuality.  I had only one life.  The shame I felt about it?  Still present.  Always present.  Knowing God hated me.  But he had hated me since the first moment I had had hands lain on me back at summer camp, so what did it matter any more?

I manifested this choice in several overt ways.  I began to dress much more flamboyantly, with bright colors, patterns, and the occasional piece of non-gender-appropriate clothing worn in public, even to church.  I started to spend time grooming myself, discussing personal hygiene with ‘the girls’ and loving the camaraderie we shared.  My male friends dropped away one by one, until none were left, which was picked up on by the homeschooling community we were a part of.  My mother was a leader in it, my father an elder in a church with a few thousand congregants who all paid close attention to his kids.

The son showing up in makeup, flares, and paisley?  With a sash?!  Yes, it was noticed.  The boy who was quickly becoming ‘one of the girls’?  Oh, very much noticed.

People whispered.  People talked.  I wasn’t invited to so many messianic seder celebrations any more, but I could handle it.  Because I was already damned to Hell!

But soon the girls weren’t allowed to be my friend either.  The more conservative families pulled away entirely, leaving my own siblings without close friends.

Finally my parents had two very different conversations with me.

My father sat me down and requested very plainly that I not come out of the closet.  He said if I did, he would cut off ties with me.  But otherwise, I was free to live my life.  There was no preface at all, it was said during a car ride to get groceries, and I guess my desire to self-destruct had reached a point where he felt it necessary to say something.  I told him I was still into girls, and his smirk made me want to prove him wrong.

Within the same week, my mother and I were baking together (yes, a homeschooled son allowed to help prepare family dinner!) when she asked me if I was gay.  She quickly followed with “because it seems like you really want people to think you are.”  I told her I sort of was and sort of wasn’t.  I just liked expressing myself.

My mother, a friend of Michael Farris, worshipper of Francis Schaeffer, former pal of Doug Phillips, said she just wanted me to be happy.

We had Bible studies every morning still.  I read about how much Jesus loved those who were as fucked up as me, obviously lacking the belief that this was true.  My parents loved me, and still love me.

Shortly, my father was removed from the board of elders of our church.  We were still welcome to attend, but not to hold leadership or serve in any particular area of ministry.  The hunt for a new church began quickly, settling on a liberal Presbyterian congregation that left me with less of a desire to rub my sexuality in everyone’s face.

Prior to enrolling in college, I dated a Good Christian Girl for a year to make my family happy.  We did it all the right way, asking about courtship, allowing her father to have some level of control (my own father terrified of messing up what seemed like the perfect ‘out’ for him with regards to his gay son), and keeping things very chaste.  After our breakup, my mother asked if we had ever kissed, and seemed disappointed when I said no.  Seemed like that wasn’t the cure, but she had hopes still.

I dated another girl in college, one I got much more physical with, though not to the point of full-on sex, as we were at a conservative Christian school and she wanted to preserve her ‘purity’ for marriage.  I was aware mine was gone and didn’t believe in the magic ability to restore virginity, so I broke up with her rather than break her heart with the truth of me.

I remained celibate for the next two years, toning down my flamboyancy and joining a church’s youth ministry where I quickly became a favorite of the kids and a hot item for the single ladies seeking a man to produce a quiver full with.  I think perhaps browsing my old Facebook photos was enough for them to know it probably wasn’t going to happen.

The period of celibacy brought great joy to my parents.  Perhaps I wouldn’t turn out gay, just maybe.  I had dated two girls after all.  I was just a bit more…out there than most men.

When I started dating my most recent partner, a black male poet from Brooklyn, I kind of figured it was time to admit something to myself.  But my Dad’s words about coming out still rung in my head, and I kept it quiet.

That relationship ended without anyone ever hearing about it.

Shortly thereafter I moved far from my family’s location.  Dated a couple other men, a couple other women.  Kept it quiet and out of their earshot (except for my mother, who once asked specifically about my ‘special friend’, who she found endearing).

The shame is still there.  The desire to hide it is still there.  Most of my siblings don’t even know I’ve dated men, much less several men.

I wonder where I’d be had it not been for that summer camp.  I wonder if my belief in purity would have resulted in many more years of repression or would have resulted in me being able to maintain a heterosexual relationship?

But those value judgements are for people who desire to make value judgements.  I’m past that.

My parents still love me.  They are from a different time, a different age, and aren’t quite able to cope with the entire truth.  But they know who their son is, and they love him anyway.  They love him enough to lose friends, to be removed from a church, to question their own deep biases.  Sure, things could be better.  But they could also be a lot worse.

Mostly, I worry about those who are less happy than me.

Is my story the picture of perfection?  No, not at all.

But I’m finding ways to like myself.  Finding ways to believe in something that brings me joy rather than pain.

I’m here, I’m queer, I was homeschooled and I’m not ashamed.

Getting Bi Ain’t Easy, No Matter Where You Are: Isaiah

HA Editorial Team1 Comment

Getting Bi Ain’t Easy, No Matter Where You Are: Isaiah

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

I don’t think growing up bisexual or otherwise sexually complex is easy in American culture, regardless of how you’re educated. I suffered through long issues of self-illegitimacy as a consequence of bisexual erasure, which can happen in mainstream culture just as easily as in evangelical circles.

That said, the relationship between homeschooling and the development of sexuality is a complicated one. All things being equal, homeschoolers — especially those with healthy social lives — would have the same basic kind of sexual development as anyone else. But in the largest and most representative homeschooling culture, it’s apparent that all things are very much not equal.

The glaring difference between being homeschooled and publicly educated is the potential for isolation, and that can play havoc on myriad factors of development even if you’re part of a relatively liberal family. The more isolated from the multiplicity of human behavior you are, the more critical every small cultural influence is, and the more damaging harmful beliefs can become.  In my experience, there is no place this hits harder than in the development of one’s own sexuality, especially for those who don’t fit easily into archetypal, simplified cultural frames.

As I have mentioned in a previous essay on this site I was raised in a relatively liberal Christian home but studied a fundamentalist curriculum, which was rarely contradicted despite my family’s milder beliefs. The media I watched and listened to, the books I read, and my family life in general never argued with this fundamentalist ideology, and it became a strong part of my reality.

My mother’s inherent empathy and lack of an authoritarian personality wouldn’t allow her to follow the most bigoted aspects of her faith, and she did not “protect” me from certain cultural influences as many other homeschooling parents did. I knew that gay people existed and didn’t think much about it — I simply assumed they were people who fell in love with their own gender instead of the other one. I knew, too, that people sometimes loved other people but didn’t get married to them, or that people could love more than one person at once.

But this knowledge was tempered by severely restrictive cultural archetypes — gay men were like women, gay women were like men, people who loved each other always “should” get married, and so on. My curriculum helped to push these mainstream archetypes into my consciousness too, and went even further as it became more strongly fundamentalist over the years.

All the subjects — history, math, science, Bible, and English — attempted to discuss sexuality in their own way. But they did so in very limited terms, probably to avoid offending the really fundamentalist parents who made up part of their target market.

History and math made poor platforms for propaganda about sex and human relationships, so they were largely free of this particular stain save the occasional Bible verse. Science never mentioned sexuality in any way for over nine years, then one day, in grade ten, a unit about human sexuality and anatomy was introduced. It was ten percent anatomy and physiology, and ninety percent propaganda — mostly the standard lines that define the purity culture and the cult of the “traditional family”. Nowhere in this lesson plan was anything other than straight, male-dominated sex mentioned, even as behavior to avoid — and once the lesson plan was finished, sexuality was never mentioned again until the next grade year.

English and “Bible” both hit the hardest with moral teachings, English doing so mainly through its reccomended reading list and Bible accomplishing the task merely by existing. There was never a fire-and-brimstone shakedown to scare you off from “immoral” behavior — which meant essentially anything but male-dominated missionary heterosexual sex within wedlock — but it became clear very quickly what was acceptable and what wasn’t.

I will give my former curriculum credit for its relative subtlety compared to other brands of evangelical education, but the message still stuck. I can remember being taught about “purity”, which, though emphasized to girls, made its point with boys too. Through cognitive dissonance or ignorance, I actually never perceived my curriculum’s obvious prejudice against homosexuality (which was never actively acknowleged, just hinted at constantly) or its extremely black-and-white morality with regards to sex and marriage, both of which I had been raised to perceive in a more tolerant way.

None of this mattered to me for much of my childhood, of course. I began to develop sexually fairly early and have always possessed a somewhat high sex drive, but I didn’t begin to have any issues until after my pre-teen years.

I grew into a teenager in an environment much more isolated than where I lived as a child, and for various reasons fell into a state of chronic but functional depression for several years. The overwhelming feeling of illegitimacy in my sexual identity was a major factor in perpetuating my depressive tendencies, and to this day can act as a trigger for depression. When the agonizing confusion I felt in my early teenage years finally stopped, and I realized the cold truth of my own variances in sexuality, I became mentally paralyzed with the idea that there was something wrong with me, something that I could not find a way to fix.

I was a torrent of repressed emotions nearly all of the time, afraid to express myself for fear of being thought evil or crazy in some way. In the depths of my mind, my instincts constantly pushed me to feel as though there was nothing at all wrong with me, that I was legitimate and had every right to exist as I was, whatever that may be. But without any cultural context or knowledge that bisexuality or sexual fluidity existed, I could never fully accept this idea. Whenever the disharmony between my instincts and my fear and guilt was brought to light, depression would take hold again and I would feel inwardly dull for hours or days. This was by no means the only reason for my depression, but it was probably the largest single factor at any given time. It peaked and finally began to slip the further I moved from the religion and curriculum I was raised with, and now that I have abandoned them completely, only their murky shadows remain.

I can’t say what was unique about my homeschooling experience, as it relates to sexuality, compared to a conventional education. It would be much more clear-cut if I identified as simply “straight” or “gay” — and likely more predictable too.

I’m sure those who are homeschooled in a truly evangelical environment — not the milquetoast one I was raised in — would prefer the risks of being bi in public school to the almost certain abuse and erasure they would suffer at the hands of fundamentalist families. But being bi, and especially learning that you’re bi, is usually a difficult and traumatic experience in both mainstream culture and the various homeschooling subcultures. Bisexual and sexually fluid people are far harder to stereotype and classify than people who identify as gay or straight or transgender, and as such have very little cultural presence, often being treated as mysterious and alien or vicious and predatory when they are given a space to exist at all. The ease with which bi and fluid people can get out of the game by simply sublimating part of their identity and identifying as merely “gay” or “straight” compounds the problem.

The fact is, having any sexuality that’s difficult to stereotype is hard no matter where you come from. When I was depressed all those years, I craved one thing more than anything else — existence. I didn’t need acceptance, permission, or tolerance — just the right to exist. In short, I needed to not be erased. But if you were to ask me whether it would have made a difference had I not been homeschooled, whether I would have been allowed to exist had I been sent to a conventional school instead, I can only say that I don’t know.

Into the Real World: Ellen Cook’s Story

HA Editorial TeamLeave a comment

Into the Real World: Ellen Cook’s Story

Ellen Cook is 18 years old and from California.

"Get out of the Christian bubble!"
“Get out of the Christian bubble!”

I feel like my parents were easily swayed into ideas they may not have agreed with. They made the decision to homeschool us when we were driving around our new neighborhood located in the Kern River Valley. They were so convinced because a couple young teens were riding horses with their mother, and they had mentioned what homeschooling was for them. We must have sat in our van on that dirt road for an hour or two. But this conversation resulted in my older sister’s journey into boys and teenage-hood. My 12 year old sister entered into 6 years of homeschool chaos, while me being 8 got to watch and wish that I had a life. My parents thought we could travel around and see historical and educational places in our area — get some hands on learning.

That rarely happened.

I am very lucky though; I was not homeschooled through high school (thank you Jesus). My sister has hated me, in a sense, since the day my parents said they wanted to enroll me in high school.

Something I always noticed in one of my sets of curriculum was little comics. The characters had weird names, like “Happy,” and they implied good morals and obeying God — which is good, I guess. But the one that will always stick out to me is one of a boy, “Pudgy,” earning money and giving it all to the offering in church. It struck me as very strange at 9 or 10 because all I wanted to spend my money on was candy. But now that I know what those homeschool companies are trying to do, it’s very unfair. Sure, giving to the church is not bad. But the money isn’t going directly to God, as implied when I read it.

I see now that the indoctrination is very strong with these Christian homeschool families, but maybe not mine. I know many homeschool parents that raised sin-committing rebels from their pure and Godly homes. Homeschooling did not work for most of the kids I knew. I realized this when they became 18 and had their first girlfriend or boyfriend. Our friends that are boys would come over to swim in our pool, and all the kids would have to cover up their swimsuits as to not attract sexual attention. We were Tweens! My sister and I didn’t know what a penis was!

What exposed me to the world was my best friend, a girl that moved in next door about a year or two after we moved there. She introduced me to Punk Rock, Tiger Beat, MTV (we didn’t have cable), hair dying, cursing, and everything else that makes me who I am today. I am so lucky to have met her, or else I would have been the weird homeschool girl in high school. I would have not survived. We even took her to our home school prom and she almost got us kicked out for sucking the helium out of balloons. All the home school moms freaked out and did not know what to do. It’s on Youtube! We were some rebels back then…

Now that I am older and have experienced more public school than just 3rd grade. I look back at my homeschooling years and I can see it was a manic decision by my parents, and it screwed up one of their children. My dad is bipolar and depressive, so our education was in his indecisive hands and it did not turn out pretty. But really, I am thankful for my short 5 years of homeschooling because I’ve learned that particular society may not be what I want to participate in, and that the Republican Party may not be the best just because they are the Christian party. I’ve learned more than enough about the Civil War, and got to run around outside when it snowed.

But yes, that’s a bit of my story. All I can say for other homeschool kids is find out things for yourself, listen to music besides Worship or Christian, and watch the news — get out of the Christian bubble! I am Catholic now, and I appreciate church now more than ever because I don’t feel judged or like a sinning teenager. I finally feel like going to church isn’t a joke, or mandatory to please my parents. And that is a blessing. But homeschooling never hurt my relationship with God — it was too safe. Getting out into the real world tested my relationship with God, and made it stronger.

Homeschooled Girls and Trash Cans: Latebloomer’s Story, Part Three

HA Editorial Team10 Comments

Homeschooled Girls and Trash Cans: Latebloomer’s Story, Part Three

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Latebloomer” is a pseudonym. Latebloomer’s story was originally published on her blog Past Tense, Present Progressive. It is reprinted with her permission.

*****

In this series: Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five | Part Six | Part Seven

*****

Part Three: Sexuality, the Elephant in the Room

"At Reb Bradley's church, my family found a culture of people who were also trying to ignore the elephant in the room."
“At Reb Bradley’s church, my family found a culture of people who were also trying to ignore the elephant in the room.”

My mom walked into my bedroom and handed me a heavy biology textbook. “Read chapter 13,” she told me, breathless and blushing. Then she rushed out. I opened to the appropriate chapter: “The Reproductive System”. That was my entire sex education; I was 17 years old.

I think we can all agree: sex education should probably be done by people who have said the word “sex” out loud at least once in their lives.

My parents’ denial of sexuality couldn’t stop puberty, and couldn’t stop our curiosity about sex. Instead, their attitude clearly showed us kids that we could never go to our parents with any questions or concerns that were related to our sexuality or genitals. For me, I found some answers around age 11 when I looked up “sex” and “puberty” in the encyclopedia. Later, a hidden copy of “What Solomon Says About Love, Sex, and Intimacy” in my parents’ closet provided hours of heart-throbbing reading.

Not every homeschooling family is so repressed about sex, but at Reb Bradley’s church, my family found a culture of people who were also trying to ignore the elephant in the room. A favorite theme of Reb Bradley was sexual purity and “Biblical courtship”. He was fond of referring to 1 Timothy 5:2, which says, “Do not rebuke an older man but encourage him as you would a father, younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, younger women as sisters, in all purity.” According to his interpretation, all young men were to treat all young women as sisters, absent of sexuality.

Paradoxically, Reb Bradley also taught that these single “siblings in Christ” should not be allowed to mingle freely with each other because of temptation…..wait, what? How are you supposed to treat someone as a brother or sister if you’re not allowed to spend time with them? I guess Reb really didn’t believe that platonic friendships were possible between the genders after all.  I think even Jesus himself would have gotten disapproving looks like the mingling teens in the back row if he came to Hope Chapel.  After all, “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus” (John 11:5)–if Jesus was close friends with single women even in ancient Jewish culture, then why was it forbidden at Hope Chapel?

So how could an honorable young man find himself a wife in this gender-segregated culture? Ideally, he had to notice a girl from across the room–for her godliness, mind you, not her body–and approach her dad to ask permission to court her. Without knowing much about her, he would have to prove to the dad that he was serious about a relationship with the daughter.

If the dad thought the young man was suitable, he would inform the young man of the physical boundaries of the relationship, such as when/if they could start to hold hands. The dad could also control the frequency of contact, monitor emails and phone calls, and require all interaction happen in the presence of other family members. It was encouraged but not Biblically necessary for the father to ask his daughter for her opinion of the young man, regardless of the age of the daughter.

I saw this courtship process attempted once in Reb Bradley’s own family. However, even with his courtship “expertise,” Reb’s involvement was not able to prevent a lot heartbreak, drama, and broken friendships when the courtship ended.  And even Reb’s involvement and teaching couldn’t prevent at least three of his six children from having premarital sex, including one unwed pregnancy. I am not saying this because I think his kids are bad people–they certainly are not. I’m only saying these things because Reb Bradley is still trying to sell himself as an expert on family relationships and courtship. His materials give other parents false expectations of the outcome; people who take his advice should not expect better results than the man himself has been able to achieve.

When I started college at age 22, I determined to give male friendship and dating a try.  It was very difficult at first.  Because I was paranoid about flirting or being attractive, I had trouble relaxing and just being myself.  However, I was encouraged to persevere because I could see the benefits right away.  Long conversations with guys helped me see the world differently and let me experience a different style of communication.  Once I could interact freely with guys, I stopped developing crushes on every boy I saw.  I started to gain confidence about myself, and I started to see what type of guys I got along with the best.

Compatibility, not just character and beliefs, is important to consider when selecting a spouse. This is something that the couple can only determine for themselves by spending lots of time together, not only in groups but also alone.  No wonder Reb Bradley tries to downplay compatibility; he wants to keep the father in charge and he wants the father to control the sexual aspect of the relationship as well. That’s why he teaches singles that they can make a marriage work with anyone, and it’s better for their sanctification to marry someone really different from themselves.

In case anyone cares, even though I dated a few different people in college, I was still a virgin when I married.  However, I was surprised to learn that my virginity wasn’t the “gift to my husband” that I was led to believe.  My amazing husband, himself a virgin at marriage, honestly didn’t care about whether or not I’d had sex before.  Additionally, we both found that physical closeness helped us maintain emotional closeness and openness with each other throughout our dating relationship.  The process of getting to know each other mentally and emotionally is gradual, so why should getting to know each other physically be so abrupt?  We were both very happy that we allowed some sexual progress in our dating relationship, and we both feel it has helped us to have a healthier sex life in our marriage.

For me, what I’ve learned is that there is no use in denying that we are sexual beings, and no benefit to fearing it or trying to hide it.  Accept yourself, take responsibility for yourself, and make your own choices.  You’ll find that sexuality is not such a scary and powerful monster when you stop treating it like one.

*****

To be continued.

Why The Rebelution’s Modesty Survey Was A Bad Idea: Shaney Irene’s Story

HA Editorial Team19 Comments

HA note: Shaney Irene’s story was originally published on March 13, 2013, on her site ShaneyIrene.com. She was homeschooled and was a former moderator on the Rebelution forum and now describes herself as a “thinker, reader, and writer” who is “passionate about adoption, youth ministry, and ending sexual abuse.” This story is reprinted with her permission.

On Valentine’s Day 2007, The Rebelution unveiled the Modesty Survey. Girls submitted questions, and guys responded. As a moderator of the Rebelution forum, I was really excited about the project. I posted it on Facebook, forwarded it to my youth pastor, and talked about it with anyone who would listen.

Six years later, if you ask me what I think of the Survey, I’ll tell you I regret having been a part of it, and I wish the project didn’t exist.

What happened? Well, basically I realized there are a lot of problems with modesty as taught in American Christianity, and the Survey hands a megaphone to some of the worst of those problems.

Perhaps the biggest and most disturbing problem is that we gave a platform to guys just because, well, they were guys.

We had no way of knowing whether the respondents had a healthy understanding of their own sexuality, knew the difference between attraction and lust, truly respected women, etc. We gave legitimacy to the idea that they had a right to speak about women’s clothing choices simply because they were male. 

Just because a person is male doesn’t mean their opinions on modesty are legitimate. And, quite frankly, it was inappropriate for us to promote the idea that men should teach women what clothing choices are appropriate. It reinforces the false idea that modesty is something that women do for men, an idea never found in the Bible and fraught with its own set of problems.

In offering a platform to over 1600 guys, many of whom shouldn’t have been given it, we lent legitimacy to some very dangerous ideas.

Many guys admitted to losing respect for girls who didn’t live up to their ideas of modesty, feeling “disgusted” or “angered” by these same girls, and even going so far as to say, “…she loses her right to ask guys to stop looking at her like something to be had…you are asking to have guys stare at you.” The word “cause” in relation to guys’ lust also made a frequent appearance.

This is the same attitude that says victims of sexual assault and harassment who wear “immodest” clothing are “asking for it.” This is the attitude that allows pastors to think that “What were you wearing?” is a legitimate question to ask when a woman reports being sexually harassed or assaulted. It’s the attitude that allows stories like this to happen.

We gave this attitude a platform.

(Ironically, all of the guys were asked to sign a petition in which they admitted that their lust was entirely their own fault. We missed the contradiction we were presenting.)

We also promoted the idea that modesty is primarily expressed through clothing choices.

While modesty as an attitude of the heart was given a lot of lip service, you simply can’t get past the fact that the vast majority of the 148 questions were about clothes.

The idea of modesty was inherently connected to the idea of not being a “stumbling block” for men, instead of being connected to the ideas of humility and self-respect. Modesty in Scripture is about not flaunting oneself. When Paul tells women to dress modestly, he’s basically saying, “Hey, let your beauty be about a beautiful heart, not about dressing extravagantly to impress others!”

But when modesty is about not “causing men to stumble,” it becomes about someone else’s reaction, not the state of one’s heart.

The survey allowed little to no room for the idea that, “Hey, maybe just because the majority of guys think a girl is being immodest, doesn’t mean she actually is.”

This is further reinforced by many responses from guys that made a direct correlation between a girl’s clothing choices and the state of her heart. Multiple guys made comments such as, “It changes everything about what I think of her,” “I feel sorry for them, because they must value their looks a lot, and esteem themselves a lot in their body, rather than in their relationship with the Lord,” and “…my opinion of her character lowers quite a bit.” In making these statements, the guys are making assumptions based solely on one factor: clothing.

You can’t say modesty is a heart issue, then make assumptions about a person’s heart based on their clothing choices. That’s backwards.

The last problem I’ll mention is that the Survey did nothing to differentiate between healthy, normal biological attraction, and lust.

Unfortunately, there are lots of guys who are led to believe they are the same thing. So when they find themselves physically attracted to a girl, they feel guilty. By asking guys to go through a list of questions about clothes and think about their reactions, we unintentionally reinforced unnecessary shame for those guys who didn’t understand that their biological reactions are not the same as lust.

(For further reading on the problems that modesty teachings present for guys, I recommend these posts by Preston and Dianna.)

When these concerns were brought up when the Survey first launched, we justified its existence through disclaimers and clarifications. Not once did someone say, “You know what, disclaimers don’t exempt you from the problems with the Survey.” Six years later, after hearing many stories on how modesty teachings have hurt people, I’ve realized it’s true: good intentions don’t erase problems.

So while I still think that modesty is important, the Survey approached the topic from the wrong angle, used incredibly problematic methods, and ultimately does more harm than good.

If you are a girl who has felt pressure from the Survey, I’m so sorry. If others have used it to control you, devalue you, or question your discernment, I’m sorry. You are free to ignore the Survey and to make decisions based on the Holy Spirit’s leading and input from friends and family that YOU trust.

Sex™ (and the lies I was told about it)

HA Editorial Team22 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Kierstyn King’s blog Bridging the Gap.  It was originally published on April 2, 2013.

(”Sex™” for this post refers to traditional (procreative/penetrative) intercourse.)

Sex™ is hard – and I don’t mean it in the cute double-entandra way. I mean it’s difficult.

It’s hard being newly married with an unhealthy body image, unhealthy (and untrue) understanding of what Sex™ is and means. Becoming quickly disillusioned by false promises perpetuated by parents and theologians and feeling horribly ashamed – and mostly? mostly angry. Because the lies of my childhood permeated every fiber of my being and made intimacy scary.

Imagine being told that you’re damaged goods and no one in their right mind would love you if you had sex before you were married. Imagine being compared to murky water in a glass, a scratch on a sports car, a chip on fine china if you were to be impure (which is so loaded that it could even mean something as simple as having a crush on someone. I know I felt guilty and apologized for having a crush once – thinking that made me undesirable). Imagine being scrutinized for kissing, or so much as holding hands while dating. Because that leads to Sex™ you know? And there’s no such thing as self control.

But then also being told, as a young girl, that when you’re married – you have to have A LOT of Sex™. Whenever your husband wants it, and you have to have unprotected, unsafe Sex™, too, because otherwise you’re ruining god’s design. Being told that essentially your job, once married is to be a baby and sex machine – because otherwise your husband would probably leave you (don’t get me started).

To make this worth it? To make not having sex before you’re married worth it, they tell you that you will have The Best Sex Ever™ just because you’re the purest of them all.

The Best Sex Ever™ is supposed to happen with absolutely no knowledge of your body, learning only abstinence, and being told your entire life that Sex™ is evil, bad, and ungodly outside marriage, but that as soon as the pastor announces you, it’s the most best thing ever and you suddenly know all about your anatomy and how your bodies work together?

It’s about time someone called bullshit.

Purity teachings, abstinence only education, and guilt/fear/shame tactics about my sexuality have been hard to get rid of. They permeate, they collect, they stay, they tell me I can’t talk about the fact that I did not, indeed, have The Best Sex Ever™ because I waited and proceeded to be ignorant about my body. My ignorance has cost me much, personally. Largely in embarrassment, but also in identifying physical problems, and forming a healthy relationship with myself and my own sexuality.

Those feelings of failure persisted for a while, failure because purity teachings required us to be ignorant. Our parents subscribed to “if you tell them nothing, they won’t do it or know how”. The ignorance that was required, the lies I was told – the fact that value as humans were dependent on first: whether or not sex was had before marriage, and second: on how many kids you’ll have after – anger me to no end.

The philosophy of, women must be 1) horribly self-conscious and paranoid about other women their husband see and 2) must be gods in bed because that’s what’s keeping their husband there, strikes me as demented and generally makes me want to strangle whoever is spreading that lie around.

I often feel strange when I’m around people who live this way. Because I don’t feel self conscious or paranoid, I don’t care, and I trust my partner. Our relationship is based on so much more than that.

“Purity” teaches you that appearances and sex are everything, but also that you should in no way think about or know about your body, sex, or have any healthy relationship regarding your sexuality or your future partner’s.

“Purity” taught me that ignorance is safe, wanted, necessary and it lead to me feeling like a failure, guilty, ashamed, confused, and disillusioned.

I was homeschooled,  I bought the lie, I believed ignorance was best, and I was told I’d be rewarded. I know countless others have suffered at the hands of purity teachings, and abstinence only education, of not being allowed to know about our own anatomy. I was ashamed because I didn’t know basic things (like, about my hymen).

I wish that I had been taught a healthy outlook of my body, of my sexuality, of my existence; instead of one that degraded not just women, but all of humanity into raging sex beasts.  Even so, if there is one thing I learned the hard way (ha), the one thing that I learned that made dealing with the shame and guilt easier (if not almost completely go away)? Is that sex is what you and your partner make of it. Sex is about enjoyment, it’s about each other, it’s about what makes both people involved feel good and is not about procreation.

Post-Fundamentalist Marriage

HA Editorial Team2 Comments

Crosspost: Post-Fundamentalist Marriage

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Latebloomer’s blog Past Tense Present Progressive. It was originally published on July 4, 2012.

"My church was completely wrong about women."
“My church was completely wrong about women.”

If I had stayed within the constraints of fundamentalism and Christian Patriarchy, my husband and I would absolutely not be happily married today.  Our relationship from the very beginning consisted of many departures from the teachings I grew up with.  Each of those departures furthered the development, health, and mutual happiness of our relationship.

The first departure: As a single woman, I moved out of my parents’ home to get a college education. What is a completely ordinary step for many North American women was a desperate and terrifying leap for me. My family’s homeschooling church, led by Reb Bradley, promoted a very restrictive view of gender roles along with a strong suspicion of the “liberal bias” of higher learning institutions. Within the church culture, daughters were obligated to stay home under their father’s authority until marriage; once married, they would be housekeepers and stay-at-home mothers.  For daughters, a college education was dangerous (because it removed them from their father’s protection), risky for their faith (because it exposed them to non-Christian ideas), and wasteful (because it was not practical for their duties at home).

However, despite my church’s reservations about college, only good things came to me through my experiences there, far away from home.  College helped me grow socially, intellectually, physically, and spiritually in ways that have benefited me in every area of my life since then.  But of all the good things, I am most grateful for the chance to meet my husband; we were definitely meant to be together.  Without college, we would never have met.

The second departure: My boyfriend and I dated instead of courting. According to Reb Bradley’s teaching of “Biblical” courtship, a daughter needed the protection and guidance of her father to find a spouse. This was because women were supposedly easily deceived, just like Eve in the Garden of Eden, swayed by their emotions and easily taken advantage of. Through the courtship process, a father could “guide” his daughter by screening any suitors for “correct” religious and political beliefs; he could “protect” his daughter by making rules about displays of affection and enforcing those rules through constant supervision.

My experiences away from home at college convinced me that my church was completely wrong about women.  In fact, it was denying women experience and education that caused them to be so dependent on men; it was not an innate quality of women. As I was working hard to increase my self-confidence and independence that my church and family had damaged, I made a goal for myself: I was not only going to date, I was also going to ask out the guy.

The first and only guy that I asked out turned out to be my future husband.  As it so happened, we lived several hours apart from each other, so we only had one meeting and one shot at a relationship.  If I hadn’t taken the initiative to ask him out, we would never have ended up together.

It is absolutely critical that my husband and I found each other without being pushed or restricted by our parents.  We were not playing a role of trying to please our parents and stay true to our parents’ beliefs; we were free to be ourselves, and we could see more clearly what our life would be like together if we got married.  We were adults, taking responsibility for ourselves and our well-being in the present and the future.

The third departure: My fiance and I cohabitated before getting married. It goes without saying that cohabitation was forbidden in the culture I was raised in, since even the alone time of dating was considered unnecessary and hazardous to “purity”.  In fact, cohabitation was seen as one of the great evils of society and a major contributor to the decrease of marriage and increase of divorce rates in North America.

My fiance and I never planned to cohabitate. The circumstances of life simply made it the best option for us. It was only later that we saw that cohabitation itself benefited our relationship.  It gave us confidence that we were making the right decision to get married, because we could more clearly envision our future married life together.  What were the gaps like between structured activities and conversations?  What were we like as introverts, when we withdrew from our pseudo-extroversion in order to recharge?  What was it like to take care of mundane tasks together, like keeping up an apartment, cooking, cleaning, and shopping for groceries?  What did he act like, first thing in the morning before he’d had his coffee?  What did I look like, first thing in the morning before I’d put on makeup?  The fewer surprises, the better–especially when it’s a lifelong commitment you’re talking about.

Besides that, cohabitating without having premarital sex allowed us to horrify absolutely everyone in the world.

The fourth departure: He pushed me to freely express my opinions and disagree with him.  As we developed a closer relationship, we began to experience some communication challenges.  Specifically, I found it extremely difficult to express my opinions, even when we were just making simple decisions such as what movie to watch or restaurant to eat at.  A lot of this was due to my emotional repression from authoritarian parenting, but there was more to it than that.  It also came from a serious misunderstanding of healthy relationships, which I had learned from my church and family.  I felt, deep down, that having and expressing my own opinions was selfish and would cause my partner unhappiness. I thought we would have a better, stronger, and happier relationship if I buried my preferences and played the role of a supportive wife.

To my surprise, the opposite was true.  Due to my “unselfishness,” I rarely felt loved or understood, and my partner constantly felt frustrated as he tried to guess my wants and needs in order to make me feel valued.

It turned out that he wanted to have a relationship with a real person, a person with feelings and thoughts. He did not want a “yes man” or a deferential subordinate; he wanted us to learn from and challenge each other.  Improving our communication skills beautifully affected our relationship; we began to understand ourselves and each other much better.  With that greater understanding, we were able to begin making better decisions as a team, compromising and compensating each other when necessary, so that we experienced the most mutual benefit.

The fifth departure: We don’t separate our responsibilities based on gender.  Within fundamentalism and Christian Patriarchy, your role in life is based on your gender, with no regard for your personality, strengths, weaknesses, or preferences.  If you are a man, you must provide and lead.  If you are a woman, you must take care of the house and children and defer to your husband’s decisions.  Any unhappiness that arises from this gender-based arrangement is merely a sign of your need to depend on God more and try even harder to fulfill your gender role properly.

That approach to life is blind to the huge amount of variety in the world and even the variety in the Bible.  Instead of acknowledging variety and diversity, everything is black and white, neatly categorized, and stacked in little boxes.  All the misfits and in-betweens are either ignored or labeled as sinful.

My husband and I realized right away that we would both be unhappy if we just automatically followed traditional gender roles without adapting them to suit who we were. In some ways, we appear very traditional at first glance; I quit my job to be a stay-at-home mom, and he supports us financially by working every day.  However, we are only doing that because we both happen to be happy in those roles right now, and we do not feel trapped because we know we could choose another arrangement at any time.

In many other ways, we have chosen to depart from traditional gender roles to promote the greatest mutual happiness and success.  For instance, he loves cooking and experimenting in the kitchen, while I find cooking to be a monotonous chore.  We are both happier when we share the cooking responsibilities.  Also, organizing and planning comes naturally to me, but he has a lot of difficulty thinking of and keeping track of the details.  That means we are both happier and things run more smoothly when I take charge of managing our plans and vacations.  Over time, we have recognized that we each have areas of expertise, so the person with the relevant skill or knowledge naturally takes the lead at the appropriate time.  Each of us is unique, and together we make a unique team; it would be a shame to damage that dynamic relationship by trying to force ourselves into roles that don’t fit us.

These five departures are risks that I took, doing the very things that I had been warned about for my whole fundamentalist youth.  In the end, it turned out that they were stepping stones from my depressed past life to my satisfied present life.  They were an escape route surrounded by scary shadows and “maybes”, but I’ve finally made it out into the light. I feel extremely lucky. I hope for the same happiness for each person who reads this; just realize that happiness doesn’t come from formulas and rules, and it will probably look different for you than for me, because of the beautiful variety of life. 

Ticking Time Bombs of Atomic Hormones: Abel’s Story

HA Editorial Team11 Comments

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

Growing up in my homeschool world, I heard constantly from everyone around me about the importance of modesty and purity. Women were supposed to dress up like Victorian-aged puritans because men are so susceptible to lust and we just can’t control ourselves. I never understood this. But I accepted it because everyone else around me seemed to and I never felt I had the right to question it. If I tried to question it, wouldn’t that just be the sexual freak inside me trying to fight God?

Oh. Yeah. I kinda got ahead of myself.

There’s a sexual freak inside of me. Or, well, there’s a sexual freak inside of every male. According to my culture, all males are sexual freaks waiting to happen.

We’re like ticking time bombs of atomic hormones.

You don’t want to let those time bombs out until marriage. And it’s really easy to let them out. That’s why women should all dress so carefully. If a man happens to see a woman readjusting her bra strap, all hell could break loose and men could turn into savage beasts. There is a rapist inside of all men, including me.

I never thought there was a rapist inside of me. I never felt a desire to force myself onto a woman when I accidentally saw a bra strap peaking out of a woman’s denim jumper. But I still felt sick to my stomach when I caught myself looking one second too long at that bra strap. I felt that indicated my inherent dirtiness. I felt nothing but pure disgust for my body. I felt God staring at me from that bra strap, as if he was about to turn me into a pillar of salt, just like he turned Lot’s wife into salt for looking back at Sodom.

I’d stay awake at night, begging God to forgive me.

I’m surprised there’s not a whole generation of homeschooled males that have fetishes about bra straps.

But really, what I took to heart from all this talk about how obsessed men were with sex was not just that there was a rapist inside of me. It was that apparently I had a broken rapist inside of me. Because, honestly, I never felt so overwhelmed by semi-exposed skin that I couldn’t control myself. I spent years thinking there was something wrong with me. Men were supposed to “stumble” when they saw a midriff, or a shoulder, or too much leg. But I never “stumbled” like that — meaning, I never saw a midriff and went home and masturbated about it.

So I decided when I was sixteen that I must be gay.

In retrospect, that only made me feel worse.

Because men never made me “stumble,” either.

Because I’m not gay.

I was actually straight. And as far as straight people go, I was actually normal, too. Apparently normal people — straight or gay or whatever you are — don’t obsess about sex as much as homeschooling parents do.

I was conditioned by all these myths that pervade homeschooling that males are so overwhelmed by sex that they can’t exercise any semblance of self-control. But you know what? We can. And we’re not only hurting women by saying that women are responsible for mens’ thoughts. We’re also hurting men by making us all out to be monsters with uncontrollable sexual urges.

Rape is a horrible thing that should be opposed by everyone. Normal human sexuality is completely different. And I am sad that I grew up in a world that saw no problems with blurring the lines between the two.

It took me years to figure that out. What I used to think was me being gay eventually became me wondering if I just had a really low libido. But then I went to the doctor and found out, no, my libido is fine, too.

Apparently my problem was that I’m not a stereotype manufactured out of thin air by the I Kissed Dating Goodbye courtship cult.

But after everything I’ve gone through, that’s a problem I am ok living with.

Be Perfect as Your Heavenly Father is Perfect: Charity’s Story

HA Editorial Team2 Comments

true_love_waits_ii_by_oriel94

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

I’ve been following HA from the beginning. I knew from the first moment I saw the Facebook page that I would write my story, even though I do not think there is anything surprising about my life. I was raised in a conservative Christian home, was homeschooled through graduation, and in graduate school dropped Christianity for feminism. That transition, while difficult, felt natural for me. Feminism gave me a language for the discrepancies I could see and feel, but could not name. To this day my parents are dismayed and my brother is bemused about my ideological transformation.

I don’t know what parts of my life are important to tell, which parts are most salient. I just know that along the way I learned to hate myself. Because even though I know that I am smart and beautiful, I also know that I should be better. The only yardstick I have is absolute perfection for whatever it is that is on my plate in the moment. And if I can’t be perfect, then I need to just complete whatever the project is and move on to something else. There is so little joy in that way of living. There is no self-acceptance. Nothing can just be what it is in the moment; the striving is both constant and tortuous. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me explain.

I was raised to be a good Christian girl who did the best she could. It just so happens that, aside from math, I’m good at most things I have tried. All of my life I’ve been told that everything I touch turns to gold. There is a shit-ton of pressure in that statement and that pressure is the center of my story.

Until college, my social circle consisted mostly of other homeschoolers and families from church. Basically my life was “all Jesus all the time.” I learned from a very early age that both God and Jesus were perfect and that perfection was the goal. Of course, my parents would deny that they ever taught me that explicitly, because of course perfection is impossible. But try telling that to a child who grows up hearing about how the perfect love of God covers all her sins! I am a typical first-born, Type-A overachiever. Combine that with the teaching that God made it possible for me to be perfect through the perfection of Christ and his sacrifice on the cross, and BOOM. I am a walking shitfest of a mess.

As a teenager I tried to do everything right. I signed the True Love Waits pledge card, and took it one step further: no kissing until marriage. I taught abstinence-only sex education to 7th graders at a local Catholic school. And as if that wasn’t enough, I happily boarded the Joshua Harris I Kissed Dating Goodbye train. I am still baffled as to how I believed that I could do so much talking about sexsexsex, whether it was blatant or veiled, and not want to even think about doing it! I was encouraged and applauded by every adult I met for my amazing character, commitment, and chastity. But what I remember most was feeling shame about every inch of my body and what it wanted, how good it felt when I touched myself, and the simple desire of wanting a boy to like me. How could I be perfect if I wanted to have sex?

Growing up I lacked imperfect role models…people who were successful, but weren’t afraid to genuinely admit their imperfection.

For the next decade, that was my frame of mind. Any little imperfection ate away at my self-worth. I really bought into Matthew whatever-whatever, ‘be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect.’ Instead of seeing my life as an opportunity to nourish my soul through learning what my mind and body could accomplish, every endeavor became yet another way to measure my failure. How can I be the perfect student if I don’t have a 4.0 (finally got it on my third degree!)? How can I be the perfect yoga instructor if I can’t touch my toes? How can I be the perfect partner if what I want is to leave the man I married? How can I be perfect if one of the few places I find both joy and solace is in a bottle of rum? Growing up in the Christian homeschooling subculture taught to view life from the negative. I want to believe this was unintentional. My flair for the dramatic aside, my biggest regret is that I wasn’t taught to enjoy and love my body or my life. I was taught that both my body and my life were things to be disciplined, controlled, and held in check.

I bought into the belief that not being perfect meant I was a failure.

A different truth is that if I ever achieved perfection, there would be nothing left for which to live.

I took a three-day break after writing that last sentence. I needed time to process. Yesterday morning I was having breakfast with a friend of mine and I told him about this essay. He asked me what my story had to do with being homeschooled, since it sounded to him like a story about being raised super-Christian. Good question. My answer? Being homeschooled meant that I only ever came in contact with other people of the same persuasion, religious/belief system, hell!, life system, as the one in which I was living. Being homeschooled for me was being surrounded by people who were also supposed to be perfect because we were all ‘covered by the blood of Jesus.’ I didn’t know that imperfection was an option. I didn’t know that I could make choices outside of the Bible and still be a good person, that I would still like myself, that people would still like me, that God would still like me. Not that I really believe in God anymore, but that’s for a different essay. It wasn’t until graduate school that I finally came out of my shell—out of my parents house—and realized that there was an entire world in which my identity didn’t hinge on if I was a virgin or read my Bible or went to church or dressed modestly or all the other things my childhood and adolescence was hyper-focused on—because of course, for a woman, those things equal perfection.

Hang on. I’ll be back in another couple of days.

After rereading and thinking and editing, I’ve decided that this is not something I want to come back to. This isn’t really the story I want to tell. So let me start again.

I was homeschooled. I was sheltered. I was raised in a very conservative, Christian home. But I got out. I don’t have any major regrets from high school; I am lucky. I have worked exceptionally hard to get to know myself, to be honest with the people in my life, and to make choices that are good for me. Being homeschooled taught me to hold myself accountable and that at the end of the day, the only person who was responsible for what was or was not accomplished was me. My parents taught me an amazing work ethic that I couldn’t shake even if I tried. Sure, that has led to me being a perfectionist workaholic who sucks at relaxing, but the yoga and rum are helping with that.

My parents and I no longer talk politics or religion, but I know that they love me and have my back. Being homeschooled meant that I had a lot to overcome in terms of finding a footing in the world outside of my parents house; I think it took me a lot longer than average to figure out who I wanted to be because the people I came in contact with were so homogenous—I didn’t have options to pick from until I was in my 20s. But, being homeschooled also taught me to be content with myself because quite often I was left alone to my own devices.

So, all that to say being homeschooled was definitely a curse; in that sheltered, Christian environment I learned some pretty shitty ways of thinking about myself. But being homeschooled also taught me how to look out for myself. Perhaps that part of the equation paved the way for me to become the feminist I am today? My mother would die if she read that. But even so, without both those pieces of the puzzle, I doubt I’d be writing this today.

Feminist philosopher Margaret Urban Walker writes that,

In any case, I think that feminist thinkers are entitled to the excitement and intellectual challenge of forging and intensively testing visionary paradigms, of inaugurating their own discursive communities as sites of solidarity and creative communication in their own terms, and of self-consciously exploring confrontational rhetorics as some instruments, among others, for initiating wholesale intellectual change in their favor. (“Further Notes” 154)

Writing this piece has been a process of “feminist thinking” for me; becoming a part of the HA community has forced me to (re)consider so much about myself. I am grateful for the opportunity to add my voice in solidarity.