“Pleasure is Holy”

— How These Latinas Broke Free From Purity Culture

By Jessica Hoppe

The story of how I lost my virginity — a tale I long held onto — was a lie. A fiction as false as the construct itself, I fabricated the narrative to please my boyfriend. Before we got together, he expressed that my chastity was one of the most appealing qualities I possessed. His previous girlfriend had not been a virgin, and he resented not having been her first. Sloppy seconds, the boys called it. Although I became sexually active with him, I’d done it once before, a fact that I clearly needed to keep secret if I wanted him to pick me.

This double standard barely registered to me as a teen. Though premarital sex was not allowed, it was normal for men to have sex before marriage. Raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, a sect of US evangelical Christianity, my mother hoped the religion would safeguard her daughters against the violence she’d endured — a common response to abuse and gender discrimination. In reality, however, organized religion often uses fear to control our bodies, corrupting natural rites of passage through an anti-pleasure philosophy.

Over a decade of affiliation, I watched as the church judged and punished dozens of women for acting upon their desires. The men who did the same didn’t face any humiliation or consequences. Sequestered behind closed doors for hours, girls had no choice but to answer to a tribunal of elders — three or four self-appointed, middle-aged white men — who, through an intimately inappropriate line of questioning and based on the rumors they had heard about each girl’s behavior, assessed her level of repentance. From what I saw, the tribunal never believed any of the women or girls were contrite. 


“Raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, a sect of US evangelical Christianity, my mother hoped the religion would safeguard her daughters against the violence she’d endured — a common response to abuse and gender discrimination. In reality, however, organized religion often uses fear to control our bodies, corrupting natural rites of passage through an anti-pleasure philosophy.”
— jessica hoppe

When the elders deemed the victims guilty, everyone would find out. An appointed elder read their names aloud at the following service, publicly declaring their status to the congregation as disfellowshipped, which initiated a period of banishment. No one could speak to or acknowledge her for months — some for years — until the elders decided she was repentant and approved her reinstatement.

Through this indoctrination and the gravity of our family history, I began to think of my sexuality as separate from my body, aligning myself with the dictates of purity culture in order to be chosen. So I could feel safe. I had no idea I’d fallen prey to a favorite instrument of white supremacy.

Evangelists contextualize sex exclusively within a heteronormative framework and uphold the image of a thin, able-bodied, cis, straight, white woman as the epitome of purity, perpetuating colonial and Eurocentric values that systemically oppress women of color. The promise to wait for marriage seems universal, but what is the result when that aspiration is unattainable no matter your actions because it’s at odds with your identity?

As it turns out, it can wreak havoc on your mental health and familial relationships. A study conducted at University of Massachusetts Boston found that while the normalization of oppression — the restriction of sexual agency, the teaching of shame as a response to pleasure, and the perpetuation of rape culture — harms all, women of color were uniquely injured by the alienation of the rhetoric, expressing symptoms that “mimic that of posttraumatic stress disorder.”


“Specifically within the Latinx community, purity culture comes from marianismo, a deep devotion toward the Virgin Mary and a set of beliefs that encourage women to be pure, wait until marriage, respect patriarchal values, and self-sacrifice for the sake of the family.”
— Adriana Alejandre

Specifically within the Latinx community, purity culture comes from marianismo, a deep devotion toward the Virgin Mary and a set of beliefs that encourage women to be pure, wait until marriage, respect patriarchal values, and self-sacrifice for the sake of the family, ” Adriana Alejandre, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and founder of Latinx Therapy tells Refinery29 Somos. “Whereas, the opposite is allowed for men. There is more forgiveness when men do not respect purity culture than for girls or women. When individuals outgrow this controlling perspective, it often creates estrangement among family members.”

Alejandre further explains that the effects from childhood are lifelong and require that we “unlearn harmful messages around sexuality and gender, such as virginity being a woman’s only worth and gift to husband upon marriage, being ashamed of sexual desires, [dressing] modestly, among many others.”

It is in regaining self-trust that healing can begin. Alejandre advises her clients to pay attention to the feeling of control and imposition. When is the message not coming from within you? “We can reject purity culture by embracing liberation, having open and developmentally appropriate conversations about sex to children, refraining from making statements such as, ‘sex is for marriage,’ and teaching all generations about body autonomy and consent,” she explains.Lastly, I would recommend journaling about messages you received around sex, sexual education, consent, and sexual expression. Some questions to ask can include: How do these topics make me feel when I talk about them out loud to someone else? What are messages I grew up with? What are some beliefs I still carry even though I may not want to? How has my sexual expression changed over time?”


“It is my choice now to rebuke it and reclaim my own: Pleasure is holy; it is freedom, and it is my birthright.”
— JESSICA HOPPE

While I do not turn to scripture often in my recovery from religious and sexual trauma, I do take delight in knowing that the Bible muses erotically through the entire Book of Solomon: A sensual collection of poems depicting lustful, consensual encounters ripe with juicy metaphors for arousal, genitalia, oral sex, and a woman who is not cast to fall on her back and receive; she is the pursuant. It is the story of her sexual awakening, and she never suffers for her passion. The sex is triumphant.

In rereading these ancient texts, I am reminded that it is the church’s calculated interpretations that have perverted sex with shame, a toxic message perpetuated from pulpits all over the world and across generations. It is my choice now to rebuke it and reclaim my own: Pleasure is holy; it is freedom, and it is my birthright. Here, three Latinas from different religious backgrounds discuss how they liberated themselves from purity culture and what they found on the other side.

Joy Valerie Carrera

I grew up evangelical Christian. To me, purity culture was something that was about remaining pure for God, and how it manifested in my life was through unrealistic standards of perfectionism in my relationships, in my behavior, and in my ways of being to ensure that I would one day enter heaven and could not afford to mess up because of one tiny thing. It fed into this anxiety. As a neurodivergent child, it made me feel like I was constantly messing up and not fitting this mold of “perfect.” It contributed to masking so much of who I truly was.

As a teenager, I remember signing a pact with God that I would remain pure until marriage. I was given a key to symbolize my virginity, the key to my heart that on my wedding night I would give to my husband. When I was 16, I thought I was in love with my high school boyfriend. I was waiting for marriage, and we had been dating for a year. My hormonal teenage brain figured a “loophole” would be that it was fine if we had sex because we would eventually get married. I ended up leaving religion at 18, but the conditioning was there and something I would keep learning to rewire. I had been raised to believe that once you had sex, you were tied and bonded to the person for a lifetime, so I ended up staying in this relationship longer than I should have, even though it was unhealthy. I had this guilt and shame that I could not break my pact with God. 


“Purity culture was something that was about remaining pure for God, and how it manifested in my life was through unrealistic standards of perfectionism in my relationships, in my behavior, and in my ways of being to ensure that I would one day enter heaven.”
— Joy Valerie Carrera

I was assaulted at 21, and that was a huge turning point for me because I logically knew it was not my fault, but I had that deep ingrained belief that because I had betrayed God and left the church I was being punished. I transitioned into the complete opposite, exploring my sexuality fully and doing everything that I was told I was not supposed to, but still had this underlying guilt and shame.

It has taken me 10 years of therapy, coaching, deep reflection, so much exploration, and embracing self-love to unlearn the deep, old religious conditioning. I now feel more confident in who I am and realize when the shame pops up, those aren’t my beliefs. They are beliefs that are ready to be liberated. This next phase of my journey, I hope to keep letting go of those to enter into conscious, intimate, and healthy relationships free from the pressure that my religious upbringing put on me.

Margot Spindola

As a cis Latina woman who went to Catholic K-12 school in a small rural town, purity culture was communicated to me through a series of insidious signals and messages that brought about immense introspection, shame, and insecurity about my own body — something I still struggle with unlearning to this day.

I learned about purity in Catholic school. While in seventh grade, I took a sexual education course taught by one of the moms of the community who was also a registered nurse. Despite her background, I distinctly remember her standing at the front of the class, waving her hands in the air, and telling us, “Condoms are of the devil.”

When I was 14 or 15 years old, my immigrant mami slipped a “God’s Plan” brochure underneath my bedroom door.I was already on my way to having sex by then, so it’s maddening that other people felt like they had control over my body when I was barely even wrapping my head around my own relationship with it.

In my junior year of high school, I attended what they called a “Morality” class, where philosophical debate and scripture overlapped and we would spend hours listening to my teacher drone on about natural family planning and how having premarital sex would send me straight on the path to purgatory. Because I was already feeling the asphyxiating grasp of organized religion’s hands around my neck, I knew that this talk of being a virgin was likely to be a scam. I didn’t yet realize or understand the invisible script it had coded into my body as I grew older. For a short time, I wore a purity ring. At the time, I didn’t truly resonate with my body and felt numb. Following the scripts my community gave me felt like the only way forward


The most radical act of rejecting purity culture is acknowledging the harms it has perpetuated.”
— Margot Spindola

Fast-forward to today, I’m 27 years old, and I embrace pleasure. But this didn’t happen overnight. It was a gradual process of self-reflection, critical thinking, and having conversations about sex. My body is no longer someone else’s to dictate. Instead, it is the “practice ground for transformation,” as adrianne maree brown so thoughtfully affirms in her book, Pleasure Activism. I’m thankful for the ways I was taught, regardless of the harm caused, because for better or for worse, it became a catalyst for my reckoning with my body. Instead of ignoring my body’s signals for pleasure (sexual or not), I embrace the ups and downs of where it takes me.

It has taken, and will take me, a long time to get to a place of crafting my own pleasure practice. It’s not to say that shame doesn’t sneak up on me, or that sometimes sex with a man can feel pressuring or the need to serve comes up. But the most radical act of rejecting purity culture is acknowledging the harms it has perpetuated.

Cindy Luquin

From my earliest memories, the concept of purity culture was ingrained in me through my family’s religious beliefs, particularly within the context of Pentecostalism. As the first child born in my family, I witnessed how religious congregations often served as a sanctuary for immigrant families from Latin America when they first arrived in the US, providing a sense of belonging and practical support.

The strong influence of Pentecostalism, combined with my Guatemalan heritage, created a subtle denial of our Maya Indigenous roots within our religious practice. I vividly recall an incident when I was just 4 years old, dressing up in traditional Indigenous clothing for a church event, which stirred conflicting emotions of pride and unease.

These early encounters with purity culture and the erasure of our Maya heritage left a lasting impression, highlighting the complex interplay between religious teachings, cultural identity, and the need for acceptance within the community. As I grew older, the effects of purity culture manifested in a profound internal struggle. I felt wrong for questioning the belief system and witnessed a disturbing double standard regarding gender roles and abusive behaviors.


“Although remnants of my religious upbringing occasionally resurface, I have done the necessary work in therapy and through personal healing to reclaim my bodily autonomy and liberate myself from judgment.”
— Cindy Luquin

The impact of purity culture led me to suppress my true identity and creative expression as a queer bisexual person. It burdened me with shame and guilt, leading to physical manifestations and a strategy of “faking” illness to avoid attending church. Only later did I realize that these feelings were genuine, rooted in the anxiety I felt about the constraints imposed on me.

In my early 20s, the pivotal experience of moving away to college granted me the freedom to explore my true identity and embark on a journey of self-discovery. Today, I proudly identify as a spiritual queer person, reconnecting with my Maya heritage and embracing the wisdom of Maya cosmology, which values earth, medicine, and nature.

Although remnants of my religious upbringing occasionally resurface, I have done the necessary work in therapy and through personal healing to reclaim my bodily autonomy and liberate myself from judgment. This process has instilled in me a sense of responsibility to support and guide others as a queer elder and educator, free from judgment.

Complete Article HERE!

What Is Sexual Repression?

— Do I Have It?

Human sexuality is a combination of cultural, psychological, and biological factors. It is a way of expressing emotions and feeling connected through physical affection and pleasure. Family, society, and culture influence our perceptions and attitudes toward sex and sexuality. Sexual repression happens when someone avoids expressing their sexual feelings, thoughts, and desires.

By

  • Everyone has different comfort levels and personal boundaries regarding sex and sexuality.
  • Sexual repression may stem from religious, cultural, or societal stereotypes and expectations.
  • Discussing sexual repression may be embarrassing, but without treatment, it can negatively impact your physical, emotional, and mental health.
  • Effective communication with an intimate partner can help you cope while strengthening the relationship.

In this article, you’ll learn about sexual repression if it’s something you might have, and how to work through it.

What is sexual repression?

Sexual repression is one way your mind copes with difficult or painful ideas about sex and sexuality. It is a defense mechanism that causes you to push undesirable feelings, thoughts or desires out of your conscious thinking.

You might be experiencing sexual repression for a variety of reasons, including:

  • Family dynamics. Growing up in a household where it was unacceptable to discuss the topic of sex might have instilled a sense of shame when talking about or participating in sexual activities.
  • Cultural norms and religious beliefs. Culture and religion often have significant roles in how you view sex and sexuality. Growing up with very restrictive attitudes toward sex, being told that sex outside of marriage or sex for pleasure was shameful or amoral, you might have negative associations with sex and sexuality.
  • Gender stereotypes. Traditional societal beliefs about masculinity and femininity may affect your outlook on sex and sexuality. The stereotypes that men must be dominant, aggressive, and sexual while women need to be submissive, emotional, and passive can adversely affect your views of sex and sexuality.
  • Sexual orientation. Individuals who struggle with their sexual identity or orientation may experience feelings of guilt, shame, and discomfort around their sexuality. Fear of judgment, stigma, and prejudice may negatively impact your feelings toward sex and sexuality.
  • Prior trauma or abuse. A history of sexual abuse or trauma can significantly impact your capacity for creating intimate relationships. Sexual intimacy may trigger anxiety, fear, or flashbacks of a previous assault.

Sexual repression symptoms

Symptoms of sexual repression are similar in men and women. You may experience the following:

  • Thoughts of shame and embarrassment around sex and sexuality.
  • Lack of desire or lack of ability to participate in sexual activities.
  • Fear and anxiety related to sex and sexuality.

Risks associated with sexual repression

If untreated, sexual repression may cause:

  • Low self-esteem
  • Negative self-image
  • Sexual frustration
  • Emotional withdrawal
  • Difficulty establishing or maintaining intimate relationships

How to cope with sexual repression

Sexuality is very individualized. You may feel pressure from your partner, friends, or the media about what “normal” sexuality is. Each individual has their own thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about what is pleasurable and acceptable.

  • Honesty. Be open and honest with your partner about your emotions. It is easier for your partner to support you when they know what you think and feel. Communication is vital to a healthy relationship.
  • Respect. Try not to pressure yourself to meet your partner’s expectations. Both partners should feel comfortable, respected, and safe in a healthy relationship.
  • Rule out physical issues. It is best to consult your healthcare provider to rule out any physical issues that might be mistaken for sexual repression affecting your libido or sexual desire.
  • Find a sex therapist. Some professionals specialize in treating individuals and couples with sex and sexuality. A sex therapist is a licensed mental health professional that uses psychotherapy to help work through mental and emotional issues related to sex and sexuality. Some therapists specialize in treating individuals with LBGTQ+ issues. With the increased prevalence of telemedicine, it is more convenient to connect with a qualified sex therapist who can help.

How to help your loved one

Sexual repression is a sensitive topic, and your partner may struggle with self-doubt, self-blame, and negativity. The needs and desires of both partners should be equally met. Working together, you can provide a safe space to support your loved one.

  • Be patient. It may take time to work through these issues. Each individual copes and works through things at their own pace.
  • Listen to your partner’s needs. Ask questions and let your partner know what you can do to help.
  • Support. Offer non-judgemental support and reassurance of your love. Your loved one may be experiencing feelings of isolation and self-blame.
  • Be aware of triggers. If your partner has a history of sexual trauma, respect your loved one’s boundaries and be aware of potential triggers.
  • Open communication. Talk to your partner about other ways of expressing intimacy that will be comfortable for both partners.

Confronting sexual repression can be challenging, but with the support of a loving and compassionate partner, it can be easier to overcome sexual repression. Trust, respect, honesty, and open communication are essential for working through challenges and building a solid and healthy relationship.

Complete Article HERE!

These Christian leaders embraced sex positivity

— and now preach it

In recent years, social media has allowed these views to become more widespread

By Suzannah Weiss

Jo Neufeld, a 40-year-old living in Manitoba, Canada, used to feel that she was sex positive despite being Christian. Then, about 10 years ago, she started following Twitter accounts like those of Kevin Garcia, a gay pastor based in Atlanta, and other Christians who talked openly about sex.

Neufeld said the accounts introduced her to “ideas around God wanting pleasure for us” and helped her to reconcile her Christianity with her sex positivity: “I’ve found examples of people living out holy sexuality. And for me, that has been about slowly embracing that I was created for sexual flourishing.”

Traditionally, most Christian leaders have accepted the teaching that sex should occur only in marriage. That has come with a great deal of stigma about sex outside of marriage, leaving Christians — women and LGBTQ people especially — often feeling forced to choose between following their religion and embracing their sexuality.

In recent years, that has borne out in mainstream politics, with conservative Christian groups backing abortion restrictions and the prohibition of discussion of gender and sexuality in schools.

But in some corners of the Internet, church leaders and other public figures are merging Christianity and sex positivity — that is, the belief that all forms of sexual expression between consenting adults are permissible and should be destigmatized.

That follows a general cultural trend: Over the past two decades, Americans have become increasingly accepting of sex outside marriage, LGBTQ relationships and more, according to Gallup.

Thanks in part to the ubiquity of these views on social media, some Christians say they are coming to view a healthy relationship with one’s sexuality as spiritually beneficial and even in line with the Bible.

In 2020, the Pew Research Center found that half of U.S. Christians consider casual sex — defined in the survey as sex between consenting adults who are not in a committed romantic relationship — acceptable at least some of the time.

And in a survey that year of 133 Christian college students across the United States, Aditi Paul, an assistant professor of communication studies at Pace University, found that 80 percent of Christian students masturbate, 68 percent watch pornography and 60 percent have had between one and six casual hookup partners.

The majority of students agreed that casual sex is acceptable; one-night standards are enjoyable; and an individual does not need to be committed to someone to have sex with the person, Paul’s survey found.

Xaya Lovelle, 28, a sex worker in New Orleans, said she had always felt at odds with the sexual mores she had learned in the Roman Catholic Church. But she didn’t feel validated in that perspective, she said, until as a 17-year-old she read “The Purity Myth” by the feminist writer Jessica Valenti. The book argues that American society’s obsession with virginity hurts young women.

Two years later, she started web-camming (which involved live broadcasts and private shows), because she found that “sex wasn’t incompatible with Jesus’ teachings,” she said. Since then, Lovelle added, other Christians, including the nonbinary Catholic mystic sex worker William October, have affirmed her belief that “sex positivity is largely about acceptance of other people and withholding judgment, which reflects Jesus’ actions.”

Alexa Davis, 23, a blogger in Illinois, was raised in a nondenominational church that taught that sex was only for marriage. But she started questioning this dogma in her teens as she came across sex-positive ideas online, from secular figures including video-blogger Laci Green and from religious leaders including the Philadelphia-based Rev. Beverly Dale.

“It felt reassuring to see that confirmation from a practicing minister that sex is meant to be positive,” she recalls of reading an article about Dale, who created the YouTube series “Sex Is Good.”

Dale grew up on a farm in Illinois in the 1950s and attended the Christian Church. Her family didn’t discuss sex at all, making it seem forbidden and shameful, she said. The role of women in her community, she remembers, was “to take care of and teach children and work in potluck oversight in the church.”

“It was the women’s movement that taught me it was okay to be a female and it was perfectly fine to be a sexual female at that,” Dale added. “Once I realized this, I turned to my Christian teachings and the church with a lot of anger.”

Christianity in the United States stems largely from a Puritan tradition that sees the desires of the flesh as contrary to those of the spirit. It wasn’t until the 1970s that women began entering seminaries in larger numbers and publishing writing that critiqued mainstream Christian views of sex, influenced by second-wave feminism. In the 1980s, Dale attended the Chicago Theological Seminary, where she got to read these works, she said, which helped her contextualize her “sex-phobic” upbringing.

“The reason I began to heal was because of feminist theologians,” she added. “If I had stayed with such negative thinking about myself as a woman and denied my own sexuality, I’m convinced I would have died — if not physically, then certainly spiritually.”

New Orleans-based minister Lyvonne Briggs, who shares her sex-positive beliefs on Instagram and hosts the spiritual online learning community Sensual Faith Academy, was raised similarly; she attended a Caribbean Episcopal church, which didn’t talk about sex, and was indoctrinated into purity culture in college, she said. She began to shift her perspective while getting a master of divinity degree at Yale Divinity School. There, Briggs said, she came to understand Jesus as a radical figure, one different from the version of Jesus she had learned about in church growing up.

>On examining the Bible, Briggs said, she found that Jesus had little to say about sex. “What we were told Jesus said are actually gross misinterpretations of the Bible,” she said. “We have to be honest about who wrote the Bible, who’s been translating the Bible, and who it serves us to believe Jesus condemned.”

Dale believes that Jesus uplifted and associated with women in ways that were progressive in his time. “U.S. Christians … have been teaching ideas about sex from sexually conflicted, misogynistic church fathers instead of Jesus,” she said. “If Jesus were their guide, Christians would discount the pleasure police in the church as party poopers.”

Rather than coming from the Bible, Dale said, many sex-negative Christian ideas came from writers born after Jesus’ time, such as Saint Augustine and Saint Jerome. It was Augustine, for instance, she said, who developed the concept of “original sin” — sin passed to a child by sex itself.

Dale and Briggs advocate for interpretations of the Bible that celebrate sexual pleasure. In the biblical book the Song of Solomon, for instance, a female narrator speaks of a lover in erotic terms.

“These lovers are not mentioned as being married; they’re not in the same household,” said Joy Bostic, an associate professor of religious and Africana studies at Case Western Reserve University. “This text, which is an official part of the Bible, echoes medieval mystics, who talk a great deal about spiritual ecstasy as akin to sexual ecstasy.”

As more Christians are being exposed to alternative readings and less-talked-about parts of the Bible, some are denouncing the directives to wait until marriage to have sex or to condemn forms of sexual expression such as LGBTQ relationships and sex work.

Others take pieces of Christian thinking without subscribing to them fully: In her study, Pace University’s Paul found that many students had adopted modified versions of traditional Christian rules, such as not having sex with someone unless intending to marry that person, avoiding in-person sex but still sexting partners, or engaging in hookups but refraining from intercourse. She also found that increasing numbers of students are identifying as both Christian and LGBTQ.

Roya King, a retired Unitarian Universalist bishop in Ohio, was already working in ministry when she started identifying as queer in 2009. When other leaders in her church spoke against same-sex marriage, she recalls, “the idea that I could perform a wedding ceremony but could never participate in one kind of shook me at the core.”

She made a point thereafter to speak to her congregation about LGBTQ rights, she said: “I talked about all people being in the image of God.” And she preached that everything God creates, including sexuality, is holy and should be celebrated, she said.

Other Christians say their sex positivity stems simply from what Jesus deemed the most important commandments: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind,” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

“If what I am doing leaves me aligned with these three commands [love God, love yourself and love others], I can rest easy knowing I’m living in the fullness of this life God has given me,” said Chris Chism, a pastor at the House Dallas church who identifies as gay.

To this end, he added, “it’s the job of our spiritual leaders to facilitate safe conversation — free of condemnation and shame.” Those negative reactions, he added, “are the conduits to unhealthy relationships, unsafe sex practices and even hardcore drug use that has ravaged our communities.”

For King, the most important thing is spreading the word that Jesus provides salvation for the entire world, not just for certain people who live a certain way.

“We have ostracized so many people because of who they are, who they really are,” she said. “We need to preach a gospel of inclusion and love. We can’t get where we need to be without it.”

Complete Article HERE!

How to Overcome Religious Shame in Your Sex Life

By Lindsey Ellefson

If you were raised to see sex and sexuality as a source of shame and embarrassment, you might notice that such feelings tend to linger, no matter how educated, open-minded, and open-legged you consider yourself today. If you come from a religious background, it’s probably even worse.

Fortunately, many religious leaders and secular counselors in the year of our Lord 2021 know that hardline teachings on sexual expression and orientation don’t do much to draw in the spiritually wayward, and can even ostracize believers. So whether you’re trying to balance your religious leanings with your carnal desires or overcome shame you internalized as a child and dragged into bed in your agnostic adulthood, we called on experts who can help.

Don’t be afraid to talk about sex

In a lot of religious households and communities, talking about sexuality is off limits, but refusing to talk about something doesn’t make it go away. A 28-year-old erotic artist in Philadelphia who goes by Claire Voyant tells Lifehacker that her religious upbringing is still causing problems in her sex life, but she’s slowly working through them by talking to friends and counselors.

Leo Morton, an associate pastor and drag queen in North Carolina, suggests the same, adding, “Everybody needs two really good things in this world: One is a good hairdresser and the other is a good counselor.” Morton is openly gay, but found that when he first spoke to a clergy member about his same-sex attraction in his youth, he was shut down and told not to bring it up. Obviously, that approach didn’t make him less gay—and not talking about sexuality isn’t going to make you less randy, either, only more needlessly ashamed of being so. Not acknowledging your sexuality only leads to repression, and that’s how archaic ideas about sex lead to such a pervasive shame. Talking about sex helps you to break the cycle before the cycle breaks you.

Fortunately, there are specialized counselors who can help—people like Kevin Salazar, a psychotherapist at the Gender & Sexuality Therapy Center in New York City, who tells Lifehacker they see lingering shame in their work often.

“I find it is common for clients who grew up in a conservative religious environment to feel shame around how they experience (or don’t experience) sexual and romantic attraction. Folks may feel shame about acting on their attraction even in a supportive and consensual environment,” they say.

Sex-positive friends can help, too

Counseling isn’t the only option, as friends make great listeners, too. Claire, who is also a retired sex worker, explains that because her Catholic education taught her that sexual pleasure was a woman’s duty to provide a man, she has struggled well into her late 20s to masturbate or focus on her own enjoyment during the partnered encounters she began having once she decided not to wait for marriage—in itself is a big step for people with a similar upbringing. Talking to friends, she says, helps, though she does admit she feels “jealousy” toward those who grew up in more liberal households and don’t really get where she’s coming from.

“I totally feel like the odd person out sometimes, like I’m hiding in plain sight,” she says.

Salazar explains, “Folks who grew up in a conservative religious environment and now have a liberal, sex-positive community have also expressed feeling isolated and not understood by their peers who did not experience the same kinds of shame and stigma.”

In some cases, a “hair of the dog” approach might work, especially if you’re still spiritual. Consider talking to insiders who can relate. Not all religious leaders are like the one Morton encountered when he was first questioning his sexuality, especially in this day and age. If you’re trying to square the sexual part of yourself with the religious or spiritual part, you don’t need to pick one.

“The shame and stigma the church has propagated around sexuality—regardless of orientation or gender—is longstanding,” says Rev. Mandy McDow, senior minister at Los Angeles First United Methodist Church, who strives to make sure her congregation is welcoming to members of the LGBTQ+ community and sex workers. “It has been a way in which the church has exercised power and dominion over the vulnerable, which is an actual sin.”

Find community online

Welcoming spaces also exist outside of traditional churches, the most obvious and vast option being right here, on the Internet.

“There are various religious and spiritual communities that will be welcoming and expansive in their understandings of gender, sex, and sexuality,” says Jesse Kahn, LCSW-R, CST, director and sex therapist at the Gender & Sexuality Therapy Center. “And if it’s important for you to be a part of a specific church that tends to have more repressive teachings, there are often variations in how the teachings are discussed based on geography and in progressive online spaces.”

Learn how to talk to yourself about sex

Don’t be afraid to work on yourself, by yourself, and for yourself. As Claire can attest, sex isn’t all about your relationship to someone else; it’s just as much about you. Salazar recommends journaling and listening to related podcasts or reading books; Claire suggests reading columns like this one, then taking time to explore your own beliefs and desires in a comfortable space. Go at your own pace, she says, and practice some gentle self-talk: “The more positive messaging you can incorporate into your life about sex, the better. Like, if you can, just max out until you’re sick of hearing people speak positively about sex, because you really need to rewire your brain completely.”

Echoing advice from Salazar, who mentioned replacing stigmatizing language with affirmations in their practice with clients, Claire advises, “Think about all of the time that was scheduled into your life for people to talk negatively about sex, and now you have to do that, like, twice as much positively.”

If you can believe an all-knowing god was angry at you for being sexual, why not try believing that same god would be proud of you for it? Morton sums up his thoughts accordingly: “God created us, and we are beautiful and our bodies are part of the extension of God himself.” Praise be.

Complete Article HERE!

Why conservative men are more likely to fantasize about sharing their wives

It may, paradoxically, be precisely because they believe cuckoldry is so bad

By Justin Lehmiller

In the wake of allegations that he spent years watching his wife have sex with another man, Jerry Falwell Jr. resigned this week from his post as president of Liberty University. Falwell has denied the specifics of those allegations, but if they’re true, he would be neither the first nor the last conservative man to take pleasure in sharing his spouse or partner while he looks on, a sexual practice known more commonly as “cuckolding.” In fact, a disproportionate percentage fantasize about just that happening to them.

They’re not alone, of course. Cuckolding routinely ranks among the top searches on the world’s biggest porn sites, as reported by neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam in their book “A Billion Wicked Thoughts,” for which they analyzed the contents of hundreds of millions of Internet searches. But as my own research has shown, reports of that sexual fantasy exhibit a surprising ideological pattern. For my book “Tell Me What You Want,” I studied the sexual fantasies of 4,175 Americans from all 50 states. I asked my participants to report how often they fantasized about hundreds of different people, places and things — including cuckolding.

A majority of heterosexual men (52 percent) said they had fantasized about watching their partner have sex with someone else. Heterosexual men who identified as Republican were the most likely to report having had a cuckolding fantasy at some point — and they fantasized about it more often than Democrats. Fewer than half of Democratic straight men (49 percent) reported having ever fantasized about cuckolding, and 19 percent said they fantasize about it often. By contrast, nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of heterosexual Republican men reported having had this fantasy, and 30 percent said it is a frequent fantasy. Republican men also reported more fantasies about infidelity, swinging and a wide range of sexually taboo activities, including voyeurism.

One way to understand why these desires are so much more common for conservative men is through what sex therapist Jack Morin termed “the erotic equation,” which he spelled out as follows:

Attraction + Obstacles = Excitement

The basic premise here is intuitive: When we are told we cannot do something that we want to do — even if we do not have a particularly strong desire for it — those restrictions make us want to do it even more. Violating taboos creates risk — and taking on a certain amount of risk can heighten arousal and excitement. This is precisely why public sex (or semipublic sex) was another extraordinarily popular fantasy in my survey: The thrill of potentially being caught in the act amps up the intensity of the situation.

Because those on the right tend to have more restrictions placed on their sexuality in general, it stands to reason that they have access to plenty of potentially appealing taboos. And among those many paradoxically pleasurable roadblocks to sexual gratification, cuckolding is one of the most prominent. They are really, really not supposed to let themselves become cuckolds, let alone to long for it.

According to this logic, a man who shares his wife with another man doesn’t just violate social and moral dictates for monogamy, but he also violates traditional notions of masculinity. In the eyes of many men, cuckolding is the ultimate form of emasculation. This sentiment is precisely why many on the right have taken to using the term “cuck” to denigrate men they see as giving up their own power and control, or humiliating themselves. It is also why many of them use the term “cuckservative” to refer to conservative men they see as caving to the left.

It may, paradoxically, be precisely because of all this that cuckoldry fantasies are so appealing. People on the right tend to place a very high value on their freedom. For example, consider conservative views on wearing masks during the covid-19 pandemic: Surveys find that Republicans are more likely to refuse to wear masks than Democrats, citing it as an attack on their liberty. This tendency is an effect of the psychological concept known as reactance, the idea that when one’s individual freedoms are threatened, one tries to reassert autonomy and independence.

Resistance to restrictions, in this mode, becomes a way to reassert personal freedom, and that’s a big deal for those on the right. As the mask resisters show, conservatives may be willing to put themselves at risk to merely assert the fact of their freedom. Likewise, it seems possible that some are open to violating erotic norms — even those that might expose them to mockery or humiliation — to demonstrate to themselves that they’re not bound by the rules. While such behaviors may seem to contradict the expectations and norms espoused by those who practice them, they actually serve to reaffirm a more fundamental conservative value, the emphasis placed on freedom itself.

With all of that said, it is certainly not the case that all Republicans and conservatives are fantasizing about cuckolding or other taboo sexual activities, nor is it the case that they’re alone in expressing such wishes. As I report in “Tell Me What You Want,” one of the kinks that Democrats report more often than Republicans is BDSM: bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadism and masochism. In other words, those on the left fantasize about things like power play and rough sex more than those on the right. For Democrats, subverting ideals of equitable and fair power relations is a major taboo. The same could be said for visualizing a scenario in which the lines of sexual consent might not be explicit. After all, people on the left tend to be much stronger supporters of the #MeToo movement and have more vocally advocated for models of enthusiastic sexual consent. Flirting with this taboo may therefore be why BDSM is more tantalizing for them.

In short, while the specific content of our sexual fantasies and the particular activities we pursue in our bedrooms may differ to some degree according to our political affiliations, the factors that feed our erotic desires might not be so different after all.

Complete Article HERE!

What the Falwell saga tells us about evangelicals and gender roles

A Falwell from grace for Jerry and Becki?

BY

Jerry Falwell Jr. may well be wishing that a photo with his underwear showing and his arm around the waist of a woman not his wife was the worst of his problems.

That snapshot kick-started a round of speculation into the prominent evangelical leader’s personal life that has cost him his job. On Aug. 25, Falwell confirmed that he has resigned his presidency at Liberty University.

His resignation comes after allegations in multiple news outlets that Falwell and his wife, Becki, were both engaged in a seven-year sexual relationship with a young man named Giancarlo Granda.

‘Not involved’

Granda told Reuters that the sexual relationship involved both Falwells. He claims he had sex with Becki while Jerry Falwell watched from the corner of the room. Jerry Falwell Jr. disputes the allegations. In a statement to the Washington Examiner, Falwell said: “Becki had an inappropriate personal relationship with this person, something in which I was not involved.”

In other words, it’s Becki’s fault.

From my vantage point as a scholar who studies religion and gender, this comment from Falwell is revealing.

How male public figures react to a sex scandal can be a very complex process. In trying to preserve what is left of their reputations, my research indicates that they will often attempt to prove that they remain a “real man” – both a loving, devoted husband and a strong, virile leader. This behavior makes sense when one understands the conservative Christian gender roles that inspire them.

Under conservative Christian gender norms, men are described not only as naturally sexual, but also as divinely designed to be far more sexual than women. In fact, male sexuality is often depicted as out of control. The point of marriage, many evangelicals claim, is to harness that male sexuality so that it is productive rather than wild and unbounded.

This view of marriage may strike many as archaic, but these ideas nevertheless permeate part of American culture – one can see it in the “boys will be boys” defense of bad male behavior.

Such ideas also strongly influence how large swaths of the public tend to view sex scandals. Generally speaking, while the public holds the offending politician responsible, they are also often eager to condemn other figures who were involved for leading him astray.

More specifically, my research shows that women who are in any way associated with sex scandals are much more likely to be demonized or blamed for the sexual incident in question. Even when they are the innocent party, they can be portrayed as power-hungry strategists who stayed in a bad marriage to elevate themselves or enablers who give all women a bad name by sticking up for another adulterer.

And as scholar Amy DeRogatis has shown, if a woman is sexual outside of marriage, she is often described by evangelicals as compromising the “gift” of her sexuality intended for her husband. Giving her sexuality to someone else sacrifices her future capacity for intimacy, it is argued.

At the same time, some evangelicals claim that a wide number of marital problems stem from the fact that women do not provide their husbands with enough sex.

In this particular subculture, everything from men’s self-esteem to their job performance can be linked to the frequency and quality of their sexual encounters. In this way of thinking, when men have problems, their wives’ sexual attitudes and behaviors are often to blame.

Demonization of women

Negative stereotypes often extend to all women involved in a sex scandal, no matter whether any sexual contact actually happened nor whether the act in question was consensual.

For instance, Paula Jones and Anita Hill both claimed to have been the victims of sexual harassment, at the hands of Bill Clinton and Clarence Thomas, respectively.

In the case of both women, elaborate sexual stories were concocted by critics of all political stripes. These stories were then adopted more broadly by the general public to portray them as immoral women who must have been at least partially responsible for the sexualized encounters they experienced with two prominent figures.

The case of Paula Broadwell is also instructive. Broadwell was the lover of Gen. David Petraeus, one-time director of the CIA. While both Broadwell and Petraeus admitted to a consensual affair while married to other people, Broadwell’s ethics were called into question in a way that Petraeus did not experience.

In short, there is a pattern in American culture of finding fault with the woman in a sex scandal. Falwell’s response falls in line with this pattern.

But there is another aspect of Granda’s allegations that deserves attention when looking at the response to the scandal. In Granda’s telling – again, which has been denied by Jerry Falwell – the evangelical leader watched the sexual encounters between Granda and Becki but did not actively participate.

As scholar Joshua Gamson has shown, men whose sexual violations do not involve actual intercourse – for example sexting, as in the case with disgraced New York politician Anthony Weiner – are often portrayed as less masculine, even silly, for failing to “do the deed.”

Chance of redemption?

What we are watching play out before us with the Falwells is a study of conservative gender norms.

If Falwell can convincingly argue that the fault lies entirely with his wife, then this well-worn story might give him the chance to redeem himself at some point in the future. After all, in this version of events, he can maintain the appearance of a loving husband and father who has some integrity.

On the other hand, being the man who “watched from the corner of the room” fulfills neither the devoted family man role nor that of the virile, powerful husband. If this is the narrative that is ultimately adopted, then the path back to redemption in the eyes of the evangelical public is harder to imagine.

Complete Article HERE!

To end conversion therapy, we must understand what it actually means

By Travis Salway

On Monday, Calgary City Council voted, nearly unanimously, to pass a municipal ban of advertising around conversion therapy, which the city defined as “practice, treatment, or service designed to change, repress, or discourage a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression, or to repress or reduce non-heterosexual attraction or sexual behaviour.” In doing so, Calgary joined cities such as Vancouver, Edmonton and Fort McMurray, along with provinces including Ontario and, recently, Prince Edward Island, in passing legislation banning conversion therapies.

The discourse at the publicly-broadcast citizen debate before the council vote was polarizing, however, with hundreds of speakers passionately arguing on either side of the issue over two days. Those opposed to the ban argued that they do not want to see their fellow citizens subjected to torture – referencing electroshock and other physically severe forms of conversion therapy – but the proposed law unfairly criminalizes practitioners who are merely offering advice to people who are struggling with “unwanted” same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria.

Opponents of the ban claimed that these well-meaning conversations should not be conflated with “true forms” of conversion therapy. They defended this argument by noting that practitioners targeted by the ban do not try to “convert” anyone but, rather, aim to help people live cisgender, heterosexual lives that are compatible with religious doctrine.

This debate had a cardinal flaw: It didn’t centre on a single definition. As with many contentious social issues, language and meanings matter. By clarifying the intent of conversion therapy practices – their defining feature – we will be better prepared to evaluate legislative action at multiple levels of government, as efforts to end this practice continue.

Conversion therapy is a misnomer: Survivors of conversion therapy are not “converted”, and it is not therapeutic. All forms of conversion therapy – whether practiced in a licensed health care clinic, spiritual support group, pastor’s office or other setting – share a common premise, as described by Canadian legal scholar Florence Ashley: They begin with an assumption that some gender identities, gender expressions and sexual orientations are more desirable than others. More specifically, these practices seek to deny and suppress the identities of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and two-spirit (LGBTQ2) people.

The practices themselves rely upon a variety of methods, including coaching, counseling, therapy, prayer and conversation. Individuals who undergo it are often left with feelings of self-doubt, anxiety and hopelessness, losing years of their lives that would otherwise be spent achieving a positive sense of self.

From national surveys conducted last year, we know that tens of thousands of LGBTQ2 Canadians have experienced conversion therapy. With the support of conversion-therapy survivors, I and other public-health researchers have been interviewing these Canadians. They frequently describe exactly the kind of “talk therapy” that opponents of the ban seek to protect, where a provider attempts to compel an individual to manage and resist expressions of gender or sexuality that differ from mainstream expectations. And these forms of conversion therapy induce psychological distress just as other more obviously traumatic forms of conversion therapy do.

To effectively prevent conversion therapy, legislative bans must adjust their definitions to clearly state that the defining feature of conversion therapy is not an attempt to “convert” or “change” intrinsic feelings of gender identity or expression or sexual orientation. Rather, the defining feature is the goal of avoiding acceptance and acknowledgement of LGBTQ2 lives as compatible with being healthy and happy. This healthy sense of self is something that all Canadians deserve, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. That sense of self is what is fundamentally at stake in the debates over conversion therapy.

We must also acknowledge that no ban can eradicate all forms of conversion therapy. We need bans at all levels of government – municipal, provincial and federal – and for these legislative bans to share language, so they are all effectively complementary. And bans must be coupled with broader educational efforts.

In Canada, we must promote the affirmation of LGBTQ2 people, particularly to parents and caregivers who may otherwise consider conversion therapy for their children when they are struggling. Continuing legislative debates offer an opportunity for us as Canadians to clarify our position that LGBTQ2 people should be celebrated. Canadians who share these views should make their majority view known – particularly as our politicians continue to consider opportunities to safeguard the well-being of LGBTQ2 citizens.

Calgary’s new bylaw is just one example of an upsurge of proposed and enacted Canadian legislation to prevent conversion therapy. Bill C-8, an amendment to the federal Criminal Code, was tabled by federal government on March 9. While our country has gradually affirmed LGBTQ2 lives through legal and social changes in recent decades – including the addition of sexual orientation in 1995 and gender identity and expression in 2017, as statuses protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms – the public debate in Calgary served as a stark reminder: Stigma, fear and hatred of LGBTQ2 people are alive and well. The only way to resist these social biases is by speaking the same language.

Complete Article HERE!

Stuck in the middle

Growing into my identity

As an empathic perfectionist, conflicts stung me. I used to perceive any conflict as a reflection of my flawed character. It took years of inner wrestling to understand that conflicts were opportunities to grow, not threatening, but nurturing in their tumult.

All too often, humans keep to their comfortable spaces, unwilling to engage in a conflict with those who differ. I do not have that luxury, nor do I want it. I open myself up to you today to push the conversation of sexual identity and religion, not as a destabilizing conflict, but rather a nurturing discussion that extends a welcome to all beliefs and identities.

I felt alienated in religious settings where my questions about the Bible and its origins were dismissed as irrelevant or spiritually weak, and as I learned more in school about the uses of the Bible to validate atrocities throughout history, I lost trust in my religious communities because the Bible wasn’t considered in its historical context or its imperfect translations. Specifically, I remember staying up one night at Christian camp reading Genesis 3, and as I read verse 16 in its NIV translation, “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” I cried without really knowing why.

Until, that is, I read Wilda Gafney’s womanist interpretation. In “Womanist Midrash,” the pain of that passage healed as she explored how the Spirit of God uses she/her pronouns in the Biblical Hebrew; how it describes an androgynous being, not Adam but rather the adam, referring to humankind that is then split in two; how “over” translated to “in” and “with” more often, reading instead “he shall rule with you.”

When I stopped living in fear and started letting go and opening myself up to conversations around religion, I found space to wrestle with my identity, my God, and their Scripture, leading me to where I stand today as a bisexual, Christian, cisgender woman.

I may have known my identity for awhile now, but only until recently have I found a sense of representation and visibility through my studies of queer and feminist biblical scholarship. With help from the class “Gender, Sex, and Religion,” I was exposed to multiple approaches to the Bible beyond just traditional biblical studies.

“I think [including more perspectives] just makes for more accurate, more representative, more interesting scholarship,” Mika Ahuvia, an assistant professor at the Jackson School of International Studies, said.] “The more [people] are looking at a text, the more nuances they notice.”

It turns out that biblical authors had no language for sexual orientation and gender identity, but rather viewed sex and gender within patriarchal constructs motivated over the years by different political, religous, and socioeconomic influences.

When the topic of “homosexuality” did arise in the religious circles at youth groups or summer camp, I was told that the Holiness Code of Leviticus in Scripture not only addresses it, but condemns it. Never, however, was I told during these conversations of its historical context, where it fails to mention how these laws merely condemned sodomy — non-procreational sexual acts — not homesexuality itself, nor did anyone explain the cultural beliefs that influenced these laws.

In biblical Israel, there was a cultural necessity to understand the religious and social significance of their bodies and so, procreation was viewed synonymously to achieving immortality and wasting semen was thought to be impure and harmful because it was believed to hold the most crucial role in reproduction.

By exposing myself in a variety of knowledgeable, heavily researched interpretations, queer and feminist biblical scholarship specifically equipped me with a platform and the language to heal. Whether it’s the deconstruction of gender and patriarchy through reinterpreted creation stories in Genesis or the contextualized and researched approach to the Holiness Code of Leviticus, biblical scholarship redefined my relationship with the Bible and deepened my understanding of its authors and how interpretations changed with time, and how they were shaped by and influenced societal constructs of gender and sex.

Regardless, the search for community as a queer Christian continues. Whether it was my faith in secular communities or my sexuality in religious ones, I still don’t know where I belong, a feeling all too familiar in my experience between straight and LGBTQIA+ communities.

While we may be the “B” in LGBTQIA+, the bisexual community still faces health disparities and stereotypes from straight and queer communities for a variety of reasons.

“Our research has found that bisexual people do experience many health disparities, both in Washington state as well as nationally,” Karen Fredriksen Goldsen, a professor in the School of Social Work, said. “For example, we found that bisexual women compared to lesbians have higher rates of disability and are more likely to experience disability at earlier ages

Fredriksen Goldsen especially noted the community’s lack of visibility, where an “increase in visibility could create opportunities to further build and expand communities” as well as reduce stigmas.

“As we recognize bisexual lives, we can begin to understand their distinct experiences,” Fredriksen Goldsen said. “Our research has documented many disparities as well as strengths in this community, as bi people are resilient.”

At the intersection of religious, secular, straight, and LGBTQIA+ communities, if I’ve learned one thing, it’s that the majority of these communities and the unique individuals within them don’t know how to interact with each other. As someone on the receiving end, the lack of dialogue between these diverse communities lends its hand to miseducation, stigmatization, and polarization.

When Ahuvia started teaching “Gender, Sex, and Religion,” she noted that the biggest gap she felt like she had to overcome was between the secular and religious students. Now, four years later, it’s shifted.

Silence and invisibility serve no one, so I will never refuse the challenge to uproot what I hold true, wrestle with it, learn, and grow.

Complete Article HERE!

How right-wing purity culture leaves women with lasting psychological damage and self-hate

By

The so-called “purity” culture in the Christian evangelical community has made millions for churches and Christian swag manufacturers. However, it’s been harming millions of teens across the country who made a vow of chastity before marriage.

Statistics reveal that 85 percent of men and 81 percent of women have sex prior to marriage, so the numbers aren’t looking good for the church. For those who made the pledge but fell short of the goal, damaging implications have followed, The Christian Post reported.

“Amid the rise of the #MeToo movement paired with reports of sex abuse within the Church, individuals whose lives were shaped by purity culture began to push back,” the report said. “They shared stories of how some of the more problematic aspects of the movement, though well-intentioned, caused them to have an unhealthy relationship with religion, relationships, and sex.”

Cait West revealed her upbringing in Christian patriarchy where women were to be submissive to male house-heads. Female children were not allowed to date unless it was a courtship seeking marriage. She recalled being “shamed for normal adolescent curiosity.” Any sexual thoughts meant she was basically fornicating.

“Dating was never an option,” she told The Christian Post in an interview. “I was never taught about sex or sexuality at all. I remember asking my parents, testing the waters, ‘What’s this about?’ And they brushed it aside. I was never allowed to explore or ask questions, so I never thought of myself as a sexual being because of that.”

She learned that women being sexual beings were bad. They weren’t allowed to be sexual. Everything was tied to shame. Even clothing had to be approved by her father, who would gauge the “modesty” of the outfit.

 

“My father would come to the store with me and judge everything I had on,” she said. “That overt male gaze judging my clothing throughout my adolescence and into my 20’s really shaped how I thought of myself because I never thought who I was from my perspective.”

That shame then turned to anxiety. It wasn’t until she left the faith at 25 that she began to explore the emotional damage that had been done. She called it “emotional, physical and spiritual trauma.”

“I felt very disconnected from my own body because I was never taught about the sexual part of me,” she said. “I didn’t want to think about my own body or explore my own sexuality because it was a dirty part of me I wasn’t allowed to explore. It made me feel weird about living in my own body, and I didn’t realize just how much I hated my own body until I left the movement.”

As a spouse, she now struggles to think of sex as something intimate for partners and not purely for procreation.

“I’ve had a lot of trouble with disassociation in sexually intimate moments because it’s too much for me to be present in my own body because it feels bad,” she explained. “For years, you’re told something is bad — and then suddenly you get married and you’re supposed to be OK with it. It was like I was trained not to have that part of me turned on or be aware of things.”

“I’ve been working through that process of figuring out what those toxic messages were and re-train myself to have agency,” she added.

Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Women and How I Broke Free by Linda Kay Klein walks through the struggle with gender-based shame, fear and the emotional distress that can leave lasting damage to women. She began compiling stories from dozens of friends in the purity movement. All of the women experienced psychological problems related to sex and sexuality.

“My interviewees made different life choices, yet among their stories, I heard many of the same themes,” she shared. “I heard about sexual and gender-based shame, fear, anxiety, and experiences stemming from their shame that mimicked Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder, such as nightmares, panic attacks, and paranoia. Several of my interviewees told me their shame was also creating deep problems in their marriages, particularly in their marriage beds.”

She explained that as girls grow into women they’re still taught never to “inspire” sexual thoughts from men. It makes an easy transition to rape culture, which maintains that women are responsible for the actions of men raping or abusing them. In no other crime is the victim the responsible party. However, conservatives blame clothing or behavior of a victim for the actions of someone else.

“In other words, girls grew up with the message that not only did we need to be pure, but it was our responsibility to ensure that the whole community was pure. That’s a lot of pressure for a young girl!” exclaimed Klein.

But it’s the shame that leaves lasting damage to women who self-impose guilt. She noted the shame is a huge part of the purity movement.

“Shame isn’t bashfulness,” she said. “It is a feeling of our being unworthy, or being seen as unworthy in other people’s eyes, that causes us to disconnect from ourselves, from others, and—from what I’ve seen in my interviews—from God at times. It can lead to emotional isolation which can develop into dangerous levels of hopelessness, desperation, subsequent self-harm, and much more.”

Complete Article HERE!

How Evangelical Purity Culture Can Lead to a Lifetime of Sexual Shame

Former born-again Christian Linda Kay Klein combines personal reflections with years of research to trace the psychological effects of purity culture on women in her new memoir, “Pure.”

by Stephanie Dubick

For millions of girls growing up in evangelical Christianity, sexuality is a sin. Girls are sexual “stumbling blocks,” they’re told—a danger to the relationship between men and God.

Such is the way of the purity movement. Emerging out of white evangelicalism in the early 1990s, the conservative Christian movement—today promoted by both local churches and national organizations such as Focus on the Family and True Love Waits—emphasizes sexual purity and abstinence-only education. The cornerstone: If women remain virgins until the day they marry a man, they’re holy; if not, they’re damaged goods. To avoid the latter outcome, young adults are required to make promises—signified in the form of purity balls, rings, and pledges—to remain abstinent from puberty ’til “I do.”

After marriage, the metaphorical chastity belt unbuckles. But as writer Linda Kay Klein engrossingly details in her recently released book, Pure: Inside the Movement that Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free, the psychological effects don’t stop there; they can follow women into their adult lives, leading to mental and physical side effects similar to symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

In purity culture, both young men and women are taught that sex before marriage is wrong. But it’s teenage girls who end up most affected, Klein finds, because while boys are taught that their minds are a gateway to sin, women are taught that their bodies are. After years of being told that they’re responsible for not only their own purity, but the purity of the men and boys around them; and of associating sexual desire with depravity and shame, Klein writes, those feelings often haunt women’s relationships with their bodies for a lifetime.

Klein knows from personal experience. After realizing she couldn’t be the woman the church wanted her to be, she left the evangelical community in the early 2000s. It was at that point, when she began considering having sex, that the symptoms started. “It began when I took the possibility of having sex and put it on the table,” Klein tells Broadly. “From that point on, sometimes it was my boyfriend and I being sexual that would make me have these breakdowns where I was in tears, scratching myself until I bled and ending up on the corner of the bed crying.”

Klein knew immediately that the reactions were linked to her religious upbringing, but assumed it was specific to her. “I never wondered where it came from, I just wondered why it was manifesting that way,” she says. “It couldn’t be that everyone who was taught these things were having these experiences, because surely I would have heard about it.”

Eventually, though, Klein realized that she wasn’t nearly alone. In 2006, she began compiling dozens of testimonies from childhood friends involved in the purity movement and found that they were all experiencing similar feelings of fear, shame, and anxiety in relationship to sex. “Based on our nightmares, panic attacks, and paranoia, one might think that my childhood friends and I had been to war,” writes Klein. “And in fact, we had. We went to war with ourselves, our own bodies, and our own sexual natures, all under the strict commandment of the church.”

Today, Klein considers the phenomenon an epidemic. When she first realized the scope and severity of what she was researching, she decided to quit her job—at the age of 26—and dedicate herself to learning more about the effects of purity culture. She went on to earn an interdisciplinary Master’s degree from New York University, for which she wrote a thesis on white American evangelicalism’s messaging toward girls that involved interviewing hundreds of current and past evangelicals about the impact of the purity movement on their lives. Eventually, those seeds of research grew into Pure.

A 12-year labor of love, the resulting book is an eye-opening blend of memoir, journalism, and cultural commentary that masterfully illustrates how religion, shame, and trauma can inform one another. Citing medical studies, she lays out that evangelical adolescents are the least likely “to expect sex to be pleasurable, and among the most likely to expect that having sex will make them feel guilty.” And in comparison to boys, Klein observes, girls are 92 percent more likely to feel shame—especially girls who are highly religious. For many women, like Klein, that shame can manifest in physical symptoms.

Klein observes and cites an expert who found that many women who grow up in purity culture and eventually begin having sex report experiencing an involuntary physical tightening of the vagina—also known as vaginismus—that is linked to a fear of penetrative sex and makes intercourse extremely painful. This could also be considered a symptom of Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS), a diagnosis developed by Dr. Marlene Winell, a psychologist in San Francisco and author of Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion. According to Winell, as quoted by Klein, RTS is a condition “experienced by people who are struggling with leaving an authoritarian, dogmatic religion and coping with the damage of indoctrination.” The symptoms resemble those of PTSD, anxiety disorders, borderline personality disorders, and can result in depression, sexual difficulty, and negative views about the self.

Perhaps more convincing than the medical research and professionals that Klein cites, though, is the wealth of testimonies she gathers from women. One woman she spoke to described having years of awkward, uncomfortable sex with her husband until she began to feel overcome by such extreme exhaustion, she had difficulty getting out of bed. Another shared that after her first sexual experience, her body began to shake uncontrollably. In one extreme account, a woman said that feelings of panic and guilt flooded her mind “like a cloud of locusts” after an early sexual encounter. Soon after, orange-sized welts broke out on her stomach, arms, back, and breasts and it became difficult to breathe. After jumping into the shower to find relief, welts the size of both of her palms formed on her vagina. “I would say it’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” she told Klein. “I had no idea what was happening to me. My legs, my face, everything was bright red. It felt like I had absolutely no control over these horrific, nightmarish things that were happening to my body.” The woman was rushed to the emergency room, and though the doctors told her she went into anaphylactic shock, they couldn’t explain what caused it. While she knows something medical happened, she told Klein that’s she is certain something spiritual happened to her as well—the result of what happens “when you tempt Satan.”

Pure is a thorough and focused study on the effects of the purity movement’s rhetoric on women and girls, but Klein stresses that her findings aren’t relevant only to religious conservatives. Rather, they represent an extreme microcosm of a broader culture of gendered sexual shaming to which we should all be paying attention.

“The conclusion that I reached was that the evangelical culture is useful because it provides a mirror of what’s happening in other places in the culture,” Klein says. “You see what happens when you have high doses of this toxic messaging. But the reality is that this toxic messaging is everywhere and we’re all taking in unhealthy amounts of it.”

Complete Article HERE!

The secret gay history of Islam

In Muslim cultures, homosexuality was once considered the most normal thing in the world – so what changed?

By

Islam once considered homosexuality to be one of the most normal things in the world.

The Ottoman Empire, the seat of power in the Muslim world, didn’t view lesbian or gay sex as taboo for centuries. They formally ruled gay sex wasn’t a crime in 1858.

But as Christians came over from the west to colonize, they infected Islam with homophobia.

The truth is many Muslims alive today believe the prophet Muhammad supported and protected sexual and gender minorities.

But go back to the beginning, and you’ll see there is far more homosexuality in Islam than you might have ever thought before.

1 Ancient Muslim borrowed culture from the boy-loving Ancient Greeks

The Islamic empires, (Ottoman, Safavid/Qajar, Mughals), shared a common culture. And it shared a lot of similarities with the Ancient Greeks.

Persianate cultures, all of them Muslim, dominated modern day India and Arab world. And it was very common for older men to have sex with younger, beardless men. These younger men were called ‘amrad’.

Once these men had grown his beard (or ‘khatt’), he then became the pursuer of his own younger male desires.

And in this time, once you had fulfilled your reproductive responsibilities as a man you could do what you like with younger men, prostitutes and other women.

Society completely accepted this, at least in elite circles. Iranian historian Afsaneh Najmabadi writes how official Safavid chroniclers would describe the sexual lives of various Shahs, the ruling class, without judgment.

There was some judgment over ‘mukhannas’. These were men (some researchers consider them to be transgender or third gender people) who would shave their beards as adults to show they wished to continue being the object of desire for men. But even they had their place in society. They would often be used as servants for prophets.

‘It wasn’t exactly how we would define homosexuality as we would today, it was about patriarchy,’ Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed, a gay imam who lives in Marseilles, France, told GSN.

‘It was saying, “I’m a man, I’m a patriarch, I earn money so I can rape anyone including boys, other slaves and women.” We shouldn’t idealize antique culture.’

2 Paradise included male virgins, not just female ones

There is nowhere in the Qu’ran that states the ‘virgins’ in paradise are only female.

The ‘hur’, or ‘houris’, are female. They have a male counterpart, the ‘ghilman’, who are immortal young men who wait and serve people in paradise.

‘Immortal [male] youths shall surround them, waiting upon them,’ it is written in the Qu’ran. ‘When you see them, you would think they are scattered pearls.’

Zahed says you should look at Ancient Muslim culture with the same eyes as Ancient Greek culture.

‘These amrads are not having sex in a perfectly consenting way because of power relationships and pressures and so on.

‘However, it’s not as heteronormative as it might seem at first. There’s far more sexual diversity.’

3 Sodom and Gomorrah is not an excuse for homophobia in Islam

Like the Bible, the Qu’ran tells the story of how Allah punished the ancient inhabitants of the city of Sodom.

Two angels arrive at Sodom, and they meet Lot who insists they stay the night in his house. Then other men learn about the strangers, and insist on raping them.

While many may use this as an excuse to hate gay people, it’s not. It’s about Allah punishing rape, violence and refusing hospitality.

Historians often rely on literary representations for evidence of history. And many of the poems from ancient Muslim culture celebrate reciprocal love between two men. There are also factual reports saying it was illegal to force your way onto a young man.

The punishment for a rape of a young man was caning the feet of the perpetrator, or cutting off an ear, Najmabadi writes. Authorities are documented as carrying these punishments out in Qajar Iran.

4 Lesbian sex used as a ‘cure’

Fitting a patriarchal society, we know very little about the sex lives of women in ancient Muslim culture.

But ‘Sihaq’, translated literally as ‘rubbing’, is referenced as lesbian sex.

Sex between two women was decriminalized in the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century, probably because it was deemed to have very little importance.

Physicians believed lesbianism developed from a hot itch on a woman’s vulva that could only be soothed by another woman’s sexual fluid. This derived from Greek medicine.

Much later, the 16th century Italian scientist Prosper Alpini claimed the hot climate caused ‘excessive sexual desire and overeating’ in women. This caused a humor imbalance that caused illnesses, like ‘lesbianism’. He recommended bathing to ‘remedy’ this. However, because men feared women were having sex with other women at private baths, many husbands tried to restrict women from going.

5 Lesbian ‘marriage’ and legendary couples

In Arabic folklore, al-Zarqa al-Yamama (‘the blue-eyed woman of Yamama’) fell in love with Christian princess Hind of the Lakhmids. When al-Zarqa, who had the ability to see events in the future, was crucified, it was said the princess cut her hair and mourned until she died.

Many books, especially in the 10th century, celebrated lesbian couples. Sapphic love features in the Book of Salma and Suvad; the Book of Sawab and Surur (of Justice and Happiness); the Book of al-Dahma’ and Nisma (of the Dark One and the Gift from God).

‘In palaces, there is evidence hundreds of women established some kind of contract. Two women would sign a contract swearing to protect and care for one another. Almost like a civil partnership or a marriage,’ Zahed said.

‘Outside of these palaces, this was also very common. There was a lot of Sapphic poetry showing same-sex love.’

As Europeans colonized these countries, depictions of lesbian love changed.

Samar Habib, who studied Arabo-Islamic texts, says the Arab epic One Thousand and One Nights proves this. He claims some stories in this classic show non-Muslim women preferred other women as sexual partners. But the ‘hero’ of the tale converts these women to Islam, and to heterosexuality.

6 Muhammad protected trans people

‘Muhammad housed and protected transgender or third gender people,’ Zahed said. ‘The leader of the Arab-Muslim world welcomed trans and queer people into his home.

‘If you look at the traditions some use to justify gay killings, you find much more evidence – clear evidence – that Muhammad was very inclusive.

‘He was protecting these people from those who wanted to beat them and kill them.’

7 How patriarchy transformed Islam

Europeans forced their way into the Muslim world, either through full on colonialism, like in India or Egypt, or economically and socially, like in the Ottoman Empire.

They pushed their cultural practices and attitudes on to Muslims: modern Islamic fundamentalism flourished.

While the Ottoman Empire resisted European culture at first, hence gay sex being allowed in 1858, nationalization soon won out. Two years later, in 1870, India’s Penal Code declared gay sex a crime. LGBTI Indians are still fighting this law and living with its consequences today.

But what is it like to be colonized? And why did homophobia get so much more extreme?

‘With the west coming in and colonizing, they think we are lazy and passive and weak,’ Zahed said.

‘As Arab men, we have to be more powerful and virile and manly. Modern German history is like that, showing how German nationalization rose after [defeat in] the First World War.

‘It’s tribalism, it’s the same problem. It’s about killing everyone against my tribe. I’m going to kill the weak. I’m going to kill anyone who doesn’t fulfill this aggressive nationalistic stereotype.’

Considering the male-dominant society already existed, it was easy for the ‘modern’ patriarchy to end up suppressing women and criminalizing LGBTI lives.

‘In the early 20th century, Arabs were ashamed of their ancient history,’ Zahed added. ‘They tried to purify it, censor it, to make it more masculine. There had to be nothing about femininity, homosexuality or anything. That’s how we got to how are today.’

8 What would Muhammad think about LGBTI rights?

Muhammad protected sexual and gender minorities, supporting those at the fringes of society.

And if Muslims are to follow in the steps of early Islamic culture and the prophet’s life, there is no reason Islam should oppose LGBTI people.

For Zahed, an imam, this is what he considers a true Muslim.

‘What should we do if we call ourselves Muslims now? Defend human rights, diversity and respect identity. If we trust the tradition, he was proactively defending sexual and gender minorities, and human rights.’

Complete Article HERE!

We’re Queer And We’ve Been Here

Rediscovering Buddhism’s LGBT history of gay monks, homoerotic samurai, and gender-nonconforming practitioners and gods

By Dr. Jay Michaelson

It’s no secret that many LGBTQ people have found refuge in the dharma, and it’s easy to see why.  It helps us work with the wounds of homophobia, recognizing internalized self-hatred for the delusion and dukkha [suffering] that it is. Yet when queer people interact with the dharma, there is often something missing: visibility. It’s nice that Buddhism doesn’t say many bad things about us, but does it say anything good? Where are we among the Dogens and Milarepas and Buddhaghosas?

This is not, of course, a question limited to Buddhism. Everywhere, queers have been erased from history. Often we find ourselves only when we are being persecuted; we have to read in between the lines of our interlocutors, trying to reconstruct a lost past.  

But there is much to be gained from the effort. Finding ourselves in history, for better or for worse, reminds us that we have one. We can see the different ways in which gender and sexuality were understood across time and cultures, and we are reminded that sexual and gender diversity has always been a part of human nature.

The history of queer Buddhism does not always paint a rosy picture. We find a mixed tapestry that includes stories of acceptance and persecution as well as examples that are problematic or offensive to modern Western sensibilities. While books can be (and have been) written about this subject, here I will limit myself to four examples that demonstrate the breadth of queer experience throughout Buddhism.

1. Mild offenses

First, and I think least interestingly, there are various levels of injunctions against male-male sexual behavior. What’s interesting here, apart from the mere visibility—yes, the monks were doing it with each other—is the minor nature of the offense. In the Theravadan monastic code, for example, sexual (mis)conduct between monks or novices was no more egregious than any other sexual misconduct, and did not warrant additional sanctions. The offense is similarly minor in Vajrayana monastic communities, leading both to consensual “thigh sex” (frottage) among monks, and, tragically, to many documented instances of sexual abuse.

Conflicting statements by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama have reflected this ambivalence. In 1994, he said that as long as there were no religious vows at issue, consensual same-sex intimacy “is OK.”  But in an interview published two years later, he said that only when “couples use organs intended for sexual intercourse” could sex be considered “proper.” After meeting with gay and lesbian activists in 1997, he noted that the same rules applied to straight and gay people alike, and that they were not part of the direct teachings of the Buddha and thus might evolve over time. In 2014, he reiterated the view that for Buddhists, homosexual acts are a subset of sexual misconduct, but that this was a matter of religious teaching and did not apply to people of another or no religion. Other rinpoches have disagreed and fully affirmed gay and lesbian lives.  There is no clear position. 

2. Gender-nonconforming ancestors

Second, there are several instances of what today might be called gender-nonconforming people in Buddhist texts, now newly accessible thanks to historian Jose Cabezon’s recently published 600-plus page tome, Sexuality in Classical South Asian Buddhism. Many Theravada and Mahayana texts, for example, refer to the pandaka, a term which, Cabezon shows, has a wide variety of meanings, encompassing “effeminate” male homosexuals, intersex persons, and others who exhibited non-normative anatomical, gender, or sexuality traits. (The term pandaka is often translated “eunuch,” but insofar as a eunuch is someone who chooses to be castrated, this is an inaccurate translation. Because of the breadth of the term, Cabezon himself renders it “queer person.”)

By and large, the pandaka is not depicted positively. As Cabezon describes in great detail, the Theravadan monastic code prohibits the ordaining of a pandaka—“the doctrine and discipline does not grow in them,” it says. And a Mahayana sutra called A Teaching on the Three Vows says bodhisattvas should not befriend them. But to me, just the visibility of the pandaka is encouraging. Here we are! And if we have been stigmatized, well, as Cabezon notes, that is hardly comparable to how queer people have been treated in other religious traditions.

3. Sexual samurai

Third, there is a fair amount of male-male homoeroticism in Buddhist textual history. The Jataka tales [parables from the Buddha’s past lives] include numerous homoerotic stories featuring the future Buddha and the future Ananda; in addition to the tales themselves apparently being told without a sense of scandalousness, these stories suggest an interesting appreciation of the homoerotics or at least homosociality of the teacher-disciple relationship. Like Batman and Robin, Achilles and Patroclus, and Frodo and Sam, the Buddha and Ananda are, emotionally speaking, more than just friends.

Japanese Buddhism probably had the most fully developed form of same-sex eroticism—nanshoku—that endured for hundreds of years, beginning in the 1100s and fading out only in the 19th century, under the influence of Christianity.  These relationships—sometimes called bi-do (the beautiful way) or wakashudo (the way of the youth)—were pederastic in nature, often between an adolescent boy (probably aged 12–14) and a young man (aged around 15–20), and thus not role models for contemporary LGBT people, but a queer love nonetheless.

As with Greek pederasty, these relationships combined a sexual relationship with a mentoring relationship. And as in the Greek model, there were clear rules and roles that needed to be followed; nanshoku was not hedonism but a homosexuality that was socially constructed.

The legendary founder of the institution of nanshoku was the 12th-century monk Kukai, also called Kobo Daishi (“the great teacher who spread the dharma”), who was also credited with founding of the Shingon school of Japanese esoteric Buddhism, which incorporates tantric practice. Although there is not much historical evidence for this, it’s interesting that the institution of nanshoku became linked with tantra, which has its own polymorphous eroticism in the service of awakening.

This culture has left us the greatest collection of homoerotic Buddhist texts of which I am aware. Nanshoku Okagami (the Great Mirror of Male Love), published in 1687 and available in a fine translation by Paul Gordon Schalow, is a collection of love stories, some requited and others not, between samurai warriors and Buddhist monks, actors, and townspeople. Now available in multiple translations, the book is an almost unbelievable artifact of Edo-period hedonism, warrior love conventions that closely resemble the Mediterranean ones, and Romeo-and-Juliet-like stories of forbidden love, impossible love, and star-crossed lovers. If you can get past our cultures’ very different ethics regarding intergenerational sex, it’s an amazing queering of history.

4. Gender fluidity

Finally, the fluidity and play of gender within some Buddhist texts is often inspiring but also frequently problematic. Numerous Buddhist enlightenment stories feature women suddenly transforming into men, for example. On the one hand, that’s kind of awesome from a queer and trans point of view. On the other hand, it’s often a way of explaining how deserving women can become fully enlightened—by becoming men.  

That highlighting the role of a prominent female bodhisattva like Kuan Yin or a female deity like Tara has enabled many Western dharma centers to manifest their commitments to gender egalitarianism—awesome. That Kuan Yin is but one manifestation of the male bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara—less awesome. And yet, that a male bodhisattva occasionally manifests as a female figure—maybe more awesome.

So too the feminization of the principle of wisdom, prajnaparamita, and the Vajrayogini, who is female, erotic, and enlightened. These figures may be gender-essentialistic, gender-binaried, and heteronormative, but especially for Westerners, they productively queer the assumptions of what is masculine and feminine.

These examples of queerness in Buddhist text and history are just a sampling; there are many more. When queers look at these echoes in the past, we’re doing several things: We are finding ourselves in history and theology. We are claiming and acknowledging our existence, albeit in different forms from those we know today. And we are, hopefully, keeping our senses of irony and historicity intact. This isn’t gay-hunting or a naïve apologetics that siphons off the bad and leaves in only the good. We are, instead, searching for a usable past, not with a faux nostalgia or appropriative orientalism, but with a sophisticated relationship to what has gone before and what is present now.

Complete Article HERE!

Here’s What Could Get You Committed If You Were a Woman in the 1870s

Many of things that got women committed in the 1870s would be considered normal behavior today.

By

Woman in the 1870s

Despite all the effort made today to de-stigmatize mental illness, the history of mental health and its treatment isn’t pretty. Even as late as the 1970s, lobotomies were widely practiced in the United States to “cure” things such as depression, anxiety, and even homosexuality. Now, imagine yourself in the late 1800s … let’s say around 1875. The germ theory of medicine had barely been worked out, let alone any sound understanding of the human mind and mental illness. People were still treated with bloodletting, mercury, and other dangerous practices. The definition of “insanity” was flexible, and often used to strip inconvenient family members of their money and land. Protections against being committed to an insane asylum in the late 1800s were few … and even fewer if you were a woman. With only the signature of a husband or a male guardian, women could be committed for the rest of their lives for “illnesses” that are now recognized as normal, healthy sexual behavior.

 

Complete Article HERE!

My Complicated Relationship With Religion and Sex

By

Religion and Sex

Religion and sex have been intertwined for thousands of years. Religion often inspires guilt about sex. That guilt needs to go away.

I was raised Christian, which involved Catholic school, Baptist church and consecutive nights at Bible study. The recurring message throughout all of the teachings was that sex is wrong, wrong, wrong – unless you’re married.

When I’ve written before about the complicated relationship I have with religion and sex, people have messaged me that it’s possible to be religious and fuck. While I’m sure this is true, and there are absolutely liberal churches out there, where I was raised the rules were staunch on this: you don’t have sex until you’re married. Full stop.

 

Complete Article HERE!