Pure

by Linda Kay Klein

  “What do you mean by dark and horrible?” I asked her.

  “Fantasizing about somebody that I find attractive or somebody that I’ve been in intimate situations with before, and just recalling those feelings of being with them. Or imagining somebody touching me or saying things to me that I want to hear that make me excited. It’s complicated,” Katie summed it up. “I think masturbation is a comfort thing. The pleasure, the happy endorphins. It’s a way for me—if I’m feeling super tired or super insecure—you get the good feelings and you feel better or relaxed, or whatever.”

  “It’s a form of self-care,” I suggested.

  “But then there’s the loathing that comes afterward. The fantasy helps you to get excited, and that gives you that physical reaction of happy endorphins, but then comes the self-loathing.”

  “When you describe the clinical masturbation, it almost sounds like you are trying to avoid shame by stripping sexuality of pleasure.”

  “Yes. Totally, yes,” she agreed. “I think that it’s hard to separate what may truly be . . .” Katie trailed off. “I do believe in sin,” she began again. “And I do believe in a sin nature. But to what extent is true joy and pleasure robbed of me because I’m calling it sin when maybe . . . it’s not?” She shrugged, picked her fork back up, and took a bite out of her now cold chicken.

  * * *

  I’ve spoken with a lot of women about masturbation. In fact, it is one of the most common topics to arise in my interviews. One of my most memorable conversations about it was with a childhood friend named Alma.

  “I had an incredibly sexually active imagination,” Alma admitted from an armchair in the corner of her living room, her legs tucked up under an afghan.

  “Masturbation is what got me through so many years of chastity,” she continued. “But I didn’t use porn or things like that. I didn’t even see my first porn magazine until I was twenty-six. I had to find ways to do it without totally breaking the rules so I didn’t hate myself for it. I would fantasize that I was with my future husband and we were on our honeymoon. Or I would think about that verse that they always referred to in order to say, ‘don’t masturbate’: ‘If you sin with your right hand, cut it off.’ I figured, ‘Well, I won’t use my hand then.’ ”

  Alma raised her voice and mimed a scene: “ ‘Oh, I have this marker that just happens to be here, or this pencil or whatever. Oops! I don’t know how that got there!’ ” she laughed. “And I also used to arrange these little pointy tissues in my panties so that they would rub against me while I walked.”

  We both fell into laughter and Alma’s husband, who had been doing the dishes in the adjacent room, came in to see what was going on.

  “Now that I think about it though,” Alma added thoughtfully, “I was scared. For a while, I thought I had used all my orgasms up. And that I had damaged my baby-making things and wouldn’t be able to reproduce. I remember now, I was afraid I was doing it in my sleep. I was afraid that I would be caught by my Christian college roommate doing it in my sleep.” She shook her head. “I was surprised that not everybody struggled with it. Either that or they were very good actors. I felt like I was a little bit of a freak. Really what it all equals is enormous psychological damage. It’s amazing that this one subject can bring up so much pain in me . . . even now.”

  Alma’s husband walked over and sat on the arm of her chair, putting his hand on her shoulder.

  “Senior year of Bible college I decided to go to this woman who was a counselor,” Alma said. “Everybody loved her, but I should’ve known not to go to her, of course. She was the same woman who said in class, ‘If your husband beats you, you should thank Jesus for the opportunity to show your husband Christ’s love by staying with him.’

  “I was angry about that, but I had no place to put that anger. The glimmer of fury was put out by it having no other fire on campus. But I went to talk to this woman who taught this class. I threw up my arms and said, ‘I need your help.’ She told me to come in but she left the door of the administrative office wide open, so all the secretaries could hear.

  “I said, ‘I’m out of control sexually.’

  “The woman said, ‘What do you mean? Making out with your boyfriend? Masturbating? Having lesbian thoughts?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ ”

  “You and Zach were making out?” I asked Alma with surprise. Zach was Alma’s college boyfriend.

  “Well, we were holding each other really tightly and that brought up sexual feelings in me, so . . . in that way . . . yes.”

  “That just sounds like hugging,” I said.

  “Whatever you want to call it, I’m sure the woman would have considered it making out. She said, ‘How serious is this? Is there wetness down there?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘Let me go and get a chart.’ The door was still open. I had no idea who was listening and was absolutely terrified about that. It seems strange now that it never occurred to me that I could just stand up and close the door. But I was in a place where I had no rights.”

  “She asked you whether you were wet?” I interjected.

  “Uh huh,” Alma answered, raising her eyebrows and tipping her head to the side.

  Again, the greatest threat seemed to be pleasure.

  “So then she came in with a book on how to fight sexual desires by denying yourself sugar, training yourself to go without a delight that is bad for you. The book implied that you could tell how sexually deviant someone was based on how much sugar they ate, because you could see their restraint or lack thereof.

  “She showed me this chart, and proceeded to link all of my sexual misdemeanors to a poor relationship with my father. She said to me, ‘If you confess to your father, your sexual sin will go away.’ So a few weeks later, I told my father, ‘I’m messed up with boys because you didn’t care when I tried to commit suicide in high school.’ ”

  I looked up from my notes.

  “He cried,” Alma said softly. “I regret saying that to him so much.”

  Then, “If we could just have the ‘Masturbation Revolution’ we could all get over it,” she announced. “Our leaders probably could never get over the fact that they masturbate. That’s why they’re all making a big deal about it.”

  Her husband and I laughed.

  “You know, I still masturbate,” she said. “Less now that I’m married,” she smiled at her husband. He smiled back, lifting an invisible glass and miming a toast.

  “I still have lesbian thoughts. And today, I have to at least give lesbianism a passing glance. I mean, who knows? Maybe I’m gay. Maybe I’m a scientist. How would I know anything? I’ve spent my whole life pretending I am who they want me to be. My husband comes home from work and says, ‘What did you do today, honey?’ And I say, ‘Oh nothing, just searched the web for hardcore lesbian porn. By the way, we’ve got these pop-up ads now that I can’t seem to get rid of.’ ”

  Alma laughed. I looked over at her husband and he nodded.

  “I still have sugar,” she continued. “There’s still lots of wetness down there. And I think that woman was full of shit.”

  * * *

  In the mid-2000s, when I was in graduate school studying American evangelical gender and sexuality messaging for girls, I decided to go to the Christian bookstore and find out what girls were actually being taught about masturbation.

  “I work with a group of girls,” I approached the clerk, “and lately I’ve been getting a lot of questions about . . . masturbation.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. But it wasn’t the truth either. For some reason, I felt like I had to perform the part of an evangelical small group leader in that moment, as though I would get kicked out of the store if I told anyone why I was really there. The clerk laughed uncomfortably and took a small step away from me. “Do you have any books that address that issue?” I pressed. Now she laughed even louder. Too loud. Uncomfortably loud.

  “I don’t know!” she almost yelled. “Maybe Youth Ministry,” and pointed to the Youth Min
istry section. “Or Counseling,” now pointing to the Counseling section. “Or Dating and Relationships!”

  I went home from the Christian bookstore that day with five books—two addressed masturbation for men, two addressed masturbation for women, and one addressed it without being gender specific. Here’s a snapshot of what I found: Masturbation is a gray area. The gender-neutral book and those written for males basically said that masturbation was bad, but not that bad, and obsessive shame over masturbating could be just as harmful to individuals and to their relationships with God as masturbation itself. For instance, the authors of Every Young Man’s Battle: Strategies for Victory in the Real World of Sexual Temptation wrote: “If you’re living with a deep sense of shame over masturbation, you need to stop masturbating, but you also need to stop the shame.”8 These books talked a lot about the individual’s health and the health of the individual’s relationship with God.

  The books written for females were different. Masturbation was more strictly forbidden, and an emphasized reason given for why girls and women shouldn’t masturbate that I didn’t see much about in the books targeted at boys and men was protecting their future marriage, in part by protecting their future husband’s feelings. For example, one book warned that if a girl masturbated, she might rob her future husband of the pleasure of giving her an orgasm without her stepping in and telling him what she likes (which she would have learned from masturbation). This logic is reminiscent of the logic of the princess story we discussed in chapter two, in which the princess lost her prince by telling him how to successfully kill the dragon. Basically it comes down to the hackneyed old story that men and boys don’t like it when you know more than they do, so, just don’t.

  The gendered differences in the messaging I found in books on masturbation parallel the gendered differences in the messaging I am told many Christian couples receive when they go to their pastors or other religious leaders with sexual problems. If the wife admits to any premarital sexual expression, including masturbation, in a counseling session, she risks being told that their problems are rooted in her sin.

  * * *

  I think one of the reasons that masturbation is seen as so much worse when women do it, is that it is a subversion of purity culture’s gender expectations around sexual and other forms of passivity.IV As Jessica Valenti puts it in The Purity Myth:

  Staying “pure” and “innocent” is touted as the greatest thing we can do. However, equating this inaction with morality is not only problematic because it continues to tie women’s ethics to our bodies, but also is downright insulting because it suggests that women can’t be moral actors. Instead, we’re defined by what we don’t do—our ethics are the ethics of passivity.10

  This is something Katie understands well.

  “I assumed—of course!—that God was going to bring the man that was meant for me,” she told me, leaving our plates in the sink and walking back over to the table. “That it wasn’t supposed to be me going out looking for somebody or making it happen. I definitely got the sense that if you were somehow spiritual enough, God would lead you through every choice, or presumed choice—because you don’t really have a choice. And if you are faithful and trusting enough to listen and follow him, to obey his leading, then you won’t have as many troubles in life. I thought, ‘Surely I will find a wonderful man and we will make a happy family.’

  “Then one day I said, ‘Well God, where is he?’ This was all I wanted my whole life, and it wasn’t happening. I was just like, ‘What is going on? I’m young. I’m kind of cute, I could be cute to some people. I’m kind of nice. I’m very understanding. I’m not outrageously funny—like, people don’t want me at their parties because I’m the funniest person alive—but I can be funny.’ ”

  “For sure,” I responded.

  “So what is wrong? Am I just not a good listener? I must be sinful and not listening to God’s guidance. Or am I just rebellious and he is telling me what to do and I’m just saying, ‘No.’ Or option three: he doesn’t care.

  “I just felt no guidance from God, and I started taking it personally after a while. I didn’t feel like God kept his end of the bargain in terms of leading me and guiding me. I always thought that he had a plan and purpose for us and I was like, why wouldn’t he tell me what that was, or at least let me feel what that was, or somehow shut the doors in some way so I have to go this other direction. I felt abandoned. I tried talking to him. Why wouldn’t he talk to me? I just felt silence from Heaven.

  “That was the first time I started walking away from God a little bit in my heart. I was kind of like, ‘Up yours, God. You can’t get me a man? I’m going to get my own.’

  “I felt super secure with Raj right away. I just trusted him and I knew that he respected me as a person,” Katie said of her only long-term boyfriend, who she started dating in her late twenties. Raj was a Catholic and neither Katie, nor her evangelical friends, considered him a “real” Christian so dating him was a serious insurrection. Still, she liked him. And she had been waiting a really long time to like someone.

  “Even though I was in rebellion mode, I was a believer,” Katie said. “I knew that if I ever came to a sexual line where I felt uncomfortable, Raj would stop. I knew that he would; I felt very confident about that. Still, most of my Christian friends were very like, ‘I don’t think that dating Raj is best for you because he isn’t a born-again Christian. It doesn’t feel true to who you are’—their just knowing how important my faith was to me. ‘But if this is what you want, I will support you.’

  “I think that in some ways, it hurt my friends when I threw my whole self into dating Raj. It was painful for them to see me choosing something that they thought would bring me pain someday. I definitely started disconnecting from my Christian friends at that time, and some of it was just feeling guilty about dating Raj when he wasn’t a Christian, and not wanting to be reminded of that.

  “I was almost at the point where I was like, ‘I really like this guy. And maybe I could just even marry him the way that he is.’ I was just so mad at God. I was really upset and disappointed. I wasn’t finding a Christian man or a meaningful career—all the things that I wanted. So I was feeling frustrated. And after graduating from school, I had four or five avenues that I thought about as a vocation for myself, but I was just really looking for guidance from God: ‘Where would you want me to be, God?’ ”

  “What if God was asking you the same question?” I asked. “What if he was waiting for you to tell him what you wanted?”

  Katie laughed under her breath. “It’s funny because it really never occurred to me that maybe he was letting me choose. It never even occurred to me that he would be saying, ‘And here’s your life; do what you want.’ ”

  In the end, though, Katie did choose. She and Raj had started to talk about marriage, but she still felt uncomfortable about marrying somebody who didn’t share her faith. “What I finally came to was that I did still believe in the Bible and the God of the Bible, and I want somebody in my life who wants God in their life,” she said. “So I broke up with Raj, which was a choice to put God first again. I hadn’t done that in a really long time. And I think just the act of finally choosing brought me closer to God.

  “Having gone to the dark side and back with God and with the Bible and the church, I think that I have a fuller appreciation for it now than I used to. Because I mean, there’s a lot of crap in there. And a lot of really dark, scary, unanswered things. I went through a period of blame with the church, just as I went through a period of blame with my parents. Then I got to a place where I thought, ‘I’m an adult now. I have to, at some point, stop blaming them for my problems and take ownership. I have to decide: Am I going to move on from the church and be with this man? Or not.’ ”

  Katie has since resigned herself to the possibility that she will never get married. And that if she does, it probably won’t be to the kind of man she has been holding out for—a born-again virgin like her. Aft
er all, what man would have waited all these years to have sex the way she had? It makes her sad. She’d be the first to admit it. But in the end, it is a trade she is willing to make for her faith.

  * * *

  I. Formerly known as London Bible College.

  II. Right now, around 80 percent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine are single, and nearly half of adults under the age of thirty-four have never married.5 Between people getting married later in life, and the increasing rate of divorce, the connection between marriage and church attendance (and singleness and not attending church) provides an important insight into the rising number of people who consider themselves religiously unaffiliated.

  III. When giving me permission to cite this article in late 2017, the author asked that I inform my readers that she has not been a Christian for a decade.

  IV. As an illustration, the authors of Every Young Woman’s Battle: Guarding Your Mind, Heart, and Body in a Sex-Saturated World, the counterpart to the evangelical book I previously quoted in regard to male masturbation, advises women tempted to masturbate to: “Place your sexual desires back into God’s hands rather than taking matters into your own.”9

  7

  * * *

  The Tigress

  When I pulled into the driveway of Muriel’s small midwestern house, the midday sun was already hidden behind darkening clouds, warning of worse weather to come. Inside, Muriel’s living room curtains were tightly drawn and the lights low. As we greeted one another, the words she had written to me over email when we were introduced by a mutual friend a few months ago came back to me: “I don’t live the wide, vibrant life I expected. My life is quiet, my sphere small. I’m a poet, but the living itself is calm. Smallish. The result of an immune disorder that’s slowly eaten away at my life so that I’m housebound, in a wheelchair when I go out, and occasionally bed-bound for weeks or months at a time.”