Pure

by Linda Kay Klein

  In many ways, I was still playing sex. The scripts had gotten more explicit, but my role—that of an actress—had remained the same.

  Religion has a way of getting inside the most private parts of your life. Though I no longer attended an evangelical church, I still found myself analyzing my thoughts, obsessing over my mistakes, and seeking out even the tiniest sins in hopes that confessing them could free me from the feeling of impurity that was always there. When your inner life looks like that, sometimes the safest place to do something “bad” is in public.

  Standing onstage playing Martha Stewart, I must have appeared to those who didn’t know me like a completely normal twenty-two-year-old healthily exploring her sexuality through comedy. But inside, I was a wreck.

  * * *

  The first time my now-boyfriend Sebastian and I tried to have sex, things did not go well. My head said it was fine for me to have sex with the long-term boyfriend I loved. Yet every aspect of the actual attempt triggered a physical reaction: the removal of each individual item of clothing made me tremble, the introduction of the condom made my head flame, the condom coming out of the packaging made my eczema flare, and the kissing that I knew was meant to lead somewhere this time, not just be what it was, sent a shudder through me that screamed: You. Are. Bad.

  I fought it back.

  This is just like when I realized that I speak in a higher register than is natural for me, I told myself. Your body is just stuck in an old way of being. You don’t have to let it control you. You can control it. Just close your eyes, Linda. Reset your equilibrium. And go on.

  I pushed forward. I tried to force my body to behave. But this wasn’t like the other times that I had resisted the gender and sexuality messaging with which I had been raised. Sex was just different for me.

  Before I had decided that I was open to the possibility of having sex before marriage, sexual exploration didn’t terrify me in the same way that it started to once the loss of that all-important “virgin” label was a legitimate possibility. But since I told Sebastian I thought I was ready to have sex, everything about our intimate lives changed.

  Sebastian called them my freak-outs. In the midst of them, names that I would never use for anyone else—slut, whore, harlot (a term that isn’t used in secular culture much but that I certainly heard growing up a lot)—ran through my head as though on ticker tape. My eyes would get watery. Sebastian would ask me if I wanted to stop. “No, no,” I would say. “Let’s just do this. I have to be able to do this.” But then the tears began to roll down my cheeks, I was scratching at the raised red skin from my flaring eczema and, before I knew it, I was huddled in a corner of his bed crying and scratching myself until I bled.

  “I remember we would just be talking,” Sebastian told me recently when I asked him what he remembered of the years—literally, years—that we endured these freak-outs together. “Then something sexual would come up,” he continued, “even just talking about another couple having sex, and suddenly you would be curled up in the fetal position. During your freak-outs, it was like you weren’t really present. Your emotions took over and you spoke and acted from that place. You were always looking to pick a fight with yourself. It was like you had a chip on your shoulder for you. There was a lot of self-accusation: ‘I’m terrible, I’m the worst.’ ”

  Even after an attempt to have sex was over, the anxiety Sebastian saw stayed with me—along with new layers of self-hatred at having humiliated myself in front of him again. If I got close enough to having sex before the freak-out came, I couldn’t help but anticipate the terrible consequences that I felt would undoubtedly follow. Surely, something horrible was about to happen to me. Some punishment was coming. Some terror was about to arise. After all, hadn’t I been taught all my life that this was simply what happened to girls who did the kinds of things I just did?

  Of all the ways I imagined the sky might fall, pregnancy seemed the most likely. My irrational fear could only be quelled with a store-bought test. I could breathe easy again when that beautiful minus sign proved to me that, for now, no one would find out what I’d—almost—done.

  A common adage in neurobiology, Hebb’s axiom, states: “neurons that fire together wire together.” In other words, if two neural circuits—such as sexuality and shame—are fired simultaneously often enough, eventually firing the neural circuit for one will automatically activate the neural circuit for the other. Dr. Norman Doidge refers to this phenomenon in his book The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, at one point describing the work of Dr. Michael Merzenich.

  Merzenich has described a number of “brain traps” that occur when two brain maps, meant to be separate, merge. As we have seen, he found that if a monkey’s fingers were sewn together and so forced to move at the same time, the maps for them would fuse, because their neurons fired together and hence wired together. But he also discovered that maps fuse in everyday life. When a musician uses two fingers together frequently enough while playing an instrument, the maps for the two fingers sometimes fuse, and when the musician tries to move only one finger, the other moves too. The maps for the two different fingers are now “dedifferentiated.” The more intensely the musician tries to produce a single movement, the more he will move both fingers, strengthening the merged map. The harder the person tries to get out of the brain trap, the deeper he gets into it, developing a condition called “focal dystonia.” A similar brain trap occurs in Japanese people who, when speaking English, can’t hear the difference between “r” and “l” because the two sounds are not differentiated in their brain maps. Each time they try to say the sounds properly, they say them incorrectly, reinforcing the problem.1

  I believe that the merger of sex and shame that I experienced is just such a brain trap. Even if we eventually come to understand that our sexual nature is natural, normal, and healthy, we may find that our upbringing in purity culture, which has dedifferentiated shame and sex over years of messaging, observation, and experience, ensures that our brains fire those shame neurons when the subject of our sexuality arises, with or without our permission, trapping us in a shame spiral. The first time an adolescent girl feels shame about her sexual nature, it may just be because she knows she is “supposed” to feel this way. But if this same girl continues to feel shame when having sexual thoughts or feelings over years, repeatedly firing those neurons at the same time, sex and shame will eventually become very difficult to disconnect in her brain. Her neural pathways have been paved, physical and mental habits formed, metaphors for how sex will change her internalized, methods for fighting off sexual feelings made habitual, and on and on.

  * * *

  “It’s negative,” the nurse announced brightly.

  “Great!” I replied from the edge of the examination table, hugging the paper dress around my waist.

  “Let’s get you a birth control prescription though, okay hon?” the nurse continued. “You really shouldn’t be having sex without protection.”

  “Oh, I’m good,” I responded. “I’m actually already on birth control.”

  “You’re on birth control?” the nurse repeated me, her face contorting.

  It was one of those moments in which you suddenly see yourself from the outside. When things that had seemed relatively reasonable to you mere minutes ago—like the fact that you felt it was necessary to take a pregnancy test before undergoing an X-ray despite the fact that you were on birth control (to say nothing of your virginity about which she didn’t even know)—are suddenly exposed as not normal at all.

  “If you’re on birth control,” the nurse said slowly, “then why did you think you might be pregnant?”

  Because I’m crazy? I wanted to answer. So okay, I grew up in a really conservative religious community and I’ve been a little messed up about sex ever since. It’s complicated, but . . .

  “I missed my period,” I sputtered out instead. “So. You know. Better safe than sorry, right
?”

  It wasn’t exactly a lie. After all, taking birth control for my particularly painful periods over the past few years had completely messed up my cycle. Most months, I didn’t get a period at all. The technicality of my truth felt very important to me at the time.

  The nurse smiled, though the look of suspicion didn’t leave her eyes. Still, she probably just thought I was having unprotected sex, I thought to myself. Which felt a lot less embarrassing to me at the moment than what was really going on.

  So I just nodded and smiled back.

  What is wrong with me? I prayed as I threw the paper dress into the trash bin after the X-ray was finally done. I put my clothes on as fast as I could, desperate to get to my dorm before the tears began to fall. None of the other girls I go to school with are experiencing these things, I told God as I ran across campus. They aren’t having nightmares in which people call them horrible names. They aren’t having freak-outs every time they try to have sex. And they sure aren’t making the school nurse give them pregnancy tests when they’re virgins.

  I jammed my key into my dorm room door, burst inside, and shut the door tightly behind me. So why am I, God? I railed. What is wrong with me?

  I thought I had been ready to leave my sexual shame behind. And yet, the very choices I was making in an attempt to circumvent that shame wound up triggering it! And it was a lot more difficult for me to deal with this than it had been to deal with the original shaming experiences that started everything. When other people shamed me, I could resist, differentiating myself and my values from the values of the purity movement messengers. But who could I push against now? Who could I fight? Whose values could I differentiate myself from? When the only person left was me.

  For a long time, I thought I was irreparably damaged. That I’d never be able to have a healthy romantic relationship. Then, around my senior year of college, a childhood friend left her position as a faculty member at a conservative evangelical college. Talking with her over the phone, my friend confided in me that she had been overwhelmed by fear and anxiety for years. She was always walking on eggshells, afraid she would do something to upset the all-male administration. Only recently had she found the strength and the acceptable excuse—getting married—to put in her resignation and move several hours away from the school. Yet even since leaving, she was still haunted by recurrent nightmares of her school’s deans raping her and found herself scared that they had found ways to watch her from afar.

  The next time I went back to my hometown, I helped my friend riffle through her plants, Kleenex boxes, and picture frames to reassure her that the school’s administration was not recording her in an attempt to find some information they could use to “pulpit shame” her, as she had seen happen to so many others. I watched the relief spread across my friend’s face when no recording devices were found, and realized, that look on her face? It was the same one I was sure spread across mine every time I took a pregnancy test.

  My friend and I had taken opposite paths after high school. Whereas I had left evangelicalism, reforming myself as a spiritual-but-not-religious person who was really trying hard to have sex with her boyfriend, my friend had attended a college even more conservative than our home church, pursued a career in Christian education, and remained sexually “pure” until marriage. And yet, here we both were—tormented by the same fear and anxiety.

  One day, this friend told me a story about when she was a student at the college at which she later taught. The school had a strict policy, she told me: Women were not allowed to wear pants on campus or, in fact, anywhere other than their hometowns (presumably because they were in their fathers’ jurisdictions then).

  In the first few days of my friend’s second semester of college, she was called into an administrator’s office.

  “One of your fellow students reported that she saw you wearing jeans at a mall over Christmas break,” the administrator accused her.

  “Yes,” my friend said, her stomach turning over. “But the mall is in my hometown,” which was several hours away from the school. “It’s okay for me to wear jeans in my hometown, right?”

  Once the administrator verified my friend’s claim about her location at the time of the pants sighting, he let her go without punishment. But the message that someone was always watching stayed with her.

  Within a context in which one is not safe to walk around her hometown mall hours away from her religious school without the fear that someone, somewhere, might be watching her, was my friend really paranoid for combing her home for recording devices? Or was it possible that the administrators actually would plant recording devices in her home to maintain their control over her after she left her post? She didn’t know. Just like I didn’t know if there was an actual risk of my getting pregnant if my boyfriend’s genitals and mine were in the same general vicinity. I didn’t think so, but . . . what if? That not knowing, the constant question of whether we were being crazy or we were just being smart was maddening.

  Today, my friend isn’t sure what to make of the paranoia she experienced after leaving the school at which she taught. She is the first to say that the college was more conservative than most Christian colleges and she struggles with the knowledge that some of her fellow female faculty members seem to have been unaffected by even the extreme doses of shame and control doled out at her school.

  But for me, seeing somebody—particularly somebody who had followed all of the purity movement’s rules—face challenges similar to my own at a time when nobody in my new secular world seemed to be was big, regardless of the details. It would be several more years before I would begin interviewing individuals raised in the evangelical church, but it was then that I first knew this was what I needed to do. Because if I was not the only one experiencing these things, then perhaps there was still hope for me after all. When I eventually began my twelve-year tour through the stories of evangelicals and former evangelicals like myself and my friend, interview after interview filled me with the same feelings I had with my friend that day—relief, anger, and the righteous knowledge I was anything but alone.

  * * *

  As I mentioned in the opening, evangelical young people are the most likely religious grouping to expect that having sex will upset their mother and cause their partner to lose respect for them. Evangelicals are also among the least likely to expect sex to be pleasurable, and among the most likely to anticipate having sex will make them feel guilty.2 And yet evangelical young people are basically just as likely to have sex as their peers are.3 In other words, most evangelical youth are a lot like I was in the years after I left the church—sexual, and ashamed of it.

  Several of my interviewees, whether or not they were still in the church, attempted to sidestep their shame by telling themselves they were still technically virgins, despite what many would see as evidence to the contrary. They engaged in other forms of sex, but avoided penis-in-vagina sex. Or they had penis-in-vagina sex, but promised themselves they were going to marry their partners someday so they could at least say, “I’ve only slept with one person” or “my husband was my first,” tricking the untrained ear. This logic led more than one of my interviewees to marry men they said they might not have otherwise.

  The summer after my freshman year in college, my boyfriend and I, who I had sex with when I was fifteen, broke up. I quickly started to become afraid: “Wait, if I ever get into another relationship, I am going to have to tell them that I am not a virgin. And how am I going to do that?” That conversation seemed so insurmountable and humiliating for me. I couldn’t even imagine it. I didn’t want to have to say to someone, “I’m dirty and used and not pure. Will you accept me?” I thought, “I need to get back together with him because he is the one that I did this with and we need to be together, right?” And once the ball was rolling and all the stuff was happening—invitations were out and all the people from this church I had grown up in were going to be there—how could I leave? I thought, “There’s nothing I can d
o about it. I can’t change anything. I can’t get out of this relationship. I just have to figure out how to make it work.” (Andrea, recently divorced)

  Others justify having had sex by calling it a crime of passion, which somehow feels less “bad” than having premeditated sex.

  A Christian friend had been having sex for a few months and I bought her some condoms. She was so mad, because they never planned to have sex. It just “happened.” Had they bought condoms, that would be planning to do it, planning to have sex. It’s almost like getting drunk. You don’t plan to get drunk, so you don’t make a plan; you don’t have a way to get home or whatever. But then you do, and you’re stuck. (Rosemary)II

  Yet the sex/shame brain trap is set and sprung all the same, ensnaring many of us raised in the purity movement in fear and anxiety.

  Over the course of my interviews, I learned I wasn’t the only one having freak-outs.

  We’re rolling around naked; he would be rubbing his penis on my vagina but not in it; I would have orgasms from it. But I still, in my brain, I could be like, “We’re not having sex.” I would still be a virgin. And you know what happened . . . an inch, quarter-inch, whatever, would start to go in and I would recoil and freak out. (Scarlet)

  I wasn’t the only one afraid of getting pregnant though I hadn’t had penis-in-vagina sex either.

  Surely you’ve heard of “the phantom baby”? How nobody has had sex but they all think they’re pregnant? I’ve never met an evangelical woman who doesn’t irrationally believe she’s pregnant at some point. I dare you to find me one who’s well adjusted enough that that hasn’t happened to her. I don’t think she’s out there. Since I started dating after my divorce, I even feel it coming back. My period was three days late this month and I was like, “Well crap! I’m pregnant and I haven’t even gotten any action yet! I haven’t even kissed anyone!” But the thought that I must be pregnant is there. It’s just there. It’s like a goiter. It’s just living with me. I don’t know how long it will take to get rid of it. (Val)