“Later I remember the nurse asked the photojournalist what happened. He said, ‘We had sex two times. Nothing happened while we were having sex. This happened ten or fifteen minutes after we had sex for the second time. I have no idea.’ They asked him, ‘Were you wearing a condom?’ He said, ‘First time I was, second time I wasn’t.’ The nurse wrote it all down. They came back and they shot me with something. Then, I blacked out. I couldn’t do it anymore.
“I came to for a split second. The photojournalist was yelling and this nurse dude was yelling to other people. I don’t remember what they were saying, but everybody was yelling. And I was out again.
“I know,” Scarlet looked at my face, which must have registered shock, though I’d heard the shorter version of the story on the phone with her already. “It’s surreal to talk about. I never talk about it. I’m actually shaking a little bit right now talking about it.”
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” she said quickly. “I woke up on a table. They were pulling my clothes off and yelling numbers. I don’t know. I guess blood pressure. Scary stuff that makes people yell.” Then she stopped again. “I’m totally shaking, talking about this . . .”
“Do you want to squeeze my hand?” I asked, reaching out.
“I really will be fine. It’s just so weird because I don’t talk about it in this much detail, almost ever.” But then she did take my hand, and she squeezed it hard. “Thank you,” she said breathing out audibly.
“Somebody was holding my eyes open,” Scarlet continued. “Saying, ‘Okay what is your name? Can you say your name? Can you say your name?’ And I couldn’t say my name, which was also really weird because I could say it in my brain, but it wouldn’t come out of my mouth. She was like, ‘Do you know where you are?’ And I nodded because I knew I was at the hospital. And she was, ‘I don’t want you to— Don’t go away. I want you to stay. I want you to stay with me. I want you to stay with me, stay with me.’ Over and over. Holding my eyes open. I don’t think I’ve ever physically tried harder to do anything in my whole life than that moment and I couldn’t, and I was out again.”
* * *
Since this day, Scarlet has talked to countless doctors about what happened to her. None of them have been able to explain it. It looks as though she went into anaphylactic shock, they’ve said, but they don’t know why.
“They asked me about allergies. I said, ‘I’m allergic to cats, and he did have a cat. If I pet them and rub my eye after, my eye will get puffy and itchy, but it really didn’t match the extremity of what happened obviously. And not all things cause anaphylactic shock. Latex condoms can cause anaphylactic shock, peanuts, sometimes shrimp, but not animals.
“At that time, the best guess was that I had some sudden allergy to the condom. That’s the only one that really made sense. They asked me if I was allergic to condoms and I said, ‘Not that I had ever known of.’ I went through a million allergy tests. They tested me for everything in condoms and it came back completely clear. I have never been allergic to peanuts. I didn’t eat peanuts that day. I have eaten peanuts a million times since and nothing. Nothing. They tested me so many times for a million bazillion things and the only things that came back were cats and a random dust bunny. Weird little side stuff that wouldn’t cause anaphylactic shock. I don’t think I’ll ever know, because every doctor I’ve shown my case to looks at it and kind of—” Scarlet shrugged. “Not one person can make any sense of what happened. The most anyone can tell me is that I might have a very mild version of some kind of allergy—maybe to cat fur on his bed or some kind of lubricant on the condom. But I mean, these are really stretches. Some people I’ve told the story to have suspected the photojournalist tried to roofie me, and it went wrong. But I did not have any food or drink with him that day. All of it remains a perfect jet-black mystery. No answers.”
“What do you think happened?” I asked Scarlet.
“I cannot with 100 percent certainty explain what happened on that day. Obviously, something medical happened. And in my mind, just as obviously, something spiritual happened. I had thoughts like, ‘Maybe this is actually what happens when you tempt Satan. When you go that far and you feel like you know better than God knows.’
“Doctors don’t understand it. They bring their colleagues in and they say, ‘When did you feel the body change?’ And I tell them the truth. I say, ‘It was right after I realized he wasn’t wearing a condom.’ My gut tells me that if, when the photojournalist stood, I had seen his butt instead, and he had shuffled off to the bathroom and I never saw his penis and had not found out he hadn’t worn a condom, none of this would have ever happened. I have no scientific proof for any of it. But I don’t know what else to say. What if my head was turned, and he got up and he moved to another room? A tiny shift could have changed everything.”
* * *
This is how Scarlet’s story ends:
“I woke up in the hospital and there was nobody in the room except for the photojournalist. My robe was soaked; my body was soaked; the mattress was soaked; I couldn’t talk; I didn’t even know what had happened, but it was very calm. Everything was very, very quiet.”
Then Scarlet saw her sexy red underwear discarded on the chair by her bed. And flashes of memory struck her in reverse chronological order—a more extreme version of what she had experienced after telling me her story on the phone. “Just little things. Again, part of my synesthesia is I remember details—a question the photojournalist asked me at dinner, something weird he did with his fork. Just this little, tiny”—she moved a pen sitting on her coffee table over a quarter of an inch, illustrating—“but really fast. Domino-fire fast. Then there were flashes of my relationship with Chris. Of all of my past romantic relationships. Then back to my parents, what I was taught and how lovingly they brought it to me. Then I was thirteen years old in my youth camp and this volcanic shame overcame me. I heard all the demonic things you hear growing up come from the bottom of the ocean of my mind. I was hearing, This is what happens when you go against the will of God.
“The photojournalist came over to me and he started talking to me. He was actually very sweet. He was rubbing my hand and saying things to me that I don’t remember. But I just know that it was very warm and comforting. He told me it was nighttime. I believe it was around midnight. I think we’d gone there in the afternoon, probably like two, three, four, something like that. To this day, the time that passed doesn’t seem possible to me, but I mean, it happened.
“I remember the staff came in and asked me ‘Do you have family? I really think you should call them and they should know this happened.’ But my family would have been horrified in so many ways. So they looked on their paperwork and said, ‘The last time you were here your emergency contact was someone named Chris. Should we call him?’ I said, ‘No.’ I thought of him being totally disgusted and sickened by what I had done. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. My best friend was on her honeymoon so I couldn’t call her. My other friends, I love them, but this was not—I’m not going to call them at 12:45 AM to please come over to the hospital and help me.
“The doctors wanted me to spend the night and I didn’t want to be there. I was like, ‘Please let me leave. I really don’t want to be here. Please let me leave.’ I begged and begged. Finally, the doctor was like, ‘I will let you go against my better judgment. If anything happens, you need to come. If anyone finds out I let you leave, I could be in really big trouble.’ It felt very, very serious.
“The photojournalist took me home. He walked me in and sat me in that chair,” she said, pointing to the chair in the corner of her living room. “And then he suddenly became a different person. He was like, ‘I have to leave. Like, I need to go. Look. Right now. I need to leave.’ Something switched inside of him.
“And now, I was alone. It was the most alone and ashamed I had ever felt in my whole entire life. I just felt stripped of all my dignity and stripped of all my value. And I t
hought back to what the Greek doctor said after my first panic attack.”
I nodded. I had been thinking about her too.
“Then I fell into a death sleep and woke up and was just a zombie wearing old clothes and sitting here on this orange couch,” she said patting the couch. “Just staying in the same red underwear for days, though I could never wear them again afterward. There was heavy shame all over my body. Everything hurt. My vagina hurt. My full body hurt. I was an ocean of shame. Talking about it still drops my stomach out.”
“Did you ever see the photojournalist again?”
“We had some texts back and forth. I hadn’t heard from him so I was like, ‘Look, I know you’re totally freaked out, you have every reason to be freaked out, but you understand that I basically almost died and I’m having a complete crisis right now? And you were the only other person in the whole world that was there when this happened. Actually, you know more about what happened in the hospital than I do.’ I became really upset and really angry and scared. I needed some kind of conversation to understand what just happened to me. And he would not engage with me at all, but I could see on OkCupid that he kept looking at my profile all the time.I
“Then three weeks later, he was like, ‘Can we talk? I think we should talk,’ and basically apologized for how he was acting. He said, ‘I don’t even have an operating system to process what went on and I’m so sorry. I handled it so badly. It was so scary because we were basically having a relationship at the very early stages and I didn’t even know what to do.’
“I needed that. We’d lived through this very frightening thing together. Suddenly we were back on planet Earth and then things started between us again on the orange couch,” she said. “I remember him carrying me, like a movie, back to the bedroom. I told him, ‘I so want to, but I’m really scared that it’s going to happen again,’ and he was like, ‘But I’m the person that was with you, so I know how—I’m here.’ He was weirdly very comforting.’ So we had sex again, a different kind of sex. My whole body was still numb. I was not there.
“After it was over we talked for a little while and I said, ‘I think we should go to dinner next time. I think we need more just talking and being together.’ And he was like, ‘I do too.’
“He left.
“And we never talked again.”
* * *
I. As of summer 2017, OkCupid no longer allows users to see who visited their profiles.
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* * *
Dementor
Finding Harry Potter fan fiction changed everything for Rosemary.
“A big part of why I started reading all of that—fan fiction, hentai, because why go mainstream porn when you can go nerd porn?—was just because I wanted to know about sex,” the twenty-five-year-old former evangelical homeschooled student explained from the other end of the tweed couch we shared. “Having learned about sex from fan fiction though, I genuinely couldn’t imagine how you could have sex without magic,” she laughed. “And I became very concerned I was addicted to porn. So I told my mom, and she sent me to an anti-gay counseling center for porn addiction. I was about sixteen. I had never kissed a boy. I hadn’t even been on a date at this point. And my counselor, who was gay—or ‘ex-gay’—had me reading books about people having promiscuous affairs that were ruining their marriages and things.”
Rosemary slipped her Birkenstocks off and tucked her legs up under her long patchwork skirt, beginning to get comfortable in my friend’s house. We had both taken long bus rides to get there that morning, as my friend’s city was, conveniently, halfway between Rosemary’s and my homes. “In a weird way though,” Rosemary added thoughtfully, “I think being treated for a porn addiction made me feel important. At the time, I felt very small and ignored. I was depressed. And my brother—who is two and a half years younger than me—was acting out really aggressively. He threatened to kill me a lot. He was even hospitalized for a while. I never really took him seriously on the murdering thing, but I started locking my door all the time. My parents really hated that I did that. I think they thought I was hiding out in my room. Which, I was. But, I mean, what are you going to do?
“I brought up to my parents how unhappy I was several times, but they weren’t really receptive to it. My brother was verbally sexually abusing me—asking me to have sex with him or describing sex to me. When I was maybe fifteen, I told my mom. She burst into tears and just didn’t say anything to me for hours. When my dad came home, he said, ‘Do we want to talk about this?’ My parents made me confront my brother about it in front of them. I was like, ‘Oh. Yes. Robert, stop propositioning me.’ My brother was like, ‘What does that mean?’ And I was like, ‘It means stop asking me to have sex with you.’ And he was like, ‘What are you talking about? What? That’s so gross.’
“And then it was dropped.
“When I was seventeen, I mentioned it to my mom again. I remember intentionally making it nonthreatening: ‘Hey, I know he’s joking, but it’s really irritating. Can you tell him not to say this?’ And she was like, ‘Yes, yes.’ And then that wasn’t a big deal either. I think that’s the whole reason I told my mom that I had a porn addiction. I was going through all this stuff and I just really wanted attention.”
Talking about her fear and discomfort around her brother didn’t get Rosemary the attention she needed. But she knew she’d be seen if she confessed a sin. Rosemary’s parents’ reactions to the two varieties of sexual “issues” Rosemary brought to them—her reading Harry Potter fan fiction, which resulted in her being sent to ongoing therapy, and her brother’s sexual propositions and threats, which resulted in brief conversations—reflect the purity movement’s values and norms. Generally speaking, purity culture excuses male sexuality and amplifies female sexuality, and it shames consensual sexual activity and silences nonconsensual sexual activity.
Sexual violence perpetrated by those within the community in particular is strictly censored, as it challenges the pure/impure binary upon which the purity movement is based. The binary demands that predators are outsiders, though seven out of ten rapes are perpetrated by someone known to the victim (this is even more likely among juvenile victims, 93 percent of whom know the perpetrator) and 55 percent of sexual assaults take place at or near a victim’s home.1 One of the results of othering perpetrators is that victims can be psychologically unprepared to protect themselves when threats come from closer to home than they ever imagined they could.
“My parents wanted me to know how to defend myself against back-alley rapists,” Rosemary said. “I even took a self-defense class. But none of that prepared me for someone I loved and trusted disrespecting me.” She took a deep breath. “I was home for the summer after my first year of Bible college,” Rosemary began. “The assault itself wasn’t physically violent. I had never even heard of ‘consent.’ I didn’t hear that term until I started studying feminism when I was twenty or twenty-one. My brother just came in, did his thing, and I was just like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ No options even occurred to me.”
“You froze,” I suggested.
“Yes. I’m pretty much at peace with that now. I mean, my understanding is that’s a very normal reaction. When you’re scared, you’re just trying to get through the situation and a lot of times, it’s your body deciding what it will do, not your mind. I remember staring at a globe the whole time. I remember fluorescent lights. I also remember having my eyes closed. It’s one of those sensory jumbles. I just wanted him to leave. It was just, ‘If I compromise with him enough, he will leave; it will be like nothing happened.’ ”
A few weeks later, Rosemary told her parents. “My mom screamed like I have never heard her screaming. My dad was really angry. And then,” Rosemary looked down, “I guess they talked to my brother.” Rosemary’s brother told his parents that Rosemary hadn’t fought him off. “And my parents took that to mean it was kind of my fault,” Rosemary said. “My dad said he didn’t have a video camera in my room so he’d never k
now exactly what happened. I hated him for saying that, though he’s since said he never said it. The church views men as animals with no agency. The whole ‘as a girl it’s your job to stop guys from doing stuff’ line of thinking. So my parents treated my brother like he’d messed up but nothing more, and I felt really blamed. They acted like it was consensual, like it was sex. Sex is so penalized in evangelicalism, it’s easier to chalk rape and abuse up to sex and be done with it. But I don’t think what happened between me and my brother was sex at all. This was abuse.”
* * *
Though purity culture messaging about girls and boys is very different, the gender-based messages are absorbed by all. For instance, boys hear girls being told that they must cover their bodies and avoid flirtation in order to protect themselves from boys’ and men’s uncontrollable sexual virility. What does that say about men? some of these boys may find themselves wondering. Or, more specifically, What does that say about me?
Several years ago, writer David Ellis Dickerson spoke about his experience as a young evangelical man on the radio program This American Life.2 At one point, David called up his childhood friend, Derek, the son of a missionary, and they exchanged stories. “I, uh, developed a technique of seeing girls as just floating heads,” Derek admitted to David. “You just learn you’re just not—not going to look below the neck. . . . I was a cartoonist for my college newspaper, and I didn’t actually know how to draw girls really. I mean you can see—you can see when I would draw a female figure, uh, top-to-bottom in a cartoon, there’s an awkwardness to it, because I didn’t actually know what they looked like,” Derek laughed. “It’s funny to look back and talk about them now, but it was all very dead serious back then.”
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