After Purity Culture

We didn’t have intercourse on our wedding night. We definitely had sex, but the actual mechanics of consummating our marriage? We didn’t quite get there. I was a virgin, he was a virgin, so basically we didn’t know what the hell we were doing. My husband is the only man I’d ever held hands with and kissed. My parents didn’t talk to me about sex. The conservative Christian school I grew up in only warned us that we would all want sex a lot, especially the boys, but to never do it. We were given very explicit instructions on how not to do it, including which base we should avoid, not lying down together, no tongue when kissing, etc. Because those acts will surely lead to the debauchery of Pre Marital Sex, which again, must be avoided if we wanted any hopes of a happy, Jesus-ful life.

So I knew all that, but I didn’t know my own body. I didn’t know how many holes were “down there,” I didn’t know the physiological responses of lubrication, I barely knew how to make a baby. When we did get pregnant a year into our marriage, I remember thinking with relief, whew! We did it right. It worked.

I also did not understand my sexual desires. I had touched myself since the onset of puberty, but I never knew what I was doing, what it was called, or what it meant. There weren’t a whole lot of resources on female sexual desire in my little evangelical bubble. I honestly believed up until recently that I was perhaps asexual (reader: I am definitely not asexual) because I simply didn’t have access to any language to understand my erotic desires.

How did you masturbate through adolescence and not know what’s going on, you might ask. I don’t know, it’s super embarrassing. My only excuses are that in the 90’s I didn’t yet have the internet to give me any answers, and that growing up evangelical made me exceptionally good at disassociating from my body. 

Believe it or not, I remained almost that ignorant for the 20 years that I’ve been married. It’s possible because I am in a monogamous sexual relationship with a man who loves me very well, inside and outside of the bedroom, so it’s just not an issue, at least not a pressing one. I fought alongside my LGBTQ+ friends and family for their right to exist fully with their sexuality and celebrated the legalization of same sex marriage first in the U.S. in 2015, then in my home country of Taiwan in 2019. My mind stretched and expanded as I kept reading and learning about a variety of ways to love one another including polyamory, friends with benefits, and the ever expanding sexual orientations along the big, beautiful spectrum. At times, it felt challenging, but mostly, I welcomed exploring and understanding and supporting my fellow human citizens for their freedom to come out and be themselves, all the while thinking this isn’t my personal fight for liberation because I was safely ensconced in my conventionally accepted, cis-hetero monogamous marriage. 

And it’s true that I have experienced all the privileges of conventional marriage, but the sexual silence of my youth began to catch up to me until I could no longer ignore the call from my own body to pay attention to her. 

It began, as I do, with consuming large amounts of literature. I read Emily Nagoski’s seminal book, Come As You Are, where at one point in the book, she encourages her readers to put down the book and use a mirror to take a look at their own genitals, to see it, marvel at it, and celebrate it just as you are. I felt a bit awkward doing that, stopping mid-book from my reading nook and headed to the bathroom with a small mirror. What I saw in the mirror was not flawless but it was mine. I looked and looked and then I put down the mirror and shook with tears. It unlocked something in me. The embodied act of seeing my own body with intention and self-love lit a fire in the depth of my being. It became imperative that I take the time to not only look at my genitals, but at my entire sexuality–to uncover the lies I had been told, to insist on the full revelation of my body to my own self, and to pursue relentlessly the pleasure and liberation that had long been denied me.

I’ll start with self pleasure. Women have been fed the lie that our bodies are for the pleasure of men. I’ll just flip that script and tell myself that I deserve pleasure as well. That my body, those beautiful folds I saw in the mirror, exist not to bear babies, not for the pleasure of men, but just for me: my comfort, my pleasure, my orgasms. Should be easy, right? Should be the most natural thing in the world to figure out what my desires are, what I like and do not like, and how to please myself, right? Right? 

Turns out, undoing a lifetime of programming, of having my autonomy erased, isn’t as simple as flipping a script. Now, I have been undoing my programming from my evangelical faith for many years, this sex thing, is just a new frontier I’m braving, so I have some prior experience. I knew it was going to take some time but I was willing to do the work.

It always starts with just doing the thing and realizing you didn’t die from doing the thing. Cussing, for instance. I didn’t grow up cussing because I grew up evangelical and that was not condoned in that culture. The first time I tried swearing, I didn’t die. I did, however, feel my face flush and my heartbeat race, and a dollop of shame injected throughout my nervous system. This is a natural, human response to doing something you were told as a child would displease God, the Being capable of casting you to hell. But I didn’t die–it was so wonderful to not die. The next time I swore, it was a little less fraught. And a little less after that. Can I say that I can swear without any physiological reactions anymore? No, it takes time to unwire neural pathways and this particular circuit is showing resistance. It’s okay, I’m working on it. 

Back to self pleasure. Would it be okay if I took time out of my life to focus on this thing of discovering my sexuality, to actually prioritize something that I believed to be shameful at worst, and unimportant at best? I was going to try and see if I don’t die. Thus began my journey to my sexual liberation. After Come As You Are I kept reading. I read books about sexuality, purity culture, and porn. I listened to sex advice podcasts, argued with people on the internet about sex, and hosted a sex conference. (It was a conference titled, Parenting After Purity Culture, but behind the scenes my team and I referenced it as the sex conference for giggles.) I read some more, I wrote some more, and yes I practiced what I was learning–by myself and with my partner, which was when I discovered I was not, indeed, asexual–it was great fun. 

What I learned was what I should’ve been taught as a child–I learned my own anatomy. I learned accurate names for all my body parts, that the vulva encompasses the entire outer region of my genitals including the opening to the vagina, and the vagina is the internal organ. It’s popular to misuse vagina to refer to the entire female genitalia. I learned about physiological responses to arousal, that lubrication happens but not always, is not necessarily indicative of the state of arousal, and cannot and should not be a method to communicate consent. I understood how and when I got wet, and that peeled back the layers to how women’s physiological reactions have been used as evidence against rape and violence towards our bodies. There were many times in my journey of exploration that I broke out into cold sweat, struck by how much my sexual ignorance could have led to sexual abuse, and indeed does happen to many girls and women. And it made me angry at the ways I had been left vulnerable by those who could and should have given me this information and instead, gave me nothing. 

I didn’t just stop at biological facts and physiological responses, I also dove deep into my desires and attractions. I grew up with cis-heterosexual norms and have been married for 20 years in a cis-heterosexual marriage. Did I make those decisions because it was the norm, and I was subtly coerced into this arrangement? Or is it who I am and what I truly wanted? How straight am I, really?

I’ll not lie and confess I may have taken a Buzzfeed quiz. 

It turns out I am, boringly, pretty damn straight. Which makes sense because I have not had much anxiety throughout a long term hetero relationship. But the exploration was not all in vain. I learned that desires and attractions are complicated and fluid. I am very attracted to women’s bodies, just not sexually. I admire the female form more than a man’s. “What’s up with that?” I’d pester my husband, and he would just shrug because, well, he likes looking at women’s bodies too. “I like looking at women but I do not want to have sex with women.” I concluded, and with that opinion, we parted ways. Eventually, we gave up on figuring it out because it just is what it is. And what it is, is liberating. I learned that desires and attractions are wonderfully wild, which also explained to me why my religious upbringing was so obsessed with controlling it. It cannot possibly be contained into any social constructions–at least not persistently or consistently.

Our desires and attractions wax and wane, throughout last night’s sex, throughout the day, throughout the week, month, and over our lifetime. I came to understand that my sexual desires and attractions are best not understood–that they be given space to breathe, change, and bend to the whims of my imagination and joy. 

With all of my newfound sexual liberation I’m engaging with others with even more openness. The more free I get, the more freedom I want for others. I want people to know their own bodies, to be in alignment with their bodies, to exercise autonomy over their own bodies. Policy wise, this means I advocate for the right to healthcare for trans kids, for the right to reproductive choice, and for comprehensive sex education in schools and in the home. Relationship arrangements I used to judge: people who repair after affairs, polyamorous families, friends with benefits, I now am more willing to listen to their stories and believe their experiences. I now know we cannot box something as mysterious and nuanced as human relationships with one another into outdated, patriarchal constructs. The diversity of our humanity continues to stretch my sensibilities and expand my capacity to include. 

As I’m scrolling facebook and celebrating with a hearty “like” on pictures of half naked friends at the Pride parade, it is truly hard to imagine that this person that I am, with the views that I hold, is the same conservative evangelical virgin who married straight out of college. And although it feels absurd to say that I am a sexually liberated woman when I am still in a long term monogamous marriage with the only man I’ve ever kissed, I feel indeed, that I am liberated. I now know my own body, feel free to explore my desires, am able to communicate my wants, and unabashedly pursue self pleasure. This is life after purity culture, freedom from sexual ignorance and repression. I had to relearn the information I was deprived of, practice getting in touch with my own body and mind, and figure out how to engage meaningfully with others.