The church taught me to be afraid of my own body and my own thoughts. Here are the receipts.

The Hulk. Image source.

[content note: Christian anti-self ideology, conflating consensual and nonconsensual sex by calling it all "sexual sin"]

So for anyone who maybe didn't believe me when I said purity culture taught me to be afraid of my own body and my own desires- to be constantly paranoid about how "one thing leads to another" and I might commit the horrible crime of having sex before I could even realize what I'm doing- I got all your f***ing receipts right here: Be Afraid of Yourself: A Plea to Christian Leaders on Sexual Sin.

Behold, the blog post at that link. It's about how more and more Christian leaders have been exposed as having committed "sexual sin", and so no Christian man should EVER think he is anything but a sex-obsessed monster who can't be alone for one minute because WHO KNOWS what could happen.

You might think I'm exaggerating. I'm not:

Here’s my modest proposal: Men, it’s time to stop trusting ourselves. Stop trusting in your integrity and strength. Stop telling yourself that you would never surrender to temptation. Stop telling yourself you are better than the scores of Christian luminaries whose lives and families have disappeared in scandal. There is no moral chasm between them and you. You are not made of finer clay. Each of us is just one bad decision away from becoming the next stroke in the nauseating drumbeat of the church’s public failures.

Let me say this dramatically to get my message across: You should get to the point where you are afraid to be in a room alone with yourself. I’m not kidding. As Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry put it, we have met the enemy and he is us.
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We are weak. We are usually no match for sexual temptation.
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Christian men, it’s time we stopped trying to be heroes. It’s time we stopped going it alone. It’s time we recognized how muscular the monster of sexual sin really is. It’s time we had the courage to run.
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Even your victories can turn to defeat. The battle may be going well. You may have defeated sexual temptation on your own, a few times. You may be reaping the blessings of obedience. You have the trust and admiration of those you love. They place you on a pedestal. They strive to imitate your integrity. You are a model Christian. Then you start pacing the parapets at night. A woman on her rooftop catches your eye. The next morning, it’s all over.
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It means being able to see the beginnings of temptation, to catch its shadow coming around the corner, and run. It means recognizing that you cannot beat it. You cannot stand against it on your own. Look how many better men than you have fallen! It means fleeing to where you know there are reinforcements, where the hosts of Heaven are strongest. It means dialing up a trusted confidant in Christ the moment desire is born, before it even matures to lingering thoughts, much less into full temptation!
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What I am proposing is something a little more radical than accountability partners. It is a fundamentally different attitude toward ourselves, one of everlasting mistrust and suspicion. Do not trust yourself. Do not believe in yourself. Do not even turn your back on yourself. Do not dare keep a secret.

This goes against everything our culture tells us, I know. And it goes against something still stronger than our culture: our pride, as men. We want to be seen as self-sufficient and strong. We want to be immovable rocks for God. But I am convinced that any man who thinks this way will become lunch-meat for the first sexual temptation that strikes him. You cannot stand on your own. You will not. None of us can, consistently, and reliably. That’s why God gave us the Church. That’s why He gave us each other.

Run, men. You are no match for yourselves.

Holy shit.

All right, I see a few problems with this ideology:

1. It treats all kinds of "sexual sin" as the same- from the things that are fine and don't hurt anyone (porn, lust, masturbation, consensual unmarried sex) to the things that are actually bad (having an affair, sexual harassment, rape, abuse, molesting children). Over here in reality land, it's perfectly fine and normal to have sexual desires ("lust"). But it is NOT fine and normal to sexually harass one's coworkers. That's not okay, and that's not something that "just happens"- it's a deliberate choice. But this writer seems to think that if a man watches porn once, he's basically the same as a man who lost his job over allegations of sexual abuse. Or at least, the only thing standing between them is one verrrrrrry slippery slope.
2. It teaches women that men just can't control themselves, so we shouldn't expect them to like, be able to respect us and not be terrible. If you're alone with a boy, well OBVIOUSLY he's going to sexually assault you, like what did you expect? If this is really what men are like, then women are required to police them. Eff all of that.
3. And it tells men they shouldn't try to be anything better. This could even become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Boys don't try to learn self-control because they're taught that it's not possible anyway.
4. It tells asexual men they don't exist, or something is wrong with them and they're not "real" men.

But mostly the reason I'm posting this is that I've written a lot about how terrified I was of my own body and my own desires, back when I believed in all that "sexual purity" stuff. (See my posts For This Asexual, Purity Culture Was All About Fear and Asexual and "Impure".) I was scared to sit on my boyfriend's bed, back in college when I was dating my first boyfriend. It never crossed my mind that I would be interested in having sex with him- I thought about sex exclusively as a horrifying scary dangerous thing that I needed to put up barriers to protect myself from.

I was scared, I was so scared. Purity culture advocates told stories about how a good Christian couple was alone together and somehow "one thing led to another" and they had sex without meaning to. Don't kiss because it might lead to other things. Don't lay down. Don't be alone with your boyfriend at night.

And, by the way, none of these warnings were about protecting myself from rape. (Yeah there were other warnings about rape, but those were separate from the warnings about "temptation".) It was about a belief that sex could "just happen" without either partner actually choosing it. And both of them would be at fault, because they chose to put themselves into that situation in the first place.

All those years being scared of myself and my own desires, and then I finally tried to have sex with Hendrix (about 2 years before we got married) and we couldn't even ****ing figure out how to do it. (More details on that in this post, it's a bit explicit so I won't write it here.) Sex was never something I could have just done accidentally. And I'm f***ing angry.

And a while after that, I figured out I'm asexual. Yes all that "struggling with lust" I had back then, when I worked so hard to stomp down my thoughts related to attractive boys- none of it was actually sexual attraction. (It was romantic and sensual attraction, for those of you keeping score at home.) I'm asexual- I spent so much time afraid of my own desires, and now it turns out I don't even HAVE those desires, and having sex with my husband is confusing as hell. 

I'm asexual and I'm angry.

One more thing I want to say: Yeah, the "be afraid of yourself" article is very clearly directed toward men, not women. So you might be wondering why I'm saying this is also what I was taught, as a woman. Basically, I also was taught to be afraid of my sexual desire, but for sort of different reasons than men. Men were assumed to just want sex for the sake of sex, while women would want sex when they were in love with their male partner. (Oh, and did you notice in this ideology, queer people don't exist?)

It's awful to live afraid of yourself. I don't want anyone to live that way. Instead, we should teach that there's nothing wrong with having (or not having) sexual desire, and there's nothing wrong with exploring that desire in order to understand yourself better. We should teach people how to handle their desire in healthy ways.