The Great Sex Rescue: Gatekeeper

Screenshot from a pokemon game, perhaps Pokemon Blue, which shows a snorlax blocking the road, with the text "A sleeping pokemon blocks the way!" Image source.

Links to all posts in this series can be found here: Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue"

---

[content note: non-explicit discussion of arousal]

So here we are in the second part of chapter 4 of The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You've Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended [affiliate link], pages 66-76.

The first part of this section is about the problems caused by the "gatekeeper" idea, in purity ideology. Let me explain this "gatekeeper" thing: So, purity culture teaches that boys always want sex and can't control themselves, and girls can control themselves much better than boys can. Also, if a couple has sex before marriage, it's a sin for both of them, but realistically it's a much worse thing for the girl than for the boy. Girls' worth is tied to their "virginity" to a much greater extent than boys'. If a girl has sex before marriage, it's like, eww she's dirty, she's ruined, she can't be a "pure" godly wife any more. If a boy has sex before marriage, it's like, well, he's not supposed to do that, but, yeah boys are just like that, what are you gonna do. (And, in this ideology, asexual men don't exist. In reality, they do though!)

What all of this adds up to is, when a boy and girl are dating, the girl believes that she has the responsibility to stop them from going "too far" and the boy isn't really expected to have any responsibility at all. "The Great Sex Rescue" even points out that in Shaunti Feldhahn's book "For Young Women Only," Feldhahn literally says that boys have little ability to stop, and therefore girls need to know that it's a bad idea to even start kissing or anything. (I wrote about this here: "Boys Can't Stop".)

Gregoire and her co-authors say this:

When we tell girls that all boys will want to pressure them, we set a very low standard for boys and a very high one for girls. If all guys will push your boundaries, and you need to fight off every one of them, then will girls even know that they deserve to date and marry someone who will respect their boundaries? Or even worse, are we priming girls for date rape? We were heartbroken to hear story after story of women who didn't realize until years later that they had been raped or assaulted when they thought the issue was that they let a boy go too far-- even if they had said no.

!!!!!! This is so real.

And let me emphasize this part: "If all guys will push your boundaries, and you need to fight off every one of them, then will girls even know that they deserve to date and marry someone who will respect their boundaries?" OMG, PREACH! Because back when I first started being interested in dating boys, I really did believe that all boys were leeches who would try to trick me into having sex. My first boyfriend, let's call him BF1, was a decent human being, who considered it very very important that he not pressure me into anything- and I just had no way to understand that. He wanted to kiss me, I said no, and then a while later I found out that he felt bad for mentioning it more than once, because he didn't want to pressure me. I was so extremely confused. I had no category for that, no concept of a boy who would hear "no" and literally treat it as a "no." 

Purity culture had me believing that, when you have a boyfriend, said boyfriend will always be coming up with manipulative ways to ask you to have sex with him, and you have to stay strong and say "no" over and over and over. I believed that was normal. I believed that's just what dating is, and that's just how boys are.

Wow, that is so messed up.

My view on this now is, we should tell girls that there are boys out there who will try to pressure them into sex, so be careful. And if you meet a boy like that, DON'T DATE HIM. He is not a safe person to date. If you want to date someone, only date someone who respects your boundaries. (Also, not everyone is straight, but I guess the authors of "The Great Sex Rescue" aren't ready for that conversation.)

Purity culture never mentioned the possibility that there could exist boys who respect girls' boundaries. Instead it was all about how important it is to keep saying "no" even though your boyfriend will continue to try to coerce you into sex.

Gregoire and her co-authors say it this way:

Instead of saying, "Boys will push girls' boundaries," say the following to both genders:

1. "It's natural and healthy to want sex."
2. "You are capable of resisting temptation, and you are responsible to not violate anyone else's boundaries."
3. "If you are pressured to do something you do not want to do, that is not a safe relationship."

Yes.

Then the book talks about why this "gatekeeper" line of thinking causes problems for the way that women participate in sex:

But let's think more about what's going on in Susie's head. She's dating Bill, and they're making out on the couch. It feels good, but rather than concentrating on what she's feeling, she's paying attention to what Bill is doing. Where are his hands? Is he breathing too hard? If his hands start to wander, she swats them away. If he puts them back, she sits up and says they have to stop. She's learned that she can never truly relax, even when they are just kissing.

Bill, on the other hand, has been given carte blanche to relax and enjoy it all because he knows Susie will stop when it's time. So Bill is able to become sexually aroused and enjoy exploring-- to a point-- while Susie is frantically trying to prevent herself from becoming aroused or else she won't be able to stop him. For many women, this learned behavior does not evaporate when marriage vows are recited.

Oh. 

Wow, I'm really glad the book explained all this, because I had never thought of it this way before, and it makes a lot of sense.

This was not my experience, and I'm trying to figure out why. I guess I, perhaps naively, believed that "we talked about it and agreed on where 'the line' is, so we are going to do the things we agreed are okay, and not do anything that crosses 'the line'," and I never really considered the possibility that ... like... in the heat of the moment (?) the boy would cross the line anyway.

Reading this anecdote about Susie and Bill, it sounds just horrifying. "If his hands start to wander, she swats them away." Oh my goodness, where does consent come into this? I can't even imagine being in a situation where I discuss it with a boy and we agree "we're going to do X" and then in the middle of doing X, he starts doing Y, which I never agreed on. Like, oh wow, I would feel so jumpy and scared and unsafe every time I tried to do X with him again after that.

And the idea of ... you have to be on guard, because the boy is always looking for a chance to sneakily go "farther" when you're not paying attention- wow, oh wow that sounds like it would make the entire thing a terrible experience.

I definitely see how purity culture logic leads to a situation like this. So why wasn't it like that for me? Maybe because, like I said in the previous post, I really had no idea about arousal, and no intuitive understanding of "one thing leads to another"- I had been warned about it a lot, so I believed it was a real danger I needed to be scared of, but I couldn't understand it, and therefore I wasn't able to see where it might come into play in practical situations.

Oh, here's an example from my life: So, after much analysis and prayer (oh that's embarrassing), I decided I did want to kiss BF1. So I informed him that I would be okay with kissing him that night. So, later that night, when we were feeling romantic, we started kissing, and kissed A LOT, like spent A LOT of time on it that night, and, is that weird? To go from 0 to "spending a lot of time making out" right away? It didn't feel weird to me; it felt completely logical. Like, for a while I had had a desire to kiss him, but I had drawn "the line" such that kissing was not allowed. Then when I decided to move "the line" so kissing was allowed, of course I would want to do A LOT of it. It's okay now, so what reason would there be to put any limit on it?

And then because of kissing him, I got feelings like "we're going to be together forever," and I didn't feel that was right, because I couldn't marry a non-Christian. (Spoiler: I am now happily married to a non-Christian.) So a few days later, I decided that we had to stop kissing. Changed the location of "the line" again.

And then someone saw us spending time together, and saw how I would lean my face against his face, and they said to me, "Don't you think you shouldn't do that, since you're not letting him kiss you now? You're making it too hard for him to not kiss you." And I had totally never thought of that. I thought, we both know about the updated location of "the line", so we will simply act accordingly. And leaning my face on his face was on the acceptable side of "the line" so why wouldn't I do it? If it was an issue, then BF1 should tell me that we need to change the location of "the line" so that I don't do that any more. (I ended up asking him if it bothered him, and it turns out it did, so we changed the location of "the line" accordingly.)

Yeah, the line. The line is a huge thing in purity culture. Teenagers are always asking their youth pastor, "We know we're not supposed to have sex, but what are we allowed to do? Where is the line?" And usually pastors and purity culture teachers refuse to give an actual answer to this question. They say, "You shouldn't ask where the line is, because if you have an answer to that, then you'll just go and do as much as you can, as close to the line as you can, and that puts the focus in the wrong place. You shouldn't be trying to get as close to sin as possible; you should be trying to follow Jesus in your dating relationship."

Which, okay, that's nice, but what it meant for me in reality is that I have no idea if I'm sinning or not- nobody can give me any reassurance about what's okay and what's not, so I just have to be scared all the time.

Back then... yeah, back then, if I was allowed to think for myself, I would have said that it doesn't make sense to say it's bad to get as close to the line as possible. If that's truly the location of the line, and you truly haven't crossed it, then what's the problem? If it's bad to be right up near the line, then it sounds to me like that place you drew the line is not really the correct place. You need to redraw it at the place where the things right up next to it truly are acceptable things.

Right? Doesn't this make sense? Like, spend a lot of time making this decision on where the line is, then once you've decided, you can confidently go right up to it- without crossing- and you know you're okay. You can enjoy yourself, without this fear of "I don't know if I'm sinning or not" hanging over you.

(But also, purity culture wants us to be scared, and uncertain about whether we're sinning, and believing that totally normal things are "sinning", in order to make us easier to control. There, I said it.)

So, yeah, every guy I've dated, we discuss where the line is, we agree on something- and the guys have always respected my boundaries, luckily- and then we do ALL THE THINGS on this side of the line and NONE OF THE THINGS on the other side. And then later we discuss again and perhaps change the location of the line.

I've always had total confidence that, once the location of the line has been clearly established, a boy wouldn't try to do things that crossed the line. Like, it never occurred to me to be concerned about that.

And I realize that sounds really contradictory, because earlier in this post I said I believed that boys would always try to pressure girls into having sex... I guess I believed that pressure would happen during the "let's decide where the line is" conversation... the boy would "pressure" me by saying things like "if you love me, you'll have sex with me" and then I would have the opportunity to say yes or no. 

I never imagined it would be, like... we're in the middle of agreed-on action X and then the boy just starts doing not-agreed-on action Y, without even saying anything. Maybe I'm really naive. Maybe I never realized that the practical way that "one thing leads to another" happens is "his hands start to wander." Maybe the idea of anyone touching me in a sexual way was just completely unimaginable to me. Yeah... like... so extreme and shocking, that it never would have occurred to me to think someone would just do that, out of the blue, without extensive discussions beforehand.

And, probably, arousal is sort of a force pulling *most people* in the direction of crossing the line, so that's why it's not a good idea to go too close to the line. Yeah I never knew about that either.

But let me tell you something. If this had happened to me- if I was with a boy, and we agreed to do action X, and then in the middle of X, he started nonconsensually doing action Y, and then he claimed "I'm so attracted to you, I couldn't control myself, really it's your fault for tempting me," I would have believed him. I would have totally believed him, no question. Because that is exactly what I was taught by purity ideology. 

When I started reading feminist blogs, and I started reading about consent, let me tell you, I was ABSOLUTELY SHOCKED when I read "just because you consent to one thing, doesn't mean you consent to everything" and "consent can be withdrawn at any time." Just completely astounded. I was taught the exact opposite. I was taught that it was unrealistic to think a boy could respect my consent, if I was kissing him.

This scenario with Bill and Susie, described in "The Great Sex Rescue"... I'm just imagining what if a girl has a strong desire for action X, but she knows that her boyfriend might nonconsensually do action Y, while they're doing action X. Her desire and her experience of physical pleasure will always be mixed with fear, and with lack of trust. Wow, that is MESSED UP, but yes this feels like a very realistic thing that would happen to people who buy into purity ideology. And then when they get married, the woman has internalized this approach of constantly evaluating what's going on, rather than just being in the moment and experiencing it, and so it's hard for her to enjoy sex. I'm glad to see Gregoire and her co-authors pointing this out.

In the next section of this chapter, it talks about how some Christian marriage books give very explicit instructions, like here is the exact series of steps the husband should use to stimulate the wife's clit, that sort of thing. And, Gregoire says, women appreciate when this is talked about explicitly, instead of using euphemisms, but the thing that's missing in these instructions is awareness of whether or not the woman is aroused. And if she's not aroused, none of this is going to feel good.

Gregoire et al give this analogy:

Men, imagine trying to have sex or masturbate right after you've orgasmed. It's not enjoyable at all. Women similarly can find having the clitoris rubbed or fingers inserted into the vagina prior to arousal uncomfortable and unpleasant.

Yes, this is a good analogy. So, the point is, if you want the woman to have sex that feels good physically, you really have to start with the arousal aspect of it.

(Also, trans people exist, not everyone who has a clit is a woman, but the authors of "The Great Sex Rescue" aren't ready for that conversation either.)

So, how does "The Great Sex Rescue" advise readers who haven't been able to figure out how to make arousal happen? They advise women to "go back to no pressure"- meaning that you should make out with your husband without the expectation that it's supposed to lead to sex. Just enjoy it for what it is, relax, and don't expect it to "go anywhere." Yes, I like this. Good idea.

Here, check out this bit, I'm reading this as an asexual and feeling like this comes from some weird mirror dimension:

After all, why was making out so much more arousing before you were married than it is now? Often it's because you watched a movie together, and then you started kissing for an hour, and your hands were stroking each other's hair, and you wanted to rip the clothes off each other-- but you couldn't yet. You took enough time on those preliminary steps because that was as far as you could go, and so you gave arousal time to awaken.

I'm torn between saying "oh, is this how it works? huh this fills in a lot of the gaps, I've always been confused about how people talk about this" and "LOLOLOLOL getting aroused from kissing! Hilarious how this is described as the normal thing that happens and everyone knows that's how it works. LOL imagine me wanting to rip someone's clothes off, just because I was kissing him for an hour!" and "uhhh I'm pretty sure in purity culture you're not allowed to 'give arousal time to awaken' before marriage- the next day you're gonna be feeling so guilty for this 'sin' of having genital reactions caused by your desire for your partner."

Anyway. Yeah, so that's the 1 piece of advice given in this chapter, for how to get arousal to happen. Make out with your husband, but with the clear expectation that it doesn't need to lead to sex- so you don't feel pressured, and you can just enjoy it for what it is.

I like this. This is good advice. Wouldn't lead to arousal for me, LOL, but sounds enjoyable.

(Wait... lol... I just realized, as an asexual I'm reading this "just kiss and touch but don't have sex" and I'm like "this sounds great"... uh maybe I like it for different reasons than what the authors intended...?)

Okay, what other advice do they give?

...

Uh. Wait, that's it? They only have 1 idea to try?

(I, umm, have some more ideas!)

But first, here's an interesting anecdote, shared in this chapter of "The Great Sex Rescue":

My husband and I were clueless virgins when we got married. When my husband asked or I asked myself mentally if it felt good, as long as it didn't hurt I said yes. My "A-HA" moment came when we were making out one time and I started having a feeling that I had gotten a few times before when I was younger and reading Christian romance novels. Embarrassing but true-- I got aroused from that stuff but didn't have the language or awareness to identify what was happening. It felt like a warm heartbeat in my clitoris that spread outward. So when I began to feel that with my husband, I wondered if that was what "good" meant. I focused on what was causing me to feel that way and what would intensify that feeling, and that's how I figured out how to orgasm. Once I knew what "good" felt like, I was able to listen to my body and learn what different things made me feel that way, and it got easier with practice.

So, this commenter has experience getting aroused when reading Christian romance novels, and that sort of helped her to understand what arousal is. The authors of "The Great Sex Rescue" don't comment at all on the "Christian romance novels" aspect of this anecdote- they just use it to show that women need to take the time to understand how arousal works for them. But I say this is very interesting, and points to how things like erotica can be useful.

I read fanfiction, and a significant fraction of the fanfic on Archive Of Our Own is porn. And, uh without going into too many details, it has been helpful for me. The most helpful aspect is being able to see a variety of characters who have different feelings and perspectives on sex. In purity culture, there's only 1 narrative about what sex means- if you're a "virgin", then you're perfect and will be highly sought-after as a potential spouse, and if you've had sex before, then you're dirty and no one will want you. But then I read fanfics where a character felt ashamed of not having any sexual experience, and they didn't want to tell their partner that they were a virgin- and it was astonishing to me. I couldn't understand why someone would feel that way. So I spent a lot of time thinking through the logic, trying to piece together what sort of beliefs they had about sex, which would logically lead to that conclusion. It's really a whole different ideology than what purity culture says sex "means." And it was really good for me to see there can be many ways to view sex, many different sorts of feelings that people can have about sex. Many different queer identities. (It's fiction, so definitely don't assume everything in there is realistic- but it's better than only having purity culture stories about sex.)

(Obviously I don't agree that people should be shamed for being a "virgin." And people should not be shamed for having sexual experience. I'm saying, even though I didn't agree with these points of view held by some characters in the fanfics I read, it was extremely helpful to me to find out that there are many different ways that people conceptualize what sex is and what it's supposed to mean- to really think through it and realize that these characters were starting with completely different assumptions than the ones I learned in purity culture. It showed me that the things I had always been taught, about what sex obviously means, and what sort of feelings people are obviously supposed to have about sex, and what sort of relationship obviously would be an acceptable or unacceptable setting for sex- none of those things are actually obvious or universal or "designed by God.")

And yeah, for figuring out how arousal works, sexy fanfic/ "Christian romance novels"/ other erotica can be helpful. I don't really know anything about other kinds of porn, but hey, maybe that's an idea too. (Gregoire and her co-authors definitely think porn is always bad. There's a chapter on that later in the book.)

Also, I have some more ideas: sex toys, and masturbation. You know how this book said that it's helpful if the wife is just allowed to explore and enjoy herself, without pressure that it needs to lead to PIV [penis-in-vagina] sex- well, wouldn't masturbation be perfect for that? 

As I'm making these suggestions, I'm coming from the perspective that it's simply a mechanical problem- like, she wants to have sex, but she just doesn't know how. (My life as a sex-favorable ace...) But I do realize that these approaches just address the physical mechanics, and won't be helpful if the actual problem is "I don't trust my partner" or something along those lines. And later chapters of "The Great Sex Rescue" will talk about those kinds of issues.

Okay, so, to sum up the second half of chapter 4: In purity culture, girls are expected to be the "gatekeepers" of sex, because boys supposedly have no self-control. Gregoire et al say this teaching is harmful, and they share an anecdote about how this would play out. I have SO MANY CONCERNS about consent in this anecdote- but yes, everything in it follows logically from purity ideology. I'm really glad it didn't affect me in that specific way (it definitely affected me in other harmful ways though). 

Also, some advice is given for how women can figure out what arousal is- or rather, 1 piece of advice is given, and it's to make out with your husband without any expectation that it's going to lead to sex. This is a good idea, but I don't like how it's the only idea they present. I think some other things, like masturbation, are also very helpful.

---

Links to all posts in this series can be found here: Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue"

Related:

"Boys Can't Stop" 

"How Far Is Too Far?" My Story, And What I Wish I'd Known

6 Ways Purity Culture Did NOT Teach Me About Consent 

Seriously, stop accusing us of "how close can we get to the line"