The Bible and "Purity"

Bible and rose. Image source.

[content note: it's about rape culture in the bible and in purity ideology]

Purity culture teaches that this is what the bible says about sex: In God's perfect plan for everyone's lives, each person is only supposed to ever have sex with 1 person. (Or maybe 0, if God gives you "the gift of singleness.") You aren't allowed to have sex outside of marriage, and then you get married to 1 opposite-sex partner, and have sex with them, and that's how it works. Purity culture explicitly teaches that this is what the bible says.

(Or... if you're a widow then you're allowed to get remarried and have sex again, but it's not clear how this really fits into purity culture logic.)

Now, there's not *exactly* a bible verse that says "don't have sex outside of monogamous hetero marriage." There are bible verses that say not to "commit adultery." There are bible verses about specific combinations of people who aren't allowed to have sex- for example, a man should not have sex with both a woman and her daughter. There are bible verses about how if a woman is discovered to not be a virgin on her wedding night, she should be stoned. There's "the marriage bed should be kept pure." There are plenty of verses about the sinfulness of "sexual immorality" but the bible never exactly defines what that is.

Of course, though, when I was in purity culture, it didn't bother me that there wasn't 1 specific verse that explicitly said "all sex outside of marriage is a sin" because I felt that was the overall message of the bible's teaching about sex, even though it didn't say it directly. I thought, it's obvious, right? That would be gross, to have sex outside of marriage- obviously that's God's opinion on things.

So that's what purity culture claims the bible teaches: Every person should have at most 1 sexual partner, total, over one's whole life, and this standard is the same for both men and women. 

However, if you actually look at how people act in the real world, they're not applying this same standard to both men and women. Women get judged much more harshly for having unmarried sex, compared to men. 

I believed that in theory it should be the same rules for both men and women, and it was wrong (and didn't make sense mathematically) for men and women to be judged differently. Like... if we're only talking about straight people, it's 1 man and 1 woman sinning together. How can you possibly judge the woman's actions as being more "dirty"/"sinful" than the man's? If it's so terrible that the woman is doing this bad thing, shouldn't the man be held equally responsible for participating in her doing this bad thing? I always thought, the math just doesn't work, so it makes no sense to judge women worse than men for having unmarried sex- so I tried not to pay too much attention to the double standard. Since it was so obviously nonsensical. I was sure that the rules from the bible applied equally to men and women.

Recently, because I read "Womanist Midrash" and "The Red Tent," I had a whole new realization about, umm, how to make the math work, so to speak. "Womanist Midrash" closely examines the lives of women from the bible, from a womanist (black feminist) perspective, and "The Red Tent" is a bible fanfic novel about the 4 wives of Jacob- showing what the women's side of the story of Jacob's family might have been like. These books have a lot to say about women's experience of sex, and how it would have been viewed.

Basically, it goes like this: A girl who's in a good family, with a father who can protect her and have high standards about whom she's going to marry- she is a pure girl. On the other hand, there are plenty of girls and women whom anyone can have sex with, and nobody cares. Slaves, sex workers, girls who don't have their father protecting them, prisoners of war, etc. 

So don't think of sex as being "1 man + 1 woman." It's either "1 man + 1 pure woman" or "1 man + 1 impure woman." 

If she's an impure woman, well, whatever, a man can have sex with as many impure woman as he wants, and why should anyone judge him for that? (Some people would say it's good and normal for a man to be sexually experienced in this way.) Even if he's married, he can still have sex with slaves and sex workers, whatever.

But if she's a pure woman, oh gosh, well a man might actually get in trouble for that- watch out for her father. That would actually be a serious thing, to have unmarried sex with a pure woman. But, still you can't judge the man as harshly as the woman because maybe it's just an honest mistake and he didn't know which kind she was.

In the ancient world portrayed in "Womanist Midrash" and "The Red Tent," women were treated better if they were in the "pure" group rather than the "impure" group, but most of the time they didn't have much control over that. Try as hard as you can to stay as one of the "pure" ones, because we all know it's totally fine for men to rape the "impure" ones, that's just the way it is.

This isn't something that either of those books explicitly spelled out; I'm just kind of trying to summarize the overall ideology that serves as the foundation for the way women are treated in those books.

Here, let's think about these 2 different ideologies and see which one seems to match better with what we see in the bible. Is it "everyone is supposed to have only 1 sexual partner, and stay pure until marriage, and these rules are the same for both men and women"? Or is it "there are pure women and there are impure women, and it's fine for men to have sex with impure women as much as the men want- try to not be an impure woman"?

Hmm. 

Why are there laws in the bible about executing a woman who's not a virgin on her wedding night, but no equivalent laws about men? Why do lots of male bible heroes have multiple wives, and the bible doesn't necessarily portray that as a bad thing* (sometimes it's even described like it's a sign of God's favor)? Why is there a list of specific relatives that a man is not allowed to have sex with, rather than one simple rule "only have sex in a monogamous marriage"?

Huh. Well that's... not great.

I really had always assumed that of course God meant that the rules for men and women were the same. Of course it would be bad for a man to not be a virgin on his wedding night, just like it would be for a woman. Right? The bible just happened to not mention that part, but of course we all know it's true, right? Right? But now I've come up with this alternative framework that fits so much better, and is also horrific and terrible.

(You could argue that the bible is "progressive" on this, in the sense that the rules given in the bible require men to treat women a little bit better than what was typical for societies at that time. Sure, you could make that argument. I personally am not interested in going down that path. I don't think we should let the bible off the hook so easily. Frankly I don't think it's meaningful that the bible is slightly less misogynist than the average stone-age person, and we shouldn't act like it is.)

Okay at this point you are probably saying, "Umm, Perfect Number, you are not the first person to come up with this 'there are 2 types of women' concept, this is called the 'virgin/whore dichotomy', ie, 'every woman is either a virgin or a whore.' How have you not heard of this?"

Well yeah of course I have heard of that, but I guess I never really *got* it? I don't know. I don't think I've ever seen anyone specifically making the connection between the "virgin/whore dichotomy" and the "double standards for men and women about having lots of sex"- how you really need both of these godawful concepts to hold each other up, or else the math clearly just doesn't work. See, it's not *really* about the actual act of having sex. It's about whether the patriarchy judges you to be "pure" and worthy of men's protection, or "impure" and deserving of whatever men do to you.

And the thing is, even though I was taught in purity culture that the rules should be the same for both men and women, there were some purity culture teachings where this ugly "virgin/whore dichotomy" sort of started to show itself. Where the purity teachings were less about "here is God's plan for how everyone can have a perfect marriage and sex life" and more about "it's okay for men to disrespect (and maybe even rape) impure women- make sure you're not one of them." Less about "here is how men and women are supposed to treat each other, how we are supposed to act, we all follow these rules and everything is great" and more about "we protect the women in our in-group, who follow our rules, while the women in the out-group are sluts who are at risk of being raped, what did they expect?"

When they talk about modesty, for example. In purity culture, here is how they talk about modesty: Women, you should respect and value your body instead of flaunting your body. If you don't respect yourself, obviously men won't respect you. D. Anderson had a very good post in 2013 about the way boys in purity culture are taught to view "immodest" women- containing quotes from these good godly teenage boys about how disgusted they are. I basically was taught that if a woman is dressed "immodestly", men are literally incapable of respecting her, unless they wear a blindfold or something I guess. There was a chapter of "The Great Sex Rescue" that did a great job arguing against this ideology.

People who are really into patriarchy like to talk about how "the way it should be" is that men protect women, and feminism is the reason that you hear more about sexual assault nowadays- but what they actually mean is, patriarchy is about protecting the women who follow men's rules. And any women who find themselves in the "impure" group, well they deserve whatever men do to them. Try to not be those women. From that perspective, feminists are the ones to blame, for making women think it's okay to be in the "impure" group, and thereby causing women to lose men's protection.

Anyway...

So what do we do with the bible, then?

Well, first of all, the bible does NOT teach that it is a sin for men to have sex outside of marriage, in the general case. There are plenty of rules in the bible about specific categories of women that men are not allowed to have sex with (and also, rules against men having sex with men), ie, "do not covet your neighbor's wife", and I always viewed this as being part of an overarching "sex is only for monogamous marriage" ideology- but no, it's more like "it's okay for men to have sex outside of marriage, but not with women who, like, actually matter."

And, it's not exactly a sin for women to have sex outside of marriage- the issue is if a woman has sex outside of marriage and then dishonestly tries to present herself like she's one of the "pure" ones.

(One caveat here, I'm focusing on the Old Testament in this post, because I'm thinking about this in terms of an evangelical mindset where the bible supposedly presents one clear and consistent message regarding "God's plan for sex and marriage." But it's possible the New Testament writers weren't coming from quite the same perspective. "Womanist Midrash" and "The Red Tent" focus on the Old Testament, specifically the Torah.)

I'm not sure I would say the bible teaches this view of sex- it's more like, that was the way sex was viewed by the people who wrote the bible. These are the assumptions they brought to it, when they wrote down rules for people to follow. None of this is explicitly spelled out anywhere in the bible- look at me, I used to be evangelical, I read the whole bible multiple times and never noticed this. The writers of the bible were not trying to say "there SHOULD be this double standard between men and women, and feminism is wrong," because they wouldn't have even been able to imagine an alternative. Just like how I was taught by purity culture that all sex outside of marriage is dirty, so I believed that the bible taught that too, and I wasn't able to imagine an alternative.

But anyway, now we know better.

I'm not going to be subtle about this; let me come right out and say it: The bible should not be the authority over our moral beliefs. Instead, we bring our own moral beliefs to the bible, and then we judge which rules in the bible are good ("love your neighbor as yourself", etc) and which ones are horrible. 

Evangelicals believe that if you just have the right technique for how to interpret the bible and parse it into rules for us to live by, this process will lead to a set of rules which we would recognize as good and moral- and if they don't seem good and moral, either our understanding of morality is wrong, or we're misinterpreting the bible. So then you have to keep tweaking things until you can get an interpretation of the bible which you can accept as moral. This strikes me as terribly inefficient. How about we just use our own understanding of morality right from the start, and reject anything from the bible that is obviously terrible?

Then you might ask "well what's the point of even bringing the bible into it, then?" Well, yeah, good point. I like the bible for cultural reasons, but if other people aren't interested in the bible, that's fine. No real reason to bring the bible into it if you don't want to.

Suppose you're a modern-day advocate of purity culture, and you want to combine the bible's emphasis on virginity with modern ideas about how men and women should be treated equally, and so you come up with "nobody can have sex outside of [monogamous hetero] marriage, and the rules are the same for men and women" (ie, this is what purity culture teaches, in my experience). Sure, you can believe that. But don't frame it like you got it directly from the bible. Like you're simply reading the bible and reporting what it says. Like you're not adding your own spin on it. 

I was always so sure that the purity-culture view of sex- that sex outside of marriage is disgusting and nobody should be involved in that- was just self-evidently true, was obviously God's opinion on the matter, and the biblical writers too. I didn't have a specific verse that said it, just a lot of verses about "sexual immorality" and the claim that "well, the readers of the bible would have understood 'sexual immorality' to mean having sex outside of marriage." But now I've found this other explanation... the idea that there are 2 kinds of women, and it's fine for men to have sex with "impure" women- and it's horrible but it fits so much better with what we see in the Old Testament. 

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* I might need to write a whole 'nother post about polygamy in the bible, because the standard apologetics answer is "yes, there's polygamy in the bible, but it's always portrayed as a bad thing, the bible shows that it leads to a lot of problems, so you see, the bible doesn't *really* condone it" and I disagree with that.

Update: Here it is, The Bible and Polygamy

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Posts about the book "Womanist Midrash" by Wilda C. Gafney:

Womanist Midrash 
The Slavery We Ignore in the Book of Exodus 
The Second-Worst Bible Story 
Michal wasn't here for David's worship, and now neither am I
Why did I think David was the good guy in the story of Abigail? 
David's Womanizing 
The Bible and "Purity"

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Related:

"God has one perfect guy for you!" Yeah, that's not biblical. 

"The Red Tent" (this bible fanfic is great) 

6 Ways Purity Culture Did NOT Teach Me About Consent

Blogaround

1. Every Source for The Chosen's "Anointing the Passover Lamb" Goes Back to the Same Person (July 8) The most bonkers part of this is the possibility that this really is a historical tradition, but it was lost to time and nobody wrote it down, and then some time around 2010 we find out about it because Jesus himself reveals it to some pastor. Which, if you're evangelical and you have a "personal relationship with God" then that is totally a real thing that could happen. But also, if it did, what on earth would we- other Christians who didn't hear from Jesus personally- do with it? There's not really any reasonable mechanism by which Jesus could reveal this true information, out of the blue in the year 2010, and have it recognized as real. Or, I guess maybe if Jesus revealed the exact same thing to a whole bunch of people at the same time? Maybe?

2. HSDD was not the beginning nor the end (July 18) "It was an obscure diagnosis, and in all my years I have not heard even a single anecdote of an ace getting diagnosed. And that’s not to say that aces didn’t have issues with psychologists. Ace-competent mental health care is a broader issue that extends beyond a single diagnosis, and continues to be a problem long after DSM 5."

3. Beam of Light (July 15) From xkcd.

4. Baidu’s Robotaxi Stirs Up Controversy (July 22) 3-minute video about Baidu's driverless taxi, in China.

5. East Vs. West (July 21) "We can’t see that from here, but from over there — from, say, some airport in Beijing — we’d have the perspective to view that connectedness and kinship as an indisputable and wonderful fact. We’re not strangers — we share the same continent." As an immigrant in China, I can 100% confirm this.

6. Wednesday Was 'Mass Deportation Now!' Night At The RNC, Everything Totally Excellent For Sure (July 18) What on EARTH. As an immigrant, this is what scares me the most about the Republican party platform right now. I mean, I'm an immigrant in China so it doesn't affect me, but I understand what it's like to work so hard to build a life for yourself in a foreign country, and how traumatic it would be if that country suddenly decided you were bad and needed to be deported.

Support all immigrants.

7. I Want A Popsicle!: A Story about Dealing With Anger (July 23) "A bilingual children's book for AAPI families written by a psychologist that teaches children how to manage their emotions." This sounds really cool!

8. Women athletes are being abused, and the helpful media aren't helping. (June 5) "This trend punishes those who are skilled, who are excellent, who are fast, who are strong. This trend punishes those who gain notice, gain visibility, within a small community or on a national stage."

9. Would you pay to be able to quit TikTok and Instagram? You’d be surprised how many would (July 23, via) "The finding is a measure of the extent to which many, many users hate TikTok and Instagram — even though they feel compelled to use them. To make clear the bizarre nature of his finding, Bursztyn drew the the conference’s attention to another product, a refrigerator. Could you imagine, he asked, 60% of refrigerator owners saying they wished fridges didn’t exist?"

10. When Modesty Rules Make Drowning More Likely (July 24) "I did not do this personally, but it was normal in my fundy circles for girls to swim in ankle length denim skirts."

The Great Sex Rescue: Attraction, and "Think Nothing More of it"

A bunch of pins colored like various LGBTQIA flags. Image source.

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

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2 weeks ago. I wrote The Great Sex Rescue: Lust (about chapter 5 of The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You've Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended [affiliate link]) but I have 1 more thing I want to say about this chapter. 

So, the writers of "The Great Sex Rescue" are responding to the common evangelical teaching that lust is a "battle" that "all men" have to fight every day. Evangelical resources about lust have all kinds of anecdotes about how distressing it is for men to see women existing in public "immodestly." Well, the writers of "The Great Sex Rescue" don't buy this. They say it doesn't have to be a "battle":

The route to lust is not straightforward, and there are many, many chances to avoid lust that don't need to lead to stress. It is possible to notice a woman is beautiful, and even to feel a flash of attraction, and then to think nothing more of it and go on about your day.

I also found a blog post on their site, LUST SERIES: Noticing is Not Lusting! We Need to Free Men from this Fallacy (2019), which says it this way:

Do you believe that a man can notice a woman is beautiful or is nicely shaped but then do absolutely nothing else with that information? 

I understand the point they are making- people can notice that other people are attractive, without it becoming a big huge obsession that overtakes all of your thoughts as you try to repress it. I agree with this point, but since I'm asexual I really have no idea if that's how "lust" works or not.

But I just want to point this out because of the way it's worded. "Think nothing more of it." "Do absolutely nothing else with that information." I understand that when they use the word "nothing", what they mean is "don't be a creep" and "don't drive yourself crazy obsessing over whether or not you're 'lusting'", and things of that nature.

But. Let me tell you something. The way queer people experience attraction is not "think nothing more of it."

Hoo boy. No. In a society that tells us what kinds of attraction we're supposed to have, queer people don't simply feel attraction and then move on with life like it's no big deal. No, we feel attraction and question our entire identity. Or, for ace and aro people- we DON'T feel attraction, and then question our entire identity. We feel attraction- or don't feel attraction- and then wonder "is there something wrong with me?" 

We go looking for answers, and then we come upon a word, a label- and many queer people can tell you this- the way that suddenly everything can click into place when you find that label. How good and life-giving it is when you find people who have experienced the same things as you. Finding your identity. 

And then, how good and life-giving it is to come out. To say the words, "I'm gay", "I'm bi", "I'm asexual", and so on.

Even for bi people who are in a monogamous relationship with an opposite-sex partner. One might think that they don't need to come out, they can just let everyone think they're straight- but no, I've seen many bi people talking about how important their bi identity is, and how they want to come out. (For example, this thread from a bi woman married to a man.)

And I've seen women who are married to men, who got married young while they were still in purity culture and never had a chance to explore, and these women are realizing they're bi, and just... the way they gush about how amazing women are. The bisexual joy. It's so beautiful.

And I've also heard this story many times: "When I was 15 and I saw [whatever movie] with [whatever celebrity], that's when I realized I was gay" or "that's when I realized I was bi."

We don't notice someone is attractive and then "think nothing more of it." We build our identities on it.

And for aces and aros... we have words for so many different kinds of attraction. When you're going through the process of questioning if you're asexual, it's all about analyzing "I feel something for this person- is it sexual attraction? Is it romantic attraction? Is it sensual attraction? Is it aesthetic attraction?" We spend SO MUCH TIME analyzing our feelings and picking apart the differences between these different types of attraction. In my case, it turns out that when I thought I was experiencing sexual attraction, it was actually sensual attraction, and I was able to figure that out only because I stopped repressing myself and just allowed myself to feel my own desires- and discovered that they didn't lead to sex.

Queer people know how important it is to explore, to analyze, to know yourself, to take pride in your feelings of attraction or lack thereof. We don't just experience attraction and then move on with life like it doesn't matter. Perhaps after we've gone through the whole process, all the angst, the coming out, and we are confident in our queer identity, and then we notice someone attractive, at that point maybe it really is no big deal, like what is described in "The Great Sex Rescue." But wow, the amount of work it takes to get there.

And, actually, even if we're not talking about queerness, even if we're just talking about straight allo people, it can still be useful to notice what kind of people you are attracted to, and see if there are any patterns that could be unhealthy. For example, what does it mean if you're only attracted to people of a certain race? In the international community here in Shanghai, interracial relationships are very common. And I'm white and my husband is Chinese. And that's great- but we should be aware that there are problematic reasons why someone might be attracted to people of a certain race. Like if you're viewing them as "exotic" rather than as people. So instead of just experiencing attraction as little isolated incidents that don't mean anything, it can be useful to examine your feelings and see if you have biases that are affecting your feelings of attraction.

Another example: The book "Boundaries in Dating" had a chapter about the problem of being attracted to the wrong types of people- people you have intense feelings for, but they don't really have the personality traits to be a reliable partner in a healthy relationship. "Boundaries in Dating" said you should notice this pattern in your feelings of attraction, and you should think about what it says about you, psychologically. And make changes to yourself so you're no longer drawn to people who aren't good for you. I had never heard anything like that before, but I think it's true.

So even if you're not queer, it can still be useful to do some analysis on your feelings of attraction. Perhaps you will discover you have some unhealthy ways of thinking, and you can make changes to address those problems.

But you know what you shouldn't do, when you experience attraction? You shouldn't build a system of rules that other people need to follow so you won't feel those feelings. You shouldn't go around telling people what turns you on, so they can change their behavior to avoid those things. You shouldn't expect that other people will change the way they dress, just for you.

I'm talking about "modesty" here. The whole system of modesty exists because good Christian men feel attraction and then instead of "thinking nothing of it", they believe their feelings are the objective authoritative perspective that should therefore dictate what women are allowed to wear.

Yeah, don't do that. Not cool. Your feelings of attraction are your own business. Go ahead and analyze them, find other people with similar experiences, don't repress yourself, be proud of your identity. But don't use those feelings as a justification for making rules to control other people's lives. And don't be a creep.

So, my point is: "The Great Sex Rescue" says it's possible to feel attraction to someone, and then do nothing with it and move on with your life. What they mean is, you don't have to constantly "fight lust"- you can just act normal, instead of spending all your time obsessing over how hard it is to repress all your feelings. I agree with the overall message, but as a queer person, I have a huge problem with the wording. "Think nothing more of it"? That is so NOT how it works if you're queer. We don't "think nothing more of it" when we feel attraction (or when we realize that we haven't been feeling the attraction that we're expected to). We struggle. We look for answers. We find labels, find community, and celebrate that. We take pride in our identities.

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

Related:

In Purity Land, Only Straight Men Are Allowed To Have A Sexuality 

So this is new 

Orientation is About Finding the Pattern

The Great Sex Rescue: Lust

Distracted boyfriend meme. A guy is walking with his girlfriend, but he is turning his head to look at another woman, and the girlfriend looks exasperated. Image source.

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

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We now come to chapter 5 of The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You've Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended [affiliate link]. This chapter is about the way that evangelicals talk about "lust."

The chapter starts out with an anecdote about a wedding that Gregoire and Lindenbach attended, where the couple wrote their own vows:

But at the end of the vows, we turned to each other with surprise. They forgot something important-- "forsaking all others." It was just an oversight but, nevertheless, that is a rather crucial promise. We're supposed to expect that our spouse will be able to say, in the words of the 1950s jazz group The Flamingos, "I only have eyes for you." Despite the stretch marks and the baby weight, despite the expanding middle and the receding hair, despite the years and the wrinkles and the fading health, we want to know "I am yours, and you are mine, exclusively and forever." That's safety. That's acceptance. That's love.

That's what we all dream of.

But is that all it can ever be-- just a dream?

Umm. Okay. You know some people are polyamorous, right? 

And some people aren't interested in marriage.

Like, it's literally not true that "we all dream of" having 1 lifelong monogamous partner.

I find it quite weird that the chapter about lust starts out with an anecdote about monogamy. Setting it up like lust and monogamy are opposites. Just seems like a really weird framing to me. 

And actually, later in the chapter we will see that their solution to lust is to respect people and recognize that they are entire human beings and not sex objects. (And yes, I agree with this solution.) So actually, this chapter ultimately says that respect is the opposite of lust. So why does the chapter start with a little story about monogamy?

I would say there are 2 separate issues here:

1. You're lusting after some random person, objectifying them, imagining that they are just a sex object that exists to play out your fantasies- this is a sin against the random person.
2. Your desire for this random person becomes such a big deal to you that it actually threatens your relationship with your actual partner- this is a sin against your partner.

I don't necessarily see why problem #1 would lead to problem #2. Yeah, sure, sometimes it would, like if someone cheats on their partner. But problem #1 is bad just by itself, without bringing concerns about faithfulness to a monogamous relationship into it. 

And, also, being attracted to other people is fine, that's just part of life for most people, it's not "lust", and I don't see it as having any relation to whether or not you're keeping your commitment to monogamy.

At this point, I think it would be helpful for me to bring in some concepts that are talked about a lot in the ace, aro, and polyamorous communities. ("Ace" means asexual spectrum, "aro" means aromantic spectrum.) Okay, so, there are several different types of things that may or may not be present in a relationship:

1. Sexual feelings/actions
2. Romantic feelings/actions
3. Being life partners

Mainstream society says that you're supposed to do sexual things with exactly 1 person, you're supposed to do romantic things with exactly 1 person, and you're supposed to have a partner that you're committed to for life, to support each other through all of life's ups and downs, and that these all have to be the same person.

I'm really glad we have ace, aro, and polyamorous people to question this! It doesn't have to be that way! You could be married to someone and not have sex at all! You can date someone even if you don't understand what romance is! You can have a long-term committed relationship that isn't sexual or romantic at all! You could be married, and your spouse is your committed life partner and you have sex with them, and also you have sex with other people sometimes. Many possibilities!

It's all about knowing yourself and knowing what you want. What do you want, in terms of sex, in terms of romance, in terms of having a committed life partner?

For myself, maybe my answer is boring because I'm in a monogamous marriage and I do have sex with my husband. But, even so, I feel rebellious because I'm not following the definition of monogamy that I learned in purity culture- because when I'm attracted to some random person, I don't repress it. I just enjoy it for what it is, but obviously I know it's just some feelings and nothing real is going to come of it because I'm monogamous. 

And it doesn't threaten my relationship with my husband, because marriage is about choosing to be together, and being committed to each other- it doesn't mean we never have feelings about other people. We are 2 separate people with our own complicated lives, and we choose to live together, to support each other, to share our money, to raise our child together, all these very standard marriage things- and that's not threatened by having occasional feelings about other people, because those feelings are a totally different thing than the day-to-day reality of building our lives together. And yes we do have feelings of attraction for each other, but my point is, our relationship is so much deeper than that, and if there exists someone who's more attractive than my husband, well, so what? That doesn't threaten my marriage because my marriage is so much more than that.

Purity culture always made such a big deal about how it would be SO TERRIBLE if you compared your spouse to other people... for example, if you had sex with someone else before marriage, then when you're married and you're having sex with your spouse, you'll always be comparing them to your ex, and that would just be THE END OF THE WORLD or something... It feels so shallow to me now. Why would any of that matter? Our marriage is so much more than that.

All right we'd better move on because we're only a half page into this chapter and I've already written this much.

So, this chapter is about lust. One of the most popular Christian books on the topic of lust is "Every Man's Battle" which erases ace men right in the title, so you know it's gonna be bad. The authors of "The Great Sex Rescue" also think it's bad; this chapter is basically about the harm that is caused when people buy into the "Every Man's Battle" ideology.

"The Great Sex Rescue" sums up "Every Man's Battle" this way:

And what was this battle that every man was fighting? Lust. Every man struggles with it, every man is tempted by it, every man must fight really, really hard to overcome it.

Oh and also, remember how I said this "every man's battle" ideology acts like ace men don't exist? Well it also acts like gay men don't exist, because it's only talking about men lusting for women. It's also not great for bisexuals, because if the solution to lust is that men and women can't have close friendships with each other, then by that logic, bisexuals aren't allowed to have any friends at all.

The book "Every Man's Battle" features really over-the-top descriptions of men ogling women, masturbating near nonconsenting women, obsessing over breasts all the time, and it frames it like all of that is completely normal, this is just how God made men, and men need to fight the battle by treating women as threats and avoiding them. Gregoire has a really good blog post summing up just how bad this book is: A Summary of Issues with Every Man's Battle (with download).

Gregoire and her co-authors point out that this "every man's battle" ideology sets the bar so incredibly low for men. Like it's expected that men aren't able to treat women as people. Like men will inevitably see women as nothing more than sex objects- so instead of sex objects to fantasize about, men need to see them as sex objects to avoid.

Gregoire et al point out that one of the biggest problems is how attraction is conflated with lust. There's nothing wrong with being attracted to someone. There's nothing wrong with noticing. And they say that instead of fearing that every attractive woman is a threat that will pull men toward the sin of lust, men can simply notice a woman is attractive and then "Think nothing more of it and go on with your day." I like how their approach has no fear. Instead of fear, it's confidence that men can "defeat lust." (I personally can't tell you if lust actually works that way, because I'm asexual, lololololol.)

There are a few anecdotes in this chapter about men whose experiences are very different than what "Every Man's Battle" says:

The first chapter of Through a Man's Eyes [another book similar to "Every Man's Battle"] explains the battle that men face on a daily basis with sexual stimuli all around them: trying not to look at billboards on the drive to work, trying to bounce their eyes from the barista's chest, worrying that a female coworker in a tight blouse might sit directly across from them. In the book, we read the "Jack breathes a sigh of relief" when a coworker's skirt doesn't ride up too high, and "the next few hours are tough" because another attractive coworker is in high line of sight.

My (Sheila's) husband works in an almost all-female setting (he's a pediatrician; his colleagues are female, the nurses tend to be female, and the parents bringing in their kids tend to be female). Did he experience this level of stress all day? After reading that chapter, I asked him. He laughed. I asked again. He made another joke. I got rather perturbed that he wasn't taking me seriously.

"Wait," he said, "you're saying that there are guys who are stressed to go to work because they might lust? That's crazy." But could I believe my husband? The book told me all men struggle with this, but they don't know how to explain it or are afraid to confess their struggle to their wives.

And this story, from Chris, a commenter on Gregoire's blog:

As someone who grew up in the Every Man's Battle / purity movement era, I've been working on resetting my brain for a few years now. So many years of struggling daily to just avoid looking. The Bible says His burden is easy and His yoke is light, but spending every part of every day spending energy to make sure I didn't look at an attractive woman is the opposite of easy and light.

I was forced to confront my wrong thinking while on a vacation in Europe. The first day on a topless beach in Spain was excruciating. I was giving myself a migraine constantly bouncing my eyes but having nowhere to bounce them to. I was definitely not enjoying the beautiful beach nor enjoying time with my beautiful wife. 

Near the end of the first day I realized this was no way to live. I remembered your writing about focusing on the whole person without making them into a sexual object.

I talked to my wife and explained all this to her... With some fear and apprehension, I looked up at a beach full of [breasts] and started to talk through the process of not making them there for my sexual gratification. The rest of the trip was so relaxing and enjoyable, and I had such a good time with my wife on the beach. Since then, I can see an attractive woman and not become aroused.

I think Chris's story here is very important and powerful. It completely disproves some of the main foundational beliefs of purity culture- that men are overwhelmed by lust and can't control themselves, that women need to cover up and can't possibly expect a man to respect them if they aren't covered up, that a woman showing her body in public is inherently dangerous and is an attack on men, etc.

There's also a very good anecdote in the book about a husband who doesn't "struggle with lust" but his wife totally buys into the "all men struggle with lust" ideology, and so she's always paranoid that he's looking at other women, and that this is a threat to their marriage. She doesn't take him to swimming pools, she won't let them be friends with other couples if the wife is attractive, etc. Yeah, this is really messed-up. (And also, this is an example of lust getting conflated with concerns about commitment to monogamy, and I think that needs to be questioned. If your husband is attracted to other women, that's his own business and doesn't affect his relationship with you. Right? It only becomes a problem if he gets it in his head that he should actually take actions to go have romantic/sexual experiences with another person.)

I'm just thinking right now about how much energy I would have to spend worrying every day, if I thought my husband being *somewhat near* an attractive woman was a dangerous thing that threatened his love for me and commitment to our marriage. Wow, so glad I'm not doing that! He can talk to other women, he can meet up with a woman alone, whatever. I trust him. I also meet up with guys alone sometimes. I'm so glad it hasn't even occurred to me that that would be a problem. (No Billy Graham rule here!)

Moving along, the next bit of "The Great Sex Rescue" says that these books about lust claim that they want to help women understand men better. That women need to understand men's "struggles", or something. But, the authors of "The Great Sex Rescue" found, in their survey of 20,000 women, that women who believed in the "all men struggle with lust" message had lower levels of marital satisfaction and sexual satisfaction. There are a bunch of stats here; I'll just copy one of them: Women who believe "all men struggle with lust" are 79% more likely to agree with the statement "I engage in sex with my husband only because I feel I have to." This is so messed-up.

And there's this quote:

"Men seem like untrustworthy pigs whose minds and thoughts just go wherever they want," [Brenda] commented. "Is nothing sacred to them? As women, do we trust men after reading this? ... I feel that if anything ever happened to Fred, I'd never remarry because I would have very little trust in men." -- the wife of an author responds after reading her husband's words in Every Man's Battle

Yes, really. The "Every Man's Battle"'s author's wife says she's disgusted by what she "learned" about men from reading that book. Ya know, the more I'm out of purity culture, the more I realize that a lot of the things that Christian leaders teach about sex, marriage, dating, etc are not objectively true facts about how God Says This Is How It Works For Everyone, but actually just their own individual weird hangups. "Every Man's Battle" says this is just how all men are, and that's normal and women shouldn't expect men to be decent human beings, but actually the reality is, the authors are just describing themselves. Yikes.

I'm glad I didn't read "Every Man's Battle" back when I believed in purity ideology. I would have totally believed it, because what do I know, I'm not a boy, and one of the core tenets of purity culture is "women just can't possibly understand what men are going through." It's been really good and life-giving to me now whenever I see men on the internet just completely shocked by what evangelicals say "all men" are like- immature, no self-control, obsessed with sex all the time, incapable of respecting attractive women, self-esteem so fragile- I love to see men, especially non-Christian men, just so completely shocked at how wrong this is, how insulting, such a low view of men. Men are better than that, and should be held to a higher standard than that.

"The Great Sex Rescue" has an anecdote along those lines too:

[a blog commenter is talking about her husband who recently became a Christian, and had no idea that men supposedly "all struggle with lust"]

He has only recently become aware of the lust issue within the church, and he has been appalled. Most of his friends have generally been women-- he even had a best woman instead of a best man at our wedding-- and most of them are quite attractive. But even as a non-Christian he told me he didn't lust after them. It was far too disrespectful.

It is crazy to him-- and me-- that even as a non-Christian he could control himself, but the church treats this as an insurmountable obstacle for men who are indwelled with the Holy Spirit! He has told me that the easiest way not to disrespect women is to view them as people. If a non-Christian could figure that out, what is giving the church so much trouble?

I'm not a fan of the prejudice against non-Christians here, the idea that obviously Christians should be more moral than non-Christians. I say there's nothing wrong with being non-Christian, or Christian, or whatever religion, or non-religious. And I'm glad my husband is not a Christian- for one thing, he doesn't have all the purity baggage I have... But I appreciate this anecdote because of the contrast between how much of a big deal Christians make this, an "insurmountable obstacle"... and the non-issue it is for people outside the church.

Anyway, yeah, "The Great Sex Rescue" says the solution to lust is to respect people. To remember that the attractive people that you happen to see are whole people who have their own lives- they don't exist to be sex objects for you.

Here's their advice for men:

How Men Can Fight Lust:

The key to fighting lust is to see women as whole people rather than potential threats.

1. When you are passing by a woman, instead of bouncing your eyes, look her in the eye, give a quick, friendly nod, and turn away.
2. When you are with a woman, look her in the eye, and engage her in conversation. Ask her opinion about different topics.
3. Don't live a sex-segregated life. Join groups where women are in leadership roles or where women's opinions are considered.
4. Identify women in your life from whom you can learn, whether it's advice about work, parenting, finances, etc. Make it a practice to consult women as well as men when you are making a decision.

Yes, basically I agree with this, but also, wow the bar is on the floor. Why do these things even need to be said? Just act normal, don't act all jumpy and scared of sex every time there's a woman nearby. Women are people, just treat us like people.

So, yes, the bar is on the floor, but also, these things really do need to be said, and I'm glad that Gregoire and her co-authors are saying them. Because, wow, when I started reading her blog, and reading these kinds of messages... this is unlike anything I'd ever heard from Christians. Really. 

(And here's a fun little bit of my history: In 2012 I was thinking about these topics, and I wrote a post called Isn't dating the opposite of avoiding lust?. It addressed the idea that, if I'm supposed to avoid "temptation," then doesn't that mean I shouldn't date someone that I'm attracted to? If we're dating, spending a lot of time together, doesn't that make it likely that I will lust? How can I justify putting myself in a situation where I'm likely to sin? And the answer I gave was, no actually, this way of thinking is all backwards- because when I'm attracted to someone I don't know well, I view him kinda one-dimensionally, like his being attractive to me is his most important characteristic, and that sounds much more likely to cause "lust" than actually getting to know someone by dating him. Kinda interesting to me to realize I was writing about that in 2012, but also I had NO IDEA I was asexual, and I was using words like "hot" and "lust." Looking at it now, I know what I meant by those words, but now that I know that I'm asexual, I realize those words mean something different to most people, so I wouldn't write it that way now. And also, the last bit of the post, where 2012-Perfect-Number gives advice to before-2012-Perfect-Number, "Don't be so afraid. God gives us freedom." ... like wow yeah, that's so real.)

And "The Great Sex Rescue" has a few anecdotes from women about how they were treated by "good Christian men" who refused to even look at them or talk to them. Men who are good and godly and therefore won't take the risk of being anywhere near a situation that could lead to sexual temptation. This is not cool, and it leads to women feeling like they are dirty just for existing. (And, this is NOT how Jesus treated women. Jesus met women and talked to women and connected with their spiritual questions and emotional needs and so on, even in situations where society said it wasn't proper for a man to talk to a woman, and even when the women were sex workers. No Billy Graham rule here.)

The next section is about modesty, because modesty is the other side of the coin. Men are taught "you have to fight lust" and women are taught "you have to be modest, to help men fight lust." Yeah, I have blogged a lot about modesty, and I agree with the criticisms that Gregoire and her co-authors write here. I especially appreciate the quotes from Focus on the Family's "Brio" magazine, because I also read "Brio" when I was a teenager, and it influenced me to follow purity culture. Gregoire's co-author, Rebecca Lindenbach, says this:

My curves made it impossible to dress according to some people's modesty standards without going back a few centuries. My body became the problem. And Brio reinforced this idea that my body was dangerous with messages like these: "If a guy sees a girl walking around in tight clothes, a miniskirt or short shorts, you might as well hang a noose around the neck of his spiritual life."

Yeah, not cool how modesty ideology says female bodies are inherently dangerous and sinful.

And I'm glad to see "The Great Sex Rescue" mentions "The Modesty Survey" and Shaney Irene's excellent blog post from 2013, Why The Rebelution’s Modesty Survey Was A Bad Idea. Yeah, "The Modesty Survey" influenced me a lot... I guess it was so bad, that it caused me to obsess over it and worry and try to make it make sense, which led to me realizing the entire concept of modesty is bad and needs to be thrown away. So.

Some of my posts on modesty:
The Story of Me and Modesty - This is the post where I talk about how "The Modesty Survey" affected me.
August 20, 2022 Blogaround - I also wrote some opinions about "The Modesty Survey" here
Modesty is Causing Women to Stumble
The Male Equivalent to Modesty

I also love Laura Robinson's take on modesty: Women Are Never Going to Cover Themselves Enough to Get Men to Shut Up About Us 

Anyway, there's 1 more section left in this chapter of "The Great Sex Rescue", and it's about how evangelicals teach that "men are visual" and women are not, but actually that's not always true. There are women who are visually stimulated to have sexual thoughts, and there's nothing wrong with that, and it's NOT COOL how the church acts like these women don't exist.

I definitely agree with the point that Gregoire and her co-authors are making there! But I don't have any personal experience to mention because I'm asexual. 

Anyway, that sums up chapter 5. Overall, I agree with what the authors are saying in this chapter- the way that evangelical culture treats "lust" is harmful. Teaching men to see women as threats, to avoid women rather than risk falling into "lust", teaching women that all men are like this and we can't really expect a man to get his head out of the gutter and interact like a normal human being, and that goes even more when women are wearing "immodest" clothes- ugh, yeah, all of this is so incredibly messed-up. I agree with "The Great Sex Rescue"'s answer to this: respect, and treat each other like people rather than potential sex objects.

Still, I think this chapter falls short because it doesn't say anything about gay men or asexual men, and how they are erased by this "all men struggle with lust [toward women]" ideology. And also, that weird bit about monogamy at the beginning. Actually, I think the conversation about lust could benefit by clearly untangling the parts about "are you objectifying random people?" from the parts about "are my spouse's feelings of attraction to random people a threat to our marriage?"

---

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

Related:

The First Time I Heard About "Locker Room Talk" Was When the Church Taught Me About Modesty 

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

BREAKING NEWS: Purity Culture Adherents Completely Miss the Point

Miss me with your "we are all sexually broken" hot takes. I'm asexual.

Getting the Power Dynamics Backwards

A woman in a beautiful dress stands on the red carpet, while a huge group of photographers takes photos of her. Image source.

[content note: abusive dating relationships, "Fifty Shades of Grey"]

So for some reason, "Fifty Shades of Grey" has been on my mind. (Maybe because I watched some videos about why "Twilight" is about an extremely unhealthy relationship.) I never read the book, but I watched the movie a few years ago, and wrote a post about it: How would we even know 'Fifty Shades' isn't normal? Basically, I was so EXTREMELY CREEPED OUT by how much that guy (Christian Grey) used language about "choice" and "consent" as if it was a healthy relationship, while also stalking and manipulating her. It SCARED me, imagining a girl like me, with a purity-culture background and barely any sex-ed or teaching on what a healthy relationship looks like... if she walks away from purity culture and then immediately finds Christian Grey, she will see ZERO RED FLAGS. She has no ability to recognize that the way he treats her is shady as hell.

Thinking about being extremely naive, and how easy it would be to get caught up in a bad situation like that. And that's what I want to talk about in this post too.

The point I want to make is, I can easily imagine how a naive girl [like me] would see this situation and see a power dynamic in it, which is actually exactly backwards from the power dynamic that exists in reality.

He buys her all kinds of expensive gifts. He tells her he's so attracted to her that he can't control himself. He stalks her.

And she might interpret it this way: Wow, I'm such an attractive/beautiful/interesting person, that I've got this rich guy wrapped around my finger. He wants me so much, he's so desperate, that I could ask him for anything and he'd give it to me. I have so much power here.

But if you know a little more about how the real world works, you see it's actually like this: He has enough money that he's able to maintain a habit of impulsively buying whatever he wants. If some shiny toy catches his attention, he can buy it, it's no big deal. Currently, this girl is the "shiny toy" that he wants. He spends money on her because he always spends money on things; it's no big deal to him. But he never risks anything that he actually values. He has years of experience being a rich businessman, of course he knows how to calculate where the line is between "having fun doing whatever I want" and "throwing away things that are actually of value to me, which are going to affect me." He's not going to throw away everything on a whim, just because he's attracted to someone.

All that stuff about "not being able to control himself"? That's bullshit. He can certainly control himself enough to avoid, say, making a scene in front of his colleagues/ business partners. Because that's something that actually matters to him. But apparently he "can't control himself" when he's cornering a girl in an elevator, because it's a situation where there won't be any consequences for him.

So I can easily imagine that she thinks he's so infatuated with her, that he would do anything for her, and she's the one with power. But that's completely backwards. In reality, he manipulates her, while not allowing any risk to the things that actually matter to him.

(For example: Does he introduce her to his friends? Does he talk to her about what's important to him, and value her perspective on it? Does he want to share his life with her, as an equal? Idk, maybe in the sequel, the relationship develops a bit more. At the beginning, though, he sees her as an object rather than a person.)

And actually, her naivete may be one of the reasons that he is drawn to her. He doesn't do these romantic gestures for her because she's so beautiful and kind and intelligent and interesting, and he's just in awe of what a wonderful person she is- he does this because she's inexperienced and will be easy for him to manipulate.

I have another example of having the power dynamics backwards. It's about modesty culture.

So, in Christian purity culture, girls are taught that we have to dress "modestly" because boys just can't think straight when they're in the presence of an attractive girl, the poor dears. The boys are so weak, and need the girls to help them.

I used to imagine it like this: Wow, as a girl, I possess in me this amazingly potent feminine power to control boys, but I must never use it. Oh, but if I did use it- if I let a bra strap show- if I wore a tight shirt- I could get the boys to do whatever I wanted. I would have a line of boys following me around while I teased them. They would stand at a respectful distance and look at me with hearts in their eyes, awed at just being in my presence. They would beg- beg me for a date, a kiss, etc- and I would say no, and they would never violate that "no." All they could do would be continue to beg, or maybe bring me gifts, etc. I would have so much power.

But it's not like that, it's actually opposite. Sexual harassment... women getting catcalled by men on the street... A creepy guy notices a girl, and it can be a scary thing for her, because she doesn't know what he'll do if she rejects him. Maybe he'll call her names, maybe he'll attack her or rape her.

There are people who think that sexual harassment is "a compliment" and don't understand why women complain about it. I think the reason for this misconception is that they imagine a power dynamic completely different than what's actually going on. They imagine a more equal power dynamic, where one person says "you're sexy/beautiful/whatever" and the other person says "thank you" and then they part ways and nothing else happens. In reality, though, it's not "a compliment." In reality, the person who's being "complimented" may fear- "what does this guy want from me? if I say no, is he going to become dangerous? would I be able to get away from him?"

"Modesty" was supposedly about how women are so powerful and men are so weak, but the reality is that powerful men who rape women often get away with it, and people defend rapists by asking about the victim's modesty. "What was she wearing?" Modesty is a way to control women. As a naive teenage girl, I had the power dynamics totally backwards.

(I specifically mentioned "men who rape women" there, because it relates to my point about "modesty", but obviously rapists can be any gender, and victims can be any gender, and it's a PROBLEM that society doesn't take it seriously when a man is raped.)

And, actually, in my fantasy about boys following me around and respecting my boundaries, well, that kind of sounds like celebrities with their fans and paparazzi. But here's the key thing: Celebrities hire bodyguards for exactly that reason. If you have obsessive fans stalking you, they don't stop just because you say "no", they stop if someone (your bodyguard) has the power to stop them. They stop if they are going to face consequences that actually matter to them.

Naively, one might think that it's about attraction. It's about if Person A is so incredibly attracted to Person B, that Person B therefore has the power to make Person A do anything they want. But no, in reality it's not about that at all. It's about who has power, in the real world, not in a sexy/romantic way. Who has the power to do whatever they want and get away with it. Who has the power to stop the other person.

Now, the exception to this is extreme romantic infatuation which drives a person to make unwise decisions as they pursue the person they're infatuated with. A person falls in love and then wants to make sacrifices and give up things they've worked hard for, just for the chance of being with the person they're infatuated with. And perhaps this is what Ana thinks Christian's situation is, in "Fifty Shades of Grey." She thinks he's so in love with her, that it drives him to act reckless. No. He's not actually being "reckless"- he's identifying situations where he won't face any consequences for his behavior, and specifically when he's in those situations, he takes whatever he wants.

In my own experiences being young and naive, I can understand how a very naive person would think that attraction necessarily means romantic infatuation. But... after the second time you fall in love, you understand that just because you feel something, doesn't mean it's true. Doesn't mean it's a good idea. People who actually have practical experience in the real world know that there's more to life than romantic feelings. After experiencing crushes a few times, we learn to keep them in perspective. So just because someone is attracted to you, and they're performing romantic gestures for you, doesn't mean that they're overtaken with obsession for you, and you hold all the power over them. Maybe that's how it works for a teenager having their first crush, but that's not how it works as an adult in the real world.

When I was young and naive, I wish I had been taught how to take a step back and see the actual power dynamics at work. It's not about the strength of one's attraction, it's about how far you can go before someone's able to put meaningful consequences on you.

---

Another excellent example of getting the power dynamics backwards is the idea that "women make men do things" which Dr. Laura Robinson describes here:

Do Women Make Men Do Things? Part 1

Do Women Make Men Do Things? 1A, "Feminizing the Church"

Do Women Make Men Do Things? Part 2

---

Related:

How would we even know 'Fifty Shades' isn't normal?

"Boys Can't Stop" 

8th item in this May 25, 2022 Blogaround

The Story of Me and Modesty

Blogaround

1. My 2023 Reader Survey will be open until June 19. Please go take the survey- it's useful for me to know what kind of topics readers want to read about.

2. Died: Tim Keller, New York City Pastor Who Modeled Winsome Witness (May 19)

3. IKEA's New Ad Claims they Are 'Proudly Second Best' and It's a Stroke of Genius (May 14) I love this. Yes, I'm a mom and I can confirm, the baby doesn't want to sleep in the expensive state-of-the-art baby bed that you bought for them. The baby wants to sleep on Mommy.

4. Women Are Never Going to Cover Themselves Enough to Get Men to Shut Up About Us (May 12) "As The Rules become longer and more consuming, being on the wrong side of them becomes more and more eroticized. Today it's nursing moms, but tomorrow it'll be women holding babies, because babies make men think about nursing and nursing makes them think about breasts (if you think I'm exaggerating, remind me to tell you the story of the time I was reprimanded for hanging a swimsuit to dry where boys could see it at church camp). The rules create the fetish, not the other way around."

5. "Hey, stop!" Taylor Swift defends Baltimore woman during Philadelphia concert (May 15) "Taylor Swift might have bad blood with one particular security guard in Philadelphia. In a viral moment, the star defended a concertgoer during the middle of her set while performing her 2014 hit 'Bad Blood.'"

6. Israelite Divination and the Mysterious Teraphim (May 4, via [along with links 7 and 8]) "The story of Michal helping David evade Saul’s guards by putting a teraphim in his bed, dressing it up to look like him, and then telling the guards David is sick (found in 1 Samuel 19:11-16) while David escapes out the window does little to inform us of the teraphim’s purpose. It simply suggests that teraphim could be nearly life-sized, and that it was not unusual for a household to have one around."

7. Why the Carroll verdict might matter (May 15) "And yet, there was never a come-to-Jesus moment when conservatives repented their previous views and pledged to go a different way. Instead, a conservative sea change happens like this: People who used to be zealots for a particular view go silent for a while. And when they start talking again, they have the opposite view, which they put forward as if they had always believed it."

8. Florida bill would require patients to share their immigration status (April 28) Wow not cool. Aren't these lawmakers worried about going to hell? 

9. The Sudoku With Only 4 Known Solvers (December 20, 2022) "Oh you're jocking my straps, that is absolutely- I've got digits, I've got 2 digits. ... That... That... I've actually got tears in my eyes. That is un... That is unbelievable setting." (1-hour-25-minute sudoku solve video)

10. Beijing LGBT Center shuttered as crackdown grows in China (May 16) Sad news. I've seen people talking about this in WeChat groups- where it's a bad idea to say things about the Chinese government- and based on what they *weren't* saying, I assumed it had something to do with the Chinese government's dislike of queer organizations. This article from AP News comes right out and says it directly.

A similar thing happened to ShanghaiPRIDE a few years ago. The people involved with ShanghaiPRIDE are still around, organizing queer events, but are no longer doing it as part of one big organization, because that attracts the wrong kind of attention.

11. 5 Questions to Ask Before You Talk to a Woman About What She's Wearing (May 15) "She cannot do anything about being well-endowed. The issue can never, ever be about how her body is affecting the men around her; that’s on them." Wow, really amazed at this post about dress codes- the idea presented here is that it has to be about clothes, not about a woman's body. It has to be a standard about what clothes are okay to wear, and it has to be universally applied. 

This is completely different from modesty ideology, which says that if a skinny girl wears a modest outfit, that's fine, but if a girl with big breasts and curves wears the exact same outfit, that's not okay, that's not "modest"- and yes, it is ALL ABOUT her body type, modesty culture doesn't even try to hide that. The result of this modesty ideology is that for some girls/women, there's really no possible outfit they can wear that will satisfy the modesty police. And this intersects with race- women of color are seen as more "sexual", so even if they wear the same "modest" thing that a skinny white woman is wearing, they might still get labelled as "immodest" and sinning against the boys. NOT COOL.

Blogaround

1. Why anti-vaxxers get in more car crashes (February 16) This is fascinating- a study of 11 million people in Canada found that people who were unvaccinated (for covid) were 72% more likely to get in car crashes than people who were vaccinated. I would definitely like to know more about the reasons why. We can speculate but I don't think we really have good evidence on what the reasons are.

2. 2,400-year-old flush toilet discovered in China could be one of the oldest ever (February 21)

3. Free lumberjack cake tutorial from Sugar Geek Show (2018, via)

4. A Christian school canceled a concert after learning one of the singers is gay (February 14) "And notice how PCC doesn’t explain what 'endorsement' they would have been offering by allowing a gay man to sing traditional and popular songs on campus. How much of a bubble do students live in that even choral music must be heard through a prism of sexuality?"

5. This whole thread:

The Christian woman wears turtlenecks, fingertip length shorts,
And shame
Hers
And his, too
Despite this attire
Clashing with the supposed freedom in Christ
This yoke is too heavy
It weighs her shoulders down
Revealing a bra strap
“Slut”

— Hannah 🫠 (@HannahBo_Bannah) February 22, 2023

6. Southern Baptists Expel Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church for Ordaining a Female Pastor (February 22) Wow, isn't the SBC worried about going to hell? Yikes.

7. Freely, freely you have received (February 21) "And but so, that’s what I think 'revival' refers to, a moment in which we encounter the possibility that we are both fully known and fully loved by God. ... But the key thing, I think, is that this moment is not itself the story, only the introduction to the story. The story involves what happens next."

8. Ken Ham Finds Threats to Young-Earth Creationist within Young-Earth Creationism (February 2) Yep, that's kind of Ken Ham's whole thing- someone disagrees with Ken Ham on some little detail, and therefore that person is a false teacher and they are bad bad bad.

Blogaround

1. A whirlwind history of asexual communities (August 7) Very cool.

2. Why The Rebelution’s Modesty Survey Was A Bad Idea: Shaney Irene’s Story (2013) "The survey allowed little to no room for the idea that, 'Hey, maybe just because the majority of guys think a girl is being immodest, doesn’t mean she actually is.'" PREACH!

I'm sure I've linked to this on my blog before, but I just came across it again and had to share it again because The Modesty Survey had a big effect on me back when I was so pure and repressed and on fire for God. (It has since been removed from The Rebelution's website.)

I remember reading carefully through all the stats, very concerned, putting numbers into an excel sheet to try to sort out which of the questions had a high enough rate of guys saying "this is a stumbling block" that I would need to take them into account and change my own clothing-wearing habits. 

Thinking about it now, if I came across something like that now- where a bunch of boys give their opinions on what clothes girls should or shouldn't wear- I'd be like "What on earth? This is none of their damn business" and not even bother to read through it. And actually, I remember back then, when I had so much confusion and anxiety over it, over the idea that I had to let this minefield of impossible standards control my clothing choices every morning, and also boys are all raping me in their minds- I remember I shared a link to The Modesty Survey on Facebook, as an attempt to find someone who would leave a comment and help me make sense of it. And someone did comment- she said it made her so angry that apparently people believe women's clothing is to blame for men's behavior. She called it "rape culture." This was an acquaintance that I had argued with A LOT about LGBT issues (because, back then, I was doing the whole "hate the sin, love the sinner" thing, like, of course we love gay people, but it would be unloving not to tell them that "acting on it" is a sin). I remember being so confused by her comment- rape culture? what? but Christians believe you can't do anything sexual at all! so of course we believe rape is a sin!- but I mean, yeah, she was right, it's rape culture.

Also, I always felt it was COMPLETELY ABSURD when Christians who believed in the concept of modesty (ie, "you need to cover up, to help the boys") were not on board with The Modesty Survey. (They said it was "too extreme" or they tried to add disclaimers that said "women should be modest so as not to cause men to lust, but that doesn't mean we should put men in charge of dictating what women should wear" like what on earth, that's EXACTLY what it means.) Like, the very thing that these Christian role models are teaching girls is "oh you just can't understand what it's like for boys, because you're girls, that's completely different, oh but if only you knew, if only you could understand how hard it is for boys, how much they STRUGGLE with LUST, and how boys consume and sexualize girls who dress like that" like OBVIOUSLY if you buy into that, the logical thing to do is to make a survey and ask a bunch of boys detailed questions about what does or doesn't "cause them to stumble." Like, wow, what an incredibly useful resource, if you buy into that ideology. That is exactly the set of the statistics you would want to have, if you truly believe that "girls need to cover up, so they don't cause a brother in Christ to stumble."

3. 3 Doors Down - Here Without You (Official Music Video) (2009) A song for those of us- like me- who are homesick.

4. All Rainwater is Unsafe to Drink According to Study (August 15)

5. 太卷了！为拍上海外滩的环金串月，摄影爱好者前一天晚上就抢占好机位... ["Wow! To get a photo of the moon passing through the eye of a Shanghai skyscraper, photographers claim their spots the night before..."] (August 14) This is incredible! The article is in Chinese, but it has a lot of pictures, so don't be intimidated. (Although, uh, I am not sure if the pictures will load if you're outside of China...)

Basically, it's about this:

A full moon is visible through the trapezoidal hole at the top of Shanghai's "bottle-opener building," A tall post from another skyscraper is in front of the moon, looking like the pupil slit of an eye.

(Here it is on douyin too.)

Shanghai's Eye of Sauron.

6. The Feds are investigating the Southern Baptist Convention for sexual abuse (August 13) GOOD. FINALLY. Like Jesus said, there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed.

7. Salman Rushdie will never be safe. That’s what fundamentalism is. (August 12) "Thirty-three years have passed since Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa (an Islamic legal ruling) demanding Rushdie’s execution for the nonsensical crime of blasphemy."

8. Kindergartner kicked out of Baptist school after adoption by lesbian couple (August 11) "You’ll never see a news story about a Christian school kicking out a child because her parents spent a weekend gambling in Vegas. But if that child has loving same-sex parents, it’s a five-alarm fire."

9. The ‘blasphemy’ of Beth Moore crushing on Jesus because of grapes (August 19) This is... wow, this is bonkers. Imagine getting all bent out of shape and throwing around accusations of "blasphemy" just because someone tweeted about having a crush on Jesus.

Like on the one hand, I'm fascinated, and I want to explore the nuances of this. Evangelical Christians constantly sing songs about how we love Jesus so much, and it's a well-known running joke that you can play "is this a song about your boyfriend, or Jesus?" with A LOT of popular Christian music. But the moment Beth Moore uses the word "crush", suddenly that gets a different response- perhaps because "crush" is an explicitly romantic word, and maybe has some connotations of being something that happens to silly teenage girls. 

Being in the asexual community, I think a lot about the different kinds of attraction (sexual attraction, romantic attraction, sensual attraction, aesthetic attraction, etc), and now I'm wondering, which ones are "okay" ways to be "attracted" to Jesus? What would that even mean, using "attraction" in a religious context?

But on the other hand, I'm like, lol patriarchal Christian men are mad about something, what else is new, it's not worth my time to care.

In Some Alternate Universe, I'm Writing a Post About Masks and "Causing to Stumble"

Sign that says "Please wear a face mask or face covering." Image source.

Well this post was in my drafts but I wasn't sure if I should post it because it's about American evangelicals and masks, and I'm in China and the culture around masks is totally different here. But I read the SBC report- the one about how the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention covered up sexual abuse for years, and it's so much worse than we thought- so yeah, now feels like a good time to say "it was all fake."

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In some alternate universe, where I took a different path away from evangelicalism, some version of me is connecting the dots between not wearing a mask in the US during the pandemic, and the Christian teaching about "don't cause others to stumble."

This earnest, innocent version of me, who believes in loving God and loving your neighbor, who believes that if I take the things that I was taught in church, which I believed with all my heart and built my life on, and bring them and put them in front of Christians' faces, then it will mean something, she is writing things like this:

I was taught that, as a girl, I had to be careful about what I wore, so I didn't "cause a brother to stumble." Meaning, a boy might have a sinful thought about sexiness, and of course since all Christians are supposed to love others and put others before ourselves, I should do what I can to prevent that sinful thought from happening. That's what it means for a Christian girl to show love to Christian boys.

They said the same thing about alcohol. They said it's not a sin to drink a little bit, but it's a sin to get drunk- but regardless, you probably shouldn't let other people see you drinking, because what if it tempts them to drink too much? What if it's someone who gets drunk too much, but then they see you drinking, and they think that means their drunkenness is totally fine and not sinful?

So now here we are, in a pandemic. In the United States, many places are not requiring masks any more. But you should wear a mask in public anyway, because what if someone sees you without a mask and thinks you're doing it because you don't care about vulnerable people- people with health conditions that make covid particularly deadly to them, or children who are too little to be vaccinated? Or what if someone sees you without a mask, and it encourages them in their own sin of not caring for vulnerable people? 

Regardless of your actual reasons for not wearing a mask, someone who sees you might "stumble" by thinking you are committing the sin of not loving your neighbor, and it will encourage them to also commit that sin.

The logic is sound. If girls have to "cover up" for boys because that's just basic Christian love that of course all Christians should show to each other, and has nothing to do with misogyny... then yes, in the exact same way, all Christians should wear a mask in public so others don't "stumble" into the sin of thinking it's okay to not care about if people with "underlying health conditions" live or die.

In this universe, the one we actually live in, I am not writing that post. Because, how should I put this... It was all fake.

All that logic they laid out, when they explained the importance of modesty. About how boys have this problem, and of course if someone has a problem, the rest of us should care about them and try to help them. About how girls weren't allowed to just wear what we want; we have to be thinking about men first. Because all Christians should care for others first, and put your own preferences last. This is just what it means for Christians to care about each other, and there is nothing sexist about it. They said.

Yeah that was bullshit, it turns out.

But alternate-universe-Perfect-Number still thinks that's the logic behind Christian modesty teaching. She thinks it's simply about doing something that someone might interpret in a way that encourages them to think sinful thoughts. She thinks that's actually what Christians believe- because that is truly what she believed when she was evangelical. And so she thinks they will be convinced about the "wearing masks" thing when she explains how it follows the same "causing to stumble" logic.

She thinks she's making a really good point.

No, it was all fake. When did I realize it was all fake? I know for a lot of us American ex-evangelicals, it was during the 2016 election. Maybe that's the case for me too, or maybe it was earlier. We saw our Christian friends, our role models, supporting a man who basically matched every description I've seen Christians give of what "the antichrist" will be like. (That's why I call him "the orange antichrist.") We saw them choosing blatant racism over helping immigrants- he is just nakedly racist, more blatant than anything I'd ever seen from a presidential candidate, meanwhile the bible is clear, from beginning to end, over and over and over, it says you need to help immigrants. He has had affairs, he has been married multiple times, he bragged about sexually assaulting women, and many many women came forward and accused him of sexual assault- and yet he has the support of the people who call themselves the "family values" party, who claim they can't let queer people have rights because it's a threat to "the family" and "how will we explain this to the children?" It left us ex-evangelicals asking how we were supposed to explain the orange antichrist to our children. And on top of that, he can't name a single bible verse when asked- it's obvious he's just using evangelicals because it gets him political power, not because he actually believes it.

I remember seeing a tweet, some time around December 2016, in response to some conservatives talking about the "war on Christmas"... it went something like this: "Really? We're still doing this 'war on Christmas' stuff? Don't you know that we all see it was fake now?"

It was all fake. All that stuff about loving your neighbor. All that stuff about following what the bible says even if it's hard. All the stuff that I took to heart and I thought my Christian role models did too.

So let me tell you what modesty and "causing to stumble" was actually about. It goes like this: There are 2 types of women in this world. On the one side, you have good, modest Christian women, who follow the rules about not dressing sexy, and therefore these are the women who deserve to be respected. These are the women that men should protect. And on the other side, you have sluts. They are bad and sinful because they dress in a "revealing" or "provocative" way, and therefore we are right to judge them. They don't deserve respect. They put their body out there like that, of course they are giving up the right to consent about what sexual things are done to them. 

Christian "modesty" teaching is all about this: You need to be one of the good girls, not a slut.

That's it. Really, if you frame it that way, it makes a lot more sense.

Back when I was in college, I spent so long asking questions, trying to unravel what "modesty" was and what it meant for me as a woman. I truly believed it was about "helping the guys" and that of course all Christians have an equal responsibility to give up what they want in order to help others. I believed it wasn't sexist at all, it was just an unfortunate fact that men were so weak in terms of lust, and they needed women to do so much to help them.

But there was always one part that didn't make sense: If, say, I should wear a long dress because that's "more modest" than a short dress, then wouldn't it be even better if I wore an even longer and baggier dress that covered even more? Sure, the nice ladies at church told me that the long dress is fine, but "The Modesty Survey" (a survey for Christian boys about what does or does not "cause them to stumble") says some small percentage of guys is still going to lust even when I wear the "modest" long dress.

If it's really about "helping the guys" and I need to "put others first", then where does it end? Wouldn't it be even better to wear something big and ugly and completely unattractive? Wouldn't it be even better to wear something not feminine at all? If you take it to its logical conclusion, girls shouldn't go out in public at all, because no matter what you wear, some guy is going to have a sexual thought about you, there's nothing you can do about it.

(Or, actually, if you take it to it's logical conclusion, wouldn't the most "modest" women be the ones who dress in drag...?)

No matter what I wear, no matter what I do, some percentage of guys is going to have sexual thoughts about me. And the nice church ladies taught me that we have to "put others first" which means that preventing boys from having sexual thoughts is more important than ANYTHING I want.

So, I asked them, am I allowed to be beautiful? Why not dress even worse? If outfit A is more "modest" than outfit B, but outfit C is EVEN MORE MODEST, than why is it apparently okay to wear outfit A?

I asked, over and over, because I really believed it. I really believed in "helping the guys" and "putting others first", but something was wrong. Something was wrong, because the logical conclusion was that I shouldn't be beautiful or feminine, and surely that couldn't be right. Surely I was missing some other bit of logic. So I asked over and over to try to figure it out.

Well. Let's look at it a different way. If it's actually about "there are 2 types of women: good girls and sluts, Madonna/whore", then look, it makes so much more sense! All the times that I asked these questions, and the nice church ladies said, "But you don't need to worry about it! The way you dress is fine!" (And I said, "But WHY is it fine???? Wouldn't it be more modest and therefore better if I dressed less feminine?") See, it makes so much more sense if they are thinking of "modesty" in terms of "you need to look like a 'good girl' not like a 'whore'" rather than "you need to be really concerned about the possibility that any boy anywhere might have a sinful thought about your body, those poor boys, they need our help so bad."

It wasn't about "loving your neighbor"; it never was. It was about "it's okay to disrespect women who don't follow our rules- so make sure you're not one of them."

It was all fake.

(Oh, and if you're thinking, "hey, it wasn't all fake- it actually is true that boys have sexual thoughts when they see immodest women" well guess what, the part they taught the boys was all fake too. Yeah, the idea that having sexual thoughts is bad and means you are "sexually broken" and incapable of respecting women- fake fake fake.)

So then alternate-universe-Perfect-Number shows up with her hot take about "not wearing a mask could cause someone to stumble because they will think you don't care if people die of covid", and... I mean, it's incomprehensible, because those nice Christians who taught her about modesty never actually believed that.

She thinks people are going to be moved by a argument about "helping others" and "the bible says 'put others first', so that means you HAVE TO", because she was moved by them, back when she was a teenager. And she thought the adults in her church really believed that. But it was all fake.

It was- and I'm going to be brutally honest here- it was about preserving existing hierarchies. Yeah, sure in church they taught us about loving your neighbor and all those virtuous things. About "the last shall be first, and the first shall be last." But when it came down to the things Christians really cared about, really fought for- the things they start culture wars over- no, it was about preserving the existing hierarchies in society.

So I'm not gonna waste my time writing that post.

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Related:

Modesty is Causing Women to Stumble (yeah maybe when I wrote this post in 2015, I was alternate-universe-Perfect-Number. It has that exact "they have to listen to me because I am talking about the same biblical principles they said were so important" naive attitude I've described here.)

The Story of Me and Modesty

The Male Equivalent to Modesty 

The First Time I Heard About "Locker Room Talk" Was When the Church Taught Me About Modesty

Also this post by Libby Anne: Do Face Masks Violate Evangelical Anti-Modesty Standards for Men? 

And the "it was all fake" idea reminds me of this 2012 post by Libby Anne: How I Lost Faith in the “Pro-Life” Movement