218: Meet the Sexvangelicals (w/Julia Postema & Jeremiah Gibson)
You’re an eight year-old girl. The purity culture of your evangelical church, ruled by men but policed by women, has you worried that the spaghetti straps on your summer top might be sinful. You learn from the women around you how to defer, serve, please, keep your voice girl-like forever, and use it to both signal obedience but also piously request relief from sexual aggression.
You’re a seven year-old boy. The holy laws of gender in your church dictate that when you’re the only male present at Bible study, you must lead the room full of women in reading and prayer. You must perform manliness in your boy’s body, assuming an anxious leadership role you did not earn. If you don’t puff yourself up, you’re a sissy—one of the girls alongside you learning the tones of the Fundie Baby Voice.
These are parts of the stories of Julia Postema and Jeremiah Gibson, the co-hosts of the podcast Sexvangelicals: The Sex Education the Church Didn't Want You to Have. They are Boston-based licensed psychotherapists and certified sex therapists. They specialize in helping couples with negative religious backgrounds discover sexuality that works for their partnership. Julian and I sat down with them to learn about how their clients recover from purity culture, and sometimes in the process run smack into its mirror world: the tantric workshop land of divine masculine and feminine stereotypes plus fascinations with semen retention.
Show Notes
Sexvangelicals: Podcast | Website | Instagram | Substack
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The practice of simultaneously infantilizing women while also holding themselves to be the gatekeepers of their own sexuality and the sexuality of men.
And when women communicate in these tones and affects of the Fundy baby voice, it can be more palatable to men of a certain socialization.
And they do present in this very girl-like kind of way.
If you're a fan of workplace comedies like The Office or satire like The Onion,
then I have a podcast that I know you'll love.
It's called Mega.
Mega is an improvised satire from the staff of a fictional megachurch.
That's the premise.
Each week, the hosts, Holly Laurent and Greg Hess, are joined by guests, people like Cecily Strong or Jen Hatmaker.
To portray characters inside the colorful world of Twin Hills Community Church, which they describe as a mega church with a tiny family feel.
The result is a sharp-witted and hilarious look into the world of commercialized religion using humor to cope with the frightening amount of power that church and religion have.
So I very much recommend you checking out Megha's episodes, like the one with Saturday Night Live's Cecily Strong playing Cece String, a hilarious character who's fresh out of jail, and also comedian Jason Mantzoukas.
You may find yourself dying of laughter and perhaps inspired to take an improv class yourself.
Megha is able to keep you laughing as you think and reflect about the world we live in.
You can find Megha on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Comedy fans, listen up!
I've got an incredible podcast for you to add to your queue.
Nobody listens to Paula Poundstone.
You probably know that I made an appearance recently on this absolutely ludicrous variety show that combines the fun of a late night show with the wit of a public radio program and the unique knowledge of a guest expert who was me at the time, if you can believe that.
Embrace yourself for a rollercoaster ride of wildly diverse topics, from Paula's hilarious attempts to understand QAnon to riveting conversations with a bonafide rocket scientist.
You'll never know what to expect, but you'll know you're in for a high-spirited, hilarious time.
This is comedian Paula Poundstone and her co-host Adam Thelber, who is great.
They're both regular panelists on NPR's classic comedy show.
You may recognize them from that, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.
And they bring the same acerbic, yet infectiously funny energy to Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone.
When I was on, they grilled me in an absolutely unique way about conspiracy theories and yoga and yoga pants and QAnon, and we had a great time.
They were very sincerely interested in the topic, but they still found plenty of hilarious angles in terms of the questions they asked and how they followed up on whatever I gave them, like good comedians do.
Check out their show.
There are other recent episodes you might find interesting as well, like hearing crazy Hollywood stories from legendary casting director Joel Thurm, or their episode about killer whales and killer theme songs.
So Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone is an absolute riot you don't want to miss.
Find Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Hello, everyone.
Welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
We are on Instagram and threads at ConspiratualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or just the bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
We are independent media creators, and we really appreciate your support.
218, Meet the Sexvangelicals with Julia Postema and Jeremiah Gibson.
You're an eight-year-old girl.
The purity culture of your evangelical church, ruled by men but policed by women, has you
worried that the spaghetti straps on your summer top might be sinful.
You learn from the women around you how to defer, serve, please, keep your voice girl-like forever, and use it to both signal obedience but also piously request relief from sexual aggression.
You're a seven-year-old boy.
The holy laws of gender in your church dictate that when you're the only male present at Bible study, you must lead the room full of women in reading and prayer.
You must perform manliness in your boy's body, assuming an anxious leadership role you did not earn.
If you don't puff yourself up, you're a sissy, one of the girls alongside you who's learning the tones of the fundy baby voice.
So, these are parts of the stories of Julia Postema and Jeremiah Gibson, the co-hosts of the podcast Sex Evangelicals, the sex education the church didn't want you to have.
They are Boston-based licensed psychotherapists and certified sex therapists.
They specialize in helping couples with negative religious backgrounds discover sexuality that works for their partnership.
And Julian and I sat down with them to learn about how their clients recover from purity culture, and sometimes, in the process, run smack into its mirror world, which is the tantric workshop land of divine masculine and feminine stereotypes, plus fascinations with semen retention.
But first, This Week in Conspiratuality.
This past week, some not-widely-covered bombshell investigative journalism from Pope Publica
was reported on Democracy Now!
about a group called Ziklag, which is supposedly a non-profit associated with the Seven Mountain Mandate branch of Christian nationalism.
Now, the odd-sounding name Ziklag is a biblical reference to David's war against the Amalekites, who had taken Israelites captive in the Book of Samuel.
Yeah, it's a pseudo-archaeological site celebrated by the religious right in Israel, who, of course, Bibi Netanyahu is pandering to whenever he uses that story of David wiping out the Amalekites to justify turning Gaza into rubble with 186,000 casualties, now estimated by The Lancet.
Wait, Matthew, are you suggesting that there are things in the Bible that may not be historically accurate?
It's possible.
Could be.
Interesting.
Wow.
Mind blown.
So metaphorically mirroring that mythic, perhaps historical war, the already aggressive Christian dominionist movement is seeking not only to get out the Christian vote for Trump, But it's also been exposed as participating in the fraudulent activities of the so-called election integrity groups, which are actually working to disenfranchise voters, and in propaganda strategies specifically to make transgender rights a wedge issue to re-motivate GOP voters who are otherwise exhausted by Trump.
Right.
Now that story from this week will be unpacked more in our brief that we'll drop this coming Saturday.
The timing is interesting, though, for this election year because there's even more of a Christian nationalist backdrop on the MAGA side this time.
We have Leonard Leo's stacking of the Supreme Court with conservative Catholic judges, as well as his connections recently sort of more unpacked to Opus Dei, as well as Project 2025's explicit agenda to make Christianity central to every aspect of government and society.
And then Trump's pick, J.D.
Vance for VP, also became a main character of both the mainstream and online discourse over the last few weeks.
And the topics on which he drew focus all had to do with reactionary Christian so-called family values, you know, abortion, Marriage, being between a man and a woman, everyone should have children or else they're sociopaths.
But there's more, right, Matthew?
Yeah, so for last week's brief, I looked at how by calling child-free people sociopaths, Vance is, I think, shouting in the mirror, really.
He's tapping into this shameful rage that Christians who parent children within a neoliberal state that on one hand doesn't give a runny shit about family life and on the other hand depends on family structures to provide the services that it will not like that's what they're angry at but their piety won't allow them to complain about the existential drudgery of real parenting because children are gifts from God and of course they'll have to find a scapegoat
Where we haven't gone yet is into all of the sex stuff around Vance.
The fake quotes from Hillbilly Elegy, which is a bad enough book, we don't have to make up quotes, but, you know, the fake quotes circulated that he was a love-lorn college kid and he fucked a lubricated latex glove in between two couch cushions.
That was totally made up.
Uh, there was also the allegation, which actually can't really be proven, that he was searching out dolphin porn because he posted a screenshot of a dolphin humping a woman at a marine land type place and captioned it, maybe the internet was a mistake.
Which is actually a reasonable take, but the problem with the story is that the screenshot could have come from anywhere.
But, you know, in any case, within days, there's a few anti-MAGA accounts attacking this deeply unlikable man, creating a tidal wave of sort of mirror bullshit that, you know, takes after almost QAnon gang stalkings of the past, but in a kind of circus mode.
And I think this unleashed a paroxysm of Democrat schadenfreude over Vance's precarious charisma and what his elevation to the VP nomination Actually says about Trump.
So wait, wait, you're saying there's things on the Internet that are not true as well?
Yeah, the Internet and the Bible.
What do you know?
Yeah, I mean, I hear you, though.
It's this was, I think, a regrettable decision and something that should not have been celebrated.
That completely fabricated sex shaming sorts of stories were made up to go after this guy when there are so many other things you can go after that are real.
We'll get into the politics of that, I think, in another episode, but I think there are some real liabilities there with regard to shame and the fact that so much of the MAGA movement is motivated by resentment.
I mean, I think that stuff doesn't really help.
Anyway, it was all topped off, kind of, and really almost sanctified from above with the following comment from Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, just announced as Harris' running mate just this morning, and he let this one rip.
These guys are just weird.
That's what they are.
So, in a nutshell, don't give them the power.
Look, are they a threat to democracy?
Yes.
Are they going to take our rights away?
Yes.
Are they going to put people's lives in danger?
Yes.
Are they going to endanger the planet by not dealing with climate change?
Yes.
They're going to do all that, but don't lift these guys up like they're sometimes heroes.
Everybody in this room knows, I know it as a teacher, a bully has no self-confidence.
A bully has no strength.
They have nothing.
The fascists depend on fear.
The fascists depend on us going back.
But we're not afraid of weird people.
We're a little bit creeped out, but we're not afraid.
You know, I had some reservations about this up front, but I've listened to more of Walls, and he's actually careful to walk the flavor of that Basket of Deplorables-type epithet back, the weirdness thing.
He takes pains to explain that he's not calling his MAGA Rust Belt neighbors weird.
He's pointing out that the MAGA leadership doesn't speak to their pragmatic, state-out-of-other-people's-business, prairie-home-companion values.
Yeah, that they are obsessively preoccupied with some pretty weird things.
Like, come on guys, why?
Yeah, so I think there's a strategic discussion to be had around Weird for a future episode because I think it has some hallmarks of a kind of populism that can have some drawbacks.
But I think our guests today set us up for some of that because anxieties around sex and gender and how people feel about these things and how they try to police each other are perennial right-wing weapons.
And that's why I think it felt so good for so many people to flip the script on Libs of TikTok and JD Vance and to point out the twisted hypocrisies of, you know, child sexual abuse in Christian families and churches, the anti-queer fevers of gay pastors, and the trans panickery and the wave of transvestigation fervor that Just peaked recently with a global harassment campaign against the Algerian boxer Imam Khalif, whose actual story of poverty and grift was, you know, really kind of an echo of Million Dollar Baby, I think.
It could have been directed by Clint Eastwood if he wasn't a bigot.
Yeah, that's a nice point of connection.
I mean, obviously she's a very inspiring person, right?
This story is complex because both Halif and the silver medalist she defeated at the weekend to win gold had previously been disqualified from an international competition under controversial circumstances, of course.
The details of the testing involved are disputed.
And then, you know, that doesn't justify the trans-obsessed MAGA and heterodox people just jumping on the story as soon as they could as evidence of the woke Olympics and Kamala Harris supporting men punching women in the face.
I think to call the testing results disputed might be generous because the Russian-led IBA, the International Boxing Association that we're referring to here, was actually taken off the list this year as the IOC's Boxing Oversight Commission for judging and corruption issues.
They didn't actually publish the results of the unspecified tests that they used to disqualify two women.
But now after the Paris firestorm, they've come out and they've said that Khalif's tests showed high testosterone and XY chromosomes, but they still haven't provided receipts.
They haven't published the actual studies.
So I think there's more information certainly to be had.
Yeah, all of that is true.
And it turns out there's just one way to get to the bottom of that.
There's one way to find out what the actual truth is in scientific terms.
The boxers are not transgender.
We don't know for sure at this point, but what seems most likely to me and to a lot of other people observing this is that, like South African Olympic gold medal runner Kastor Samanya and several others, Hilif and Yuting, who was her opponent in the gold medal match, probably have this rare intersex condition, which does give certain male advantages in speed and strength.
It's just really hard and nuanced.
It's a tricky situation for the governing bodies to figure out, as exemplified by how messy all of this is.
Yeah, so I agree that the science and ethics might be complicated, but, you know, the IOC let her compete.
They let her lose in 2020, then again now.
The IBA even let her compete for years before disqualifying her after she beat an undefeated Russian prospect.
Like, that's when they triggered the tests.
And then these complications, unfortunately, are then red meat for ghouls like J.K.
Rowling, who are so obsessed with how they think women must be in the world that she's just happy to defame this boxer as male without looking up the first detail about her.
So, I mean, it's just really pure bigotry on display.
Yeah, I mean, my activities on Twitter in that immediate rush of people jumping on the bandwagon of anti-trans rhetoric was just to repeatedly say to people, I wonder what it would be like to wait to have more access to the facts before you roll out your anti-trans talking points.
So, yeah.
Yeah, there's no waiting.
There's never waiting.
It's gross.
Matthew, I really enjoyed talking to Jeremiah and Julia.
I have no doubt that their clients and followers benefit greatly from their much needed perspective and tools and the experiences that they're drawing from.
One of the reasons I'm personally so openly anti-religious, as you know, is because I see the major religions of the world as an artifact of a bygone era, an era in which we navigated our human anxieties via appeals to some supernatural authority.
So questions about the nature of reality, meaning, the purpose of life, how to behave, how to think about death, and then of course, how to deal with and express our sexuality, were at one time all organized and policed by interpretations of books, falsely attributed to gods that don't actually exist, most likely written by people who were either straight up liars or delusional and having, you know, hallucinatory experiences.
Yes, the delusional liars who wrote the Sermon on the Mount, the opening of the Gospel of John, the Proverbs, Song of Solomon, psychotic poets, all of them trying to express ineffable things, ruining the world they should have been strangled in their cribs.
They're delusional to the extent that they believe that any of that stuff has a supernatural origin and it is harmful to the extent that they get millions and millions of people over time to believe that that supernatural authority should therefore define who you do and don't get to have sex with.
And through your direct interviews of the writers of those texts, you know exactly what they meant and how.
I don't get that argument at all.
Right, okay.
Yeah, I'm talking about the downstream effects.
But you're talking about written by people who are either liars or delusional.
Yes, absolutely!
Yeah.
If you think that God is talking directly to you and telling you the absolute truths of the universe, you're either lying or you're delusional.
How do you know they weren't poets doing poetry?
Is there some good poetry in the Bible?
Yeah, in some places.
But you can find poetry, philosophy, thoughts about ethics, aesthetic, contemplative reverie in much, much more satisfying and rich ways outside of scriptures without all of the unnecessary baggage.
Sure.
So again, don't get me wrong, I know there are many beneficial things about what religion has represented for many people, but I think we probably agree that when it comes to sex positivity, the existence of gay people, gender roles and patriarchy, traditional religion has, on the whole, been a disaster.
And nowhere is that more apparent in today's evangelical movement.
Yeah, I agree with that.
And to your point, I think that one of the most important things that Julia and Jeremiah point out in our discussion is how these conservative religious attitudes towards sex carry a kind of intergenerational trauma around shame, guilt, coercion, denial, submission, and servitude.
If we're interested in depolarization and mutual aid, we want to think really carefully about rubbing salt in those wounds with the couch and dolphin memes.
And I had one last thought about our discussion, Julian, before we go ahead and roll it, which is that so many good things get dragged to the surface here, but the thing that I'm most haunted by, because I can see some of it in my own conditioning, is when Jeremiah describes the evangelical male body as being armored by the unearned authority of being placed in high positions without training or life experience.
It really gives this insight into why the rhetoric feels so hollow, so vapid.
Setting aside all of the bad ideas, I now can listen to these preachers And hear the stuffed shirt talking, trying to steal glory.
Boys, really, all of them struggling to embody any advantage they can in the absence of real life experience.
And then Julia talks about this in the discussion as a developmental loss.
And I think that that's exactly it.
A society where boys are forced to act in lieu of God before they know who they are.
And because they don't know who they are, they're just repeating the mantras of authority
to a chorus of women who are brought up to support their fragility.
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That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster.
So, we're joined today by Julia Postema and Jeremiah Gibson, the hosts of the Sex Evangelicals
They are licensed psychotherapists in the Boston area and ex-evangelical sex therapists who are here to tell us how to have the kind of sex that will please the Lord and sanctify His name.
We're really excited.
Welcome, Julia and Jeremiah.
Thanks!
I'm excited!
I'll speak for myself and I'm a fan of your podcast, so this is very exciting for me.
And I'm happy to please the Lord, which is why I left the church and became a sex therapist.
Awesome.
To start, regarding how your background relates to your work, could you tell us briefly about the church or churches that you grew up in and when in your journey you realized that you'd personally been given distorted perceptions, shall we say, about sexuality?
I grew up in an independent Baptist church in western Massachusetts.
The combination of my church community, my very tiny—I say private school in quotation marks.
It was essentially a homeschooling co-op.
And my Christian camp were the three structures that defined my childhood.
I can't remember the first time that I learned problematic messages around gender, sexuality, or relationships, because that was the water that I swam, and it wasn't until decades later that I was actually able to begin identifying and unpacking that.
And then I grew up in a denomination called the Church of Christ.
The Church of Christ is a highly conservative group that has some fun elements to it, acapella music and all of that, but also has some horribly damaging elements to that as well, specifically around gender and the repression of women, especially as it pertains to the, quote, public assembly.
I learned really early on that and was also asked to do things as a boy, as a seven-year-old man-child, to take leadership roles in spaces around worship, around corporate worship, things like that.
So that was the primary way that and a high focus on perfectionism, highly cognitive behavioral kind of model.
So think right, do the right things.
Take communion every week, get baptized, you'll be good with Jesus.
Be perfect as the Lord is perfect, which is a Bible verse instilled in me.
Don't remember the reference any longer.
We're gonna come back to how that all impacts your work, but, you know, given current events, we really wanted to ask first, how is the evangelical world, or at least that corner of it that you serve through your practices, responding to this avalanche of news?
So we have an assassination attempt, we have the rise of JD Vance, we have Biden's withdrawal, we have the candidacy of Kamala Harris.
Like, what's the pulse?
There's so much political engagement within the ex-evangelical community exclusively because we've seen and experienced firsthand the ways that the 21st century Republican Party has caused so much harm to individuals and families through the immersion rather than the separation of church and state.
Exvangelical Social Media has been a great source of information about the dangers of the Republican Party.
I highly encourage you to check out two quick sources.
One for the Instagrammers.
Please, please, please follow Tia Levings on Instagram.
She's the author of the new book.
It actually comes out, Julia, next weekend.
A well-trained wife, and she provides a lot of great information about the theology and the philosophy that drives MAGA.
And on Substack, for those of you that are Substackers, Julia and I are Substackers.
I highly encourage you to check out Andra Watkins.
She has an amazing Substack that explores the depths and the implications of Project 2025.
So, the anxiety on ex-evangelical social media has been extremely palpable.
Understandably, the authoritarian dynamics within the Republican Party are similar to those that folks have seen in churches, from the outright homophobia and sexism to the consolidation of power to a few powerful male voices and the expectation of rigid gender norms.
Exangelical social media is an interesting place because it has been a virtual trauma response, but this week has been really nice with the transition, especially from Biden to Harris.
There's been an enormous amount of hope and positivity.
Some folks weren't too keen on Biden.
A lot of folks are excited about the potential of a BIPOC female president.
Some folks, me included, have been thrilled with the way that Biden's announcement sucker punched the New York Times and CNN and other forms of media who have been blasting us with ageist and ableist nonsense for the last two months.
But regardless of what happens in the next six months, I hope that the ex-evangelical community can remember and can hold on to this hope.
The exvangelical community can be a bit reactive.
I would say that's an area of growth.
So, I am not the one in our group who is on social media to any extent.
Jeremiah and our phenomenal communications coordinator, Maddie, really handle that.
The few times that I am on social media and the few times this week that I engaged for about 90 seconds, I also could experience that palpable anxiety.
It makes sense.
However, I would encourage folks of any background, particularly an exvangelical background, to take a deep breath when receiving news sources, read more than the title, read the full article with all the context, and perhaps engage other kinds of relationships before moving to an immediate hot take.
Right.
So thanks for that.
Let's turn to your work because there's a really interesting intersection here.
When we first started communicating, you had this really good description of how some of what you're observing in your work as sex therapists relates to themes that we cover here on the podcast.
To get into those juicy topics, I thought it might be nice, Julia, to have you read this paragraph from your email to us that we've included here.
Would you mind doing that?
Okay, so here's the email we initially sent.
We, Jeremiah and Julia, are committed to the process of psychotherapy, especially relational psychotherapy, as I'm sure, and I know from listening, that many of your listeners are.
We are both certified sex therapists, and we've noticed how the sex therapy community falls prey to some of the same essentialist perspectives around gender and sexuality that religious and other
conservative communities do, such as engagement around divine masculine and divine
feminine, semen retention, which is one of my favorite topics, and a whole host of other practices. We'd
love to talk with you and your audience about how to assess the presence of essentialist
language and professional processes that mirror the conspiracy-laden ideologies within
religious spaces. All right, so that really piqued our interest.
It's a lot and I want to break it down slowly.
So, we've heard a little bit about both of your backgrounds and evangelical spaces.
You've become therapists mainly for people coming out of those spaces.
What are the core challenges that your clients face?
I would say that the core challenge, the most primary core challenge, would be the gendered scripts that people receive from highly controlling religious groups, especially evangelical, Mormon, and Pentecostal communities.
receive those messages, like me, often before they can even have a memory.
And those gendered scripts can shape pervasive aspects of our lives.
So for me, as a child, I remember having conversations at eight and nine years old with my friends
about whether or not spaghetti straps were sinful.
That is absolutely rooted in a gender script around femininity.
And modesty is only one aspect of that.
So as an adult, I still have times, especially when I see my family or conservative groups,
that getting dressed causes anxiety for me.
And this is years after leaving those kinds of communities.
So it might sound trite, but I can think of countless examples of conversations that I've had with my clients who are in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and beyond, who are trying to dress themselves for the first time.
So that's just one example of how controlling those gendered scripts can be.
Are the spaghetti straps sinful?
Instead of, are they comfortable?
Right!
Do they fit?
Like, what color are they?
I wonder how that will feel with the sun on my back.
Right, or what do I want to wear?
And the sad note around the spaghetti straps is that Women, well actually in this case, very young girls, learned that modesty was important to protect themselves against sexual assault.
And we'll probably talk about that a little bit further when we discuss the Fundy Baby Voice because I can make a connection there.
So, the other deeply harmful part is that we burdened little children with the crimes of adult men.
Jeremiah, what would you say?
Well, speaking of adult men, the crimes of adult men not just being sexualizing young children, but also encouraging children, including young boys, to move into over-functioning types of roles, especially as it pertains to kind of the leadership of the church structures.
In my denomination, Men lead everything.
So when I was seven, my family attended a small group Bible study, as you do when you are in an evangelical church, because going to church once a week isn't enough.
The families would get together, we'd sing songs, read scripture, eat, pray, all that stuff.
At that time, my dad worked late, many of the other dads did too, or so they claimed.
Nonetheless, I would be the only male person at Bible studies.
And the adult women would turn to me and say, Jeremiah, you're the boy.
You're the male.
You have to lead the songs.
You have to lead the prayers.
Oh, man.
And so being the people-pleasing firstborn that I am, I led the songs with gusto.
I led the prayers with gusto.
And that set the precedent for me that in many of the activities of my life, I moved really quickly into leadership roles.
That's kind of the innate version of what Julia was talking about, the stuff that has formed into me even before I remembered it.
Not necessarily because I wanted to, but because people, often women, either directly asked me to or because nobody was taking a leadership role, so I begrudgingly and anxiously did so.
Well, anxiously is the key word, right?
Because you're not prepared to do that.
That's right.
Especially when I'm seven.
And that, you know, there's been a lot of, there's been a lot of memoirs being published recently about how the evangelical Mormon Pentecostal worlds have fucked over women.
It's also important to talk about how they fucked over men as well.
And one of the wounds of patriarchy for me has been giving, has been the expectation
that I'm going to be in charge of things.
And the healing process for me has been giving myself permission to not be so quick to take
over things.
Yeah, that's really fascinating and sad.
I mean, I think of you as a boy that age, where regardless of your natural developmental
stage in terms of your identity, in terms of your intellectual capacities, your emotional
maturity, there's a stereotype of what is expected of the man that is being thrust upon
you without any possibility for you to have objections, right?
That's right, that's right.
And if you choose not to step into that, there's all sorts of language, often either sexist, you're a girl, you're a sissy, or homophobic, you're gay, you're a fag, that punishes you for not stepping into those roles.
I think we're going to get to this, but my sense is, is that in order to do that as a seven-year-old, you have to inflate yourself beyond your sense of I don't know, reality.
You have to create some kind of identity that is beyond your station, that's beyond your size.
And I'm wondering whether that's actually what we see when we see the kind of stereotypical, quite rigid male preacher who has been entrained into a kind of That's right.
earned certainty over decades to just sort of believe that whatever he has to say is
not only true, but that he has every right to say it and that he must say it.
That's right.
And it's also important to remember that evangelical Christianity has a multi-billion dollar publishing
industry that funds it.
And a lot of the people that are writing, a lot of the men that are writing are men
I'm 40.
Men who are speaking outside of their wisdom, speaking into areas in which they don't have the life experience to speak to that, and also speaking outside of their scope of practice.
We see this a lot with relational self-help books.
Many of the relational self-help books published by Christian publishing houses were not written by therapists, were not written by relationship specialists.
They were written by ministers, by clergy, who may have taken like one class in pastoral counseling in seminary, for whatever that's worth.
Congratulations!
You know how to do premarital counseling, I guess.
There's no doubt.
We're at a crossroads.
And it doesn't have to be this way.
We all feel it.
But here's the good news.
We, the people, are still in the driver's seat.
We get to decide whether our future will grow brighter or whether we'll settle for an America in decline.
Well, I know which choice our children deserve.
And I know the choice the Republican Party is fighting for.
Listeners are going to remember that back in March of this year, Republican Senator from Alabama, Katie Britt, gave a now viral response to Joe Biden's State of the Union address.
It was made fun of quite a bit for the overacting, but also for this strange vocal inflection that a lot of people just didn't really understand, but which, you know, many commentators, including Jess Piper on Twitter, broke down vis-a-vis the mechanics and meaning of the Fundy baby voice.
And it seems emblematic of what exvangelical women have to navigate as they come out of these environments.
And so, Julia, I wondered if you resonate with that analysis of Fundy Baby Voice, if it's something that you have dealt with yourself and what it has meant to come out of it.
And then I've got a follow-up question for you, Jeremiah, as well.
Sure.
I definitely had versions of the Fundy baby voice at different points in my life, and I'd like to highlight two specific points related to the Fundy baby voice.
Number one, to dovetail off of what Jeremiah said, the Fundy baby voice is one example of women being the foot soldiers of misogyny.
Wow.
Women both directly and indirectly encourage all kinds of Aesthetic presentations.
We've already discussed the modesty component.
And I'm going to add the voice here as a part of that aesthetic because it is a part of the presentation.
So women learn from mandates and from other types of socialization that the Fundy baby voice is the way that they practice that gendered scripts.
And when I reflect on the people who most policed my sexuality, my appearance, and every other part of my existence, they were mostly women.
So we have to remember and hold accountable the women who are perpetuating these patriarchal norms.
And at the same time, as fun as it is to make fun of the Fundy Baby Voice, and I definitely had my fun with it, Jeremiah and I watched that clip together and I laughed a lot, we have to remember that the Fundy Baby Voice also has roots in a survival skill.
What I mean by that, to also point to Jeremiah's point around the million-dollar publishing industry, one of the books that I grew up reading was And the Bride Wore White, which is a popular one, by Dana Gresh.
And in this book, there is a segment in which Dana Gresh is coaching, let's be honest, young girls in courting relationships about how to defer some sort of unwanted sexual advance.
And rather than stating that, no, I don't want this in my sexual experience right now, is the only necessary response, Dana Gresh encouraged girls, think of 10 ways that you can, she would say defer, I would say protect yourself from this unwanted advance in a way that the man will respond well to.
So it might be some version of, Isn't it great that Jesus is watching our every moment?
Some version like that.
And Dana says, create ten examples of those.
And although she doesn't say it in the book, I know, and women know, that you don't just say those things in the book.
In exclusively the word form, you say it with a voice, with an affect, with a presentation, and those were often employed in situations in which a girl or a woman needed to protect themselves.
So hopefully we can hold space for the nuance that, yes, women are accountable to perpetuating misogyny, and the Fundy Baby voice does have roots in literal survival.
To clarify those two parts, that first part, I think the phrase that you used was that when the person marshals the Fundy Baby Voice, they're operating as a kind of foot soldier for misogyny.
Does that, are you implying that there's a laundering aspect to it?
that the Fundy baby voice, when articulated by or used by somebody like Mike Johnson's partner,
will actually make very regressive ideological positions sound like they're coming from a child
or sound like they're innocent?
Is that part of what's going on as well?
And then the other side of it is that, you know, it's a protective response.
To the first question, I would say yes.
Another part of purity culture is the practice of simultaneously infantilizing women while also holding themselves to be the gatekeepers of Their own sexuality and the sexuality of men.
And when women communicate in these tones and affects of the Fundy baby voice, it can be more palatable to men of a certain socialization.
And they do present in this very girl-like kind of way.
That virtue signals to the conservative group all kinds of things.
It virtue signals that I am deferring to my most likely husband, and I am going to be that language within an evangelical context would be help meet, but I am the second person and my main role is to support my husband.
Right.
Yeah, it's so fascinating to me because I hear all of those aspects of what you're describing, Julia, and it just seems so layered, right?
Because I think, too, of Mike Pence.
And what was the thing on Mike Pence that he called his wife mother, maybe?
Mike Pence was too anxious to be in the same room with other women.
It was the Billy Graham rule.
Yes, yes.
Unless his wife was present, he couldn't be in a room with other adult women.
But I think too of like how adult women who are using that voice, which is regressive and which is childlike and which is submissive, they're also mimicking The mothers.
Yes.
Of the evangelical men who are their husbands.
So it's also there's there's like this weird kind of dynamic in terms of the power play, it seems to me.
Right.
I would put it in as part of the dress code or part of the aesthetic, because it is part of presentation.
Jeremiah, follow up to this.
Are there similar challenges for men in terms of like the fundy manly armor, perhaps, or way of presenting yourself and speaking?
In April, there was something called the Stronger Men's Conference, hosted by an evangelical church in St.
Louis.
It caught the attention of the media because Mark Driscoll showed up through a temper tantrum at the performance of a, I kid you not, a professional sword swallower and pole dancer who took off his shirt during the presentation.
Driscoll was captured saying the Jezebel spirit opened our event because, of course, everything one is sexual, even things that aren't sexual.
And to everything is Jezebel's fault.
Yeah.
Sorry, Julia.
But this conference speaks to the Fundy manly armor that you're referring to.
Amidst this conference last year was a monster truck performance, a boxing match, and a ton of fireworks.
Harrison Butker, the idiot kicker from Kansas City, was a speaker last year.
They apparently have small group discussions.
I couldn't actually find what they were about.
I did a lot of Google searching for this in prep for this conversation.
No idea what they were about.
All the pictures that describe last year's conference capture either one of the speakers, A large group of men or a combination of monster trucks and fireworks.
What this has to do with helping you be a better person is beyond me, but I think it speaks to the funny, the funny man armor about.
About big engines, loud noises, taking up space, those types of things.
And I think it fits into an overt enactment of what Kristen Copes-Dumé describes in her book, Jesus and John Wayne.
The man who is aggressive, dominant, and confrontational.
So masculinity has been conflated with the concept of asshole-dom.
In the 2020s in multiple venues, I talk with a ton of men who are eager to avoid being assholes.
They actually actively say that in relationship therapy, particularly in dynamics with women.
One of the hard things, though, is because men aren't socialized to talk about how they want to collaborate with each other, how they want to collaborate with other people.
Men are socialized to be competitive with each other.
There's not a good framework, in larger senses of masculinity, about how to do masculinity in a way that is firm, but that's also compassionate, that's also curious.
And so what we see a lot of men do is go in the other direction and they go completely passive.
The men who embrace asshole them, they tend not to end up in therapy.
That was the question I was going to ask is whether you can describe the moment,
but maybe this is the person that doesn't come to you, but maybe you also can refer to it in your own experience.
The moment in which you realized or the series of moments in which you realized that the seven-year-old boy who is loaded up with all of this responsibility and had to build up a kind of projected self, what did it feel like and what does it feel like in your clients when they can see that that starts to relax?
And are there any sort of typical ways in which that happens?
Let me answer the second question first.
Julia, you've talked about this and I've observed this as well, that men who grow up in evangelical spaces are often unable to confront the damaging messages around gender, especially straight men, until one, they get kicked out of the church, like I did, or two, they see their female partners begin to exhibit physical manifestations of religious trauma, for lack of a better term, which shows up very similarly to PTSD.
That could be through panic attacks.
I had my own version of that in my former relationship to reading, getting more information about sexism and abuses within the church.
Typically speaking, this isn't for everyone, but often what we find, that's a prerequisite for men to then realize, oh, and this fucked with me as well.
Yeah.
And Jeremiah, when you were, when you were talking about the, the trucks and the fireworks, How to be a more manly man.
It also made me think of Thomas Lecoq's article, I think it was last year, in which he highlighted the Twitter photograph from a gun manufacturer that had a picture of a very small boy sitting with a semi-automatic weapon in his lap.
And there was a finger pointing at him and they quoted a Bible verse about, you know, training up your kids to, you know, be able to go to war essentially.
And it's just like, wow, the pressure on these boys is just astonishing.
You know, we've been talking so far about, largely about gender roles, right?
And about the assumptions and what is foisted upon boys and girls and men and women within this culture.
What about the sexual aspects of maturing into sexuality, of being a sexual human being?
Give us a little thumbnail on that in terms of the religious messaging around what is allowed, what is forbidden, and perhaps what the punishment might be.
My world as a child revolved around sex and hell, so depending on the level of conservatism within your community, sexuality does have strong links towards eternal damnation.
Jeremiah and I have our pilot series on the seven deadly sexual sins according to the church, and that is the ethic that folks within those communities So, when they either follow the path of purity culture and become married, they realize, I suppose not in all situations, but in enough situations, that they were sold a false bill of goods.
That happened to me.
My world really crumbled after I got married at a very young age and then divorced.
Or folks decide that they are going to deviate from that at some point before or after an experience of disillusionment, and they don't have skills, tools, or resources to engage either their own sexuality or the sexuality of relationships.
And sometimes Jeremiah and I will have a new client and they might say, oh, okay, I have started to heal.
I have read the Linda K. Klein book around purity culture, and now I don't know what the fuck to do in my relationship.
How do I translate that to a relational lens?
And that's a current gap within the fields of sexual health and the fields of The key theme that we find in The Seven Deadly Sexual Sins According to the Church is the word don't.
Don't have sex before you get married.
Don't be gay.
Don't have desires, especially women.
Don't watch porn.
Ultimately, don't talk about sex.
And an education system around the word don't is actually not an education system.
It's a fear-mongering system.
That kind of leads then to the second thing that I wanted to name to build on, Julia, what you're saying.
We have to remember that purity culture isn't some funky thing that only happened in evangelical churches.
Purity culture was nationally mandated through the passing of the Title V abstinence until the Marriage Act in 1996, when the Clinton administration, in direct response to hundreds of thousands of purity pledges planted on the National Mall, signed legislation that funded public school districts Who thought that sexuality should, quote, only happen in a monogamous relationship between a man and a woman.
Monogamous marriage between a man and a woman.
Title V focused on how sexual activity outside of marriage has harmful psychological consequences.
So, I went to public school.
I missed private school, at least until college.
But in my school, that happened in two ways.
One, I learned a hell of a lot about STIs and almost nothing about sexual health, consent, or relationships.
Two, we had a class in which we had to take care of flower babies for a couple of weeks.
With the implication of don't have sex because if you do have sex, not even if you have sex without like contraceptives, here's how you use condoms, but if you have sex, this is the situation you're going to end up in.
And so 1996, I would say, argue that anyone in the U.S.
under the age of 45, under the age of 48, has been impacted by purity culture regardless of whether they grew up in church.
That's astonishing.
I did not know that about Clinton, the Clinton sort of complicity in that.
And I just want to add, based on what you were describing there, summarizing about that legislation and that way of educating kids, is that saying that sex outside of a heterosexual marriage is going to have harmful psychological consequences is extremely ironic because it seems to me That telling developing teenagers just getting in touch with their sexuality, that if they allow themselves to explore and become who they truly are and express themselves and connect in loving ways and pleasurable ways with people that they really like, who they feel safe with, is going to result in eternal damnation.
That seems to me quite psychologically damaging and traumatizing.
Well, I'll go a step further than that, Julian, that not only creates psychological damage, it also creates eroticism.
In the world of sex therapy, we talk about eroticism being attraction plus obstacles.
And what better obstacle than to be told by a bunch of adults, don't have sex.
Okay, I don't have sex.
And then teenagers go like, I don't know, climb into the second floor windows
of their boyfriends and girlfriends or have a sexual experiences
like underneath the football stands, like those types of stereotypical situations,
you know, which are, maybe there's a lot of emotional,
like excitement that's connected with that.
Those are also extremely uncomfortable situations.
When Julia, when you and I have kids, Like, I want our kids' initial sexual experiences
to be as comfortable as they can.
And not just in terms of reducing anxiety, but also like physically, kind of geographically comfortable in a positive, sex-positive setting.
Yeah, and you know, I'm a parent too, and I would love for my child to have their first sexual experiences be, to have the stakes be accurate.
Yeah.
To not have the stakes be freighted with this strange supernatural intensity.
Right.
Right, right.
So one of the big mind fucks of purity culture is that purity culture establishes a scenario of eroticism and then shames teenagers, shames young adults for participating in that.
When it's the adults, it's the boomer generations, it's the people in church leaderships, it's the Heritage Foundation, those are the ones that are actually at fault here.
Sorry, Julia, I spoke over you.
Well, it also creates what a former therapist of mine would call a developmental loss.
So, I remember being 28 in therapy and saying out loud for the first time that I don't know if I want to stay married in large part because of the ways that religious structures set me and my ex-partner up to fail.
And my therapist had mentioned, oh, well, you experienced a developmental loss.
Here you are on the cusp of 30 and you are doing the work that ideally someone from the ages of like 9 to 16 are doing.
So, ex-vangelicals then are struggling because they might have achieved all these adult milestones in other areas of their life, and they might not know how to date, or to ask for what they want in a sexual experience, or the anxiety is understandably so high that the impact is negative.
I don't know if I'll keep this in the final, but I just want to note that there's going to be some QAnon listener out there who's going to skillfully clip some of the last comments about thinking about how our children will have sexual experiences in the future to prove that actually we're the groomers here.
So I just want to put it onto record that...
We see you.
We know what you're up to.
We reject the characterization.
So, Jeremiah and Juliet, you have a lot of work, obviously.
No shortage of clients.
You're also saying that your clients make their way out of sexually repressive environments, but then they can run right into some weird relationship coaching advice.
So, what's the 101 on that?
There's a lot of unhelpful stuff in the coaching industry about masturbation, from NoFap November to semen retention, Julia, as you alluded to earlier, the alleged practice of masturbation and sexual experiences that involve orgasming without ejaculating.
These practices are linked to high levels of control and repression as well.
I prove that I'm a man by not masturbating.
I prove that I'm a real man by controlling the physiology of my body so that I can save the real energy, quote unquote, the literal ejaculate for the most important moments of my life.
That's the same values as purity culture.
And I would say that the semen retention, one of the reasons that it's my favorite topic right now is that it's this really perfect fucking of misandry and misogyny all at the same time because The concepts around semen retention weaponize all the worst stereotypes around toxic masculinity, right?
That men have these uncontrollable sexual urges.
That's what I learned within a church context.
Now, folks within these wellness structures are perpetuating the same idea.
that men need to control themselves and they have coded language around those sexual urges.
So that's the misandry part. And then the misogyny part is that the focus on the semen retention
still treats women as these literal vessels for your semen.
They are objects.
Who are either worthy of it or not. Right.
Like, that's the kicker, especially from South Asian wisdom traditions and certain tantric practices, is that often the literature will describe women as being, you know, vampiric in a way, that the life force is something that they're going to capture, that they're going to drain the yogi's energy and reduce his spiritual power if he happens to spill it, right?
Which ex-Christians take to things like seminal retention most enthusiastically?
Like, is it the Catholics, because it confirms, you know, latent beliefs in sin?
Is it the Mormons, you know, who would be forced to reconsider all of the vainglorious orgasms of their past?
I don't know!
What do you think, Jeremiah?
Probably the evangelicals, just because they're kind of the hot topic right now.
There's some really interesting... One of the things we also have to talk about when talking about semen retention is this myth of sex addiction.
And the research, so Joshua Grubbs is a researcher, I think he's at Bowling Green.
Others have talked about this idea of self-conceptualizing as a sex addict.
And that is almost exclusively connected with high degrees of religiosity.
And so I think that whoever engages with high degrees of religiosity, meaning high attendance of church and religious services, high participation in religious practices in the last 10 years, engagement and connection with the Republican Party, for sure in the last 10 years, if not longer than that.
So yeah, whoever it is, probably the higher the religiosity, the more likely they would take things like seminal retention enthusiastically.
I have a clarifying question about this and forgive my ignorance.
My sense is that the semen retention sort of lore, it seems to be mostly in the world of like more alternative spirituality, more Eastern spirituality coming out of Yogic traditions, for example.
So are you talking about ex-evangelicals seeking to have healthier sex lives and then getting involved in subcultures that emphasize things like NoFap November or semen retention and then some of the other stuff that we're about to get into?
Or is this part of sort of mainline evangelical churches as you understand it?
We don't have data about that.
The research that exists doesn't track specifically the religious affiliation of the former religious affiliation of folks.
I think that'd be a fantastic study.
There is research though, there's quite a bit of research on the psychology of people who participate in NoFap and in semen retention.
I want to give a shout out to one of my sex therapy heroes, Nicole Prouse.
Nicole's an MD at UCLA.
In one study, she and James Bonney interviewed over 600 people.
Who participated in what's called the Reboot Program.
So the Reboot Program is essentially like organized, organized nofap and semen retention elements that are involved with that that are that claim to treat pornography addiction and the erectile dysfunction issues that purportedly come from masturbating too much.
They discovered that participants of reboot programs were generally younger, had fewer sexual partners, were more sex negative, and interestingly viewed pornography less often than the average person.
Right.
So these men experienced higher volumes of anxiety, not necessarily higher volumes of pornography or masturbation experiences.
Specifically around expectations around erections.
Which makes sense, given the nationwide purity culture trends that we've all been subjected to.
One of the direct byproducts of Title V is that pornography becomes sex education.
Porn's original purpose is entertainment, the over-exaggeration of sexual acts, often for the sake of assisting masturbation.
We can talk about the values of porn in a little bit, but for the sake of this conversation, what Prowse is getting at is that the quantity of porn usage is not necessarily an issue for folks who attend nofap and semen retention groups.
It's a lack of sex education.
It's relying on entertainment and media for education that our school systems and that our homes should be providing.
I love this quote, pulling from the research article that Proust and Bonney wrote.
By framing pornography as a drug that hijacks, they put that in quotes, hijacks their brain, these men may seek to absolve themselves of feminine anxiety.
Put another way, Reboot, NoFap, and NoFap Christian men may believe that simply being
Wow.
anxious about sex makes them feminine, whereas doing battle with pornography makes them masculine.
Wow, okay.
Really, really fascinating research.
It's so extraordinary, right?
And then some of the parallels that you're drawing are incredible, and then some of what I've seen is then the sort of testimonials that it made me more confident, it made me more muscular, it made me like regain my mental clarity, all of the ways in which I had been sort of poisoned and turned more feminine, essentially, is being reversed.
To also clarify your clarifying question, Julian, my understanding as an observer, please correct me if I'm wrong, anyone, is that the semen retention does tend to exist More in the new age spirituality groups than the Christian churches because the Christian churches don't need to use language around semen retention because they already tell men and not women because of course women aren't aren't sexual according to them.
They already tell men you can't masturbate outside the context of your marriage.
You can't watch pornography.
So Sure, that is semen retention, but they wouldn't use that language.
And folks in the semen retention community do still have these planned outlets for it that could occur outside of marriage.
You know, it must be extraordinarily confusing because you're talking about your client base, which has migrated out of this very structured moral environment with regard to sexuality.
And then they move into this territory in which The rules are different, and yet the ideology is similar, and it is presented as though it's a form of freedom, right?
Yes.
You know, retaining your morality is now about retaining your biological virtue and sort of shining up your spiritual spirit.
And that must be so incredibly confusing because it's also, you know, being transmitted through like a workshop and a consumerist context in which, you know, they're not getting this from their families and their ministers anymore.
They're out on the market seeking advice and they're being given very strange messages.
And it's attractive because they're getting those strange messages from people that are like really edgy.
We're going to get to that.
We're going to get to that.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Actually, I wanted to ask you about that because now we're sort of approaching this whole topic of the transition, right?
The transition from one set of relationships around how spirituality and sexuality are connected, which is very repressive and very traditionalist and very Christian, and then into this other space where it's like, oh, you can have sacred spiritual sexuality in these ways.
and sign up for my mastermind coaching course on how to become this expression of what the
universe actually wants you to be.
And then we see these weird overlaps in terms of things like gender essentialism and various
messages around what sexuality means in spiritual terms.
And ashwagandha supplements for men and shatavari for women.
So tell us about that.
What have you observed there?
Well, one of the things that I think is really important to remember, and Julia, you alluded to this earlier, is that from our perspective, sexual health and relational health have a huge overlap.
You cannot talk about sexual health without also talking about relational health.
And I think that that's what a lot of the wellness world misses.
Sexual health, sexual experiences, spirituality becomes this hyper individualized thing, as opposed to a relational, as opposed to a communicative process, either between yourself and yourself, or yourself and another person or persons.
And We find that working with folks about how they communicate their needs, about how they engage with themselves, how they experiment with touch, experiment with pleasure, and then figure out how to communicate that to their partners, to the people that they're interested in having sex with, and how to make that dialogical.
And how to slow down, how to ask good questions, how to be more intentional.
That is a practice that lays a foundation for a longer term, kind of more sustainable sexual health model.
We have to think relationally.
We have to think in terms of communication.
Julia, do you have anything to add to that?
Yes, to add to what Jeremiah was saying, the aesthetic of The wellness world that perpetuates ideas around divine masculine and divine feminine might, on appearance, look very different than the conservative Christian world.
Right.
However, if, Jeremiah, you actually did this on social media.
Tell me if I'm rephrasing this accurately.
You had posted, probably well over a year ago, a list of divine masculine, divine feminine qualities in these literal binary columns.
And they are exactly the same qualities that one would find under a list of biblical femininity, biblical masculinity.
Now, folks in the New Age community might come back to me and clap back and say, oh, well, we're different because everybody has both within them, right?
However, they will still say that as a man, and they define gender often by God-given genitalia, not necessarily a person's understanding of themselves, that you still have this maleness as dominant.
And all these other qualities that are very stereotypical.
And sure, yes, women have divine masculine within them too.
However, the goal is to tap into the divine feminine and have that be your primary persona.
Yeah, it's a divine energy.
It's a polarity that we're going to access.
Some of the confusing ideas we've gotten from the culture, which have sort of diluted the polarity of what it means to be a man and a woman, need to be sort of dispelled so you can tap back into that primordial truth, right?
Like we always say, the New Age world gives people cover for their sort of inborn and unchallenged conservative beliefs.
That's basically what it does.
That's a big part of the job.
You know, to bring it home, I've got a question about the future.
I'm getting from your descriptions of your work that one of the things that has to happen in your client base is that these essentialized gender roles have to be questioned and they have to be explored and they have to be softened and they have to be integrated and understood.
I'm imagining that that will always involve a kind of patriarchal dominance of women being challenged and hopefully resolved.
And I'm wondering to what extent you are seeing this trickle down into changes in parenting style.
Cindy Wong Brant studies the impact of moving out of conservative religion on parenting.
And she wrote a book a couple years ago called Parenting Forward, which talks about the idea of parenting ourselves being a really, really important part of parenting, parenting children.
And this gets Julia to the developmental loss thing that you're talking about.
When you see your children experiencing something in healthier environments and going through things that you didn't get the chance to go through because you were in a more repressive space, that brings up a bunch of shit.
I love this question she asks in the chapter on re-engaging with bodies.
Do we want to raise children who fall into line with what culture imposes on them?
Or do we want our children to grow into culture creators and makers?
Their ability to create is predicated on their freedom.
Because ultimately, patriarchal dominance, which gives incredibly limited options on how to engage with people in the world based on gender and sex, is a manifestation of falling into line with what culture imposes on us.
And we talked about what that looks like in real time with two interviews that we did, episodes 70 and 71, with the women from the Holy Ghosting podcast, where they talked with us about how their experience is deconstructing from high control religion aligned with new ways of engaging with parenting.
The conversations they described were more curious, they're more interested in learning about their children as they are, and not interested in wedging their children into cultural expectations.
We have a colleague who's a sex therapist in Maine, Jennifer Wiesner, and the metaphor that she uses is that if you are able to non-anxiously teach your children about sexual and relational health, you are sending them into the world.
Let's pretend the world is a lake.
And they are in canoes or kayaks.
You are sending them in with their life jackets, with their paddles.
And yes, they'll fumble along the way.
The canoe might tip over.
However, they know how to navigate that with maturity and self-reflection.
Folks like me got pushed into the middle of the lake without even a paddle and then were shamed when I decided to get divorced and step away.
So...
We can hopefully think about this with a hope for the future generation.
They will be—I mean, this is such a cliche thing to say, but they are the upcoming generation of leaders, so don't we want them to have positive relational and sexual health, especially given the ways that sexual and relational health have fucked over the entire election right now?
You know, Julia, I'm thinking about where we started, and I'm also thinking that it would be so nice if the word about spaghetti straps was just, hey, that's cool.
Do those feel comfortable?
And then I'm thinking about you, Jeremiah, and about how, like, at seven years old, somebody could have said, hey, what would you rather do than lead the Bible study group?
Is there something else you would like to do on Tuesday night at 7 o'clock?
Wednesday, Matthew.
Bible studies are always on Wednesday night.
Sorry, sorry.
Yeah, right.
Choir's on Thursday.
Choir's on Thursday, right?
Oh, man.
Jeremiah and Julia, thank you so much for helping us understand this amazing world.
And thank you so much for the work that you're doing with all those folks, because that's really, really, really important.
It's really important.
I think everybody coming out of evangelical culture has a lot to teach us about our condition right now.
Thank you.
This was delightful.
Thanks so much.
Thanks for having us on the show.
Yeah, that was lovely.
Thank you for sharing everything you did.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
