Mild at Heart: Love, Sex, and Masculinity After Purity Culture: Intro and Ep. 1
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On this first installment of Mild at Heart, Brad shares some of his experience with purity culture. He focuses on how it taught him to hate his mind for the way it led him into continual sexual sin, and to hate his body for the way it stood in the way of his walk with God.
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Nishi, welcome to my series, Mild at Heart.
Love Masculinity and Sex After Purity Culture.
It's something I've been excited about for a long time.
A lot of you've heard me talk about it and it is something that is near and dear to my heart.
The first thing I think we need to address is there are so many great commentators, artists, writers, thinkers who are helping us understand the trauma and ravages of purity culture.
For me, the most influential folks have been Linda K. Klein and Sarah Mosliner and Julie Ingersoll.
There's so many other voices, Emily Joy, Jamie Lee Finch, memoir, documentary, all kinds of things.
And I think folks are really sort of coming to a place where talking about the toxicity of purity culture is out in the open and helpful, and it's different than even five or 10 years ago.
One thing you may be wondering is, okay, do we really need men talking about this?
Men, especially cis straight men like me, are everywhere and they butt themselves into every conversation.
They often dominate those spaces and don't allow other people to talk and all kinds of things, right?
I think for me, I've tried to take that very seriously and think hard about whether or not another voice in this mix is needed, especially from a cis straight guy.
What I realized is it's taken me a long time to face up to my trauma as it relates to peer-to-culture.
It's taken me a long time to even admit that it was there.
To admit that what happened 15 and 20 and 25 years ago for me still lingers and still affects me and has affected my relationships, my romantic and sexual relationships.
That it's affected how I understand myself.
It's affected how I understand my masculinity.
One of the other things, though, that hits me there is something from Bell Hooks.
Bell Hooks says in The Will to Change that patriarchy is founded on the idea that straight men are superior to all others, right?
That everyone else is somehow weaker and inferior.
Toxic masculinity as it is expressed in patriarchy and certainly in purity culture rests on the idea that domination and power are virtues, right?
That control and security are how you should be as a man and as an authority figure.
What happens In the process, and Bell Hooks makes this so clear, is that men hurt themselves and men hurt everyone else.
And so when you take on this system and its virtues and its logic, you not only do damage to yourself as a man, but there's a very good chance you're doing damage to other people.
Any society community populated by men who are living according to these ideals and these virtues Will be plagued by anger abuse and trauma So for me jumping into this mix is not is not a Coming from a need to say well, what about men no one's listening to us and This is not a competition.
It's not a desire for some other, you know, unheeded perspective to be thrown in, right?
Cis straight men have been at the forefront in bad and misguided ways in cultural and political and economic decisions and discussions for too long.
For me, jumping into this mix is about the fact that if we, and I'm saying me as a straight cis guy, don't face up to this, not only will I continue to do damage to myself and live with unconfronted trauma and effects of purity culture, but we are going to continue to emanate, foster, and develop a sense of masculinity that is going to hurt other people.
We have to do the work to confront our trauma and our suffering, not only for ourselves, but also because this is a way that abuse and assault and control and domination and harassment and so many other Thanks for being here.
of toxic forms of masculinity are spread throughout our society.
That's my goal with this series.
I hope you'll come along with me.
I feel super excited.
I also feel a little bit nervous because I know it's going to mean a lot of vulnerability on my part, but I'm ready for that.
And thanks for being here.
We'll catch you next time.
Nishi, welcome to my series, Mild at Heart.
Love masculinity and sex after purity culture.
This is our first installment of this series.
As I said in the intro, my goal is to really reflect on the issues of masculinity and love and sex from somebody who was a youth group, you know, superstar, somebody who took on purity culture.
Throughout his teenage years and into young adulthood and somebody who's just taken a long time to face up to the trauma and the effects that Purity Culture had on me as a human being but also as a man and so I want to share those things with y'all and in order to do that I need to tell you a little bit about my story.
So I grew up in a pretty non-religious home.
I converted to evangelicalism at 14.
So I have a before and an after, both when it comes to my religious life and when it comes to purity and sexuality and all those things.
So I'm in eighth grade.
I'm a little bit of a troublemaker.
I'm a little bit of somebody who's just not the guy you would think would be at church.
And yet my girlfriend at the time invited me to Wednesday night Bible study.
I had no interest in Jesus.
I had no interest in the Bible or whatever.
But this was a surefire way for mom to let me out of the house on a Wednesday, right?
Uh, hey mom, I want to go to church.
She's worried about me.
I'm getting suspended.
I'm doing weird things.
Of course, I'll take you to church.
That sounds great.
So my plan, you know, worked pretty well.
I get to the church.
And, you know, typical sort of megachurch youth group setting.
There's a youth room.
It's got this mural on the wall with a Bible verse and some other stuff.
There's all these leaders who are like in their 20s and they have tattoos and they're playing the guitar and that kind of stuff.
At the time, I had some pretty grungy hair.
So the grunge revolution is in full effect.
It's 1995.
Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam, Nirvana.
And so like my hair was this mix of like, you know, bleached blonde and red and pink.
And one of the leaders right away was like, Hey man, what's up?
What's your name?
Cool hair.
And that was not what I was expecting.
I was expecting disapproval and weird looks.
So my girlfriend dumped me pretty soon thereafter, but I kept going back to the youth group and I really loved it.
I was a really angsty kid.
I look back now and I see the signs of depression and anxiety, but You know, I didn't have that language then.
Nobody had identified that in my life.
And so I had all these questions about the meaning of life and in many ways, life seemed kind of meaningless.
And I wondered about what happens after you die and what are we doing here?
Why, why is there a universe and not no universe?
Whatever.
And there was great answers at church.
I mean, and there was very clean answers at church, right?
And any of you who've been in those spaces know that, that there's a very straightforward answer that, you know, the reason for being alive is salvation through Christ.
God's love is unconditional.
He created us to have a relationship with him, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
And so, I'm ready to convert.
I'm ready to jump in.
I'm hanging around the youth group for a couple of weeks.
And then there's this one-night retreat, right, where all of the kids in eighth grade from the youth group would go away and camp, and that would be one of the final things they did before they all went to high school.
And it was really at this retreat, sitting around the campfire, you know, singing worship songs and hearing people talk about their testimony in the Bible that I was like, okay, I'm gonna do this, right?
The only thing that hung me up after that trip was the question of sex.
I had learned pretty quickly sex before marriage is not allowed.
Okay, got it.
But it also became pretty clear in just a few weeks that I was at the youth group, right, that there was no room for anything else.
So, you know, sexual things, sexual encounters, You know, other than sex or penetrative sex or sexual intercourse.
Not allowed?
Okay, great.
Got it.
Oral sex?
Okay.
And guess what?
Even thinking about sex is wrong.
Like, you can't even have a sexual thought.
And I remember really taking on this burden, you know, in a way that I now recognize as just somebody who thinks about things too much, over-analyzes, you know, over-contemplates.
I walked around lunchtime one day at school alone, and I just remember thinking, like, can I do this?
Can I really give my life to God if this is what it takes?
And I sort of reasoned to myself into it and said, you know, sex seems great.
And when I get married, I guess that'll be part of my life.
But this is about eternal life, and nothing seems more valuable than that.
So I'm going to do it.
I'm going to promise.
Not only to follow God and to accept Christ as my Savior, but that's going to include the sexual purity that seems like it's a big part of my promise.
And so sexual purity was part of my conversion from day one.
Okay?
You know, that summer I went to high school and after basketball practice and stuff, the guys would all ask me like, hey, so you're not gonna, you know, have sex before you get married?
And I would say, I'm not even gonna kiss before I get married.
Sorry.
And here's why.
And here's what God wants for me.
And is it really worth, you know, hooking up an Inspiration Point or behind the movie theater, guys, if you can have eternal life?
And they would look at me like, all right, bro.
Thank you.
Appreciate your sharing there.
So I became that guy.
Not only did I want to tell people about Jesus, I wanted to tell people about sexual purity.
Those two things went hand in hand for me.
Now, if you fast forward about a year, you know, I went from somebody who was excited and really enlivened by my conversion.
You know, a lot of people in the space would call it being on fire for God.
I was really guilt ridden and I was really depressed.
And I could tell, you know, I was in a bad place.
And my mom could tell.
I remember my mom asking me, she wasn't a Christian, not an evangelical.
And she asks me like, are you okay?
Like, what's going on with you?
You know, it seems like you're just, You're not right, and you're not feeling good about yourself.
And looking back on that, what I realize is, about a year into my life as an evangelical, I was overwhelmingly guilt-ridden by this commitment to purity, because it was a promise I could never keep, right?
The idea that I would not have a sexual thought before I got married was just never going to happen, as everyone, you know, most people who experience purity culture know.
And so on a daily and hourly and moment-by-moment basis, I felt a battle and I felt failure and I felt guilt.
And it was showing, you know, the people closest to me could see that.
And so I was just overwhelmed by the burden of this idea of purity.
Every time I had a stray thought, every time that a cute girl in class talked to me or whatever, I wondered if I had lusted or if I had committed adultery, right?
I mean, I was a surfer growing up, and every time I got a new surf magazine, right, there was all these pictures of people in bikinis and ads and stuff, and I would, like, do my best to, like, rip them out before I could, like, take one peek, you know, and stuff like that.
And it's super embarrassing to talk about, but that's how it was.
One of the things that I want to close with today is just, you know, one of the books that has been so powerful for a lot of people, including me, is Lena K. Klein's Pure.
And she says there, in that book, that purity culture really teaches women to hate their bodies.
And, you know, it makes so much sense to me in the way she explains it, in the sense that women and young girls are asked to be Modest and pure and to be the gatekeepers of sexual purity.
They have to dress modestly, not flirt, not flip their hair the wrong way.
I mean, all of it is just so ridiculous.
And it ends up in this place where one begins to hate their body and not trust their body, because they see it as something shameful, something that is leading others into some kind of You know, sexual sin.
And so you yourself, by just existing as a young woman or girl, are a kind of sexual roadblock and a sinful roadblock, right, to all the men and the boys around you.
I mean, it's a completely toxic and traumatic way of thinking about being a woman, being a girl, so on and so forth.
One of the things that she says also is that boys end up hating their minds, right?
And that was true of me.
I hated my mind.
I was so tired of my mind leading me into what I thought was adultery and lust and sin.
That every time I thought something, every time I thought anything that had anything to do with physical desire, it seemed like I was just doomed to fail God over and over and over and over, right?
I did, however, hate my body.
And it's in a different way, I think, than Klein talks about young women and young girls.
It was not that my body was a stumbling block.
It was not that my body was some sort of thing in the way of other people's purity.
It was the reason I felt guilty and anxious all the time, right?
It caused me, my body caused me to sin dozens of times every day.
You know, at one point, I remember hearing about how sexual predators would be punished in some cases by chemical castration.
And I remember thinking, well, that seems ideal.
Like, if I could just do that, and I didn't have any sexual desire, then I would stop sinning, and my body would stop betraying me, and I could just sort of like be happy again, you know?
If I didn't have a sex drive, I wouldn't have to fight my ugly, disgusting flesh, right?
On a moment-by-moment basis.
I remember one time telling an accountability partner, somebody who I shared stuff with, that I wish I was blind, because then I couldn't see And I wouldn't be led into temptation and then my body and my flesh wouldn't go down this sinful pathway, right?
So I think for me, as I've thought about these things and just telling you the little bits of my story to start here, I did hate my body and I did hate my mind.
It was for slightly different reasons and in a slightly different frame than I think Klein talks about in Pure when it comes to young women and young girls.
But for me as a boy and a man, that self-hatred was present on a moment-by-moment basis.
It was something that I could never escape.
And it was to the point where even just a year in to being a Christian, my mom was like, you seem depressed.
You seem like you're sadder than I've ever seen you.
It seems like things aren't going great.
So one of the things I said in the intro to this series is that I'm not doing this because it's some sort of competition.
Who suffered the most?
Who suffered the worst?
And I personally just recognize, and from my viewpoint, See that for women and girls of purity culture.
There's just an undue pressure.
There's an asymmetrical sense of who carries the burden so nothing I'm saying today is trying to compete or You know some sort of trauma Olympics or anything like that.
What I'm trying to say is my experience was one where in a certain sense I did hate my mind, and I did hate my body, and that continued for the 11 years that I was an evangelical, even after I got married, even after I did what I was supposed to do and married somebody who was a Christian and all that stuff.
I'll get into more of that in the coming episodes, but for now, I'll just say thanks for being here.
Thanks for listening.
If you're on audio, I appreciate you all, and I'll see you next time.
