Mild at Heart: Love, Sex, and Masculinity After Purity Culture: Ep 3
Brad continues his analysis of sex and masculinity in purity culture. He focuses on how it teaches men to hate themselves twice.
First, they hate themselves for continually giving into lust and sexual temptation. It is a losing battle that can't be won.
Second, they hate themselves because men are supposed to be sexual barbarians. So, when they get married, if they don't want to engage in sexual activity all the time, then they aren't real men.
This hurts women because they are asked to be the gatekeepers of purity in one instance and taught that they are doing something wrong if their husband doesn't want sex multiple times per day in the next.
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What's up y'all?
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
This is our series Mild at Heart on masculinity, love, and sex after purity culture.
I'm Brad Onishi.
Today is our third installment and I want to pick up where we left off last week in talking about the harmful visions of masculinity and sexuality that are propagated in purity culture.
What I talked about last week is that there's a vision in terms of masculinity of men in evangelicalism, and this filters into purity culture specifically, men as sexual savages and people who are domineering, assertive, aggressive, borderline violent.
When it comes to sexuality, this means they have an insatiable sexual appetite that is different from women.
We talked about how this is a form of rape culture because it teaches that men, in some sense, are beings who cannot control their sexual urges and so if they're in a relationship, especially a marital relationship, their, you know, their approach to sex is going to be one of expecting it when they want it and if they don't want it, I'm sorry, if they're refused or if their partner is reluctant, then
You can see built into this culture a kind of teaching that says, well, I'm going to do what I want anyway because that's who I am.
That's what I am as a sexual barbarian.
We also talked about the sort of paradox of why, or how at least, purity culture teaches that men are on one hand these sexual savages and uncontrollable lost boys and then also should be the leaders of church and society and and politically and so on and that just doesn't make sense.
It seems to be a naked power grab.
What I want to talk about today is how purity culture teaches men to hate themselves twice and how, like everything we're talking about in this series, this also hurts women.
But let's just take it from the kind of perspective of the man or somebody who's at least socialized as a man and is assigned a male sex at birth.
In purity culture, as we've talked about, you're taught that you are a sexual being who can barely control himself and yet the expectation is that you would hinder and limit and block every sexual desire before you are married.
I spoke about this on the first episode.
And so you have a situation where you're 14 years old or 18 years old or 21 years old and you have to see every sexual impulse and every sexual desire as evil, as something to curb, as something to block, as something to suppress.
And as I shared on the first episode, I had this experience and I had it like many folks in a very extreme way.
I know I'm not alone in this, but you know, I'll just tell you personally, when I was 15 or 16, this was a moment by moment battle.
You know, having any sexual thought, having any sexual desire, whether that was, you know, Seeing certain images in a magazine or on a video or movies or, you know, talking to somebody in my class or going on a date with my girlfriend, you know, at every turn when you're a teenager.
There's this sort of thought, at least for me, as somebody who's dedicated to purity, that I needed to be wary of any sexual desire, and that that part of me was wrong and evil, and it just created a constant sense of shame.
You know, I mean, there was just no getting away from it.
It didn't matter what was happening on any given day.
I knew that that weight would be on my shoulder all the time and that I was going to feel guilty all the time because there was just no way to kind of avoid it or to, you know, remain quote-unquote pure in any kind of unscathed way, right?
And so I will admit that for me, This just left lasting impressions where, you know, I really associated, whether consciously or not, sexual desire with sin.
And I associated sexual desire with my fallen flesh, and I associated sexual desire with something that was unholy and undesirable, in some ways gross or even perverted.
It just felt like sex was my enemy.
It felt like sexual desire was my enemy.
As I said on the first episode, I hated my mind and I also hated my body.
I hated my mind because it seemed to be the thing that led me into temptation and to lust.
And I hated my body because it was the kind of vehicle.
And no matter what I did, it seemed to react in ways that We're not pleasing to God, at least in the ways that I was being taught.
And so there was a deep sense of shame.
There was a deep sense of disgust with who I was and with myself.
So that's how I entered into my marriage.
And so some of you know this and some of you don't, but I married my high school sweetheart when I was 20 years old.
We had been dating off and on, but mostly on since I was a freshman in high school.
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