Mild at Heart: Love, Sex, and Masculinity After Purity Culture: Ep 10
On the final installment of Mild at Heart Brad discusses how purity culture taught him to treat his body as an enemy that his mind was in charge of controlling. This had after effects long after he left purity culture. It took him years to learn how to exist in his own body, to recognize how his mind was preventing him from feeling in real time, and how to quell the hypervigilant inner dialogue that he couldn't turn off.
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What's up, y'all?
Welcome to our series, Mild at Heart, Love, Sex, and Masculinity After Purity Culture.
My name is Brad Onishi, and it's been amazing going on this ride with y'all.
This is going to be our last installment of the series, and today I want to talk about that old trope of dying to yourself and putting to death your flesh.
Those are themes and phrases that many of us heard growing up or heard in church, The idea that you need to die to yourself so that Christ can live, and that you need to put your flesh to death or die to your flesh, and so on.
One of the things that I mentioned way back at the beginning of the series is that there's a kind of adage that for me goes back to Linda K. Kline, but I'm sure others have talked about it too, which is that purity culture teaches men to hate their minds and women to hate their bodies.
One of the things I've talked about is for me, in Periodic Culture, I did detest my body because it was a source of shame and of temptation.
It was not in the same way, I think, that most women, and at least most of the female voices and women authors who I've read talk about Periodic Culture and others who've discussed their experience.
It was not as a stumbling block or as a source of sexual temptation to others, it was more as a stumbling block to myself.
It was a stubborn, uncooperative part of me.
And so there was this sense that my body was my enemy in a very real way.
There was also this battle of the mind and this battle of fighting my thoughts and fighting the images that were in my head and just the constant strain of trying not to have a sexual thought.
Well, I want to talk about that today just to sort of bring everything full circle.
And I think for me, what I want to talk about is what effects that kind of hatred of my mind had on me and my body too, but I do want to talk about the mind.
I want to read a little bit.
This is a quote from the book, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, but he's actually quoting another thinker and that's Antonio Damasio, whose book I read actually years and years and years ago.
The book is called The feeling of what happens.
And here is the quote.
Sometimes we use our minds, not to discover facts, but to hide them.
One of the things the screen hides most effectively is the body, our own body, by which I mean the ins of it, its interiors.
Like a veil thrown over the skin to secure its modesty, the screen partially removes the mind, from the mind, the inner states of the body, those that constitute the flow of life as it wanders in the journey of each day.
And so there's a lot going on in that quote because he mentions that, you know, oftentimes we use our mind like a veil thrown over the skin to secure its modesty.
And so it's rather fitting for a discussion on purity culture.
And this quote hits me every time because this is, you know, in essence what I did in purity culture.
My goal was to do everything I could to purify my thoughts of any sexual desire or imagining.
And in that way to throw a veil over my body, right?
And here's what I'm getting at, friends, is my experience in period culture as a man who was taught that his mind would lead him astray was that I needed to do everything I could to get my mind to obey.
I needed my mind to provide a stopgap and a disconnect from my body.
So when my body had a sexual desire, when my body was aroused, when my body, you know, sort of was telling, you know, me things, trying to get messages to my brain.
There was this skill that I developed, right, which was to use my brain to cut that off, right, to ignore my body, to to separate my what I thought of myself from my body to think of my flesh as a sort of enemy and To think of myself as having to distance myself from it blockade myself from it and to sort of make sure that all of the things it was trying to get through The wall or the dam didn't make it, right?
Because if I allowed that, if I allowed my body just to run free and to sort of allow its messages and its stimuli to kind of reach my thoughts, then I would be totally out of control, right?
And I know, I just want to stop for a minute, and I know that there are many stories out there of men who were part of purity culture and perhaps even leaders but, you know, kind of used it as a way to manipulate people and to live a double standard, right?
Where men could sort of engage in sexual contact and not be punished or sanctioned or socially excluded, and if women did that they would be just completely, you know, Exiled or seen as as temptresses and blah blah blah, right?
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