In an interview, “Natalie,” a 23-year-old Mormon feminist, describes how her teenage sexuality collided with her faith:

The thing is, masturbation is a normal thing, but [the community] doesn’t talk to girls about it—I have since learned that they talk to boys about it—because we’re not supposed to desire. So I knew it was something a girl is not supposed to do, which made it even worse. So then it became kind of masochistic for me. It was like, Oh, Natalie ate too much today, she’s going to masturbate. I didn’t want to cut myself, I wasn’t ballsy enough to get drunk, I wasn’t ballsy enough to smoke—it was the biggest thing I could think to do to hurt myself within my religion. Which is really sad, that I was using my sexuality to hurt myself. So that was one of the things that I had to unpack with my therapist. After that, I put my religion in a box for about a year. I was kind of like, I need to know who I am right now.

She eventually made her way to BYU-Idaho and decided she would give the religion another chance, describing her first two semesters there as her attempt “to be the good Molly Mormon” – an ideal she eventually relinquished. And what, exactly, is a Molly Mormon?

It’s kind of the Mormon idea about how a woman’s supposed to act.