“I felt like I was born with a saboteur living inside me, and it was my sexuality.”

No Shame Movement is collecting personal stories specifically on defining purity culture, the ways it is internalized, and the process of leaving it behind. Share your own story here.

How do you define the term “purity culture”?

The obsession of a culture with other people’s bodies and sex lives, and equation of celibacy (until heterosexual marriage) with goodness, and a deep distrust of anything pleasurable that does not come directly from the Bible.

What did purity culture teach you about your self-worth?

That worth is connected directly to my actions, and I’m only worthwhile so far as I align myself with the appropriate values and behaviors. Worth was a result of discipline and self-denial, not an innate quality.

How did purity culture impact your relationship with your body?

It taught me that my body is something to fight against. I never felt dirty or defiled for being sexually active, but I felt helpless. Like I was being asked to deny and repress my body’s beauty and ability to give pleasure, and see those very things as sinful and bad. I felt like I was born with a saboteur living inside me, and it was my sexuality.

What did purity culture teach you about relationships and marriage?

You get one. When I realized that my high-school sweetheart wasn’t my Prince Charming, there was an intense moment of panic that kept me tethered to him for months, because I didn’t know what to do. In purity culture, the end goal is marriage, and I felt like I had reached the end of that race only to learn that the finish line was actually miles ahead. Relationships are an exhausting search for the Right One, and marriage is the relief of being done–done worrying about sexual desires, dying alone, loneliness, confusion, even sin. Everything will be solved by marrying The One–but you couldn’t actually want to find The One, because then you were too focused on worldly desires and not God. So marriage was the end goal and the answer to every woman’s problems, but it was also something you weren’t supposed to want.

When did you first begin to question what you’d been taught about sex?

When it stopped working for me. I fell into the culture late in life, in college, and the high of self-righteousness and the emotional cocktail of worship music, a supportive community of girls, and a comfortable set of rules that eliminated any uncertainty were enough to carry me through a painful breakup where I went from having my life figured out to being completely lost. Being told that living correctly was just a few easy rules and 3 worship services a week away erased all of that uncertainty, and for a while it even deadened sexuality. When I did occasionally fall into “sexual sin” (masturbation), I was comforted by the feeling of guilt and unfulfilledness, because it meant that I was “right” with God.

What changes have you noticed in your life as you’ve been unlearning?

It’s really hard to accept enjoying things. Not just sexually–I used to freak out when I would rather watch TV than read my Bible, and I think a lot of sexual purity demands emotional purity as well. It took a long time to be okay with who I am, without feeling like my mind, emotions, and body were in a state of constant rebellion that had to be quashed. I still have the sick tingle of nervousness that I’ve got it all wrong, and that even though I’m still a virgin, the fact that I’m even on first-name terms with my sexuality (so to speak) is a sign of disobedience.

What advice would you give your younger self about sexuality?

You are not a mistake. You’re not broken, and you don’t need to be beaten into submission in order to be good enough. Listen to yourself and trust your own impulses, because more often than not you know what is good for you (and others) and what isn’t, and trying to subordinate yourself to the whims of others will only confuse you and force you to relearn how to trust yourself.

What resource (book, poem, song, etc) has helped you in your unlearning?

Lots of therapy. Just, like, all of it. If you’re Christian, check out Benjamin Corey and Rachel Held Evans for some thoughts about God that aren’t steeped in fundamentalism.

Name: Casey