Read my full interview on purity culture with Jenny McGrath here.
Having grown up in a progressive Christian context, I was graciously spared much of the explicit harms and impacts of purity culture.
So when my friends, many of whom were raised in conservative and evangelical environments, share with grief-filled laughter their stories of promise rings and abstinence-only education, I can often only connect with bits and pieces of their experience.
And yet – there is a subtle similarity that exists in our stories as well.
It is the fusing together of shame with our bodies and physicality.
Whereas my friends share of public shaming and the weaponizing of sexuality against them, my upbringing had a more quiet flavor to it.
I hadn’t been subject to teachings on “purity” or the purchasing of promise rings, but it was quietly implied that sex was meant to be saved for marriage. And while our church liked to fly a pride flag every Sunday, almost everything about my experience of church defaulted to heteronormativity. There was little-to-no spiritual formation that I experienced around body-love or sex-positivity.
And so in the face of a Christian culture chugging along with a conservative “sex-is-shameful” dynamic, the failure of my progressive upbringing to openly provide a sex-positive theology meant I was also filled with shame and guilt around sex.
I think of what the great historian Howard Zinn liked to say: “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”
Without an alternative vision, I was unable to divorce sexuality and my body from the questions of worth attached to it.
Jenny McGrath, a licensed mental health counselor, somatic psychotherapist, and movement educator shares this:
There is a phrase in neuroscience [from Donald Hebb]: “what fires together, wires together.” When sex, desire, arousal, or any other normal thing about being a body fires together with shame, fear, and guilt from a young age – often the safest place for folks to go is away from themselves.
And so with all of this swirling within me, firing and wiring together, I learned to reject my body through overeating and not taking care of basic needs on a regular basis. When I looked in the mirror, I often found myself looking at someone I didn’t want to be.
Our stories are different, but there is a thread that weaves itself through the experiences of both my conservative and evangelical friends and myself:
The thread of disembodiment.
We were taught to exist in a disembodied way that created and continues to create boundaries and barriers between ourselves and our physicality.
While this manifested in me as an unhealthy relationship with food and body image, for others it can appear in the form of acute or chronic trauma responses. The impacts of this disembodiment can show up as a lens through which we see and understand the world and in the ways we second-guess ourselves, run away from our gut instincts, and choose to cling to others for their wisdom without learning to trust our own.
And yet – the path of re-embodiment isn’t as simple as “learning to trust our bodies” again. (Although that’s part of it!)
Jenny shared with me recently that there’s so much more to healing than this simplistic phrase:
I’ve seen a lot of folks in the post-purity culture world saying ‘just trust your body’ and ‘your body is never wrong!’ I actually disagree with this…
I think we should always listen to our bodies, but I don’t think that should come at the expense of also holding the messages of our bodies in dialogue with other bodies – primarily those that are most oppressed from systems like purity culture.
Because healing is a communal act.
It requires us to be in dialogue, as Jenny says, or to experience the friction of being alongside another.
When we engage in a communal-orientation of listening, offering our vulnerabilities, practicing our embodiment through somatic practices, and holding space for one another – that is what creates the conditions for healing to emerge up from within our own experiences and stories.
What we need is collectively already held within us.
And at a more systemic level, and yet still deeply intimate, it’s this kind of dialogue and communal practice that challenges the unhealthy structures that benefit from our disembodiment. Jenny quotes Minna Salami who says, “Tyrants have always known that the more robotic people are, the more easily manipulated they are.”
I see purity culture as a system of disembodiment that enables folks within that system to remain compliant and complicit in the system…the somatic work to live more freely from the inside out is part of the labor of disempowering autocratic systems such as Christian Nationalism.
By engaging in somatic and communal practices that invite our re-embodiment, we not only begin to heal from the toxic and insidious impacts of purity culture, we build our capacity – individually and collectively – for action in the face of tyranny and for what lies ahead.
Resources:
Jenny offers two courses you might find impactful:
- Embodied Story – Anyone who has a body can benefit from this course! It looks at how our stories are impacted by our bodies and how our bodies impact our stories.
- Embodied Sexuality – Primarily for cisgender, white women who are in the beginning stages of deconstructing the impacts of purity culture on their relationship to their bodies and sexuality.
Learn more about the Embodied Sexuality course:
Read my full interview with Jenny McGrath here.
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