Ever heard of purity balls? Me neither, and one of Hement Mehta's latest videos totally blew me out of the water.
I came from the evangelical community and I didn't even know this was happening, but I did do something kinda similar at around 13 where I signed a pledge to not have sex (of all kinds) until marriage. I wore a purity ring all through high school. When I started getting intimate with a partner, I felt like I had lost all moral standing. I felt so guilty about what were, in retrospect, relatively harmless activities that I withdrew from friend circles and ran away from church. I felt worthless when I had done nothing wrong. Even after I stopped believing in the God for whom I had pledged to be abstinent, I felt like scum.
Even now, getting married in just a few months, there are times where sex makes me feel guilty, and I really doubt that it will change after my wedding ceremony. I think a lot of women coming from the evangelical community, even those who do remain abstinent until marriage, feel intense guilt about responsible, loving intimacy with a committed, gentle, and respectful partner because all these years they had it drilled into their brains that sex was bad, wrong, and dirty. These women feel worthless because they enjoy something so "vile."
I'd go a step further than Mehta. Practices, like purity balls and the Silver Ring Thing, which tell young girls that sex is bad and makes them a bad person are inherently emotionally abusive, and can leave permanent scars.
YES. This is so true and so important to get out there. I mentally beat myself up if ANYTHING happens, let alone the complete shut down if anything truly sexual happens, and I left the church years ago.
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