face to face

It’s been about 9 years since I left Christianity and I’m still unpacking how growing up as a Pentecostal/Baptist Christian has affected (and still affects) my sex life. As I mentioned in a previous post, losing my virginity was terrible. Yet, there are more ways in which I believe purity culture poisoned my sexuality. Photo by me. The two metaphors I discussed in my last post are centrally focused on permanent loss of and damage to one’s self. This is the idea I had of sexuality going into adulthood: the act of physical intimacy was an act during which I would permanently give something away. I had better save that something for my husband, otherwise I would be damaged goods on my wedding day – un-sticky and full of rocks instead of water. Enter, sexual shame. When I lost my virginity, the mood was of overwhelming shame. Shame as a consequence of sin is a prominent theme in the bible. From the story of Adam and Eve: 6 The woman was convinced. She saw that the tree ...

A couple of weeks ago, I was enjoying ‘apericena’ with some friends. Among them was a friend from high school, who was visiting Florence. For one reason or another (probably because I was thinking about writing this post), we got talking about the sex education we received at school. As I’ve mentioned, my high school was very religious. Our ‘sex education’ was often focussed on promoting abstinence until marriage. We began sharing purity metaphors we were taught. Strap yourself in. Photo by me. Metaphor One: You have a piece of fresh (virgin) sticky tape. When you have sex, it’s like sticking the tape to someone else’s skin. If you were to keep the tape stuck there, it would continue to be well-adhered; if you commit to one person and only have sex with them for the rest of your life, your ‘tape’ will remain intact for both of you to enjoy.   However, if you decide to have sex with someone else, you reuse your tape. After being removed, the tape now carries piece...

If I’m being honest, my loss of faith was motivated by emotions. The reasons I left Christianity are quite different to the reasons I’m still an atheist. I can think of two major experiences that most likely initiated my conversion. Photo by me. Firstly, I felt betrayed when I discovered my science knowledge from school was completely different to real science. During my childhood, scientists were generally presented to me as arrogant types who thought they knew everything about the universe. Many scientific theories, especially evolution by natural selection and the big bang theory, were flippantly dismissed as nonsense due to their perceived contradiction to the Bible. Based on what I’d been told, I believed that these theories had very little evidence. I thought scientists only backed these theories because they had no other explanation, or because they didn’t want to admit that the Bible was the truth. Moreover, there are a lot of Christian books that try to debunk scie...