Sexvangelicals

"In purity culture, both men and women are hypersexualized and then also supposed to be asexual at the same time," explains Dr. Laura Anderson, cofounder of the Religious Trauma Institute. In short, the expectation is that men are expected to say yes to all things sexual, and women are expected to say and embody the word, no. The sixth deadly sexual sin captures the practice of rigid gender roles. Men are expected to be dominant. Women are expected to be submissive. Don't say no to those gender roles. Laura, Jeremiah, and Julia talk about: The pressures on men to say yes to positions of leadership (4:40). Jeremiah explains how his seven-year old self was pressured into a position of leadership strictly because of his sex. The pressures of women to present and embody submissiveness (16:00): Laura explains "You're told like there's this very specific certain way that you're supposed to live and act and think. And if you do these things, then you're gonna get this reward. In my case, it was gonna be a husband that I could then have children with, and that's how I'd serve God. But there's no room for any self authenticity, curiosity, freedom of expression." The paralysis that accompanies decision making for women (21:40): Laura shares, "In the context of relationships, it's going, which shirt should I wear today? So that if I do come in contact with my future husband, he will look at me and, oh, I chose this shirt. And he'll be like, wow, what a godly woman. Versus if I took and wore this shirt over here, he would be like, oh wow. Her shirt reflects this? So it was absolutely paralyzing. What do I wear? What do I eat for breakfast? What socks do I wear? What shoe?" The pressures on dating (32:50): This episode talks largely about Laura's adolescence and young adult experiences. Laura summarizes: "I can't just date anybody. I have to only date who I'm going to marry, which then means I've gotta wear the right shirt to school. I can't date for fun. I can't even try things out. It really felt like this huge weight descending on me. Everything had a holy consequence to it." The "threat" of single women in Purity Culture (43:30): Laura reflects, "And I know from my experience as a single woman, I was even more dangerous. It was this idea of, "Because I didn't have a husband to rein me in, I would then seek opportunities to make other men stumble, especially married men, to get them to sin sexually," right? So then there's this hypersexuality of all you are good for is sex or your sexual being, but then also don't act on it because that's a sin and that's gross and that'sdisgusting and you are only supposed to act on it in a very specific context. So keep it shut down even though this isn't who you are. Laura closes the episode by describing an experience of saying yes to herself and her sexuality, and the freedom that experience opened up for her (49:30). Julia closes the episode: "I'm thinking about how the theme around the episode is, Don't Say No. And this is a story in which you said Yes. Yes. And you experienced freedom. What you learned, what I learned, Jeremiah, what you've described that you've learned is that freedom comes from following the rules, which means saying no to all these different things. Obviously that was not freeing for you, for me, for many people. And then you said yes, and the journey was much longer after that. But what a beautiful moment in which you could connect with yourself and connect with a yes. Healing together involves finding spaces to say yes to things that are meaningful to us.

Last week, we talked with Cayte Castrillon about her research on the pornography consumption of teenage girls impacts the ways they view their bodies, relationships, and perceptions of men. We continue our conversation with Cayte this week about how we can talk about pornography in our sexual and non-sexual relationships, and ways we can remove shame, comparison, and judgment from these interactions. Jeremiah summarizes Cayte's position in the introduction (4:10): "We're not at fault for our social conditioning, but we are responsible for it. We have to reflect on how we have developed as sexual beings, how that impacts us and our relationships, and then ask ourselves, am I content with who I am as a sexual person? Or do I want to be more intentional about who I am, who I want to be, and for the sake of our conversation, what I want to consume?" Cayte asks her research participants what would be different if they were to design pornography (8:50). "Almost unanimously," she describes, "there was more communication about the types of touch that are pleasurable. More clitoral stimulation, more gentle touch on the rest of my body." We also talk about the ways that pornography invites unhealthy comparison (18:20): Cayte reports her research participants asking questions like, "Am I performing? Am I having an orgasm? How am I having an orgasm? Are my breasts responding like that? Is my vulva responding like that?" The "what-if's" are unlimited, Cayte summarizes. How moral reactions prevent us from having conversations about pornography (25:00): Julia reflects, "And then the moral panic is a red herring from the conversations that we need to have. And it actually stops us from talking about it, because being good or bad actually isn't a conversation about pornography or sexuality at all. That's about someone's value system. It's important to talk about value systems, but I would say value systems within sexual health versus the binary of good or bad value systems." Cayte responds by describing how sex education processes reenforce the larger cultural morality and judgment. How to talk about porn with your partner (34:50): Cayte describes the usefulness of a third-party source, such as a sex therapist or a podcast. (She recommends the podcast Girls on Porn.) She also reminds us, "If you are going to have a conversation, if you're gonna tiptoe, which I would recommend tiptoeing in. I think a good first step would be how do you even conceptualize watching porn?" How to talk about porn with your children (48:45): Cayte encourages parents that conversations about pornography "don't have to be all at once. It doesn't have to be long, drawn out conversations with, , diagrams and PowerPoints. It can be, 100 one minute conversations. It can be, in the car, not looking eye to eye with your kid." We conclude by sharing ethical pornography resources, including, but not limited to (58:00): Lust Cinema X-Confessions Crash Pad Series Indie Porn Revolution www.thepornconversation.org A huge thanks to Cayte for all of her help, research, and resources! We look forward to sharing more of Cayte's publications as they come along. Let's heal together!

Welcome back to the Seven Deadly Sexual Sins (According to the Church). We continue with Deadly Sexual Sin #5, especially geared toward men: Don't Watch Porn. After all, we know that women don't watch porn. Or do they? We invite Cayte Castrillon, sex therapist and PhD student, to share her research about how women consume porn, what porn teaches women about their own bodies and sexuality, and the observations that women make about the ways that male partners are influenced by porn. Cayte discovers that approximately two thirds of college age students are using porn to masturbate (10:00). She reflects, "Women are challenged so often to be more assertive, but in order to assert your needs, you have to know and at least be on the path to understanding what those needs are." (18:40) Cayte conducts in interviews with dozens of college women, centers around three questions: How did pornography impact your body image, both generally and sexually? (15:00): Cayte summarizes that women commonly explore pornography, "just out of curiosity of what's happening out there. What am I, what's capable? What are the possibilities of what I can engage in? So as far as masturbation, that's the selection process I think then that women are engaging in: Does this make me feel sexual? Does this arouse me? Does this make me feel uncomfortable? How did pornography impact the development of your sexual self? How did it impact your interest in sex and specific sexual acts? (21:00): Cayte talks about the ways that porn exacerbates the process of women comparing themselves to the bodies of other women, specifically regarding their breasts and vulvas. However, Cayte describes the common response of porn "giving a place to go to explore not only my masturbatory responses to pornography, but it also giving me permission to be a sexual person, to harness that, to say, oh, there are women that are really in seeming to enjoy sex, whether or not it's performative or not." How do you think pornography potentially impact your male partners, if you have engaged in sexual activity with male partners? (28:00): This question required some hypothesizing, as most participants did not have conversations with their male partners about this. However, the participants observed, "their partners saying, I know my penis isn't as big as such and such, and feeling uncomfortable if there was a performer that had an especially large phallus or extremely masculine muscular physique." Next week, we will talk about the implications of Cayte's research, such as exploring when the current status of porn caters to the socially conditioned fantasies of men, what does that say about whose bodies are deserving of pleasure and whose sexuality is most important in our country? And we'll share our own vulnerabilities regarding talking about porn in our own partnerships. Let's heal together!

Happy New Year! The beginning of the year encourages a myriad of ways to set goals for yourself. What are your New Years resolutions? What are your goals for the New Year? What word encapsulates what you want to accomplish in 2023? Answering those questions, be they at the start of the year, midway through a project, or at the conclusion of an event, requires an effective self-reflection process. Ideally, said process happens both individually and in relationship, be that with a partner, a friend or family member, or larger community. In this episode, Julia and Jeremiah describe three practices, rooted in our Evangelical upbringing, that can provide a structure for having these conversations. 1) Month and Review (6:30): Julia explains: "Month and Review was a time for my family to reflect on three different things: answered prayer, prayer requests, and Thanksgiving and praise. So totally loaded with religious language that I don't use right now. Prayer requests, I would say, are desires. What do I want? Or if you're in the context of a partner or a family, what do we want?" 2) Grief Practices (11:00): Julia describes: "The grief practice is a practice in which an individual, or in the case of my college, a group intentionally gathered to give name to losses, pain, injustice, trauma, disappointment, unfulfilled dreams, et cetera. The practice allowed us to mourn, to be angry at God, ask hard questions, cry, or whatever else we needed. What happened is that the religious structure was a new structure that was unlike the structure that I had for the first almost decade of my life. And that was a structure in a system which gave permission not just to me, but other people to grieve. And not only was the grief okay, but that the act of grieving, especially within community, was a sacred process." 3) Process-Centered Evaluation (19:00): Jeremiah summarizes: "As therapists, we talk about this it being much more important to attune to the way, the "how" an interaction happens between you and a client, than the specifics of what a person is talking about. That's the distinction between process and content, at least from a therapeutic perspective. We encourage self-reflection practices that move away from, okay, what is the specific content of how I'm sinning, I'm lying, I'm watching porn, whatever, to this process of, okay, how do I actually evaluate myself? What are the questions that I ask myself? What's the kind of dialogue that I have with myself that's meaningful, that's helpful? What kind of dialogue can I have with my classmates, with, my family members that can be helpful and meaningful?" We use these processes to talk about our worst and best moments of 2023, knowing, as John Gottman reminds us, that for every negative interaction, it's important to name five positive interactions. We also reveal our own individual and relational goals for 2023! We hope you are having a great start to 2023! Let's heal together!

Christmas is a strange season for folks who are in the process of exploring and healing from the ways that the church has negatively impacted them. Especially when Christmas falls on a Sunday, as it did this year. The soundtrack of Christmas is a mixture of Whitney Houston's All I Want for Christmas is You, Paul McCartney's Wonderful Christmastime, and dozens of religious carols that integrate messages of hope into Matthew's narrative of the birth of Jesus. Nativity scenes join Christmas trees, ornaments, and lights as the visual backdrop. Many of our listeners are deconstructing Christianity in some way. Jeremiah describes the conundrum (22:00): "There's this idea in the deconstruction world that moving out of the church means moving out of the church. It means saying f——— you to the institution and the practices within the institution. In the therapy world, we call this an emotional cutoff: a way of completely separating yourself from family members and systems of older parts of your life. And don't get me wrong, in cases of abuse, cutoffs are necessary. However, generally speaking, cutoffs don't give you the permission to engage with the complexities of the family members and stories and institutions, and that tends to lead to a lot of problems in other areas of life." Christmastime, in some ways, represents the best of the modern Christian tradition, as Jeremiah explains (20:35): "Christmas carols and other types of acapella music and the process of singing harmonies are my continual connection to the church. And I'm okay doing some of the mental gymnastics of singing philosophical and theological ideas that I don't believe in to to draw me closer to home, closer to that sense of familiarity." Christmastime intersects hope with grief, especially for those of us who have moved out of overtly religious spaces. Julia encourages (36:00) "Being intentional to set aside space for grief. That might be a walk on your own, early in the morning or late at night. That might be time to journal or to write a letter to someone who isn't present for you." "You don't need to perfect your rituals or traditions this Christmas. It might take several Christmases to find what works for you, and maybe you'll get lucky and you and your partner or partners or friendships will find something new that you can hold onto that will continue throughout the rest of your life." We hope that you find spaces of peace, hope, and safe spaces for grieving this Christmas week!

Happy holidays from Jeremiah and Julia! We are taking a break from our Seven Deadly Sexual Sins (According to the Church) series and talking about how to navigate the challenges of the holiday season. In this episode, Jeremiah and Julia discuss two ways that sexuality can be hard during the holidays: 1) Privacy (5:30). Jeremiah reflects, "You may be surrounded by more people than usual. Or perhaps you're sharing walls with family members or ceilings with family members. For some folks, the risk of being caught can be really sexy, but for others, this can really kill the sex vibe, especially when you're surrounded by family or friends who may hold sexual values that don't align with yours." 2) The general pressure of the holidays (22:15): Julia describes the pressure "to have the best sex ever because you've got time off from work and you finally have more than a short chunk of time for a sexual experience…With the implicit or explicit messaging that the holidays are a romantic a season, and for many people, not all people, romance and sex occur together, and by default, then, sex has to be filled with some sort of holiday magic." We provide several Relationship 101 tips during the episode, including: If possible, get a separate space for you and your partner from family and friends. (18:00) Give yourself permission to not have sexual experiences. (21:00) Talk with your partner about the pressures connected with the holidays, and how that might impact accessing sexuality. (29:30) Create transition spaces in and out of sexual experiences, especially for those that happen outside of your place of residence. (31:55) Have a fantastic holiday season! Let's heal together!

Happy Holidays, from Jeremiah and Julia! Thank you for all of the support that you've given us in 2022! We're excited to share two holiday episodes with you to wrap up December, and launch 2023 with new pictures, new episodes, and a lot of fun!

We continue our series on the Seven Deadly Sexual Sins (According to the Church), with a relational process that's condemned inside and outside the church: Infidelity. Julia summarizes (6:30): "We have a cultural norm that shames and stigmatizes affairs. If we actually want to have relationships in which breaking commitments happen less often, then we have to move beyond the shame, because what we know from the exceptional research from Brene Brown is that shame only fuels the patterns that we are trying to change. We're sharing this story because we need to talk about the commitments that partners make to each other around sexuality, and we need to talk about the ways that people break those commitments, and why they break those commitments, because affairs don't happen in isolation." In sharing our story, we explore the following themes, understanding that infidelity occurs in numerous contexts and has multiple meanings: Infidelity as one of a bunch of bad choices (12:15): Jeremiah was in a long-term relationship where conversations about sexuality (and quite a few other topics) were met with either anxiety or criticism, and an unwillingness to address this pattern via couples therapy. His bad choices were a) stay in the negative dynamic; b) initiate a process of divorce; c) attempt to have it both ways by pursuing sexuality outside of the relationship. For Jeremiah, option C actually initiated a very quick divorce process. Infidelity as an autonomous choice in a sexual history with minimal autonomy (31:00): Julia, after surviving messages of purity culture, reflects, "I didn't know who I was as a sexual person. I didn't know that I was a sexual person. All I know about sexuality is what men want." The sexual shame connected to premarital sex followed Julia into her marital relationship, and, combined with a series of unfortunate events (including, but not limited to two miscarriages), created a crisis of loss of self, which was reinforced by participating in the marriage, especially given the relational grief of two pregnancy losses. As such, sexuality was incredibly difficult to access in the marital relationship, despite the immense amount of work Julia and her ex invested in the relationship. Infidelity as protest (50:00): Julia describes the intense amount of rage toward the systems that failed her. "That was the first big choice I had made that was just for me. And it felt really good to do something that was just for me, of course. And it felt really good to put my middle fingers in the air to the church and say, "All the things you told me not to do are the only things that are bringing me like any source of healing." Infidelity as regret (53:00): For Jeremiah, infidelity was an exit strategy from the marriage; he reflects, "One of my biggest regrets is that I didn't end the relationship with my ex in a more overt kind of way." Julia shares, "I really wish I had actually been a braver person because my regret was not that I chose my sexuality, my regret was that I broke a commitment to the person that I loved. And I hurt him." Infidelity as isolation (1:07:00): Infidelity is commonly met with judgment in religious, professional, and personal communities, which reinforces the secrecy of affairs. Julia reflects on her positive experience with her therapist: "Having my therapist support me, not my decision to have or not have an affair, but to support me and my flourishing meant that I didn't have to be alone at the time in my life that was simultaneously the most painful and the most beautiful all at the same time." Her therapist's response mirrors that of Jesus' response to the woman "caught" in adultery that we talk about in Episode 62: shame-free, nonjudgmental, and loving. Stayed tuned to our series this spring, where we'll have in depth conversations about infidelity, including the intense amount of pressure on modern-day primary relationships, the presence of secrecy and avoidance, and misunderstandings of eroticism and sexuality. Let's heal together!

We are halfway through our series on the Seven Deadly Sexual Sins (According to the Church). As a refresher, the first three "sins" are: Don't have sex before you get married. Don't be gay. Don't lust. Which sets up sin #4: Don't have an affair. Some quick background. The marital relationship (between a man and woman, duh) is the most foundational relationship in the Evangelical community. It's a right of passage into adulthood, as Jeremiah describes (14:40). It symbolizes the union between God/Jesus and the church, as the church describes. And, according to the Evangelical Church, any relationship with a person of the opposite gender that is not your spouse is a potential threat to the sanctity of marriage (19:45). Jeremiah learned this in his sex-silent religious community of origin implicitly; as Julia summarizes, "The Church of Christ skirted the issue of adultery by focusing so heavily on the marital relationship, that hopefully adultery in and of itself would just disappear." (16:00) This creates an enormous amount of pressure because, "there's very little room for other types of support or other types of exploration outside of the relationship." Julia learned this by watching the horrific way her community of origin treated a member of their community. She angrily responds, "But who said anything to defend my friend's mother's right to go to church and to go to communion and not to have every person in her personal life. That is such an anti-Jesis thing, and I'm horrified and even feel like a physiological response as I'm remembering this." (30:20) So how should we talk about affairs? We turn to John chapter 8, where Jesus engages with a woman "caught" in adultery. (32:45) Tl;dr: Jesus doesn't condemn her. He ignores the kerfuffle from the Pharisees who are threatening her, telling them, "He who is without sin can throw the first stone." Julia notes, "In talking about sin, Jesus also doesn't even say leave your adulterous relationship. 'Leave your life of sin' is actually a really broad statement. (37:10) So how do we not talk about affairs? Let's avoid enacting the ways that the church commonly plays the role of the Pharisees. How do we talk about affairs? Well, next episode, Julia and Jeremiah will talk a bit about theirs. In the meantime, we highly encourage you to check out two books that talk about the anatomy of affairs: The State of Affairs by Esther Perel Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free by Wednesday Martin Let's heal together!

The first two Deadly Sexual Sins According to the Church—don't have sex before you get married, and don't be gay—are commonly linked to the church's sexual ethic. The third of the sins is the psychological engine for the church's position on sexuality: Don't lust. And to be fair, don't lust has important implications, especially in a world where over half of adult women (and nearly a third of adult men) have experienced at minimum sexual harassment. However, as Jeremiah mentions, "I think that the problem though becomes when "don't objectify women" very quickly moves into, " just don't have wants." And in a context that refuses to teach things, processes like consent , sexual anatomy, sexual physiology, the sexual response cycles and the histories of sexual response cycles, it's understandable how that move gets made." We invite our friends Jake and Sarah to talk with us about how growing up in the Evangelical Church (the same collegiate church as Jeremiah) impacted their relationship with wants as individuals and as a partnership. We describe a three step process that can help people give themselves permission to name their wants and desires, including: Developing a process for exploring your own wants and needs. Determining how to translate your wants into verbalizations, and identify the barriers to vocalizing said wants. Asking the question "What do you want?" And actually answering the question when your partner asks. Share your stories about how you learned to give yourself permission to want and desire! Let's heal together!