There’s a folder in my Scrivener draft of the book I’m writing about vaginismus called Little Darlings. It’s a landfill, a dumping ground for every precious thing I’ve written and then omitted from my manuscript. I love my Little Darlings, and I return to them often, sometimes to scrounge around for something to repurpose, other times to mourn the ideas that could have been.

There’s a whole lot about purity culture in my Little Darlings folder. This is mostly because, similar to my ramblings on James Marion Sims, I don’t really like writing about it. It’s not that I feel unqualified — I have very strong opinions about the way religious messaging in my childhood and teens predisposed me to a condition like vaginismus. Part of me feels there’s absolutely nothing more I can contribute to purity culture discourse that hasn’t already been said, and part of me is scared to overtly criticize ideas that so many people still hold dear.

In my idealistic days before I knew what getting a book published really entailed, I was certain that purity culture was the sole reason for my vaginismus, and I had little to no room for nuance. I was given a purity ring by my mother for my 13th birthday, and I took it seriously, too seriously. I took it so seriously that when I finally decided I was ready to have sex, the only thing my body could recall was fear.

It makes me cringe to remember that I wrote a first draft, then printed and distributed it to my friends and family as if to say, Watch out! She’s coming! And you’re all implicated.

That message was received, especially by my mother.

In my personal unraveling of where my vaginismus came from, and it must be a personal unraveling because researchers do not yet know what causes vaginismus, I started to see both myself and my teenaged mother as victims of purity culture.

Let’s cut to a Little Darling.

I imagine her seeking the solace she yearned for in a new marriage with my dad at her local Southern Baptist church, where they welcomed her with the promise of renewal and, of course, some prerequisites in their fine print:

Save yourself.

True Love Waits.

Don’t cause a man to stumble.

And my personal favorite,

Nobody will buy the cow if the milk is free.

I recently asked my mother about this. I’d flown home to attend my sister’s college graduation, and I migrated to my mother’s room to have a conversation with her at the foot of her bed. This is precisely the spot where I most remember asking her questions in my childhood about anything and everything, including sex. I wondered…

Does she see herself as a victim of purity culture?
Does she stand by those teachings now?

She responded exactly how I remember her responding when I was young — warm, honest, direct, and always beginning with her eyes on the ceiling during a deep, thoughtful breath. She is dual-minded and loquacious, a Gemini in every sense except for that breath she takes before she speaks. Five hours would pass before I got up from my spot on her bed and made my way back to her guest room.

We started with a definition — what exactly is purity culture? She asked me to clarify. The Wikipedia definition is fairly straightforward:

A movement in the 1990s within Christianity which emphasized sexual abstinence before marriage.

My personal definition is heavier because I’ve been burned by the aforementioned personal unraveling. I can’t unsee the piece of dirty tape from the age-old sex-ed demonstration in the P.E. classroom at my high school. Memories of grown Christian men standing on a makeshift stage at youth group emphasizing the importance of remaining chaste to a room full of young girls so that we might grow up and marry someone just like them haunts me, and frankly still pisses me off.

Purity culture, to me, is the societal obsession with the sexual activity of young girls with specific emphasis on the idea that sexual activity causes the contamination or soiling of the mind, body, and/or soul. As I’ve written before, this brand of sex education begins and ends with fear-mongering, and does little to prepare young girls for the real-world scenarios they’ll likely face before they’re ready for sex, when they decide they’re ready for sex, and after they have it.

Of course, the fear-mongering didn’t just come from youth group. If the almost two billion taxpayer dollars that have been designated to support abstinence-only education in the United States since 1996 played any role in my budding fear of sex, then perhaps my once-weekly Sunday school lessons simply provided it with a gathering place where it could flourish in the presence of other fearful individuals. This is assuming that you ascribe to the fear-based definition of vaginismus, which, based on my own experience, I do.

My Gemini mother was (and still is) a realist. I wore a purity ring, but she also made sure I had a prescription for birth control in my teens. While I wouldn’t describe her as someone who was necessarily obsessed with sexual purity, I don’t know that I would have become so obsessed with the concept if the overarching messaging at home, at church, and at school hadn’t positioned premarital sex as both the easiest and worst thing a girl could do.

On her bed, my mother clarified that no, she doesn’t see herself as victim of purity culture in the specific way I described above because both her religious convictions and her relationship with the church predated her unplanned pregnancy with me. She did acknowledge, however, that what I’m now referring to as “purity culture” was once a convenient, message-driven vehicle to warn her young daughters about the potential dangers of sex outside of marriage, consequences she feels still reverberate throughout her life. She explained that she never bought into any condemnation because biblically, she’s rooted in the idea that no sin could lessen God’s love for her, and she answered definitively that even outside the context of any organized religion, she still believes in abstinence.

I can meet her here. I ask myself,

What would I have expected to be taught about sex?
What might I teach a daughter?

I don’t disagree with her entirely. Vaginismus taught me (albeit, against my will) that there are benefits to waiting for sex. It’s not that I expected my elders to necessarily encourage my exploring sex, but there are two things I wish would have been echoed as loudly as abstinence.

1. The first is agency. I think I would have benefited from the idea that only I would know when I was ready for sex, instead of the implication that I’d be ready once a man chooses me to be his wife. I’ve never been certain that I even want to get married, and I remember being intensely curious as a child about what that might mean for my future as it relates to sex. Did I find a loophole, or would the experience never be meant for me as a willingly unmarried woman?

2. The second is neutrality. I think the concept of sexual purity as a whole was a dangerous pipeline for an obsessive, rule-following, oldest daughter/gold star collector. Furthermore, the pure/impure binary prevented me from being able to show empathy to my peers as they navigated those real-world scenarios I mentioned above, oftentimes non-consensually. (It’s worth noting here that my mother raised four more daughters after me that do not struggle with vaginismus. When I ask my sisters what they remember being taught about sexual purity, they consistently have little to no recollection.)

For me, the concept of sexual purity was an effective way to measure how good of a girl I was, which was all I ever really wanted to be. Down the line, it shaped the idea that my role in sex would be outward and performative, whether I was abstaining to be considered “good” or fulfilling my responsibilities as someone’s dutiful wife. This thinking left little room for learning things that might benefit me as a sexual person, like pleasure and consent. Before I knew it, aggressive societal messaging fed a growing internal obsession that turned sex into a mountain I became too scared to climb. Learning about those real-world scenarios secondhand only affirmed and solidified my already existing fear. That fear eventually manifested physically in my body, and so my vaginismus was born.

Even after I received treatment for my vaginismus, that mountain never fully crumbled. I often think that I’m still a little too obsessed with sex. I still hang on every word or innuendo my friends care to venture about their sex lives. Sometimes, my fear creeps back into my otherwise healthy sexual encounters, as if my body and brain forget that we’re supposed to be past this now.

On my flight back from my sister’s graduation, the flight attendant shuffled down the aisle asking,

Headsets? Headsets?

But instead I heard:

Have sex? Have sex?

I almost raised my hand. For exactly one second, I clung to the fantasy that I was finally about to be publicly recognized for my bravery in sex. Where I once carved an identity out of not having it, I now seek validation in the overcoming of a specific sexual dysfunction that prevented me from having it for so long. Owning my sexuality as mine is still a major challenge.

After sex, my first thoughts are usually intrusive:

Do I look different?
Will everyone know?

It’s a feeling I still can’t shake, an accountability I never consented to, fed by the idea that the act of sex permanently changes, and ultimately defines, the woman who has it. My purity ring was, in part, supposed to help me guard my mind from thoughts of sex, but it did the opposite, causing the very damage it was intended to protect against in more ways than one. These lasting effects require the subsequent unlearning of deep social conditioning to overcome. This is work I’m still doing, even as I type these words.

I agree that young girls are deserving of protection, I even agree that premature sex can have negative consequences, all of which I’d want my future daughter to be aware of, but I remain uncertain as to why we continue to impart value onto a concept as trite as sexual purity in a world determined to rob us of it. Purity culture frames abstaining as something girls owe their parents, their future spouses, God, and the world. When do safety, bodily autonomy, and the preserving of childlike innocence finally become fundamentals the world owes girls? When is it time to transfer that responsibility and corresponding shame?

I, for one, am tired of carrying it.