Red Flag for a Good Body Turned Bad Object
A series on Purity, Patriarchy, and Reclaiming Goodness
I fell for God the way some fall for people, drunk on the mystery, the fixation, the fulfillment, if even for a short time. I was hungry for a distraction, an answer that might explain the darkness I felt but didn’t have language for. The church did that. It was offering a reason and rhyme for every single thing that was beyond an answer. It comforted me to have a structure that held the fragile frame of my internal world in place when so much felt broken and unsaid.
I went to church multiple times a week. There seemed to be a day for everything. Monday evening was for mission groups, Wednesday was for prayer meetings, Thursday was for small groups, and Sunday was for church in the morning and the evening. When I wasn’t in the church building, I was a devout student at home. Waking up early in the morning to pray, memorizing entire chapters of the Bible, and engaging in all the teachings of the Purity Movement that said no sex before marriage, and not just that, no kissing, no snuggling. NOTHING. This movement taught a message that the body was dangerous, seductive, or, in a word, bad if it was doing anything outside the decreed will of God.
Since I was 15, I had memorized the Bible and books on chastity by heart– books like I Kissed Dating Goodbye and Passion and Purity that told me my body belonged to Jesus and that if I kissed or was physically close to anyone before marriage, then I was a sinner needing to repent. I fell for these teachings hard. Harder than any preacher’s daughters who made their way around the block. My body felt bad after all, and it needed to be taught a lesson in repression. I wasn’t told my body was bad before church, but I felt it innately like I was the bad object tainting everything it touched.
I can see now why I fell for it, even though none of my other church friends went to the extremes I did. I needed a thick enough armor to keep my body safe and chaste, and this Purity Movement provided just that as a sanctimonious reason why I could avoid intimacy and be praised for it.
Often, when trauma isn’t named, it’s inverted to self-hate and self-blame. I didn’t know how to share about the harm done to my body, and so I bore the responsibility for what I didn’t understand. In Psychoanalytic Theory, this splitting of perceived good and bad parts of ourselves categorizes what we love and hate about ourselves. Church, God, and the Purity Movement became a perfect way to work this theory into my understanding of myself. I could understand my sinful nature as the Bad Object and, on the other hand, be saved and repent my way into the Good Object.
I dated guys occasionally but was careful never to let it go too far, not even holding hands, but still saying we were in a relationship. But in college, I was finally on my own, away from the church, and hungry for a new rulebook. So I tested my body to see if what they said was true– if I got close to someone I cared about, would I be their demise, their shame, their rebound back into sinful nature?
I call those first two years of college “my make-out years.” When I wasn’t praying and hitting up campus church services, I had my tongue down my new boyfriend’s throat. It was exciting, to say the least. Chet was my very first serious boyfriend, a little older, a bass player in a band, and was in seminary studying to be a Southern Baptist preacher. His brown, shaggy hair hung loosely on his head like a dollar store mop, and he wore skinny jeans that fit too tight with raggedy metal t-shirts from the seventies. Like me, he was the perfect mix of a little bad and a little good.
I wouldn't kiss him for the first few months of our relationship. My face would hover closer than an inch, my body pressed up to his so I could feel the heat, but my lips wouldn’t touch his. Instead, they teased relentlessly with moments of almost but not quite. It was the best kind of foreplay. When I finally did kiss him, it was in my dorm room, our bodies horizontal, a manic-like frenzy of built-up sexual tension that left us sweating with a newfound desire. Afterward, my face was raw and red from his itchy beard, and his eyes drunk from longing. The feeling was exhilarating, my body being wanted, but also answered the question I wanted to know most– Is my body bad? Is it shameful?
After our make-out sessions, he would say, “I’m sorry. We shouldn’t do this.” The way he looked at my body made me soaked through with guilt as I pulled my shirt back over my head. My answer had arrived after all. I felt like the temptress I’d read about, the bad one leading men astray. Our relationship went on like this for years, sexually escalating with follow-up prayer sessions of repentance. A split of my body bad being made good, and with it, a further exasperation of my already dissociative response.
No one told me I was bad, not really, but there were religious rules I’d adopted that, when broken, left a scarlet stain that was completely unwashable, and after a while, I began to run out of clothes that weren’t marked with a scarlet letter in some way or fashion. It took me into my early thirties when I finally moved away from home, began to break up with the church little by little, and finally let my body do what it wanted. It wasn’t that I didn’t still feel the stain now and again, how it would bleed right through the fabric of the skin and turn my body purple like spilled blackberry juice. But something began to change in me the more I got to know the context of my story and sat with it as a compassionate witness. Suddenly, that stain that I used to hide no longer made me feel bad; instead, it made me feel beautiful and delicious, and I wanted to color my whole body with the things some people called badness because it made me feel like a work of art.
Thank you so much for reading. I appreciate your open heart. Love, Megan
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I resonate so much with this - feeling in my youth that my body was the temptress leading men astray. So glad you're sharing your experiences and your healing journey with the world.
Such a powerful and important story to be told. Bless you for telling it, I know they're listening X