Facing The Traumatic Effects of Purity Culture
an interview with Sarah Lacour of @deconstructingpurityculture
When popular culture imagines post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) it generally thinks of combat veterans or survivors of violent rape. But as I’ve written about before, PTSD can actually result from a wide variety of traumatic experiences, from living through a natural disaster, to having an alcoholic parent, to being the victim of a crime or accident. That’s not to say everyone who experiences these events is traumatized or develops PTSD, but, for a variety of reasons, some individuals do. In recent years, an increasing number of people (particularly women or people raised as girls) are reporting PTSD symptoms as a result of their time in evangelical purity culture.
PTSD is a complicated beast. The closest I can come to describing it is to say it feels like your brain and body are at war. It doesn’t matter what your brain knows logically to be true, what matters is what feels true. To give a non-purity culture-related example, bedtime was a very triggering time for my Complex PTSD. Logically, I knew I was safe—my apartment was secure, there was a sturdy lock on my front door, the building required a key fob for entry. But my body didn’t feel safe. My heart raced and I jumped at every noise, on high alert for signs an intruder. When the conscious, logical brain receives this sort of sensory input from the body, it searches for a justification in the environment: surely something dangerous lurks there. This is why you can’t think, or even talk, your way out of PTSD—because trauma isn’t stored in that logical, conscious part of your brain.
And these subconscious parts of the brain is where purity culture gets its hooks in you. The purity culture narrative was always, “If you have sex before marriage, you will feel guilty and ashamed. You will harm your future marriage. If you wait, the sex you have with your spouse will not only be guilt-free and satisfying, it will bring you closer together and strengthen your marriage.” There weren’t any caveats or carve-outs, no mention that years’ worth of shaming messages *might* have a negative impact, so when women raised in purity culture experience painful or difficult sex due to vaginismus, when sex brings on panic attacks or physical reactions similar to anaphylaxis, the next thought tends to be, “this is just me. Something is wrong with me.”
This “it’s just me” story is all-too-familiar to Sarah Lacour, creator of the Instagram account “Deconstructing Purity Culture.” Her Instagram account was born out of her time in physical therapy school. There she met people from around the country who’d been through purity culture experiences similar to hers. “The more that I was working through my own [religious] deconstruction in therapy, the more purity culture kept coming up…and when I’d talk to friends about it, I realized it was a universal problem,” she said in a recent interview.
The negative physical effects of purity culture showed up in her patients, too, impacting their pelvic floor functioning. (The pelvic floor muscles are involved in the vagina, as well as urination and defecation. They are also part of the “core muscle” group which support posture.)
“Studies have shown that there’s a significant increase in those raised with ‘restrictive sexual values’ (such as conservative Christianity, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses and other conservative traditions) and the rate of painful sex and pelvic floor dysfunction…even to issues with incontinence and bowel and bladder issues later in life.”
For many, purity culture’s shaming messages can add up to something akin to childhood trauma. Lacour recalled how 2 Corinthians 10:5 was used to hammer home how wrong it was to feel sexual attraction: “You are supposed to be in control of any sexual thoughts or feelings. They use the verse, ‘take every thought captive’ (they take it fully out of context) and end up saying that’s what you should do for every sexual thought or feeling you ever have.”
Lacour’s education went on to highlight that, “Sexual thoughts and feelings are biologically and developmentally normal. Especially in teenagers, who, all of a sudden, have a lot of hormones! But when you’re taught in your formative years that any time you have a sexual thought or feeling towards ANYBODY that it’s wrong and bad and sinful, and you need to shut it down…that doesn’t just go away the second you’re married. It’s something that takes a lot of time to retrain yourself.”
This long-term, comprehensive shaming of normal sexual impulses has a lasting impact. “It’s in all of the studies: when you train you train yourself out of [sexual thoughts] …your body and pelvic floor don’t know the difference when you get married or decide to start having sex. [They don’t know] that this is okay. Your pelvic floor will still involuntarily contract, because that’s what it thinks it’s supposed to do.”
With her Instagram account, Lacour seeks to educate others and remind them that they truly are not alone. Using short, direct phrases set against earthy backgrounds, her posts scroll through your feed like tiny earthquakes. “Your clothing choices do not dictate your morality or inherent worth” reads one. “Your body is not a stumbling block," says another. They are a jolt of affirmation and a reminder that we don’t have to cling to rules and roles that never served us.
When I asked her what advice she’d give to a young person about sex and sexuality, she emphasized normalizing their experiences and providing information. When teens write to her about the decision to be abstinent, she says, “If that’s a decision that you and your partner want to make, that’s fantastic, whether it’s for religious reasons or not, I really don’t care. Just have all the sex ed information and know that the things you are feeling are normal and okay, and you don’t have to hide those feelings. And you can wear spaghetti straps—you’re not gonna to go to Hell,” she laughed.
You can follow Deconstructing Purity Culture here. Sarah Lacour will also be co-leading “The Shame-Free Sex Course” with Meg Cowan in February.
*Quotations lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Journaling/discussion Questions:
What are the earliest messages you can remember about sex and/or your body? What effect do you think these messages had on you?
What advice would you give to a young person about sex? Imagine giving yourself that advice as a young person.
Would you rather TEENAGE EDITION! Would you rather go bathing suit shopping with a gaggle of church moms, OR have to put a condom on a banana in front of your entire gym class?