I grew up in a complimentarian church. By the time I reached the junior high youth group, digital dangers had already infected my mind since I was eleven. As an innocent, white girl raised in a middle class suburban homeschooling family who hadn’t yet hit adolescence and whose parents had no clue what the world of AOL dial up could bring, it’s easy to understand how. Ironically enough it wasn’t pornography that led to my lifelong issues: it was cyber sex and erotica. Perhaps not so ironically when one considers that I make my living as an author.
One could imagine a middle school youth group would be a good environment for a girl to discuss and process the threat of online boyfriends two or three times her age cyber-raping her. However, the teachings in that youth group were not so different from what I was receiving in AOL chat rooms. Here is why:
- My body was a meatsuit. This is perhaps the most potent statement I remember during my church youth days. I remember Joshua Harris coming on fire to our church’s youth group. I knew my sister had been reading his book, but my parents knew I wasn’t ready for it yet at 14 because we were forbidden to date until 16. But I still listened to Joshua speak. I still shook his hand. I listened to my youth pastors – all male – who told a room full of boys and girls standing side by side that us girls had bodies equivalent to a “factory of lust”. That dressing “immodestly” would be akin to putting on a meatsuit and diving headfirst into a pool of sharks. Yes, I remained quite fearful of boys for years after, though still longing for attention from the cute ones. How the Church saw me was not dissimilar to how my online “boyfriends” saw me. Even when I typed replies into the messenger box, I believed modest-ness was next to Godliness. I never knew what it felt like to be confident in my own skin.
- Dominance/Submission. My parents opted out of my public high school’s sex education course in favor of a complimentarian Biblical sex seminar where at 14. I learned that women’s ultimate value lay in how she could become a housewife and mother and how she could please her husband sexually. Yes, at 14. With verses on men delighting in his youthful wife’s breasts combined with what men online were teaching me about sex and my body, I internalized all this. I grew up conforming to this idea of the “submissive” woman even to the point where I routinely made sexist jokes in my teen years. Erotica, whether fan fiction online or cheap romance paperbacks, also gave me this lens. Smut seemed to confirm what the Church had taught me. That men are and should be the dominant species. And women should enjoy being dominated. Why else would so many women be drawn to the book covers of bare-chested muscular men seizing hold of a busty woman whose body was always displayed beneath his? Both of these not so different avenues were my primary sex education.
- Men were sex beasts. It was obvious that the men online who took advantage of my youth and innocence had just one thing on their minds. But the Church taught me similar lessons. And the phase of my life where this was the strongest was not in my youth. No, in my teen years, I as a girl had an unhealthy obsession with the sexual, playing out rape fantasies on my dolls…sleeping issues became routine thanks to my erotica fantasies. However, it was after I’d fallen in love and married, by God’s grace, a wonderful, egalitarian husband that I felt the full weight of the Church’s hurt. I’d only recently begun processing the emotional abuse of my youth when I read a Christian marriage book promoted by a sexuality conference at our former church. Though it was a book strictly for wives, it was so triggering, my husband, Kevin, came alongside me to read it. He felt the same damage and hurt instantly with the portrayal of how wives should view themselves as sexual commodities to their husbands. The book traded deep emotional intimacy for cheap sex and defined Kevin’s sexual member as his masculinity, in the “taking of his wife”. Contrary to this, my femininity was wrapped in my ability to be a smoking hot momma destined for child birthing. Despite having two daughters, I had two emergency C sections pre-labor after two life threatening pregnancies, another experience that the Church signaled was awkward and not accepted.
It will still take time for me to wade through all the emotional wounds of my past, both complimentarian and cultural. No, I don’t believe every church experience I’ve ever had was negative. Over the years, my husband and I have attended multiple churches, met wonderful people, and learned valuable lessons. We still haven’t given up hope on the Church and just began attending a new one. As parents of two little girls, we see the cross-stitched scars of the culture and the complimentarian Church as blessings in disguise. Our daughters will grow up with truth and love written upon their hearts and spoken upon their heads. They will grow up with egalitarianism.
And for all the girls wrestling in those youth group walls, I have this ditty for you:
Your bodies aren’t a factory of lust
But sugar and spice and cosmic stardust.
You are perfect beyond compare.
They’re not sharks. You’re not meat. And why should anyone else care?