“Now Who Wants It?”
I can still remember how proud I felt when I slipped on that little gold band. I was standing up in front of the church and making a big commitment to God. I was only fifteen, but I felt so grown up. Then the youth pastor handed each of us a True Love Waits pledge card, and I signed one.
Back in the late 80s, teen pregnancy had been climbing. By 1990, 1 in 10 girls became pregnant before the age of twenty. A lot of parents were scared to death. That’s why many Christian parents were relieved when evangelical youth groups started promoting the popular abstinence program, True Love Waits. It was an alternative message to the sex-saturated culture. On its face, it seemed perfectly logical to teach Christian teenagers that God designed sex to be within the confines of marriage. It's a common orthodox teaching for which there are good reasons.
However, the harmful messaging and the purity culture surrounding this movement created massive issues that many adults are still recovering from decades later.
Many women my age remember sitting in youth group and watching a youth leader hold up a perfect red rose and ask us, "Who here would like to have this beautiful flower?" Many of us raised our hands. Then the leader would pass the flower around the room until each person had touched it. It would return to the front of the room bruised, petals missing, partially wilted. And the youth leader would disdainfully hold up the rose again and say, "Now who wants it?"
The rose — of course — was to represent us if we had any sexual contact before our wedding night. Each of us — including the numerous girls in the room who had been abused or assaulted — received the message loud and clear: Our worth as a human being was reduced to what we had done or what was done to us. This illustration had many iterations around the country: A piece of chewed-up gum, an unwrapped candy bar, a torn present. Nevertheless, each of these were reprehensible and antithetical to the gospel.
In this movement, a girl's "purity" became the most important thing about her. It was the thing that made her most desirable to her future husband. From the time she was in middle school, she was told to hide her body so she wouldn't be a "stumbling block" to the men in her church. Comments would be made about how and at what rate her body was changing and how that could be “dangerous” for the men around her. Girls felt shamed just for existing. (Side note: Not once did I hear anyone say that if grown men found a 12-year-old girl's body to be a stumbling block they should probably seek help and stay as far away from them as possible.)
This message only got worse as time went on. Girls had strict dress codes for youth camp and youth events while boys had the freedom to wear most anything they wanted. We were told that it was our job to keep the boys from lusting, to keep them from going too far, to keep them in line. Therefore, if something happened and things went too far, it was probably because of something we did. Countless women, myself included, internalized this message and blamed ourselves for our own abuse and assault for years.
Meanwhile, the boys were receiving a different message. It basically amounted to a sexual prosperity gospel. If you wait for marriage, sex will be mind-blowing and constant. You can do it whenever you want for the rest of your life.
This can cause major problems when these boys finally do get married. They don't understand why sex might be awkward. Or why, after being told for years to be the brakes in the relationship, his lovely bride might have a real problem flipping a switch after the wedding to suddenly become some sexually liberated vixen.
There's often an internalized message of entitlement that goes along with this teaching as well. Some men feel entitled to sexual gratification no matter how their wife feels. His sexual release becomes paramount — even if his wife is injured, even if she's ill, even if she's recovering from childbirth, even if he’s hurt her, even if she has a history of sexual abuse and is struggling with PTSD, or even if she's just exhausted. After all, he was told he gets to have what he wants when he wants it. Whether there is any enjoyment for the wife is usually an afterthought. As a result, sex is detached from the holistic bonding experience God intended it to be and becomes a disembodied idol that is used to bludgeon women into submission. Megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll famously told his congregation that the wife is to be the husband's own personal porn star.
So as a result, we have thousands of women who were groomed from a young age to walk, talk, and dress to make themselves as small and invisible as possible. To take full responsibility for the actions of others. To allow themselves to basically become passive receptacles for their husbands’ gratification once they get married. So it shouldn't be a big surprise that many women who grew up in this culture ended up in abusive marriages. To make matters worse, many best-selling "Christian" marriage books still echo these toxic messages. If your husband cheats, it's probably your fault. If he's addicted to pornography, it's probably your fault. If he's angry and abusive, you must've been disrespectful.
I've seen this play out in several ways, but here are a couple of examples. Sometimes if a girl is taught she's a piece of chewed-up gum if she has premarital sex, and the boy she's dating ignores her boundaries and assaults her, she may feel like she's damaged goods. Now, she thinks she has no choice but to marry him because she’s been taught no other man will want her. To clarify, that means she feels obligated to marry her rapist. Or she finds out soon after her wedding that her new husband has a raging porn addiction and she blames herself for not “submitting” by refusing to get the breast implants he was trying to convince her to get. So she promptly goes under the knife in a desperate attempt to "cure" him.
Now that I've had a great deal of healing and distance from this line of thinking, it infuriates me. This message doesn’t even remotely reflect the character of God. It’s uncaring, ungodly, and unbiblical. It has such a low view of both girls and boys. Why did it assume boys were just mindless, drooling, sex zombies? Why didn't it call them to more? The fruit of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control) applies to every believer. Every Christian is supposed to strive to love and care for each other the way God loves and cares for us (1 John 4:7-21).
When I look at the way Jesus treated women, I see him cherishing and validating and restoring and giving dignity and worth to them — no matter their background, social standing, or age — over and over and over. And where does he put the blame for lust in Matthew 5:27-30? On the person lusting. Not on the object of their lust.
As the mother of a son, my goal is to teach him to hold himself accountable for the way he views and treats women. His future girlfriend is not responsible for his behavior. It is not her job to keep him in line. His future wife is not a sanctified blow-up doll. He is perfectly capable of seeing women as whole people made in the image of God — not just a collection of body parts.
I married a man who was in my youth group. We endured this harmful teaching together. We've both had to unlearn some pretty awful things that were causing hurt between us. But I am grateful for our shared past because we understand each other. He sees me and knows me and loves me for who I am. But it is my hope that any remnant of this type of teaching disappears completely from the church because it has no place there.