Sheila: Welcome to the Bare Marriage podcast.  I’m Sheila Wray Gregoire from baremarriage.com where we like to talk about healthy, evidence-based, biblical advice for your sex life and your marriage.  And today we are going to be talking about how purity culture can so mess us up that we really need a plan to recover from it because if purity culture hurt you as a teenager growing up, you do not deserve to live with that kind of pain and problems for the rest of your life.  So let’s figure out how to untangle this mess and get you to health.  And we have Dr. Camden Morgante joining us for that.  So that’s going to be awesome.  Before we get to that interview, I want to say a special thank you to the people, who make this podcast possible, to our wonderful patrons, who give every month and who get access to our Facebook group and even unfiltered podcasts at different rates.  So you can give for as little as $5 or $8 a month, and that helps us keep doing what we’re doing.  And as well, our—the people who give to the Good Fruit Faith Initiative of the Bosko Foundation—that’s what helps us do our research, get in—get—write more academic papers.  We’ve got some exciting news on that coming up pretty soon, so that just gets the word out so that, hopefully, seminaries,  counseling programs, physiotherapists—they’re going to start teaching about this stuff differently, so that maybe all the toxic teachings can actually be a thing of the past and not the future.  So if you would like to give to those initiatives, the link is in the podcast notes.  And, of course, you can also help us just by rating this podcast five stars wherever you listen to it, by joining us on some other platform either Instagram or Facebook.  Our Facebook page was stolen back in August, but we have a really thriving new Facebook page.  So join us in those places or on Threads or especially join our email list because we found that social media platforms can get stolen.  But our email list can’t.  And that way you will always get access to the latest information about what’s going on at Bare Marriage, and it’s a pretty exciting place.  So please join us there.  And now without further ado, I’m going to bring Dr. Camden on the podcast.  Well, I am so glad to bring back to the podcast my friend and fellow author, Dr. Camden Morgante.  Hello, Dr. Camden.

Camden: Hi, Sheila.  Thanks for having me on again.  It’s been awhile since we’ve talked face to face.

Sheila: It has been.  And, Camden, you are a licensed psychologist.  We love licensing here at Bare Marriage.  And yeah.  We’ve talked a lot over the last few years, and I’ve watched you as you’ve been talking more and more about purity culture.  And now you have this awesome new book out that I wrote the forward to.  Yes.  So I have read this and fully endorse it.  Recovering From Purity Culture.

Camden: Yes.  Thank you.  Was this the first forward you’ve written?

Sheila: I am trying to remember.  I think I may have done one 10 or 12 years ago for a book I might not even agree with anymore.  Nothing specific is coming to mind.  Yeah.

Camden: Okay.  I know you had endorsed a lot, but I thought maybe it was the first forward, I guess, in awhile.  So that was an honor for me to have your name on the cover with mine.  

Sheila: Yeah.  I feel like Great Sex Rescue was written to women who were really struggling with the effects of purity culture in their marriages.  But this is really—the purity culture messages they got about marriage, but this is just purity culture itself.  It’s so good.  And it’s so practical.  And I think one of the things I said in the—in my endorsement was—or in the forward was please, please, please do the exercises.  Don’t just read it because it’s meant to be lived out.  It’s meant to be worked through if you want healing.  So in this interview, we are, of course, going to be covering the material.  But that’s not going to help healing because we have to do the exercises.  So this is Sheila saying at the very beginning.  Get the book and do the exercises.

Camden: Thank you.  Yeah.  I really wanted it to be experiential.  So it felt like people who read the book were going through a coaching session with me or therapy sessions with me but using the same exercises I do in my work.  So yeah.  I think that’s really what makes a difference because it’s not enough to just change your mind about your beliefs.  You really have to have the whole mind, body, heart, and soul connection.  So that’s what I aim to try to provide with those exercises in the book.

Sheila: Yeah.  So good.  Okay.  So let’s jump in to what’s actually in the book.  So this is all about purity culture and how we heal from it.  So before we start, what is purity culture?

Camden: Mm-hmm.  Well, my definition of it is that it was a largely evangelical movement that peaked in the late 1990s to 2000s that attempted to persuade young people to avoid sex before marriage using shame and fear as tools of control.  So I think that last part is really important because some authors or critics of purity culture will define it as just abstinence before marriage.  And to me, that’s not what purity culture is.  It was the belief in that.  But the methods to try to persuade people to do that, to abstain from sex until marriage, and so that’s what I found to be most harmful in my work and research is the myths that they use to try to persuade us and then also the shame and fear that it instilled in people. 

Sheila: Yeah.  So give us some examples.  I know you’ve got the rose with all the petals missing or—

Camden: Yeah.  That’s just the object lessons that some people saw in purity culture messages.  We’re like damaged roses, and that’s why I have roses on the cover of my book.  One that’s representing health and healing and growth, and one that’s damaged to represent what we were told we were if you give away pieces of yourself.  You’re this damaged and broken rose.  Yeah.  And so some people saw cups of water that were spit in or chewed up gum or paper torn in half and just all of those lessons encapsulated what I call the damaged goods myth, which I think is the most damaging because it just made people feel so much shame for even if they were sexually abused.  Something that they couldn’t control and didn’t ask for.

Sheila: Right.  And you grew up in the middle of this.  You grew up in just the heart of purity culture.  You got it.  You got lambasted with it as a teenager, and it didn’t serve you well at all.

Camden: Yeah.  I feel like I wrote my book mostly to Millenials because that’s what I am, and that’s the generation that was most targeted for purity culture.  And some people had a positive experience with it.  And I say in the book if you did I’m happy for you.  And there were some parts of it that I don’t regret or I am thankful for like I think the decision to wait until marriage is a respectful and honorable one, if that’s the person’s values.  But it didn’t serve me well when it came to my faith.  It made me really suffer a crisis of faith or a deconstruction of my faith because it felt like the promises that I was told didn’t work out.  And that’s what I see in a lot of the couples that I work with too.  People who didn’t even kiss until their wedding day and they’ve been married 20 years and they never enjoyed sex.  And they still have so much sexual shame and feel like sex is dirty and just never enjoy it because they can’t make that switch in their body just because they try to switch it in their mind.  And so yeah.  So purity culture did not help me when it came to my faith.  But yeah.  It had a lot of negative repercussions for other people when it came to their sexual intimacy, as you write about, and just in the way they relate to each other.  Male, female, marriage relationships, and then just your own sense of self body image too.

Sheila: Right.  Right.  So let’s set the stage just so that people know a little bit about your background.  So you go into university.  You have been raised in purity culture.  You’ve been a good Christian girl.  You’ve done everything right.  And you’ve been told that what you should expect is to meet someone amazing that you’re going to marry probably in your early 20s.    

Camden: Yes.  Yeah.  It was very much follow the rules and hold your end of the bargain, and God will uphold His which was to give me a fairy tale marriage and a prince.  And I went through a very devastating breakup of a relationship in college that I thought was going to be marriage for me.  And when that didn’t work out, that was really when my faith started to crumble and also started to question purity culture a little bit.  But mostly questioning my faith and the goodness of God and realizing that my whole faith had been on—built on this concept of purity or virginity.  And that’s really not what our faith is based on.  It’s not based on your virginity.  It should be based on your relationship with Christ.  And the fact that my faith was so threatened because I went through this breakup just shows how entwined those concepts were.

Sheila: Yeah.  You did eventually marry, but it was later.  How old were you again?   I forget.

Camden: I was about 30.  And when I tell some people that, they’re like, well, that’s about average, or that’s normal.  You tell other people that, and they’re like, oh yeah.  You met your husband later in life.

Sheila: But in the church that is older.  Often Christians get married—

Camden: Yeah.  In the church and in the south where I live.  It’s very common for people to have been married twice as long as me or have much older kids than me.  So that is something that just didn’t turn out the way I expected.  I’m so grateful for my husband now and grateful that we got married when I was little older because it allowed me time for spiritual and emotional growth that I wouldn’t have had if I had gotten married at 20 or 21.  But yet, it was painful going through those years of singleness and seeing all my friends get married.  And I was a bridesmaid six times.  It was hard to go though that and wonder why isn’t purity culture working out for me when I’ve done everything right.  It became this very selfish and prideful thing for me which I call the spiritual barometer myth.  That I thought I was this great Christian because of my purity and I based—again, based my faith on that.  And that made me very prideful and judgmental.  

Sheila: Right.  Right.  I think a lot of us can relate to that actually.  Okay.  So you talk in the book—and this is how you’re setting it up.  That a lot of us can name the harm that purity culture did to us.  A lot of us know the purity culture hurt us.  And like you said, it doesn’t hurt everybody, and there are—for a lot of people, there are some benefits.  You didn’t get pregnant at 16.  You didn’t get an STD or whatever.  But for a lot of us, there were some harm.  But what we don’t necessarily know how to do is heal, and that’s the point of your book is how do you actually heal.  We’re not just going to rip apart purity culture although you do do that.  But you really talk about how it is that you heal.  So when you say that purity culture caused us a lot of little t traumas, what do you mean by that?

Camden: Mm-hmm.  Little t traumas are distinguished from big t traumas.  Big t would be the things that we normally think of like combat trauma, sexual assault, someone in a school shooting or witness violence, things like that.  Little t traumas are more subtle.  It’s also sometimes called complex trauma when there’s just been a series of little things over time that have left a lasting negative impact on yourself and especially if it’s rooted in early childhood, which for many of us purity culture had its roots in early childhood.  The first time you were told you shouldn’t wear a two piece bathing suit, the first time you were told you should only date when you’re ready to get married, there’s all these early origins of it that start to get into your body to where it creates a sense of shame and even a trauma reaction in your body.  So I began to see that purity culture can cause trauma for some people meaning that it causes their body to react in a way as if sex becomes a trauma trigger even when they don’t have a history of sexual assault.  And I hear my clients say that every week.  Even though I’ve never been raped, why is my body reacting like that to sex?  And sometimes it’s very validating for them to hear me say that the research says purity culture survivors and survivors of sexual assault can look very similar when it comes to the way your body reacts to sex.  And that can be very validating and normalizing to them to hear that.  And so that’s why I said it’s like a series of little t traumas because of the reaction in your body that doesn’t leave even when you get older even if you no longer believe it.

Sheila: Yeah.  And this is what’s so key.  And it’s funny.  A lot of the books we’ve talked about on the podcast lately have said this from different angles whether it was parenting or—my conversation with Dr. Merry Lin last week or last month or whatever.  But it’s like because this stuff is in the body you can’t just think it away.  You can’t just change your mind and then all of the effects are gone.  

Camden: Right.  And that’s why there have been so many good books written about purity culture especially The Great Sex Rescue, which I recommend to all my clients.  And that has helped people start to see the harm of this and start to see what the truth is because you really—you replace it, in the book, with the rescue and reframing kind of sections in your book.  But yet, sometimes people still can’t make that body shift.  They still need the next step to help them, okay, now my mind knows what the myth is and what the truth is.  But how do I get my body and my heart on the same page?  I still have—when I say heart like the emotions.  They still have the fear and the shame and the anxiety about sex.  And then also the soul piece of how do I still hold on to my faith.  How do I still see sex as sacred and beautiful and spiritual when I’ve been told it’s dirty and wrong?  And how do I see God as someone who loves me and made me as an equal person when I’ve been told that, as a woman, I don’t have as much value or role as a man?  Yeah.  So there’s all of those pieces that really have to get in line in order to fully heal from purity culture.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  You open that section of your book talking about Michelle and Jack, who are just a typical couple.  Can you just share their story?  Because I think that will help people crystallize what you’re talking about what it looks like.

Camden: Yes.  Michelle and Jack are a composite of real couples that I have worked with who may be listening to the podcast.  And just couples that have been married 20 or more years, waited until their wedding day to kiss.  They had kissed dating goodbye.  They were courting.  And they thought by getting married young and following all the rules that things were going to turn out so great for them.  And then they come and see me, often, in their late 30s or early 40s, and they’re like we’ve just never enjoyed sex.  “And it’s not pleasurable for me,” says the wife.  And then the husband is like I don’t know what to do.  I’ve just been told sex was going to be easy and really told that I’m entitled to it as a male, so I don’t know how to make sense of this.  And the wife often feels really disconnected from her sexuality of I just don’t even feel like I’m a sexual person.  I don’t have any sexual desire.  And when we really dig deeper, it’s because she’s suppressed it for so many years.  And so yeah.  So Michelle and Jack are a composite of that couple that tells me we were the poster children for purity culture.  We’ve been faithful to each other.  We’ve faithfully followed Christ for all of these years, and we want to enjoy sex.  We love each other.  We have an overall healthy marriage.  But this part of our life we just cannot figure out.  And there’s so much grief that they carry when it comes to their sex life that we really have to walk through and help them honor that together as a couple.

Sheila: Yeah.  Now I want to start untangling some of the myths of purity culture that you talk about.  But let me just say.  People know this, right?  Michelle and Jack.  We’ve all heard stories like this at this point, right?  In the last few years, this has been coming out more and more and more that this is the result.  We tried this experiment of purity culture for roughly 20 years.  The evangelical church went all in.  And it still is in to a certain extent.  But 20 years we went all in.  And now we’re seeing the fruit of it, and it’s bad.  And therapists see this constantly.  This is one of the main things that therapists—marriage therapists—are working at today is untangling all of this.  Why do you think?  I mean this is just—this isn’t in your book.  This is just me asking you.  But why do you think some of the people that pushed it the most won’t admit it?  It drives me bonkers.  I think I, personally, would heal psychologically better if someone would just admit it.

Camden: Yeah.  I know.  I know.  That’s a very hard and painful part of this process.  But I think of it kind of like why a lot of parents make mistakes, and they won’t admit it especially—again, this is my generation.  We were raised on James Dobson, spank—break the will with spankings and the strong-willed child.  And now there’s a lot of research about how harmful that parenting style is, how all of us are trying to heal from it.  And I don’t know about other people, but my parents, and many parents, will just not acknowledge that that was harmful.  And it makes sense given what I know as a psychologist.  It’s hard for people to humble themselves and admit that they were wrong when they had good intentions.  I know my parents did, and I know most parents did.  And they just thought that they were doing what was right.  They were following what James Dobson said.  They just thought that was what they should do.  So I think that’s the same thing for a lot of these authors of purity culture is that, well, we had good intentions.  And we thought what we were doing was right.  And it becomes very hard for them to actually see the data that you provide right in front of their face and really admit that.  And sometimes those anecdotes of the people that it did work for stand out more in their mind than the people like Holly and Jack—or Michelle and Jack that I open the book with.  So I think that’s why.  But I know it’s painful for us, who have been harmed by it, to continue feeling like we’re trying and trying to get that message across, and we’re not getting the validation we’d like.

Sheila: Yeah.  It is hard.  It is hard.  So that’s why you know what?  We can’t rely on other people to change for our own healing.  We have to look at our own stuff.  If you’ve been enjoying this podcast, I have great news for you.  Next Monday night—so the day before her book, Recovering from Purity Culture, launches, we are going to be hosting a free webinar for Dr. Camden as she goes through each of the five purity culture myths and how those impact us.  And you can sign up.  It is totally free.  The link is in the podcast notes.  It’s going to be an awesome party.  And so let’s join together.  Let’s encourage Dr. Camden.  But let’s also encourage ourselves that we don’t need to live with this forever.  And we can actually get over these harmful teachings.  So please sign up.  The link is in the podcast notes.  So let’s move on to that.  So you talk about five big myths of purity culture.  We’re going to look at each of them in detail.  And then five cultures, which kind of promoted all of these myths.  So we’ve got modesty culture, rape culture, courtship culture, marriage culture, and purity culture.  And all five kind of went together and produced these five myths.  And if there was one ring to rule them all in Lord of the Rings parlance, it would be the idea of patriarchy, right?  The patriarchy binds them all together.  You talk about that.

Camden: Mm-hmm.  Yeah.  Patriarchy is the underlying current of all five of those cultures.  And I kind of describe how patriarchy is a part of each of those.  We can control women through their clothing.  We can blame women and exonerate men for sexual violations with rape culture.  We can idolize marriage and give women status and power if they’re married but devalue them if they’re not with marriage culture.  And courtship culture, men are in control of the dating decisions either your father or your future husband.  And then, of course, purity culture, we can control women’s sexuality with these myths and false promises.  So yeah.  So patriarchy is the root of all of them.  And even though, again, the authors of purity culture probably didn’t sit down and say, “How can we control women’s sexuality,” I think that was really—that was some of the undercurrent of we need another way to have some control over our young people that we feel like maybe we’re losing control over.

Sheila: Yeah.  I think that’s probably what happened is—and I’ve said this before.  The 80s was not a good time when it came to teenagers.  It wasn’t.  That’s when I was a teenager.  And there was so—teen pregnancy was sky high.  You had STDs.  You had the AIDS crisis.  You had alcohol use really high.  And people wanted to fix it for their kids, but the problem was because the church was already heavily patriarchal when it was looking for solutions it naturally went in that direction, right?  

Camden: And patriarchy is all about somebody else controlling your choices and your beliefs.  And purity culture completely took away any autonomy to decide your own beliefs and your own choices—sexual choices.  And so I spend a lot of time in my book trying to help people figure out what their values are so they can make their own values based choices rather than just even me, another expert, another author, another pastor, another teacher, whoever telling them what to believe or what to do.  Instead, I’d rather teach people how can I think about these issues.  How can I make a values informed decision when I’m thinking about my sexual ethic and what I believe about sex?  Instead of just telling them, “Well, here is what I believe, so this is what you need to believe too.” 

Sheila: Yeah.  Which is what—I mean that’s the heart of Jesus, right?  Is that we have to be authentic.  What we do should stem from our heart.  And so I can’t just impose beliefs on you.  You need to adopt them for yourself.  You need to think for yourself.  And that’s something that the church hasn’t always been very good at encouraging.  

Camden: Right.  That critical thinking was just not there.  It was just do what your pastor or your parents tell you to do.  And Jesus gave us freewill.  Like you said, Jesus gave us the ability to think through and make choices for ourselves.  And one of those ways that we make choices is the Bible.  But there’s other ways that we think about things too.  So I think offering people some tools for how to critically think about sex is important.

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  Really good.  Okay.  So let’s work through the five purity culture myths, which I love that you’ve delineated them this way.  So first, spiritual barometer myth.  What is that?

Camden: Yeah.  That’s the belief that you are a better Christian if you’re a virgin.  That those things are synonymous and that you can measure your spirituality by how far you’ve gone sexually.  I think for men reading Zachary Wagner and other men who have wrote books about purity culture and sex—their spirituality was measured by the number of times they masturbated per week.  It was just very narrow focused versus looking at your whole walk with Christ and how you’re following Him and honoring Him with your choices.  So yeah.  That myth made me, like I said earlier, very judgmental and prideful of other—of myself and judgmental towards other people which is not Christlike.  That’s not the fruits of the Spirit.

Sheila: I had exactly the same experience.  I remember—gosh.  Shortly after Keith and I were married, I was thinking about some people that I really did love.  They were close to me in my life and thinking how sad it was that they didn’t really know Jesus.  Okay?  And looking back at that now, I am amazed that I thought that because these were people who gave a ton of money away to the poor, were really involved in helping people in their community.  They went to church.  They didn’t go to the same kind of church I did, but they did go to church.  They actually read their Bibles more than I did from what I could tell.  But they didn’t have a problem when family members lived together, right?  And so because of that, I’m like, oh, well, they don’t really know Jesus.  All of the other stuff they were doing—and they were—they were married.  They were married.  They were faithful to each other.  They weren’t—it wasn’t that they, themselves, were doing anything.  It’s just that because they weren’t being judgmental about sex before marriage they weren’t real Christians.    

Camden: Mm-hmm.  As if judgmentalism is a fruit of the Spirit that we should judge people on instead of looking at their heart.  And I think that’s an example of what’s been called sexual exceptionalism.  That sex before marriage is just seen as this greater sin.  The unforgiveable sin some of the people I have worked with have called it.  And that’s just not the case.  That’s just not true.  That’s not biblical that one sin is ranked worse or even unforgiveable than all the others.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  It really is insane.  And then as you’re talking about how people can think this through, what is the difference between chastity and virginity?  Because I really like the fact that you raised this because this is a pet peeve of mine as well.     

Camden: Yeah.  Yeah.  I think chastity is a spiritual discipline and something that doesn’t end with marriage.  It’s really stewarding our sexuality in a way that’s faithful to Christ and to our beliefs.  And, for me, that looks—that looked like abstinence before marriage and faithfulness in my marriage.  Other people, they may—it may look different for them.  But to me, chastity just doesn’t end when you get married whereas purity or virginity was made to seem like it does end.  I don’t think purity ends.  But that’s another thing that I’ve seen clients have a hard time making a switch with is they get married and they’re like am I no longer pure because I had sex.  As long as you’re having sex within your marriage and it’s mutual and loving and things like that, then that’s not impure.  So that’s another head—mind shift that people have to make.

Sheila: Yeah.  And I also think if we say that virginity is the end all and be all of that is the purest thing then it’s like a 14-year-old girl before she’s really that knowledgeable about the world is the height of spiritual expression.  Is that really what we mean?  That it’s all downhill from there.  It’s really the wrong way to look at our identity.

Camden: It’s really limiting.  Mm-hmm. 

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  And infantilizing, I think, too for a lot of women.  Okay.  Myth number two is the fairy tale myth.  What’s that one?  

Camden: That is the myth that you’re going to have a fairy tale marriage and a spouse probably early and young if you follow the rules.  And as I said, this one affected the most because I really bought into it and really thought by wearing this true love waits ring I’m going to be wearing a wedding ring soon.  That that was just going to give me my fairy tale.  And I’ve seen this affect other friends too that have remained single longer than I did.  It really shook their faith because here they are approaching 40 and still single and not married and not a parent as they’ve always dreamed to be.  And it’s really hard to face that disillusionment and disappointment and grief when you’ve been told otherwise.  It feels like what’s the point or purpose of holding on to my virginity if God hasn’t held on to His end of the bargain.  And so in the book, I say there is no such bargain.  God didn’t promise us these things.  And we really aren’t promised an easy life even if we follow the rules or do what we feel like God’s asking us to do.  And that’s a hard truth to reconcile.

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  I think it’s also hard when, in the Christian culture and in a lot of political commentary right now, the idea of being single as a woman is seen as a negative.  Like you’re not really able to live out the Christian life then if you’re single and you don’t have kids.

Camden: There is so much work that the church needs to do to make singleness a celebrated vocation and life choice.  A valid life choice or just life station for people rather than just you kind of got the leftovers or you just—it’s second best.  It’s really treated like second class citizens, I think.  So yeah.  There’s so much more work to do.  There’s more books that need to be written on that topic specifically.  But yeah.  The marriage culture of really idolizing marriage and giving that preferred position doesn’t help.  It doesn’t.

Sheila: I had to laugh in this section too.  You quoted Dannah Gresh’s book, And the Bride Wore White.  You quoted one of my least favorite lines from it that I just laughed at.  You said, “It was a guarantee for us too as long as we waited.  The book even promised that if you wait then you’ll make babies with great celebration.  But those who don’t wait would get Chlamydia, the author warns, which may lead to infertility and no babies ever.”     

Camden: Yes.  That is a quote.  

Sheila: Yeah.  It is.  No babies.  Period.  Ever.  Period.  That’s actually in her book.

Camden: It is.  It is.  And can that happen?  I’m sure it’s—statistically, it can.  But just presenting that as if it’s a guaranteed thing to happen or even a very likely thing to happen is very misleading, very untruthful.  And there’s no guarantees that sex will be amazing if you wait either as I wouldn’t have a career, I guess, and probably you wouldn’t either if it was—that was true.

Sheila: Exactly.  But I think with this fairy tale myth there’s also a lack of discernment when it comes to choosing a mate because if the main thing is just to find someone who is a Christian, who is committed to waiting just like you are, and then get married as soon as possible, there hasn’t been a lot of discipleship on how to actually discern someone’s character.

Camden: Yeah.  I interviewed a few women, who were divorced for the book, because I wanted to include that perspective since that’s not my lived experience.  And all of the women I interviewed got married at 20 to their first love.  And all of them were divorced within 5 to 10 years.  And they all said purity culture was largely responsible for my divorce because I was not taught how to be emotionally healthy myself.  I was not taught how to look for an emotionally healthy mate.  I was told just marry a Christian, who is saving himself, and that’s enough.  And frankly, that’s not enough.  That’s what one of my interviewees said, and I loved that quote because that is not enough to base a marriage on of we just—we both identify as Christians, and we both are virgins.  That’s not enough to make that lifelong commitment to each other on.  So you’re absolutely right.  It took away discernment and critical thinking when it comes to spouse selection too and being healthy—emotionally healthy people ourselves as well.

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  And I know Tia Levings made a big point of that when I interviewed her for her book, The Well Trained Wife.  Yeah.  It was like as soon as you get married that’s all you need to do.  And then you just act out gender roles, and everything will work.  And it was just this—and I don’t know why.  I mean I did marry young.  And my kids both married young.  So this is—I mean this is hard for me to talk about because I know that my experience was actually good with marrying young.  But we were also mature.  But I don’t personally think that we should be pressuring people to marry young.  I think we should be really encouraging people to get emotionally healthy.

Camden: Yes.  Yeah.  You and your daughters had a positive experience with getting married young.  And, certainly, many people do.  We all know the couple who got married young and has been married 50 years.  But I agree.  We should be spending more time and more emphasis on you being emotionally healthy and mature and spiritually healthy and the best partner you can be for yourself or for someone else rather than just so much emphasis on what do boys like and how can you be that and how can you perform gender roles as you said.  So yeah.  I will not be encouraging my kids to just put all that emphasis on who they marry.  I will encourage them to focus on themselves and being healthy people themselves.

Sheila: That, honestly, is my prayer for the church because I think if we could focus so much more on emotional health then if people got married those marriages would be better.  And if they didn’t get married, that would be okay too because we’re not a marriage focused culture anymore.  We’re not a marriage focused church because I think when we become a marriage focused church there is no place for people who are single.  And it does mean that people often can’t be honest about the struggles in their marriages because marriage is an end all and be all.  So yeah.  I just wish we could focus on emotional health instead.  And, again, if you do the exercises in Recovering from Purity Culture, you can grow those emotional health things.  Okay.  So that was the fairy tale myth, which is the one that affected you.  And now we have the flipped switch myth.  What is that?

Camden: Yeah.  Every time I say that name people are automatically like, oh, I know what you mean by that.  Once you get married you just flip that switch, and sex is automatically going to be amazing.  And like I said, we—I wouldn’t have had to write this book if that were the case because so many people don’t find that to be true once they get married.  That sex is a learned skill just like everything else.  And I had the benefit of already having my doctorate when I got married.  I had already had training as a sex therapist even though I was single and had all that knowledge.  And I really believe that having sex education is the number one way people can prepare for their marriage and communicating about it with your spouse or soon-to-be spouse.  In purity culture, we weren’t really allowed to talk about that because it was—it would open the door to temptation.  But it’s like when you’re engaged, you need to be able to talk about your sexuality and your sexual past and things like that.  And then once you’re married, you need to be able to continue to talk about it openly.  And so many couples I work with, even though they’ve been married for so long and they have kids together and everything, they’re just still really ashamed to talk about it and really inhibited when they try to talk about sex or just talk about what they like and things like that.  So yeah.  So my hope is that by reading books like this and yours and other books that people will get some of that sex education that they missed out on growing up.

Sheila: Yeah.    And because you did—one of the big things you brought up in this section which I so appreciated is that one of the reasons that we seem so hyper focused on intercourse as the main event in sex is because that is the thing that is forbidden until you’re married.  And so then when you’re married, that becomes the thing we’re supposed to do even though, for most women, it’s the other stuff that’s the main event.

Camden: Exactly.  Yeah.  Because couples will equate sex with intercourse or even just intimacy is intercourse, and I try to get them to expand that view of intimacy.  It’s anything that makes you feel close and connected to your spouse.  And as far as physical intimacy, it could be anything physically that makes you feel connected.  It does not have to be just intercourse.  So that definitely deemphasizes some of the other sexual or physically intimate activities that are more pleasurable for women.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  For sure.  And I laughed at—you also said one of the things that really bugs you is when Instagram influencers or social media influencers or authors, whatever, go on about how amazing the honeymoon was because it really does set people up for disappointment.  

Camden: Yeah.  Now if it was great, I’m so happy for you again, but don’t perpetuate that myth or that fantasy.  And also just, as a therapist, I just question if they’re telling their therapist a different story, if they even go to therapy.  Behind closed doors—

Sheila: Do you remember Josh Harris talked about how great the honeymoon was?  But then his ex-wife wrote her memoir, and it’s like no.  It wasn’t.  It was actually quite awful.  So yeah.  You do have to wonder, right?   

Camden: What the truth is.

Sheila: Yeah.  And then I just think people—when you are talking to people who aren’t married yet, even if your experience on your honeymoon was really good, I think it’s just still so important to say, “But a lot of people—it takes them awhile to figure out—to figure things out.  Don’t rush yourself.  If there’s pain, take that seriously.  Don’t push through pain.”  Even if you, yourself, had a good experience, it doesn’t mean that you need to tell people, oh yeah, it’s going to be great.  You can still issue warnings of what a lot of people do go through.

Camden: Mm-hmm.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Because it’s a reality that it can be painful at first.  And you’re not always prepared for that, or you think it won’t happen to me.  But yeah.  Getting help sooner rather than later and just being honest about the work that it takes to have good intimacy.

Sheila: Yeah.  And a lot of what you talk about is pain because that is so much of what you see in your counseling office, and, as we know, this is a huge issue for evangelical women especially is, like you said, our bodies—when we’ve had such traumatic messages about sex, our bodies just try to protect us from sex.  

Camden: Mm-hmm.  Exactly.  Yeah.  It makes sense that your body would clench up and would not want to go any further, would put the brakes on.  And that takes a lot of work to undo, but it is possible.  I see clients while they’re going to pelvic floor physical therapy, and then I see them for the more psychological side.  And it’s a process of really getting comfortable with their bodies because, maybe for so long, they’ve been disembodied.  They’ve really lived outside of their bodies and so even learning just how to inhabit their bodies again feels very foreign or even scary.  And you’re not going to experience much sexual pleasure if you can’t stay in your body.

Sheila: Yeah.  Exactly.  And this gets into the next myth, the gatekeeper’s myth.  Just giving women agency again which is huge.  So what is the gatekeeper’s myth?

Camden: The gatekeeper’s myth is the idea that women are the gatekeeper’s of sexuality.  Responsible for putting the brakes on before marriage and constantly monitoring those boundaries.  And then after marriage, they have to be joyfully available as Michelle Duggar said.  So yeah.  I feel like this is one that you have addressed so much in The Great Sex Rescue.  And I quote you and some of your research and just the effects of that myth in my book because it sets up such inequality right from the get go.  It really can set up men for a lot of entitlement and set up women for just sex is for him.  It’s not for me.  So there’s no focus on her and her pleasure and her desires.  Yeah.  So it’s very damaging to the couple.

Sheila: Yeah.  And it’s really, like you said too—and I appreciate that you brought this out.  It’s damaging for men because it tells men, basically, you’re deviants.  Right?  You’re disgusting.  You can’t control yourself.  And so you need someone else to control you because you’re incapable of it.  So that’s such a low view of masculinity.

Camden: And that sex is the only way to give and receive love.  I don’t think this is just a purity culture thing.  But men have been taught that sex is either the primary or only way to really give and receive love.  And so I hear, “Well, I need sex to feel loved.  I need her to give me sex in order to feel close to her.”  And it’s like you’re ignoring and discounting all the other ways that she shows you love like going to work, like making a meal, like caring for your kids.  There’s other ways that you give and receive love besides just intercourse.  That’s a very immature view of love and connection if that’s the only way you know how to do that.

Sheila: Yeah.  And sex can be something which is super passionate and does make you feel super close.  But it’s not going to do that if you’re putting that kind of pressure on it.  Right?  

Camden: Right.  Yeah.  It’s not going to feel close and connecting if it feels like an obligation or if it feels manipulated or just—yeah.  Something she has to do out of duty.  Yeah.  So the couples I enjoy working with are when the husbands say, “I want it to be good for her too.  I don’t want her to say yes if she’s not in the mood.”  It’s like okay.  The spirit of mutuality is there.  Let’s work on making it safe for her to say no.  And that will lead to a drop in frequency.  But frequency is not the best measure of the sexual wellbeing and health of your marriage, so that’s a mindset shift many men have to make.

Sheila: Exactly.  And sometimes it leads to a drop in frequency temporarily until she feels totally safe, realizes that, no, he isn’t going to self combust if he doesn’t get an orgasm every 72 hours or something.  And once she actually feels free, she—her libido suddenly surges because she rediscovers her sexuality or discovers it for the first time.

Camden: Yeah.  It may especially if they’re paying more attention to her pleasure and those other sexual activities that are more pleasurable for her instead of just emphasizing intercourse.

Sheila: Yeah.  Exactly.  I think this is the myth that really affected me mostly because I was actually pretty purity culture free until we almost—until just before marriage.  I grew up before purity culture.  I was in Canada, so it wasn’t—we’re like 10 years behind the U.S. in a lot of trends in Christianity.  So it really hadn’t come up yet.  But then someone gave me the book The Act of Marriage to read about three months before my wedding, and that just—I really think that was a lot of the problem that I had when I first got married and, likely, a major factor in the vaginismus that I suffered from which I’ve talked about in my books.  Because until then, sex had been something I was really looking forward to.  We didn’t have sex.  But we kissed.  All that sort of thing.  And I did because I enjoyed it, and it was fun.  But all of a sudden I read The Act of Marriage, and it was like, oh, I’m not allowed to say no anymore.  Suddenly, I’m not doing—this isn’t—sex isn’t something I’m doing because I want to.  He actually has the right to touch me whether or not I want him to.  And it wasn’t even that I didn’t want him to.  I did.  But that idea that my agency is gone and that I don’t matter was just really traumatizing to me.

Camden: Mm-hmm.  That your body doesn’t belong to you anymore.

Sheila: Yeah.  Mm-hmm.  Yeah.  Yeah.  And I think that’s probably why we found that evangelical women suffer from vaginismus at about two and a half times the rate of the general population.  As we were sharing on the podcast last month, our paper that’s coming out in the Sociology of Religion journal is talking about sexual pain.

Camden: That’s awesome.  Yeah.  I quote that statistic a lot.  I actually had just my annual visit to my gynecologist a few weeks ago, and I was talking to the nurse practitioner.  You know, Christian women have a 2.5 times higher vaginismus—and she’s like, okay, yeah.  And I said, “Do you see that?”  And I’m like just trying to be an ambassador for this because they’re the people who are probably going to see it first when a patient calls them with pain.

Sheila: Yeah.  Exactly.  All right.  The fifth and last one is the damaged goods myth.  What is that one?

Camden: Mm-hmm.  The idea that you’re damaged goods if you go too far or if you aren’t a virgin or even if you’ve been sexually abused before marriage.  And this just creates so much shame for everyone because everybody has got something with their bodies that they feel shame about or with their sexual pasts that they feel shame about.  And yeah.  I just see it creating so much shame and disconnection amongst couples and even just amongst women.  Again, that disconnection from their bodies and from their sexuality.  

Sheila: I think the name of the myth is so interesting too.  The damaged goods.  I think that’s the point is that women are seen as consumables, not as people, right?  We are something that can be used up.  We are consumed.  We are goods.

Camden: We are goods.  Yeah.  An object rather than—yeah.  An autonomous subject.  Mm-hmm.

Sheila: Yeah.  And there’s a lot of different things that go into that.  Yeah.  The idea that we talk about virginity as the main thing.  Well, what happens with a sexual abuse survivor, right?  Or we talk a lot about soul ties.  This is a big teaching.  We didn’t mention this one in The Great Sex Rescue just because we already had so much to say, and we didn’t feel this one related as much to marriage.  But that was actually one of the most damaging beliefs that we measured.  And we talk about it in our paper.  And it was highly correlated with sexual pain as well even among women who had waited for marriage for sex.  Because I think when you tell people if you have sex with someone, you form this tie.  And you will never actually be completely free of them which is not a biblical message.  You think about Roman times.  And in some of the cities where Paul was going and giving the Gospel message and thousands of people come to Christ and he didn’t do a mass exorcism for everyone’s soul ties, right?  These people had been having sex with temple prostitutes, for pity’s sake, right?  And he’s not doing—it just—anyway, but sex takes on this kind of threatening aspect where it can ruin you for life.  And so even if you do everything right, sex is still something which is scary.  

Camden: Yeah.  And even just all the messages about breaking your hymen.  That’s scary too.  Yeah.  This fear of I’m going to bleed, and I’m going to be aching for days.  Yeah.  It becomes this very scary and threatening thing rather than something that’s beautiful and shared.  

Sheila: Right.  Right.  And by the way, you can break your hymen through lots of things.  I should do a whole podcast on hymens at some point.  It’s super interesting.  The new research that’s coming out.  But anyway, okay.  So in your book, you talk about all these myths, and then you talk about our faith because—and this is what I realized in writing Great Sex Rescue is this isn’t just about marriage.  This isn’t just about sex.  This is actually how we see God, how we experience God.  And when we realize that so much of what we were taught isn’t right, it really throws you for a tailspin with your faith.

Camden: Mm-hmm.  Yeah.  That’s why I say it was—purity culture was the reason for my faith deconstruction.  And I don’t see deconstruction as a bad thing.  I see it as a normal and healthy and part of the maturity and development process of making your faith your own and of rethinking your beliefs and being able to discern what is true and biblical and what was cultural and myth.  So yeah.  It deeply affected my faith, and I see that in a lot of people because—yeah.  If we’ve been hurt by it, it’s what’s left.  What’s left and who can we trust if the church has hurt us in this way.  So deconstruction can be a painful part of this process.

Sheila: Yeah.  Especially, again, if the church isn’t admitting that it hurt you or if your church isn’t admitting that, yeah, this stuff was wrong.  I think that’s where it can get really, really hard.  So what is deconstruction to you?  

Camden: It’s the process of rethinking your beliefs.  It’s the process of really being able to tease apart what’s healthy and what’s not.  And I give some examples in the book of how this is a healthy part of spiritual development from—just from psychological theories.  It’s a part of our development just like physical and mental development.  We are naturally going to think more—with more complexity as we get older.  And those who don’t can remain at some of those earlier stages of development where things are much more black and white, and they can judge the people who are farther along in those stages as you’re backsliding.  When actually, we’re moving forward because we’re development more nuance with our faith and more—putting more critical thought into it and seeing how this might be true for me but not for someone else.  And just some of those nuances that are just really not taught in many evangelical churches.

Sheila: Yeah.  And it’s that nuance that you’re trying to bring to that conversation about, okay, so if we’ve rejected these purity culture myths, if we’re deconstructing our faith, how do we reconstruct a sexual ethic?  What do we do?  

Camden: Mm-hmm.  Yeah.  That was probably the trickiest chapter to write in the whole book because my hope was to not be prescriptive.  Again, of here’s what you should believe just because I believe it.  But really to help people think through here’s some tools for how to figure out your beliefs.  And that’s what I do with my clients though.  A licensed therapist is not allowed to tell people what they should believe or what they should do.  So if people ask me, “Well, what do you believe about premarital sex,” I say, “It’s not about what I believe.  It’s about what you believe, and let’s talk about how you figure that out.”  So really getting to know yourself and getting to know your values and examining your theology beyond just don’t have sex.  But looking at what is the purpose of sex?  Who has authority over my body?  And what is sin?  And what is forgiveness?  And just some of those more foundational theologies really are what our sexual ethic is built out of.

Sheila: Yeah.  It is funny because when you look at Scripture there isn’t actually a verse that you can point to that says don’t have sex before marriage.  In the Old Testament, the sin was having sex with a married woman.  It wasn’t—and if you slept with a virgin, you just had to marry her.  It wasn’t as obvious as we think.  And in the New Testament, it does talk about the word porneia, which can be translated as sexual immorality or fornication, whatever.  But, again, that isn’t actually defined as to what that means.  So I think there’s a lot of assumptions that they’re talking about sex before marriage.  And I think you could make—you could certainly make the case for that.  But when people say, “Well, it’s obvious in the Bible,” it actually isn’t. 

Camden: It actually isn’t.  Yeah.  We have to look at the greater story of Scripture and piece that together with other sources of truth and forms of knowledge.  And I share, for me, looking at the big story of God’s covenant with His people and how He promises to love us unconditionally and be in the covenant with us, that commitment with us, that, for me, helped me form my sexual ethic of really still holding on to that belief in premarital sexual abstinence and sexual faithfulness in marriage.  But other people come to different conclusions.  And I think I support that.  I just want people to go through the process of thinking it through and not just accepting either what the church says, which is that ethic of shame, or what the world says of just—as long as there’s consent, you’re free to do whatever.  More of that hook up culture mindset.  And I think that’s very shallow too.  There’s more than just consent although consent is necessary.  There is more than consent to a good sexual ethic.  A robust one.  

Sheila: Yeah.  One thing Rebecca says all the time—my daughter, Rebecca, is that hedonism is not a sexual—is not a Christian virtue.  Christianity has always been against hedonism.  It doesn’t mean that we’re against passion or pleasure.  But we’re not for pleasure for pleasure’s sake, in and of itself.  Divorced from any meaning, right?  And I think that—yeah.  That needs to be remembered as well.  I’m with you.  I would come to the Scripture.  I would come to looking at church history, looking at reason, looking at all of these different things, and I would come to a very similar sexual ethic, I think, in that if we’re supposed to show kindness and respect to others and honor dignity that does mean that sex is saved, right?  But like you, I would also say I think it’s important that people come to their own decision because insisting on one thing has actually done some harm.  So I think if we can—which is different.  I mean with your own kids, obviously, you want to tell them what you hope for them, right?  And what you think God is telling you.  I think that’s really important. 

Camden: Yeah.  But that’s why it was so important to me that the book not be arguing for a particular sexual ethic.  I thought my readers, my audience, my clients—they don’t need one more book that tells them what to believe from a supposed expert.  They really need to do the process of thinking through it themselves and having that freedom to think through it themselves.  So yeah.  So I hope people can come to it and feel like they walk away with tools and not just an easy answer.

Sheila: Yeah.  Because when you do think about what is sex supposed to be and how—what does passion actually look like, I think—personally, I think you do come to the realization that this is meant for that kind of committed relationship.    

Camden: And some of the people I interviewed—one of them said, “For me, it’s more than just does the Bible say this or not.  It’s about the safety that a healthy marriage can provide.”  That she said, “I need that level of safety to have the vulnerability that sex requires.  The self expression.”  And so I think marriage can—a healthy marriage, again, can provide that level of safety that’s missing in hook up culture.

Sheila: But isn’t that also what God meant?  Isn’t that one of the reasons that God ordained marriage for us that way so that we could be truly vulnerable with each other?  We could be truly authentic.  We could be all these things in a safe place.  So yeah.  No.  Really well done.  And then just at the very end, you did talk—you had a really good chapter on singleness and sexuality, and that is a question that I get asked a lot is where do single people fit.  Do single people have sexuality?      

Camden: Mm-hmm.  Yeah.  And I argue in that chapter that sexuality is something we have from birth.  Not that babies are sexualized, but that it’s our inherent need for connection and attachment and longing for union with others.  And so I argue that we all have a sexuality.  That you don’t have your sexual debut on your wedding night or when you have sex for the first time.  That you debuted at your birth day as a sexual being.  So I wanted to honor single people in that chapter and also include the stories of women who are divorced or widowed or single and never married and just how purity culture affects them uniquely.  So yeah.  I’m glad you liked that chapter.

Sheila: Yeah.  And, again, you think throw masturbation, not telling anyone what to think but just here’s questions to ask yourself.  I appreciated that too.  So yeah.  Okay.  As we’re wrapping up, can you give me an example—because every chapter has a number of exercises and things you can work through to help you move through the trauma of a lot of these things.  What’s an example of an exercise that someone might do?

Camden: Yeah.  There’s so many.  There’s over 30 exercises or skills or tools or concepts in the book.  But the one that just came to mind as we were talking about your kids is the very—kind of the very last one in the book.  I’m going to pull it up here, so I can—is a reparenting exercise.  First, writing a letter to yourself at a pivotal moment in your sexual story.  Maybe when you were first told about sex or the first time you read a purity culture book or got your true love waits ring.  And telling yourself what you wish you had heard because that’s the work of reparenting is giving yourself what you didn’t get.  Now as an adult, you can give that to yourself.  And then in part two, I say write a letter to your children as adults and what you want them to believe about their bodies and about sex.  And in the book, I say like I would love it if my kids were virgins when they got married, but that is not my top goal for them.  I really would rather them be equipped with knowledge and self respect and respect for others and a strong relationship and connection that they’ve maintained with me and my husband, hopefully, and just a strong relationship with God.  I’d rather them come away with all of that than just never have had sex on their wedding day.  That’s, again, just a very narrow definition of what I want for them.  So I think writing that letter to yourself and then write it to your children of what they—what you want them to come away with.  And I think that can be a very powerful exercise.  If you really, like you said, do the work, take the time to do it, take the time to journal about it, it can be very powerful to reparent yourself in that way.

Sheila: Yeah.  I love that.  Okay.  Well, thank you, Camden, for all of this.  And thank you for writing the book.  I really feel like this is the next piece for both—I mean it goes great with both Great Sex Rescue and She Deserves Better, if you loved those books.  Because we were pointing out all the problems and how people went wrong.  But now what do we do?  And how do we handle our questions about God now?  And what if this has really thrown us for a tailspin?  And so yeah.  I really appreciate the work that went into this because not everyone can afford a therapist, right?

Camden: Right.  Yes.  But yeah.  Hopefully, they can afford the book.  And that can provide them.  Although it never replaces therapy, it can provide you with a lot of the insight and tools that you need so yeah.

Sheila: Exactly.  All right.  Well, the book launches in, I think, five days.        

Camden: October 15.  Yeah.

Sheila: October 15.  Okay.  I don’t know what day it is today.  I don’t know when this is airing, but it’s very, very soon.  So you can go—if you order it now, you are guaranteed the lowest price, if you order it on Amazon or elsewhere, I believe.  So if enough people order it, they often drop the price if enough people preorder it.  So go preorder it now.  You will be charged the lowest price.  And you will get it.  If you order eBook, it’ll show up on your kindle on the day that it launches.  And they might even be shipping paperbacks by now because often they ship paperbacks a couple days early.

Camden: Yeah.  And we have some amazing bonuses too.  If you preorder and then fill out the preorder bonus form on my website, you get the audio book for free, which I narrated.  

Sheila: Oh cool.  Okay.

Camden: Yeah.  So you get that.  It’s kind of like two books for the price of one.  You get a workbook with all of the tools from the book so that you can journal and actually interact with the material, a discussion guide that you can use with groups, or on your own.  And then I recorded myself for eight guided meditations, so I’m guiding you through the meditations in the book if you like to listen or watch instead of just reading.

Sheila: Oh, that is awesome.  Okay.  So listen.  If you preorder it now, you’re going to get guided meditations.  You’re going to get a special workbook with all the exercises with spaced journal, et cetera.  You’re going to get a free audio book, which is great, and you get all of that if you fill out the form on Camden’s site.  So we’re going to put the link to that in the podcast notes, so you can go and get that right now.  Just preorder and then send in all the info and you will get that stuff immediately.  That’s awesome.

Camden: Yeah.  And you get to read Sheila’s forward too.

Sheila: Yes.  That’s right.  That’s right.  So thank you so much.  And you are Dr. Camden on all the social media channels, aren’t you?  Is that where I usually find you?

Camden: Yes.  Yes.  Dr. Camden.  And my website is drcamden.com.  So yeah.  People can find me there.  And I hope the book is really a healing resource for everyone.  And like you said, the next step of what people need in their healing.

Sheila: Yeah.  Awesome.  Well, thank you so much.  

Camden: Yeah.  Thank you.  Thanks for all your work.

Sheila: I really, really appreciate it when psychologists and trained counselors write books to help us with really practical steps on how we can get over these myths and these toxic teachings.  I’ve shared with you several authors, who have done that lately, on this podcast.  And I think that’s so crucial.  And I hope that from now on when we look at parenting resources, at marriage resources, at sex resources, we will look for people who have been trained in this area, who do research, who know what they’re talking about and not just the pastors and others that we’ve relied on in the past because it’s time to turn the page.  And it’s time to recover from purity culture, so please check out Dr. Camden’s book.  It is awesome.  And join us for our free webinar next Monday night, October 15, and the link to join up is in the podcast notes.