Episode 253 (Transcript): Revisiting Purity Culture | A Conversation with C.A. Larson

Episode Transcript

Many thanks to listener Summer Kartchner for her work in transcribing this episode!

This episode can be found on any podcast app or can be listened to here on our website as well. All the notes and resources we cited in the episode are found at this link as well:

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CAL: And healing is not about becoming more sexual or less sexual, it’s about embracing our agency that we should have had all along. It’s about relearning consent, trusting bodily signals, separating worth from obedience, reclaiming choice, going slowly and allowing ambivalence. You don’t owe your body to doctrine and you don’t owe your healing to anyone else’s timeline.

SH: Hello, I’m Susan Hinkley.

CW: And I am Cynthia Winward.

SH: And this is At Last she Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things, and the title of today’s episode is Revisiting Purity Culture, A Conversation with CA Larson.

Cynthia: CA is in the house today.

CW: I’m so excited.

SH: Our listeners are as excited as we are. I’m sure. I think that you’ve been on the podcast every season except last season.

CAL: Oh yeah, that might be true, but I’m always happy to be here.

SH: Welcome, CA. Well, we’re thrilled to have you. We are calling this episode Revisiting Purity Culture because some of our listeners may remember that we took on this topic previously in episode 112, with Colette Dalton, so it’s been 150 episodes since we visited it. And I wish I could say that all of the problems had been resolved and disappeared since then. But unfortunately, Cynthia and I got a message just this week, or maybe it was someone in our chat that said something about sitting through a relief society lesson about chastity.

For 50 and 60-year-old women. Do you remember that, Cynthia? And we laughed out loud. I mean, they were talking about things like watching racy movies and stuff like that. Bridgerton I think maybe came up. I mean, just ridiculous.

CW: It never ends!

SH: No matter what age women get to, you can’t age out of it.

CW: unbelievable.

SH: It continues. And so we figured it was high time to take it on again. So we’re gonna pretty much just turn it over to you. CA the notes look amazing, so listeners prepare to need to lie down.

CAL: Okay. Maybe that could be included in our warning about this episode. If you feel a need to lie down, it’s okay to do that. But also, more seriously, I wanted to just let you know that if this conversation feels overwhelming in any way that you can pause, you can skip ahead or you can stop altogether.

Nothing we talk about today requires you to relive anything you are not ready to. We’re gonna talk about purity culture in the LDS church, what it is, why it’s harmful, how it creates conditions for abuse, and how it deeply affects marriage and intimacy. We’ll also talk about healing and healthier approaches to sexuality and self-worth.

So, all right, that’s our preamble.

CAL: So I’m just gonna jump right in. I think everyone, well, no, I won’t say that because I have had some people say to me when I brought it up in other settings well, what is purity culture?

And so I just wanna kind of expand our definition of purity culture today and say it’s not just about modesty and chastity, it’s so much bigger than that.

It’s about a moral control system that ties worth to sexual behavior, especially for women. It places responsibility for men’s behavior on women. It frames the body as dangerous and it uses shame and surveillance to enforce obedience. Dr. Laura Anderson, who I quoted a lot in my last episode, I think I did the one about religion and spirituality.

CW: Right.

CAL: She said that purity culture, externalizes morality and internalizes shame.

And that’s, I think, how that’s a good summary and it spills over into so much of our Mormon culture. And so I just hope that will become more clear through our conversation about all of the effects of it that aren’t just about modesty and chastity.

SH: Right.

CAL: I think Colette mentioned this in her episode, but if you google purity culture, you’ll get, mainly, you’ll get how purity culture had its roots in the 1990’s-2000’s as an evangelical Christian movement. It emphasized sexual abstinence before marriage, modesty as a moral obligation and sexual history as a measure of personal worth.

Evangelical churches popularized the idea of purity with purity rings, father-daughter purity balls and other events celebrating young girls pledging their virginity to their fathers and to God. Which, kind of has an ick factor for me. It,

SH: It’s so weird to me. It’s so weird. And I think a lot of Latter- day Saints hear the phrase purity culture and they think, well, that’s not a Mormon thing.

CAL: Yeah.

SH: That’s an evangelical thing, right? Yeah. That’s not but I think it’s important for people to understand that this is. Bigger than any denomination or even just religion. This is a cultural thing. This has been a [00:05:00] pervasive thing forever.

CAL: And it’s really spilled over into politics recently. So we can’t ignore how that’s become part of this whole culture. But if we look specifically at the LDS church, actually we have a long lead on the evangelicals because even though they weren’t presented in the same way, we’ve been promoting purity culture for decades.

And I would suggest even all the way back to the beginning of our religion. Even though it looked different then, but it really does begin with Joseph Smith of polygamy.

CW: Yeah. It does.

CAL: Young women marrying older men, and not always consent. But even if there was consent, it was often because of what the culture was teaching them about their place in the world and their obligation.

And if someone tells you God wants you to do this, then how does consent even come into that conversation? And then Brigham Young famously said that when they came to Salt Lake, that they had no need for houses of prostitution because they marry the women.

CW: Right.That’s the cure to polygamy.

I had no idea until I read, A House Full of Females by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, that it was something that they actually proselytized. They were proud that monogamy is what drives men to prostitution, but polygamy solves that problem. I was like, you’ve got to be kidding me. That was actually the company line.

CAL: It’s awful. And I mean, when you think about it in the context of today, we would probably label that something totally different, and something illegal, but that’s how we began.

That is part of our history and basically it’s all about men. It’s about what you were just saying, Cynthia, about men and being monogamous. And this is how we can solve that problem. We don’t actually make them be monogamous, we give them a whole bunch of women.

So I think there will be more about that as we go through the discussion, but just as just kind of bringing us forward for 150 years, women pledged their obedience to their husbands in the temple.

They were asked to veil their faces. Men could be and still can be sealed to many women, but not women, to not more than one man. We essentially have no power, even if it seems that recently they’re determined to convince us otherwise. And women needing to be pure has always been the priority.

CW: I have a question.I was thinking CA, like you were saying earlier we haven’t used in our LDS church, we haven’t used that phrase purity culture. I mean, ‘cause we were saying that’s more evangelical, but other than, like Susan was just saying, we heard about this Relief Society lesson where it was about the law of chastity.

Has that been our go-to phrase - “law of chastity,” or did we have our own little euphemisms instead of purity culture?

CAL: I, I think we kind of lump it in with modesty and chastity. I think those are the two buzzwords that we’ve mostly used. I don’t know if we have an exact replica of purity culture. I think that’s why people don’t resonate with it as much. They’re well, what is purity culture?

Because that isn’t always part of the language that we use to describe it.

CAL: But in our church it has been alive and well. And it’s part of both a structural part of our church, the theological underpinnings and it’s behaviorally enforced.

So that would include things like the law of chastity, interviews with adult male leaders, and I’ll get into that a little bit in a minute. Sexual worthiness for temple access, modesty standards placed only on women. The idea that a virtuous woman is priceless.That’s the messaging about we wanna put ‘em up on a pedestal and worship them, right?

But that isn’t really what we want. That doesn’t give women any power to be up on a pedestal. And early marriage is a protection, again, sexual sin that’s gonna come into play here too.. So let me kind of describe that. So, in LDS purity culture, sexual thoughts are policed.

Sexual behavior is moralized. Sexual history is seen as permanent spiritual damage. Women are framed as both guardians and liabilities. Your body is not yours. It belongs to God, the church and your future husband. Okay, so oftentimes from the pulpit we hear people talk about priesthood and motherhood, right?

Yes. Like we, women don’t need to have the priesthood because they have, they’re mothers, they have motherhood. And that has never made sense to me. But I now think it’s a structural component to establish who is in charge and in control, because we don’t say motherhood and fatherhood.

Those are actually more equal ground to two people. Coming together and raising children. One woman says, I went from the control of my [00:10:00] father to my mission president, to my husband. I’ve had no real autonomy in my life. And they are worried about this pattern of compliance not continuing in this generation.

And that is why there’s talks like Camilla Johnson’s about not having children right away in marriage and about the recent remarks from President Oaks about lowering the mission age for young women as to allow them to meet a future husband on their mission and have their first marriage and marry younger.

There’s all kinds of things to unpack in that. And it’s implied in that too, to start having babies. Marry younger, so you can have more babies. Because I think they’re really worried about the number of babies that are being born in the church, the birth rate’s going down.

Those are all things that just show that this structural thing within the church is alive and well.

It isn’t a thing in the past, that we are, we’re looking to control and move women and young men. I think from childhood to mission, to marriage to families. Not having any gaps in between.

SH: And I really that we’re having this conversation right on the heels of that statement from President Oaks about lowering the mission age hopefully leading to lower marriage ages, because sometimes for me, as I’ve gotten older, some of all the modesty talk and all of those things, and as my daughters are long adults now. I’m not as connected to that in the church. I’m not hearing those messages so much. I don’t really know what’s being preached to the young women right now. So it’s easy for me to think, well, this has gotten better.

But then we have a statement come out like the one from President Oaks, and I think this may have gotten worse.

SH: Like we’re maybe even moving backward in some ways. And it’s easy for me to not have my finger on where this messaging really is. Now that it’s not all directed at me, I’m not really the target audience for this anymore, necessarily in ways that young women are, but it feels so immediate.

CAL: a good point. It feels like it’s doubling down to me too. Yes, it does. Absolutely. Not just going backwards, but doubling down. And fear, a lot of fear. And leading to these ideas that this is the way we need to go. We need to go back to the 1950’s ideal. And if you think about our leaders, they became adults in that era.

CAL: It’s easy to see why they kind of go back to that ideal. We forget about all the things that weren’t ideal then.

SH: And I love hearing you bring up fear because Cynthia and I have both talked so much about how fear is weaponized in our church culture.

And it occurs to me that as a woman, I think there’s a good chance, (I have nothing to back this up), but I think there’s a really good chance that I heard more or internalized more fear from our messaging than the boys my age did, because of the purity culture messages that were coming at me. Those were very directed to my body, and were a threat to my eternal salvation, and also to that of the young men. So there is so much pressure and so much fear coming at you that the smallest misstep is going to mark you for eternity. Not just for the rest of 10th grade, but you know, for the rest of forever. You’ve wrecked it, and that is a scary place to live.

CAL: It’s a really scary place and that’s the part that you can name. But I have started to realize too that it is so embedded in us that there are, there’s places and things that come up that we’re not even aware of until something causes them to bubble up to the surface.

We’ll definitely get to that by talking about the psychological impacts of purity culture. So, I’m gonna move along. Linda Klein, who wrote the book Pure, and I think Colette also referred to that said, purity culture taught girls that their bodies were dangerous, sinful, and a threat to men’s salvation.

Exactly what you were saying, Susan.

CAL: That’s exactly what we were taught. Nadia Bolz-Weber in her book, Shameless, which is a great book. I know you love it. Did you read Shameless?

CW: Oh, yes.

CAL: I have a lot of quotes from her because she just seems to nail it with her the way she talks about it.

“Purity most often leads to pride or despair, not to holiness.” She also said, “Purity was sold as a commodity, and fear was the marketing strategy.”

SH: Yeah. There it is.

CAL: Isn’t that so good about what you said?

Susan. That rings so true to me.

CAL: Yes, it’s insidious, right? Okay, so purity culture and how it looks in LDS women’s lives:

I’m gonna just tell a few things and a few examples. [00:15:00] This is just to go on and talk about how it’s institutionalized, and how it shows up in so many ways in our church. One of the things I think always comes up is bishop interviews. We can talk in depth about that, but I just am going to give a nod to that. Whenever that comes up, I feel this thing inside of me about how I acquiesced to that for a good part of my life. Because of my, you know, what those things we’re talking about that we take in and just store inside of us, I thought it was okay.I thought it was okay for myself that I had to talk to a older man about sexual things.

And that was okay for my daughters and that generation. And so there’s a lot of thinking about that and feeling badly about that, but also trying to figure out where do you go with it now?

And also the absence of the same rules for young men. And being responsible for their behavior, that we’re responsible for them. So they don’t have to have as much, I mean, they have bishop interviews too. That’s not our audience, but we could talk about if that has been damaging to them?

CAL: There’s a lot of shame around that. And that will also lead to talking about pornography later on.

CAL: The other ways it showed up besides in those interviews was the modesty standards that we set and the lessons about being a future wife and the silence around consent and pleasure.

Girls learned that their bodies were public property, open to commentary, discipline, and moral judgment. One of the women in one of my faith journey groups was talking about how ( I don’t even think she was at a church activity), but she was wearing a tank top. She later heard that it was discussed around the bishop’s dining table with his family about how she was wearing a tank top.

And it made me remember things where things are passed as gossip that are about young women and how they’re acting or dressing. It just feels wrong that it happens within our culture. Another one talked about how women can be our worst enforcers.

You’ve talked about this a lot. But she was talking about how she was in a church leadership position at one of our church universities. And so they did some training. In the training they basically said, now if girls come to activities or to church wearing things that are inappropriate, you need to send them home.

And she refused. She said, I just refused. I said, I’m not gonna do that, because they won’t come back. They might never come back. Why? Why are we doing that? And she said, she asked the question, does anyone ever tell the young men what to wear? And then she went on to tell about how, when they met on campus in like the lecture halls and the buildings on campus for their church meetings, that they would turn tables sideways in front of the front row of chairs.

So in case the young adult women sat in those chairs, the men on the stand couldn’t see their legs and how if their dresses were short.

SH: You have to be kidding me. I refuse to believe that. Can that possibly be true?

CAL: I know,

SH: Oh my goodness.

CW: Well, I mean on, and I’m just thinking just as a woman who wore skirts forever and dresses to church.

I’m sure all of us were always aware - are my garments sticking out when I cross my legs? So even if I wasn’t necessarily thinking or who knows what the men were thinking, if from the story what you’re saying they were thinking about that CA is okay, they could see up a woman’s skirt.

But just for myself, how much I policed myself. Of crossing my legs, and then I would kind of do the little tuck under my thigh just yep. Just to make sure.

You know, my garments weren’t peeking out of my skirt, so.

CW: Yeah. I totally believe that actually.

CAL: I think it happens pretty frequently.

Another woman talked about the difference in punishment between young women and young men. And I know this isn’t always true because I have heard of some cases where the opposite is true. But it’s come up enough that I think it’s worth repeating. She was telling a story about a young woman when the young woman and young man messed up as teenagers, that the young woman was severely disciplined. The young man was kind of given a slap on the hand and then sent off on his mission.

CAL: And so those are kind of common stories about how is this equal? And I think it shows up that priesthood protects priesthood.

SH: Unfortunately, and there’s so much leadership roulette involved in all of this too, so much.

But the thing is, when all of us have grown up with, let’s face it, [00:20:00] pretty toxic messaging around this stuff, there’s a good chance that your leadership roulette is not gonna turn out so well for you.

CAL: No, and not consistently. If you think about your lifespan, how many different priesthood leaders you’re gonna have, right?

To have them all be stellar, it’s really not gonna happen.

So let’s go back in time a little bit and talk about how we set the stage for some of this with quotes from past LDS leaders about virtue and its value. Okay. The first is by Bruce. R McConkey.” Loss of virtue is too great a price to pay, even for the preservation of one’s life. Better, dead clean than alive, unclean.”

He also said, “any sexual transgression is next to murder.” And Boyd K. Packer also supported the same idea. Now, if you’re talking about sexual assault or abuse, then okay, like I can get close to it equally murder. But what about telling a teenager that just messed up a bit, that it’s almost as bad as murder?

That just feels so wrong. Those feel a lot farther apart from each other. So, Spencer w Kimball said, “it’s better to die in defending one’s virtue than to live, having lost it without a struggle.”

CW: Oh my gosh.

CAL: And he said, “When you lose your virtue, it’s gone forever.” So what does that say to victims of sexual assault?

It says it would’ve been better if you died.

Because if you lived, you have morally failed.

SH: You’re unclean.

CW: Well, and we’ve all heard Elizabeth Smart, who has been really open about that. And how she was daily assaulted by her kidnapper and she had that thought like, oh well. There’s nothing that can be done, like the quote you just read.

CW: Even though I know that quote was probably decades before her time.

CAL: Well, I think it’s, if it’s in the roots of our religion, then it’s also come up into the soil. The branches of it. Too. Marrion G. Romney said, “your virtue is worth more than your life. Please, young folks preserve your virtue, even if you lose your lives.”

This one was for the boys, and this one was interesting to me. When I read this out loud in one of my groups, like some of the jaws dropped, and I think it’s because they, I’ve never heard it because it’s old, right? It wasn’t in their era. But David O. McKay said, remember this, “My son. We would rather come to the station and take your body off the train in a casket, than to have you come home unclean, having lost your virtue.”

And that was for sending boys off on missions. I. These are actual quotes. They did say it. And it’s important to know that because it’s where some of what we’re experiencing today comes from. Even if it’s not their era.

This comes out of their era.

SH: I mean, a prophet said it. It wasn’t just anyone.

CAL: No. No, it wasn’t just a bishop that wasn’t trained or whatever. These are top leaders in the church. Quotes from them. I think out of all these quotes also came the object lessons, the ones that when we think about purity culture, we think about all these lessons that are as blatant today as they were back in my day.

I don’t know if they’re still around. This is where I feel like too, like you, Susan, I’m out of touch.

It’s been a few years since I’ve been in Young Women’s, and so I don’t know. I personally didn’t teach these when I was young women’s president. But just the, you know, the idea of the ruined flower, the flower up on the hill is the one that the young men are gonna wanna pursue.

SH: Right.

CAL: The chewed gum, of course. We can’t go through this without saying the chewed gum,

CAL: Or the licked cupcake.

CW: Oh my gosh. I haven’t thought about that in years.

CAL: I know. It is interesting. In the evangelical world. Klein says that they were told that if they lost their virginity. They were like a used toothbrush. Now that was a new one. I hadn’t heard that one. Yeah, but I immediately pictured a Mormon ad, remember the Mormon ads?

SH: Oh, yes!

CAL: I could picture a gross toothbrush. And some saying about don’t be this.

And she talked about how girls were labeled as stumbling blocks for men. And I think that Collette did a good job. So go back and listen to the earlier episode about purity culture. And they could destroy a good god-fearing man. But this is one I had never heard either. Like the toothbrush, she said they used one that was, that the tape that binds you to your husband will be dirty so it won’t stick.

SH: Won’t stick.

CAL: Linda Klein hass done some really good research and it [00:25:00] says purity teachings don’t delay sex. They do increase shame among females. Increased shame leads to increased levels of sexual anxiety and lower levels of pleasure.

And she says it doesn’t get better over time. It gets worse. There is also A-N-C-B-I study on purity culture that found when there’s a focus on abstinence and virginity, it can lead to anxiety, guilt, and sexual problems. The pressure to meet these ideals causes stress and confusion about sexual identity and desires.

This is something that has been mentioned and I think Colette as a representation of the L-G-B-T-B Q population was able to talk about that in a really personal way that I think was really important. But I think we always have to mention that it hurts them in different ways and sometimes in worse ways.

It’s almost like one level for the heterosexual population and a deeper level because those individuals report that there’s a whole new level of shame if you’re in the church and you’re sexually active in a same gender relationship.

So we teach girls that sexual feelings are bad and wrong.

We never talk about how this is a God-given gift, and it’s something they should celebrate, explore, and understand as they move into adulthood. Linda Klein goes on and says we become cheerleaders to the men in our lives and that Christian women can smile through anything. And she says, what happens when you’re expected to show up and be kind and pretty and quiet and to serve and just do what is asked of you?

This is what the result is, and this is where I’ve kind of been leading to with this, is that what happens is that as women and young women, we learn to deny our feelings so we no longer have access to them.

CW: That sounds right.

CAL: So this is where we lead into what kind of damage it does. If we are putting on a smile and doing all the things we’re supposed to and not feeling any feelings sexually that might be stirring within us, and we just keep denying them, denying and pushing them down, then we actually no longer have access to those feelings that we’ve denied.

And I see this in my office. Someone I know married a man that she didn’t love. She knew she should not marry him after their second date, but she couldn’t say no. A priesthood leader she respected, told her that this was probably the best she could do. And so she didn’t listen to her own inner knowing.

She also said she was curious about sex and wanted to experience it. So she entered a marriage of abuse and sexual harm. It took a long time for her to listen to herself and get out of the marriage because she had denied those feelings.

This was also from her conditioning. You have to make it work. You’re sealed together, you made covenants.

CW: Right.

CAL: All right. There’s several places I think in our discussion where we widen the lens and look at what are the things that impact us besides just modesty and chastity. And I think if we look and widen our lens societally, we look and see that limiting reproductive rights has to do with women being chased and it demonizes victims of sexual assault.

CW: Right.

CAL: And that morality should be based on ethics, not on women’s bodies.

CW: 100%.

CAL: So saying that, let’s move into the psychological and emotional impact. Do you have anything you want to add before we dive into that?

CW: Oh boy.

SH: This is definitely the lie down part.

CAL: Yeah. This is the lie down part.

CW: So I was thinking lately about the tank top style garments, or as they call them, open sleeve. Okay. We are not calling them tank top garments, open sleeve garments and somebody, or, you know, social media dredged up the old Mormon ad that shows what I’m looking at it right now.

It’s a mannequin with a red tank top and it says, don’t be a dummy. And so I’m thinking now, okay. We used to say that women were dummies if they showed their shoulders, and now we’re not really dealing with the effects of that. We’ve made it okay to wear open sleeves, but we’re not really talking about the cost of telling women that they were dummies.

CW: If they dressed with a tank top before. And so anyway, maybe that has to do with what we’re gonna get into the psychological impact, because I can just say for myself it has been huge.

CAL: Yeah, it is huge. Huge for sure. I mean, I think we glibly say, oh, so shoulders aren’t sexy anymore. But that’s the way we lighten it up and say that. But I think what you’re saying is that it isn’t just about that. It’s about all the things we were told and we took to heart and felt like we needed to do that to be a righteous woman. And now all of a [00:30:00] sudden that changes and everyone’s hooray, hooray.

But then there’s a whole segment they’re going, what the heck?

SH: Right. Yeah. And there’s also a whole segment that is saying, well, really valiant members know that it’s still not okay to wear a tank top just because they changed garments so that people in hot climates could be a little more comfortable.

The standards, the Lord’s modesty standards have not changed. And I’ve seen an awful lot of that go back and forth on social media. But I think what you have there is women who have internalized that messaging so deeply that man, they are not giving that up without a fight. They’re not giving that up.

They believed it. They built their lives there. They believed, and they spent all those years doing it.

SH: Exactly.

CAL: They built their lives around, and even they taught their children, they covered their children even before they were wearing garments.

SH: Absolutely.

CAL: But it also, I think, brings up the conversation too about was that true then?

And it’s not true now? And I think did it ever matter?

CAL: Did it ever matter?

CW: I mean, when you start breaking that down, like you pull on that thread. It can unravel a lot because then you start speaking from personal experience because then you start going, what else didn’t matter?

SH: What else doesn’t matter, right?

CW: What else? Doesn’t matter now. Exactly. Correct.

CAL: So the psychological costs. Chronic shame and hypervigilance about thoughts and behaviors are pretty common in our culture. And what those can lead to is things like scrupulosity, religiosity, dissociation from body, fear of desire, body shame, anxiety around arousal, confusion between worthiness and consent, and a low sense of agency.

I know that’s a whole load of things in one sentence, but, you know, those are just ways it shows up for mental health, some of the cost of purity culture. And I don’t, I think you’ve spoken a little bit about scrupulosity and religiosity, haven’t you, on the podcast?

CW: A little bit. A little bit, yeah.

Yeah. I wouldn’t mind having an entire episode on s Yeah. Good. You wanna do that one CA?

CAL: Sure. Let’s do it. Because there’s a lot to unpack there, but basically it’s the kind of what we’re talking about with the women who double down on the dress standards and whatnot. It’s just this, it’s so baked in that then it can be overly in systems that are sensitive, it can be overly internalized.

So that then they have to check themselves and they gotta do this, and it’s not good enough. I gotta do it better, I gotta do it better. I gotta do it better. It can lead to compulsions and ways to try to soothe that, and it’s really difficult. It’s a form of OCD and it’s a difficult thing to work through and change.

So we have to, I think we have to name that, that comes out of this, is that people struggle with that. So Brene Brown says, “Shame thrives in secrecy, silence and judgment.” I think that describes purity culture to a T. The message was learned that, don’t talk about sex, don’t trust your instincts. Don’t name the discomfort.

Weber says, “Shame doesn’t come from God’s voice. It comes from the voices that claim to speak for God.”

CW: Ding ding.

SH: Ouch. Ouch. Yeah.

SH:Every one of those quotes that you read earlier. That one though is so powerful, isn’t it?

CAL: So we got it from church leaders, and then we also got it from manuals, and we got it from the interviews behind closed doors.

And when you’re disconnected from your body, you lose access to one of your most important sources of wisdom.

So that’s what it creates. Okay. This is probably my favorite part in our whole discussion today. And that is, it’s a thing about neurobiology.So it’s a thing about what happens in our bodies.

Because of purity culture, because of the things that are taught to us from when we’re really young. So in psychology we have a phrase that you might have heard ‘cause it’s pretty popularized and it says that neurons that fire together wire together.

SH: Okay.

CAL: Have you heard that before?

CW: I haven’t.

CAL: Okay. So this phrase means that when certain thoughts, emotions, and bodily responses are repeatedly activated together, the brain strengthens the connections between them. Over time, these connections become automatic. You don’t choose them, they just fire.

CAL: Okay. Now I’m gonna give some examples.

Since purity culture is repeatedly paired with threat, shame, fear, and moral danger, especially when you’re young and the brain is really malleable and highly plastic, then sexual thoughts plus fear are hardwired, ashamed. So the brain has learned that sexual feelings are dangerous. And so if I have them, I must reject myself.

So later in life, [00:35:00] even in safe, consensual context, the nervous system may still react with anxiety, dissociation, numbness, and guilt. The brain is just doing what it was trained to do,

CW: right?

CAL: Another one is purity. Culture often pairs God’s approval with obedience to authority, figures like bishop’s, leaders, and parents.

So the neurons wire as the authority voice is God’s voice, and there’s the fear of punishment and loss of belonging. So this makes it hard to trust your own intuition, disagree with leaders, or say no even if something feels wrong. And later we’re gonna talk about how that can lead to abuse. One more: body signals plus suppression equals disconnection.

So when we ignore arousal, suppress desire and distrust, bodily signals, then the brain wires that body sensation equals danger. I need to shut down. This leads to difficulty feeling pleasure, trouble recognizing boundaries, and a sense of being cut off from the body. Any thoughts about that?

SH: Oh, so many.

CAL: Are you laying down yet?

SH: And I’m thinking about all of the women that we’ve had through the six years we’ve been having these conversations who really just have trouble accessing their authority on anything. I mean, definitely their spiritual authority, but they just are disconnected from their own authority and everything that you just said. This explains it.

CAL: totally.

SH: It’s hard for them to overcome. Their brains are wired this way. They’re wired that way. So can’t just decide to take your authority one day and there it is. Yeah. Your body is doing something also. And so you’ve gotta reconnect to that, to understand what’s really going on.

CAL: Yep. It’s not just about changing your thoughts.

CW: So about this neurological wiring. What was it, neurons that fire, what was that phrase you said?

CAL: Neurons that wire together, fire together.

SH: fire together, wire together.

CAL: We wire ‘em together with the belief system, what they have and what the system tells them. They wire together. So then when anything comes up that has to do with that, they fire, meaning that, that’s the response you get, like dissociation.

SH: It seems almost like a loop, like it could go either way.

CAL: Exactly.

CAL: Yes. It’s a cycle. It is a loop. Yeah, it’s totally a loop.

CW: Speaking of all those neurons being wired the way that they were wired, for me as an LDS girl, I was thinking recently about, I don’t know, it was probably at the end of my honeymoon, so you know, sexual for the first time.

And I remember at the end of my honeymoon I started crying with happiness. I labeled it at the time because I said to myself, I made it.

I managed to stay clean. And so the relief of making it to my honeymoon without messing up made me cry. And now, as a woman in her fifties, I look back on that and I realize how much shame.

Like that Brene Brown quote that you read. You know, shame thrives in secrecy, silence and judgment. How much judgment I had absorbed about girls who mess up what that says about them. And I realize now, looking at that moment, at the end of my honeymoon where I’m crying with happiness, I was really crying with, I don’t know, you’re the therapist CA, but with relief.

CW: Relief, relief. Relief. Yes. That just makes me so sad now, like a grandma lady, to look back on that and be like, oh, in the moment I was so proud of myself and maybe it’s a little bit of everything. But now I can look back and be like, oh my gosh. I had so much fear. There’s our word again Susan, so much fear about messing up, which is crazy because I never even had boyfriends before my husband, sadly, I’m embarrassed to admit, was my first boyfriend.

And so I’m like, I was such a “good pure little girl” that. I just can’t even believe that even though I never even had opportunities to mess around with boys, that was just the fact when I got to my honeymoon, I was crying with relief that I had made it. It says so much about that psychological and emotional impact of purity culture on me.

CAL: For sure. Thank you for sharing that. I think that will resonate with so many people.

[00:40:00] One woman said to me that it would’ve been more shameful than killing someone if my father found out I’d had sex again.

SH: Where could she have gotten that idea?

CAL: Yeah. Where would that have come from? It wasn’t in those quotes or anything, was it? Oh, geez.

SH: Wow.

CAL: Wow. And when another Brene Brown quote, she says, “Sexual shame is one of the most corrosive forms of shame. It isolates us from connection.” And I would add to that connection to self as well as connection to others.

Another story, and I hope I haven’t already told this on the podcast, but it’s one that always comes up for me when we talk about purity culture. One of my young women when I was young women president, came into Young Women’s on a Sunday and she was livid. I mean, she was just boiling with anger, and she said that during Sunday school class, I don’t know if it was during the lesson or just in a side conversation, one of the young men at the ward had told her that if a woman dresses immodestly, but I think he used the word scanky and she is in the wrong place, like in a dark alley at night.

Then she deserves to be raped.

We got to have a good conversation around that. But also what I came away with was what are we teaching if this active young man. Bishop’s son is saying that to a young woman, not even thinking it, but actually saying it to another young woman, right?

Well, this is just how it is. But we have a quote, another quote from President Oaks that came a few years back, “Young women, please understand that if you dress immodestly, you are magnifying this problem by becoming pornography to some of the men who see you.”

CW: Right?

CAL: So again, he’s not saying what this young man was saying, but for me it’s not a very far leap to go.

If these are teachings, then what we’re conditioning the whole thing about women being responsible for men and girls being responsible for men. I think it’s a travesty because I think it’s unfair. It’s unfair to young men as well as it’s unfair to young women that we’re teaching ‘em that way.

SH: Well, it also exists in the wider culture because very often when something happens to a woman, the first question is what was she wearing?

CW: What was she wearing?

SH: What was she wearing? Where was she? Where was she? What did she do to provoke it?

SH: Right, but you would hope that our young men would be better than that.

You would hope that somehow they would’ve internalized the message of personal worth for all of God’s children that would transcend those cultural messages. But instead, it seems like for some people, maybe it just dials it up a little more. Maybe it just makes it easier for him to believe that there’s fault in the woman.

That’s not a far leap.

CAL: Yeah, for sure. And I don’t, I mean, again, that’s for me, it’s not a far reach to talk about it being part of patriarchal culture too.

SH: Right

CAL: And speaking on the lessons that were taught and what we learned, this is one that my husband brought up to me, and it was one of those ones where I’m like, I’ve never thought of that, and maybe you guys have even talked about on the podcast, but he said to me, he said, you know, the woman who was caught in adultery in the Bible, where was the man?

CAL: If she was caught, he had to be there too.

We don’t hear about him. If everyone was gonna stone the woman, what about the man? Was he gonna be stoned too or was he holding the stone?

CW: Well, the scripture says caught in the very act, right? If she’s caught in the very act, that means there were two.Because it takes two to tango, right? So where was he?

CAL: And to me that goes way back and says so much about how, what are the cultural expectations of women?

Jessica Valenti, she wrote a book called The Purity Myth, which is also one we can list in the notes because it’s a really good one. And she said,”It’s high time to do away with outdated and dangerous notions of virginity. If young women’s only ethical gauge is based on whether they’re chaste, we’re ensuring that they will continue to define themselves by their sexuality.”

Okay. I know we’ve gotta keep moving even though we could talk about that one for a lot more time. But this is also really these two sections kind of blend in together because if purity culture affects us psychologically, then. It also leads to sexual abuse or sets the stage for that, then that also is gonna have a huge impact on our mental health.

So purity culture does not prevent abuse. It creates conditions where abuse is easier to commit and harder to [00:45:00] report. It protects institutions and silences victims. Many LDS women don’t realize they’re carrying sexual trauma because it was normalized. Have the two of you watched the recent documentary Surviving Mormonism?

SH: No.

CW: No.

CAL: I was kind of avoiding it until I had a number of women coming into my office and talking about it. I thought, okay, I gotta do this. So I did. There’s three episodes. I took it one at a time so I could just kind of digest it and then go back and take it another one.

But the third one is about two sisters. There are two sisters being interviewed and they live in Minnesota. She talks about surviving sexual abuse by her father. And it is so heavy. It is so hard. So trigger warning with that for sure. But she talks about the fact that she was abused from the time she was a toddler until she was 18 years old.

CW: Wow. Oh my gosh.

CAL: Her father would just say to her, this is what we do in eternal families. This is acceptable. This is okay because we’re an eternal family and we’re gonna be together forever. And so he totally said in the context of, you don’t tell anyone because it’s okay, but it’s ours.

It’s our private secret thing. How would they always do? And he just kept framing it in the context of him being the patriarch. And so she suffers all this pain, and yet she says, I loved primary, I loved my church. I didn’t wanna do anything to hurt my church. So this is where it gets so confusing to a child.

SH: Right.

CAL: But I think the thing that just, I just came away so sick was about how she told so many people.

SH: Oh, really?

CAL: So they’re the ones that don’t tell at all. And then you kind of, you’re like, oh, I’m so sad for you that you didn’t feel like you could tell anyone, but she told her mother. She told the bishop, she told other leaders, I think it went to a stake president, but basically the bishop said, it’s okay, we’ll take care of this.

Called the father in, gave him a slap, put him on probation, couldn’t take the sacrament for a month, you know, that, that kind of thing. And so, but nobody knew. So someone who probably is at risk as a sexual predator is just given this little, you gotta do better.

And he promised he would do better and not do it anymore. And so everyone believed him and he continued to abuse her. And it got worse. It got worse and worse kind of abuse as she got older.

CAL: And so it wasn’t till she left and got away from it and then she pursued justice. But nobody else had done that for her.

SH: Wow.

CAL: And, you know, too many other stories. I knew someone who found out that her husband had been abusing their daughter in the bathroom, and then he would come out with her and he would say to the other kids in the family, don’t talk to Allison. She knows what she’s done wrong, so don’t talk to her. So again, victim blaming, shaming, separation, isolation. So it doesn’t get reported in any way. Or another really bad one, a stake president who would have sex with his daughter and then have her kneel down and pray with him to forgive her for the wrong. She has done that. She enticed him. So she needed to be forgiven.

Forgiven by God, and then he would forgive her. Oh my goodness. Only for it to happen again. So you see that within a system, it’s problematic where there’s no checks and balances that reach outside that system. We try to have them be there. We try to have. Rules that, you know, they, that you have to report, but we also have so many states in this country that don’t have priest penitent privilege.

SH: Right,

CAL: I mean, that do have it, that still have it, it hasn’t been brought down. And so they have this way of not having to tell.

CAL: And it creates so many awful things. A trauma researcher named Jennifer Freud said, “When institutions prioritize reputation over truth, betrayal, trauma occurs.”

CW: Yes. There’s the good name of the church.

We protect it. The protecting itself, first and foremost,

Which is why we have that hotline, right? That clergy, that church, that bishops and state presidents are supposed to call, and it goes to a law firm,

SH: To the church’s law firm. Right?

CW: To the church’s law firm, because it’s about protecting the organization. It doesn’t go to a therapist,

SH: But it’s not even just the church protecting itself. The members also protect, the church members are so, so quick to defend, to protect the church. Protect the church.

CAL: [00:50:00] Yes, for sure. And I think that hotline too, Cynthia, we, I, we had a hotline for therapists when I worked for LDS Family Services, and I may have said this before on the podcast, I thought it was to guide me through doing the right thing in cases of abuse.

Okay. That my naive self thought that was what it was. And it wasn’t till towards the end of my tenure there that I realized, oh no, this first call, my first call I make to this hotline, they do have to tell me that I have to report as legally required by my state. But I realized that they want to know about it first, and their questions aren’t about what do we do to help the victim?

They are about did it occur at the church? Were there church leaders involved? You know, they want to know and get ahead of, so they’re the first report they wanna get ahead of anything bad that’s gonna come back on the church.

CW: Wow. Wow.

CAL: I hated figuring that out.

CW: Yeah, I bet.

CAL: So these are deeper and more insidious outcomes of purity culture.

When you have a system where we’re taught from a young age to give our authority to men, to our fathers, our priesthood leaders, and to God, we set the stage for misuse of that ability to control women. This does not mean in any way that men or all priesthood leaders are bad. It’s just that we have to name it as a systemic problem.

Yeah. So these are the things it does. It silences language. Don’t talk about sex. Don’t trust your body. Don’t name any discomfort. Don’t challenge male authority. Silence protects abusers, not victims. I often see clients who talk about their inability to tell. They are so often protecting others, and they were taught not to speak their truth.

It trains compliance, which means we overwrite internal signals we submit instead of question. We confuse authority with safety. This makes it difficult to recognize coercion. It’s so hard to help the victims realize that what happened to them was not their fault. And that their body’s responses were intelligent survival, not sin. Oh, super important for anyone out there listening to this, that your instincts were intelligent. Survival, not sin. And it blames the victims. Did you dress modestly? Did you lead him on? Did you resist enough? Responsibility is shifted onto women.

Just like you said. So in high demand religions, they prioritize reputation, authority, forgiveness, over accountability. Many LDS women report being discouraged from reporting abuse, being urged to forgive quickly, being blamed for temptation. This is not accidental. This is systemic harm. Your body adapted intelligently to the world that was given. I think that goes back to all the things that were embedded in us and that we believe and we’re just responding to that. Not to even. What is, what’s going on? And again, this is a soapbox I think I could speak about all day long about victims and blaming of them. I have so many stories of things the priesthood leaders have told young women and women about how abuse is their fault from telling women that their husband didn’t mean to hurt them.

They just need to be nicer to him and give him more sex.

To a bishop telling a young girl after she was brave enough to disclose sexual abuse by a stepfather, that no one will ever want her now because she’s broken. How can anyone believe that this is a message from a from loving heavenly parents, especially heavenly mother, would ever want her to hear.

It’s also common, this is a repeat. What are you doing to attract the attention or behavior from a man? Why do we always believe the worst about women and the best about men? Priesthood protects its own.

CW: This is a systemic problem, right? Like you, you were saying CA a minute ago, like you’ve had so many women come into your office and talk about the things that priesthood leaders have said to them.

And I think, okay, plenty of people hearing this could say, oh, well she had an outlier that was, that Bishop was an outlier. That Stake president was an outlier. But the fact that this happens over and over again and that it’s allowed to happen over and over again, points to this systemic problem, is that when men are alone behind closed doors with young girls, young women, older women, all women, then that creates, you know, this Petri dish where these kinds of things can go unchecked and can just grow out of control.

And so I really find it interesting when people want to defend the system and say, oh, well that was a bad bishop, but the system is set up in such a way that these men can continue to get away with it. Once we heard one of these stories, shouldn’t we have been like, oh, we need to change our system.

But instead we hear it over and over and over.

CAL: And when I’ve heard it over and over again for over 20 years. None of ‘em are the same person. None of the stories are about the same person. Although there may [00:55:00] be multiple stories about that one person.

I’m just getting one of those stories. So the multipliers become more and more, and you’re right, Cynthia, it’s just that we give them access. We don’t give them good training, so maybe they even stumble sometimes into bad conversations. And some of ‘em are intentional, of course. Some of them get pleasure out of drawing a picture of a body and asking a young woman to tell her about what they did and where they touched and what whatnot.

Those are all, you know, that’s intentional. But it doesn’t matter because what happens is because of what the system is teaching. And so, and what it takes to make change. Like I had to think about like how they’ve changed a bit about these interviews, but it was because a man, Sam Young brought this attention to and fought for it and talked about it and talked about it and gathered people talking about it, whatever.

And then got excommunicated. And then the church made changes.

Right, even then, even with the changes, I have concerns because you invite a parent in with a young woman or if they prefer a young woman leader in with them, but also that’s gonna impact what they feel comfortable saying.

Of course, but also of course, and it’s okay if they don’t say it, but it’s also adds to sometimes the shame other people know, you know? So I think we have to get deeper into the whole idea of why we do this.

To make changes at. In purity culture at its roots.

SH: Right.

CAL: Those are super, kind of superficial changes.

I, I won’t say they’re insignificant, especially after someone lost a lot trying to make that happen. But I think it only goes so far.

SH: I think that institutionally the thinking is the shame of it and like the threat of having to confess these things will surely keep young people from doing them, right?

And it does. Exactly. No, of course it doesn’t. Young people have been doing the same things for as long as there’ve been young people on this planet. And that’s what our bodies are wired to do. These are natural explorations that are going on at that age. And so to, I mean, great for kids to learn safety and great for kids to learn self-control in the way that are healthy for them. In healthy ways. Yes. And to understand you know, what are healthy and unhealthy manifestations of the normal sexual urges that they’re having. But understanding and making healthy choices is different from trying to guide someone’s choices through threat and shame.

SH: One works and one doesn’t. One causes damage and one empowers and helps people to be able to develop healthily and have healthy adult lives because they’re not carrying the baggage of threat and shame in this specific area of their lives. We’ve created a system that we’re just like set up to have to first fail and then pay for those failures.

Really? Yeah. Psychologically. Absolutely. And in relationships for the rest of our lives. This is baked into the system.

CAL: Absolutely. Okay, I am gonna end this kind of section on the psychological impact by reading a section of a poem that was written by a victim of our system. Okay, she says, “The earnest desire to please the master becomes the breeding ground for groomed abuse. The body and object to a man who claims priesthood power and denies one’s own fears and needs and consent.

Purity ironically leads to the least pure, as men twist virginity into ownership and guardrails into obsessions. Purity starts as rules and ends as power. Pervasive, unrelenting, harmful power.” That’s a tough one.

SH: And you can say not all men, but really that poem is about the system.

CAL: Moving on to marriage and sex. Okay, so another thing out outcomes. Oh boy. The outcomes of purity culture. For many LDS women years of being told that sexual feelings are dangerous, created real barriers to intimacy. I think what you just said, Susan, about how we treat it with young people, that’s absolutely natural and that we should be, you know, helping them to just have healthy relationship with that instead no one was taught consent, pleasure, or mutuality.

It’s not a personal failure. It says another systemic one. Many LDS women after marriage struggle physically to have intercourse. There’s a condition called vaginismus. Are you guys familiar with that? Yes. And it’s basically a tightening of the vagina that doesn’t allow for intercourse, and it can come from prior sexual abuse or trauma, but it can also just be an outcome of fear and anxiety about intimacy.

CW: Yep.

CAL: And so that sets the [01:00:00] stage for what can go wrong, right? Rachel held Evans said, “Sex is not just physical, and shame does not disappear with a wedding ring.” For many LDS women, the wedding night wasn’t magical. It was panic after years of associating desire with danger, switching to desire as righteous wasn’t simple.

LDS women are often told that if they follow the rules, marriage will fix everything and it doesn’t.

Safety was replaced with compliance and marriage became a pressure cooker for unresolved shame. That can lead to duty based sex, which is sex is an obligation. Sex is a wifely responsibility, sex without desire or choice.

It also can lead to difficulty accessing pleasure. We’re not taught about our bodies and how they work, and we did not have permission to explore them. So you don’t understand what feels good to you. We don’t even talk about masturbation with young women and women. So if they go to a bishop and confess, the bishop doesn’t even know what to do with it.

One client told me she’d talked to many bishops about this topic, and they were awful. She said, they just made me feel ashamed and also weird because this isn’t supposed to be a woman’s issue.

That’s what happens with silence. Sex therapist, Tina Schirmer seller says, “You can’t flip a switch from sexual shame to sexual freedom overnight.”

So that really talks about the difficulty accessing pleasure. There’s also something called consent confusion. So if I said, yes, once I owe it, if I’m married, I can’t say no. If he needs it, I should provide it. And that was something that I had to sit with for a little while because I hadn’t ever named it that way.

Is it consent once and then it’s consent forever? Is it consent? That happens all the time. I loved in Shameless how Nadia Bolz-Weber

talked about. That consent shouldn’t just be this one concept of yes or no, but that it should be also a whole more expanded idea that includes care and concern.

CW: Oh yeah.

CAL: And I loved that concept. That was a new concept for me, which I know I’m gonna use in my practice because it isn’t just about the yes or the no. Because if you think about all we’ve said over and over again today, over and over again, we’ve talked about systemic problems.

CAL: And because of that, there’s times when women give consent because they think that’s what they’re supposed to do.

CAL: Out of obligation, out of teaching, out of fear, out of whatever. So consent isn’t enough. But if you’re in a healthy relationship where there’s care and concern ,then the other person is going to know, are you sure? Because I’m feeling one thing and you’re saying another thing. Care and concern.

CAL: Being in a kind of relationship like that also creates an environment where hopefully women are more able to express what their feelings are as far as consent goes.

SH: Okay. But I have a question there, because do you really think for LDS women, is it likely for women who came up immersed in purity culture, to feel like they have much empowerment over their sex lives?

I mean, as a therapist, you might be able to tell me if there is more trouble around this stuff in marriage for LDS people than maybe for people who didn’t grow up steeping in the things that we did. Yeah. I’d just be curious to know.

CAL: Absolutely. Because of everything we’ve talked about so far today, all of that whooshes into marriage.

And then all of a sudden we’re supposed to, it’s that thing that she says about, you know, turning the, flipping the switch. It doesn’t work. You can’t just do that. And you are right on with, the young men have been trained a certain way too, coming into marriage. They, we want them to wait, but then we don’t ever say anything about after marriage.What that’s supposed to look like? It’s just carte blanche.

SH: Right.

CAL: Have at it. You know?

SH: There might also be a disconnect when in terms of trying to work this out internally in your marriage. Young men have come through with a different experience than young women have.

And so I think it might be hard for women in a marriage to talk about some of the internalized shame and all of these things with the priesthood holder that they’re married to, who came up on the other side of that fence in a way, if it’s almost there’s a natural disconnect baked into it, just because, I mean, my husband doesn’t know what it is like to have people policing what you wear all the time. Never. That’s never part of his life. And that is no indictment of him. That is just the fact of the different experiences that we had. So I feel like women continue at this serious disadvantage as we go into marriage, that we really don’t have anyone to talk to about this.

Who wants to keep going in and talking to their bishop about it. What on earth is your bishop gonna do about it? We’re out of the realm of sin and shame now. [01:05:00] And just into daily functioning within a relationship. But the problems continue, right?

CAL: Keep the bishop out of the bedroom. Let’s not invite him into it.

SH: Please. Let’s not invite him. I think it’s ridiculous. I can see why people would I, I always think wow. I hear about Mormons talking to their bishops about all kinds of weird things. I’m like, why did this even occur to you to call your bishop?

Yes. But I can see why it did. Because all these deep things and this deeply rooted fear go to the bishop is the go to place to go.

CAL: So it really is hard, and a lot of it depends on the relationship and it depends on getting the right kind of help too.

When you say, can it get better? Yes, it could get better, but it takes you know, awareness on both parts. And desire to make it good for both of you. ‘cause I think the thing we forget is that if sex is not enjoyable for women, men lose too. Everyone loses.

CAL: Everyone loses. If it’s not good and unimportant to women, then everyone loses. And so we’ve got to change those things in our system about how we view it. And moving beyond what we teach as young men and young women. But I really would argue that what we teach then is what you said, a young woman, a young man go into marriage together, they already have this structure set up.

They have the priesthood holder and the woman, and they have a hierarchy already. And that hierarchy doesn’t necessarily stay out of the bedroom.

SH: Right.

CAL: So those needs are important.

I also think there’s a lot of advice given to women going into marriage and after marriage when the bishop says, just like he’s mean to you, we’ll give him more sex.

SH: Right.

CAL:Sex just solves the problem. And there’s not a lot of, Hey, let’s work together and let’s create an atmosphere of safety. Where you can talk about the fear and anxiety that you’re bringing to this, and let’s talk about what that might be for men. There also can be issues on that side.

Sure. And let’s be able to be open about that too, because that’s the only way we can really change things and make things better.

SH: But it seems to me that this would require couples therapy. Yes. Which I would imagine Latter Day Saints might be even less likely than people on average to seek. Because it’s admitting that you have a marriage problem.

So instead, I think for years we get the wife on antidepressants. Maybe eventually they end up in couples therapy, but it’s the wife trying to fix it from her side and trying to process the shame and figure out how to get out of this problem. The wife might know there’s a problem, but doesn’t know how to get out of it without involving the husband.

And that is taking it to a whole other level that I think would be pretty uncomfortable for a lot of people.

CAL: People for sure. Well, and when a woman comes into my office and all she’s talking about is relationship issues, my comment would be, Hey, it seems like the problems you’ve come here to talk with me about today are about you and your relationship with your husband.

And so what if we invite him to come to therapy with you? And some will totally resist. They will just absolutely resist. And it’s interesting you say that because you. I don’t even know for sure that my parents’ generation therapy was so not accessible then. But my generation, I think, has still has, there’s a lot of stigma attached to therapy, so

CW: Oh yeah.

CAL: If I see, and I do see, I see tons of LDS couples. That’s a big part of my work.

CW: Sure.

CAL: But if I see them that are closer to well anywhere between Cynthia and my age, they often are coming later. Because when they were younger it was like, no way. No way. But now either it’s gotten so bad or the wife threatens to leave or it’s just a little bit more acceptable around. Still there’s less of my generation coming in. The ones that are coming in are a little bit younger, but they’ve put it off and put it off, and the problems have been going on forever.

Luckily the good news today is that the younger generation is coming in earlier and they’re coming in together.Even within the church. And now I’m even seeing more couples before they get married.

SH: Oh, fantastic. Amazing.

CAL: Best news ever. We don’t require that like the Catholic church and we should. Oftentimes, this is really interesting. Oftentimes it’s parents who have gone to therapy, the, as a couple. And now they have a child, a son, or a daughter who is getting ready to get married.

And if they’ve benefited, then they say, this is my wedding gift. To my children about to get married is for them to come and do some couple’s work. Wow.

SH: Best gift ever.

CW: Love it. Love it.

SH: I mean, when you’re getting married at 18, there’s not that much time for therapy.You don’t have time to sort out a lot of issues before you get married.

CAL: So are we going backwards?

SH: Are we going backwards and bam, we’ve come full circle in the conversation?

CAL: Wow. That is the truth for sure.

CAL: So. Jennifer Finlayson Fife, who is an LDS [01:10:00] therapist, who deals a lot with sexuality, and I think a lot of people listen to her and she’s a great resource. She said,”You cannot shame someone into healthy sexuality.”

SH: Well, I mean, that’s the headline.

CAL: That’s it right there. Yeah, there it is.

CAL: I just wanna give a nod to this because I think this could be a full episode also, but I have a lot of women, once we talk about purity culture, they ask about okay, so how do we do it differently if we’re raising children or even with grandchildren?

Like, how do we do it differently if we’re trying to raise them without purity culture or even within the context of the church, without all the damaging messaging? How do we do it? And so I’m just gonna give a few ideas and then this could be expanded. We can even give some resources in the show notes.

CAL: So basically we need to talk openly with teens and we need to replace fear with education about consent. And so that leads us to talk about the care and concern. If they knew that they would be going into their relationships with a different attitude about what consent means, we would talk to them about body positivity.

And oftentimes out in the culture at large, body positivity is about loving our bodies at any weight or shape or how we look. But body positivity also really goes into how we feel about ourselves as sexual beings. And that’s not something to be ashamed of. It’s something to be embraced and loved and developed and thought about before we ever get close to that idea of marriage.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the book, Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski. That’s a really good resource for all the women listening to read.

CAL: And then to share appropriately with their daughters at the right maturity level that it’s a total thing about acceptance. Acceptive of oneself and coming as you are. It is tricky within the context of the church and trying to connect spirituality and sexuality without shame.

But that is something I think as we teach our youth, we want to be aware of that, is that we don’t have to separate those out and say, sexuality is this worldly thing that we talk about over here, and spirituality is the same we talk about over here.

These are the things that would mean for the youth. It would mean that they have ownership of their own sexuality. You can talk to them about what that means, but at the end of the day, they have their own autonomy to make their choices. After all they will anyway. Wouldn’t it be great if they felt good about what those choices were?

So we wanna shift modesty to body autonomy. We wanna shift obedience to consent. We wanna shift silence to having honest discussion and education. We want to tell them that your body belongs to you. Discomfort is wisdom and desire is not dangerous. Nadia Bolz-Weber said, The opposite of purity

culture isn’t promiscuity, it’s wholeness. You’re responsible for your body and your choices, and that is a gift from God.”

So I tried to put that in a nutshell.

SH: That’s good. We really could use a whole episode about that because I read that and it reads like a great wishlist. And also I can’t really figure out how we get up where we are at point A right now, to point B to that?How does that happen in a system like we have?

CAL: Well, one thing that happens, I mean, I can only just use a little personal example, is that I am the grandmother of two 16-year-old girls right now. And so my conversations with them, and I’m not their parent, so I’m careful because the parents, I talk to the parents about what they’re doing.

I think they trust me a little bit. Maybe ‘cause I’m a therapist, I don’t know. But I have a close relationship with both of these girls. And so those are where I start the conversations.

I talk to them about their boyfriends. I talk to them, what they’re thinking about sexual activity.I talk to them about what they want for their future. I do think it does start with. The individuals and whatever access we have, whatever influence we have, but especially to the younger mothers that are listening today that are raising teenagers.

SH: Your granddaughters are so lucky. I was just thinking that CA Larson is a grandma.

Let’s admit that it’s not the same having Susan Hinkley as your grandma, but no, seriously you just have so much expertise in this area and you’re tuned into it, you know, like you have the knowledge and you also have all the awareness as a result of the conversations that you have with women.

You know, what the problems are and how they develop. So you can get out in front of those, but I have a daughter who has a year and a half year old daughter, and this daughter of mine would like to come back to the church. She really valued her experiences in primary and as a young woman in the church, she wants to give those things to her daughter, however, and so far it’s a huge, however, that she doesn’t know [01:15:00] how to get over. the purity culture specifically. She doesn’t want the baggage. And as her mom, I don’t really know a way to tell her, yeah, you can give her this part without burdening her with that part. I dunno I’d love to have my daughter come back to the church if she valued all those things. And I think it could be helpful to her in her life now in some ways, like the community would be really good for her in her life. So I see why she’s feeling drawn to it. I have no answers in terms of protecting her daughter from the harms that be associated with

that.

CAL: Well, it is really tricky and I don’t think it’s a one size fits all answer. But I think there you teach her from the very beginning,that you also have to point out that there are gonna be some things you hear that maybe aren’t good or accurate or that don’t need to be true for you.

I think that’s the only way to try to navigate that together with a lot of open conversation and dialogue and that kind of a relationship where you can handle when they come home and say, oh, they taught me this today in seminary or even young women’s or whatever. And so, but it’s tricky. It is.

CAL: if I was raising girls again, I would really weigh that. Can I raise them in the church and have them have what I now know I would want them to have as a good foundation for how they feel about themselves and their sexuality and a lot of other things too? That’s a tricky one.

CAL: Okay, let’s head in. This is the last section here about grief and anger and healing. All I wanna do is just say that it’s okay to grieve for what you didn’t get and how that affected your life. And I think it’s not only okay, but it’s necessary. So I think most of the women listening to this have been affected in some way by purity culture in the church, if they were raised in it, if they got married in it, if they’re steeped in it.

And there’s some really sad things, especially as if you’re deconstructing or you’re looking at the things you put on the shelf. There’s some really sad things. And so I think giving yourself permission to grieve for what was lost, because you can’t go back and reclaim it.

I can’t go back now and be a young mother raising kids and do that differently. So I have to grieve that I didn’t know what I know now.

I also think it’s okay to have anger. I know. We really don’t like women in our church to be angry. It’s really not something we tolerate very well.

CAL: But I wanna give permission to have anger at leaders at systems at what happened to you. It’s okay to have anger. It’s a really acceptable emotion and one that we all experience, so give space for that. What you do with it that’s a choice, but give space for it and express it and find ways to, like whether my person who wrote poetry about it, like find ways to, you know, express those really strong feelings because they are valid and they should be acknowledged.

CW: Nice.

CAL: I think the last thing is just confusion about what was true. I think that’s what we’re grappling with as we talk with you, Susan, about your daughter coming back with her daughter, is what was true and good, and what was harmful? Sometimes those things get all mixed up together because again, when it’s so embedded in us what these beliefs are and fear around them, it’s hard to un-tease them. To unravel them, I think you said Cynthia, and really think about okay, that was not good.

That was not true. So it’s okay if it feels confusing to you to sort through and figure out what was good and what was bad. Fear, I think some women in the church have the fear that naming harm makes you bitter. Yes. It doesn’t. Because anger is not sin and grief is not weakness and naming harm is truth telling. So it doesn’t make you bitter. Healing is not about becoming more sexual or less sexual. It’s about embracing our agency that we should have had all along. It’s about relearning consent. Trusting bodily signals, separating worth from obedience, reclaiming choice, going slowly and allowing ambivalence.

You don’t owe your body to doctrine and you don’t owe your healing to anyone else’s timeline. So remember the neurons from earlier?

CAL: Okay. The good news is that wiring can change. Neuroplasticity is real, and it means new pairings can form so that sexuality can be safe. Desire and consent can be linked.

Body sensations can be responded to with curiosity, and maybe most importantly for our discussion today, authority can be responded to with choice or not at all.

CW: Nice. Nice.

CAL: So what does it take to do? [01:20:00] This is repetition. Safety, gentleness, and often support which might include therapy, some somatic work, and a lot of education.

You are not just changing beliefs. We said this earlier. You are rewiring a nervous system. So instead of asking what’s wrong with me, we can instead ask, what did my brain learn to associate and how can I teach it something new? It is not a moral problem. It’s a neurobiological one. Remember, your body adapted intelligently to the world.

It was given. You must gently create new neuro pairings over time and with compassion. Nadia Bolz-Weber

said, “Any theology that requires people to disconnect from their own bodies in order to be holy is not good news.”

SH: Wow.

CW: Okay. CA there’s so much to process. I feel like after everything you’ve talked about today, we can’t thank you enough.

You have no idea how many women say to us in our chat in DM’s. Oh, CA Larson. I love her. I can’t wait to hear what she’s going to say next when you know, ‘cause we had told them we’re having you on to talk about purity culture, so thank you. Thank you.

CAL: Oh, thank you. That’s so nice.

CW: On behalf of both of us and our whole community of everything that you bring to At Last She Said It.

So, in closing, what would you like to say? We’ll let you have the final word.

CAL: Okay. Oftentimes we talk about where do we go from here? And so I just thought about it, here’s just some things to think about. They’re not to do items. I don’t want it to be another checklist, but just maybe some things to think about.

• What messages did I learn about my body that I might now question?

• Where did purity culture ask me to be silent?

• What pairings did purity culture teach me?

• And what pairings would I like to gently practice?

• And what does belonging feel like without worthiness tests?

And so in closing, I would like you to hear this.

You were never broken. You were never dirty, you were never behind. Your body didn’t betray you. Your worth was never conditional. Whether you stay, leave, or exist somewhere in between, you are allowed to choose yourself. You do not need to be purified to be whole. You already are.

CW: Thank you, CA.

SH: Thank you so much.

Voicemail 1: Hi Cynthia and Susan. I sure love your podcast and learned so much from you. Hey, I just wanted to share. I went in to get a temple recommend, and I had been to Rome, and what an amazing experience. And I guess if you’ve ever been to Rome, you become Catholic. And that’s what I tell my kids.

I was born LDS, I became Catholic when I went to Rome. I became Buddhist when I went to Hong Kong. Anyway, I’m getting my temple recommend. And they say, do you sustain the prophet of the church as the only person on earth who has the keys? And I was like, yes. And the Pope and my stake president.

What? Wait, let me ask that question again. And I could not, I don’t know why, but I could not just say yes to our prophet. I kept saying yes, and then I’d whisper and the Pope. It was just hilarious. But I believe it. I believe there’s so many prophets on the earth. So anyway, that’s my story. It was a little.

I finally ended up getting my temple recommend, and I just had to say it in my brain. Okay, thanks for all you do. Bye.

Voicemail 2: Thank you for your episode on Belief. A few months ago, I had a Temple recommend interview. I was able to answer all of the action questions correctly. They align with my values, so those are easy for me, but the belief questions are a different story.

I couldn’t just answer, “yes.” I responded with “maybes”, “mostlys”, and “I’m not sures,” along with short explanations. Finally, I answered the last question which asks if I consider myself worthy to enter the Lord’s house. My answer was a firm, “Yes!” Sadly, my bishop did not renew my recommend. He said he wasn’t comfortable because I was unable to provide adequate responses.

He said we could revisit things in the future. If I ever feel I can answer the questions quote in the affirmative. This experience has been absolutely crushing to me and also my husband. I feel like I was open and honest, living in my integrity as I explained my beliefs and I was rejected. I currently have two sons out serving missions.

I imagine my children will desire temple weddings in the near future. I have always been an active member, but the thing is, I can’t just make my beliefs change. That’s not how belief works. And also, I don’t want to change my beliefs. God has led me to the things I know, [01:25:00] and I feel peaceful in that knowing.

So in terms of the temple, I don’t know what to do, but what I do know is that my bishop’s refusal to give me a recommend is not right.

SH: Man, I wanna have a whole episode about what does belonging feel like without worthiness test,

CW: right? Yeah.

SH: That’s the best

CW: line ever. As soon as she said that line, I was like wait. Now we’re talking crazy.

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