Evangelical Therapy, Part 4 - Do Not Look or Speak the Words
A serialized memoir about my former life as an Evangelical
In my childhood home in southern Idaho, where I lived with my two older sisters and stay-at-home mom and physics professor dad, we didn’t say poop or pee or butt or fart. As a little girl, I was taught to say, “I have to go wet,” a phrase I was still using when my own baby daughters were born, and which I, without realizing it, taught them to say, too.
“Number two,” was the phrase I learned to say for pooping, but I always said “bottom” or “rear-end” instead of “butt,” and throughout my growing up years, no words for genitals were spoken at all, as if these body parts didn’t exist.
My first introduction to the details of sex was from a girl in my fourth-grade class who came over to my house one summer afternoon. I went to public school those early years—the brick elementary school was three blocks from our house, and I think my parents thought it was unlikely that I’d get into much trouble associating with non-believers before age eleven—and in seventh grade, just after I turned twelve, I’d start at the private Christian school I attended until I graduated as a senior.
But “Mandy,” my fourth-grade friend with a sweet baby-round face and blond hair, lived in a run-down house with a single mom and an older high school age brother, and she knew more than I did about the workings of the human body.
One hot summer day when she came over, we roller-skated down the sidewalk and rode bikes (she had a yellow Stingray with a banana seat, like my sister’s, which I coveted) and then after, we sat in the grass in my back yard near the apricot tree, its branches heavy with ripe fruit, and she gave me the lowdown about where babies come from.
“That’s not true,” I said, firmly. “God gives people babies when He decides to.”
She seemed a bit put off, but her apparent yearning to be my friend won out over her desire to convince me. “Yeah, you’re probably right, but maybe people can do it the other way too,” she said, and we both felt relieved that we’d come to an agreement. The next year my mom bought me a book about reproduction that used cartoon chickens for illustrations (which was more than my older sisters got), and I slowly began to absorb this new information.
My dad had his version of “the talk” with me when I started dating as a sixteen-year-old and one night came home an hour past my curfew, an unusual act for me.
I remember sitting at the kitchen table as he explained in an embarrassed tone that it was best for girls not to sit in dark cars with a boy or “do too much” because “once certain chemicals interact, it causes a chain reaction that’s almost impossible to stop.” It was so like him to try to describe sex in scientific terms—the arena in which he was most comfortable.
My mom was not okay with speaking about such topics, and I’m sure must have assigned this “talk” task to my dad. The refusal to say words to describe private parts and private acts was so pervasive in my parents’ generation and in our church in general, that one elderly woman, a pastor’s wife, died (this happened in 2019), rather than report her rectal prolapse to her family, when it worsened and led to complications that could have been prevented.
Pictures were not okay, either. We didn’t have many magazines in the house, other than my father’s scientific journals, but my mother was determined to deny the functions of female anatomy, and in the few we had, Time, Good Housekeeping, and Reader’s Digest, she folded over any pages with pictures advertising feminine hygiene products, Midol, or women wearing underwear or bikinis, a neat diagonal crease to hide what was underneath. This didn’t keep me or my sisters from seeing what was under the folded pages, of course, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself from attempting to cover what to her felt shameful and wrong.
In contrast, it was normal for us to see images of a man’s feet and hands nailed to a cross—we had a pageant at church each Easter in which the crucifixion was acted out in realistic detail with sound effects, and a heavy wooden hammer and nails—not to mention the other frightening and violent images from scenes in the Old Testament that we were presented with in Sunday School, bleeding lambs slaughtered on an altar, a man holding a knife over his own son—but pictures of Kotex pads were deemed “bad.”
“Promise me you’ll never grow up,” my mom said to me many times when I was a small child.
“I promise,” I always said, and she’d smile and hug me.
I don’t think she realized how seriously I took her instructions, or how desperate I was to please her and to avoid those times when she’d grow silent, disappear into her room and shut the door, an act I interpreted as anger at me.
She kept many things covered up and inside, including most of the information about the alcoholic father she’d grown up with. We knew she’d had to move a lot as a little girl, that she’d been afraid her father would show up on the playground of yet another new school in one of his drunken rages, but that was about all.
She fixed us the same breakfast every morning of my young life—one scrambled egg, one piece of toast, a small glass orange juice, and a large glass of milk—her way of providing us with lives of stability. Other meals were equally prescribed—spaghetti on Thursday, hamburgers on Friday, a rotation of the same dinners throughout the week.
She slicked back my long hair into tight braids, made sure I had three new dresses at the beginning of each school year, and then rarely left the house herself, except to follow a routine of library and grocery store on Saturday, and church on Sunday. She ordered most of our birthday and Christmas presents from the Sears catalogue and maintained that drinking even one sip of alcohol was a pathway to ruination that we should avoid at any cost.
In family conversations, ones that my mom found difficult or stressful or that she would have rather avoided (often, in my memory, revolving around my rebellious middle sister), I remember sitting in our living room and watching her trace letters on her thigh with her finger, spelling out whatever words she was thinking of, but couldn’t bring herself to say.
Evangelicalism reinforced all of this for her—women were supposed to be silent and be at home. Her father died in San Diego when I was fourteen, a fact she couldn’t bring herself to speak about until several months after he was gone.
And she would have been mortified to see the Playgirl magazine Drew unveiled at the Red Lion once we arrived there in early November for our “marriage-repair” weekend, as well as the bottle of champagne he brought along.
Drew seemed to feel fine about spending money on this getaway to a hotel, and he championed the champagne as celebratory. On the thirty-minute drive from our house on Sunset Road to the hotel in Boise, I began to feel aware of each breath I was taking, and the way they seemed to catch in my chest, but at the hotel, once the champagne was uncorked and poured into clear plastic cups, I took a small sip, and for a minute or two, forgot my distressing symptoms. I hadn’t ever left our little daughters overnight before, and here we were in a spacious room with fresh sheets on the king-sized bed and a pretty view of Boise, which back then felt like an exciting big city to me.
We ate dinner at the Black Angus Steak House and afterwards, in our room, Drew suggested we sit down to look at the Playgirl. “Come on. Just look at it,” he said, when I seemed unenthused.
The vague annoyance in his voice reminded me of the time in high school when my older sister and her boyfriend tried to convince me to go to a movie with them, which was against the rules of our church. I refused and my sister looked at me like I was a baby and a spoilsport for not joining them in their misdeeds. I’m sure she felt as annoyed and frustrated by my role in our family as I felt by hers, but I wished anyone understood the pressure I felt to please my parents, to do everything right.
But finally, l sat down with Drew on the bed, and he opened the magazine.
“See?” he said. “It’s not that big of a deal.”
As I stared at the wavy long hair and broad muscled shoulders of the cover model, leaning naked against a white-painted fence, his half-erect penis in plain sight, I felt numb.
I knew I was supposed to acquiesce to Drew and acknowledge that looking at pictures of naked strangers was fine. Regardless of our religion’s restrictions about sex, no one talked much about the rules after marriage as far as what should go on between husband and wife, except the part about women being pleasing. Pornography was considered wrong, and there was a lot of talk about “not lusting” after things and people that weren’t yours, but in the 70s even Jimmy Carter admitted to “committing adultery in his heart,” and in my marriage, Drew’s rights as a male seemed to outweigh everything else.
And I would have agreed that a muscled chest and arms can be a pleasure to see, a man moving around in a normal way, mowing the lawn, playing basketball (Jeremy Allen White, anyone?) and one of the reasons I had fallen for Drew in the first place was his nicely developed physique. But these pictures of blank-eyed naked men felt more like an assault than anything else. I didn’t want more penises in my face pressuring me to do something about them; I wanted a man who would talk to me and care about the way I felt.
And that wasn’t what this was about. It wasn’t anything about me; it was about Drew wanting more sex. It was about him wanting me to acquiesce to what he wanted, regardless of my state of illness or health or desire.
Still, an hour later, I got into bed with Drew, intending to give him what he wanted, to follow through with what everyone in my family and at church was expecting me to give and be and do. I attempted to be enthusiastic, but as he grew more insistent with his body, pressing against me, something inside me went still, and I turned away.
I couldn’t do it. Even with all that seemed to be riding on this, I couldn’t.
Once again, my body was speaking for me. Having sex with him at that point felt like giving away something I couldn’t bear to lose. Looking back, it seems clear that in a situation in which a person doesn’t have much power, refusing to do certain things may feel like the only way to hold on to any sort of agency or selfhood.
We were supposed to stay the whole weekend, but we drove home the next morning. “It’s too bad you can’t pay people for sex,” Drew said, looking straight ahead out the windshield of our Toyota minivan.
“What?” I asked, wondering if he’d somehow found out about my secret JCPenney credit card. He knew I was unhappy about money and my lack of it. “You want to pay me to sleep with you?”
“It was a joke. I was joking,” he said, and we both receded into silence.
I felt defeated, and I’m sure he did, too.
A few months from then, I would be back in college, making an attempt to get certified to teach high school, and thinking about having sex with another man, but that morning, driving home, I didn’t know that. The leaves had been beautiful the evening before, vivid red and yellow, on the gorgeous tree-lined streets of Boise, but as we drove down I-84, all I could see was the muted tan and sage colors of the surrounding fields stretching out around us as we headed from Boise back to the small town where we lived, twenty miles west.
This makes me think of an essay by Slavoj Žižek when he wrote, and I think I am paraphrasing, "we only feel free because we lack the language to articulate our unfreedoms." I have never seen someone so clearly articulate how religious oppression can happen through the censorship of language and shame-based thinking about our human experiences. Thank you for writing this and articulating it all so beautifully.
That he sat there getting a hard-on looking at male erotic models in Playgirl as a way to get you to have sex with him is so revealing about his character. And yet it was you who felt the shame.