Yoga Pants

Early spring. Days grow longer. Daffodils are already in bloom. Easter approaches. And at a nearby coffee shop, in line in front of me was a cute coed with a long, blond ponytail in yoga pants. My eyes veered downward and admired her tight young ass. Then, as she spun toward a table, I surreptitiously glanced at her crotch.

I had already sinned (cf. Mt 5:28). But I desired to fully consummate it.

Purity culture instructed me that “women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control” (1 Tim 2:9). A few years ago, a prominent Christian blogger announced that she was refusing to wear “lust-inspiring” yoga pants and leggings. The message I received as a young man was, “Don’t think about sex.” But the blonde coed in front of me made it almost impossible to heed that admonition.

“Modest is Hottest!”

The school day at my private Christian high school began with Chapel. One morning, as usual, my classmate Caroline was in attendance. She was tall and slender, her pretty face accented by her blond hair. She stood out on that morning. Unlike the other girls in their long skirts, Caroline presented herself in a short plaid skirt with black stockings. Her breasts were outlined by her tight black sweater.

Caroline had taken my thoughts captive.

“When your eyes bounce toward a woman, they must bounce away immediately. . .”

But my eyes kept bouncing back to Caroline’s breasts.

Women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control .
1 Timothy 2:9

I recall that for girls in the purity culture, a frequently heard refrain was “Modest Is Hottest!” “Modest dress was seen as an expression of, and way of preserving, purity of thought and mind,” Sarah McCammon writes in The Exvangelicals. They were admonished to avoid provocative fashions unbecoming of a young believer. “A modest girl covers her breasts and chooses not to wear the short skirt that might cause boys to lust,” says one Lutheran website. Joshua Harris wrote to young women in I Kissed Dating Goodbye, “Your job is to keep your brothers from being led astray….You can help by refusing to wear clothing designed to attract attention to your body.”

The message I imbued was twofold:

The female body is a source of temptation.
A girl’s virtue is commensurate with the length of her skirt.

One of the first girls to express an interest in me was Nicole. Like the other girls at my Christian high school, she dressed modestly. Unlike the girls at the public high school, there was no hint of cleavage, a bare midriff, or tight jeans. But there was no hiding Nicole’s bosom.

Nicole was stacked.

I was too shy to reciprocate her interest, but the sight of her chest certainly induced lust. As much as I tried to resist, the interplay between Nicole’s chaste exterior and the treasures which lay beneath formed an erotic template. Temptation came in the form of what was not seen. (During my fling with the Deaconess, one of the big turn-ons was knowing that under her demure skirt was a pair of sexy panties from Victoria’s Secret.)

Season of Doubt

The instrumental introduction to Tori Amos’ Icicle features a setting of the hymn “O, for a Thousand Tongues to Sing.” It’s not what you would hear on a Sunday morning. It’s a discordant, haunting piano solo that prefaces a song about repressed sexual desire.

This is a season of doubt.

Progress on my dissertation has been halting. Parish ministry has been wearying as political polarization encroaches upon church life. “Spiritual dryness” inadequately describes my inner life. I’m parched.

I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy….
Crash Davis, Bull Durham

Faith is for me admittedly largely speculative. I, too, believe in the soul, but it’s a highly conceptualized, Platonic abstraction. A literary critic described Henry Miller as having developed a “theology of the cunt.” “What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience,” Miller wrote in Tropic of Capricorn, “is sexual intercourse.” There is nothing abstract about the cock and the pussy.

Leaning against the wall, Stephanie wore a mischievous smile. And a slinky babydoll nightgown. “Religion says sex is so bad,” she teased as she unbuckled my belt.

My hand moved underneath her babydoll, caressing her soft skin. She wasn’t wearing any panties. Then I gently lowered one of the straps, revealing her lush breast and erect nipple. “But perhaps it is true after all,” I responded, quoting Buber. That was the most persuasive answer I could venture.

Formed as I was by purity culture, it’s hard to overemphasize how much my faith was inextricably connected with sexual purity as a young man. Believing that true love waits… Since holiness required reining in my sexual desires, a life of faith demanded purity. As other teenagers were losing their virginity in high school, I memorized 1 Thess 4:3-7. Overcoming fleshly desires was at the heart of my religious practice. When “Liz,” a cute blonde classmate at my Christian college, tearfully confessed to having had sex, I confess to feeling a certain pharisaical pride: “I thank you that I am not like other men” (Lk 18:11). Despite the encroaching temptations, I entered my senior year of college still a virgin. Then….

The moment I knew sin, I fucked.

I committed myself to a year of service at an urban Lutheran parish, then commenced my studies at divinity school. I entered lay ministry in the Lutheran church. As I continued to yield to the seductions of Venus, a dark shadow of doubt enveloped me. Thou shalt not commit adultery. The commandment remained unchanged. Yet Jezebel had seduced me into committing fornication (cf. Rev 2:20). When she flashed her panties in that hotel room, my faith was not strong enough to resist.

The commandment, as I have internalized it, stridently forbids me from the sexual activities I engage in. I’ve proved incapable of denying or sublimating my sexual urges, so I maintain a pious façade while secretly indulging my carnal desires. The cost to my faith, as I’ve experienced it, has been considerable. As one college pastor noted, for his students “the Bible unsurprisingly starts to become a lot more ‘doubtful’ for some of them once they’d had sex.”

I’m torn between devotion and desire. I find that I seek solace not between the covers of the Bible but between a woman’s legs.

But her hips sway a natural
Kind of faith that could give
Your lost heart a warm chapel
Tori Amos, “Abnormally Attracted to Sin”

“She had sex”

“Claire” was a member of my youth group in high school. With her brown hair and round bosom, she was easy to notice. I was too shy to speak with her, but she was a faithful presence in youth group until our junior year when she suddenly disappeared. Her absence puzzled me until I heard why she had left the group.

“She had sex,” I heard it whispered.

Claire had tearfully confessed to some of the other girls in youth group that she had sex with her boyfriend. Her mother had discovered evidence of her transgression via a discarded condom wrapper on her bedroom floor and lacy thong panties in her drawer. She forced Claire to publicly confess her sin. Then Claire’s family left the church.

Claire had “fallen.” My young mind was confused as to how she could present a façade of righteousness in church each week while engaging in sexual impurity. For a young Christian girl, sexual transgression cast doubt on the sincerity of her faith and imperiled her salvation. Ye shall know them by their fruits (Mt 7:16). While I expected the provocatively dressed secular girls who attended the public high school to egregiously sin, I hadn’t expected that of a good church girl like Claire. And she was irrevocably tainted. No Godly young man seeking a wife would be attracted to any young women stained by impurity.

I recently thought of Claire and Beth, girls I knew who failed to live up to their pledges of purity. Undoubtedly there were more who had fallen of whom I remain unaware. One assumption, both spoken and unspoken, in the culture I grew up in was that females, by dint of design, had it easier than lascivious males in controlling their sexual urges. Those girls who couldn’t were simply categorized as “sluts.” Despite some maturity on my part, this schema somehow still remains embedded in my erotic imagination, which I’m certain helps account for my Madonna-whore complex.

A Further Reckoning with Lust

I had signed “The Covenant,” my Christian college’s code of conduct, with the expressed intention of abiding by its stipulations. “Sexually inappropriate behavior” was among the forms of conduct I was prohibited from engaging in. “This includes overly intimate sexual behavior, sexual intercourse outside of marriage, and the use or distribution of pornography.” By my senior year, I had retained my virginity, and I was still committed to purity.

But I couldn’t stop the burning in my loins.

I was dating a sophomore. She was a music major, blond and Rubenesque. (I confess that the first thing I noticed about her was her ample chest.) She was smart and sweet and liked quoting C.S. Lewis. And she devoutly believed that True Love Waits®.

She was, in Pete Hamill’s words, one of the “noble defenders of the holy hymen.” Our physical interactions were restrained. I suppressed my sexual attraction to her. I couldn’t conceive of my girlfriend as an object of my sexual desire. She was too pure.

But True Lust Won’t Wait.

My faith was inextricably intertwined with my purity, and despite my lust, I had preserved my virginity. A pharisaic pride had crept into my soul. Unlike so many of my contemporaries, I had kept my pledge. “I thank you that I am not like other men” (Lk 18:11). But lust is without conscience. Religious studies professor Scot McKnight calls the expectation that young Christians will abstain from sex until marriage “absolutely not realistic.” I began to buckle under the weight of that expectation. I was losing Every Man’s Battle. For the first time I began to doubt that I had the strength to endure temptation (cf. 1 Cor 10:13). Desires I had long suppressed were straining to erupt with volcanic force.

The Covenant would be violated. I was about to consummate my sin.

A Divided Man

But I am carnal (Rom 7:14).

As she undressed and revealed her naked body, I instinctively thought “it was a delight to the eyes” (Gen 3:6). Then as she nibbled on my ear, my eyes glanced down toward the only item of clothing she still had on.

Her white thong panties.

The mysteries those panties concealed.

I was about to be irreparably marked by my sin, the implications of which I couldn’t fathom at the time. Pledges discarded. Prayers unanswered.

With fear and trembling, my fingers moved along the waistband of her panties.

“What do you want to do now?”

Let’s fuck.

She pulled her panties down her legs. Then my underwear came off, exposing my erection.

But I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind (Rom 7:23).

In my quest for victory, I had read the Puritan theologian John Owen, who had written of the “indwelling sin” believers must make war against. But now I was being seduced by Jezebel — with her deep blue eyes, red hair, voluptuous figure and full breasts — into committing fornication (cf. Rev 2:20). I was a divided man. Part of me still wanted to remain pure.

But I wanted to fuck even more.

The moment I knew sin, I fucked.

Beth

Somehow I have neglected to mention “Beth”….

Beth was a classmate of mine in high school and a colleague on the debate team. Yes, I had a crush on her. She was smart and mature. Her long brown hair and tall, slender physique also captured my fancy. (Despite my best efforts not to, I found myself ogling her smooth, pert ass.) She was friendly, but I’m fairly certain she didn’t notice my desire for her. Even by the standards of our conservative Christian high school, Beth was rather demure.

Fast forward a few years. Curious about whatever happened to her, I located Beth’s profile on Facebook. It didn’t take long to discover that she had been a dancer at a gentleman’s club.

Sweet, innocent Beth. On the pole.

She wraps those hands around that pole
She licks those lips and off we go
And she takes it off nice and slow
‘Cause that’s porn star dancing
My Darkest Days, “Porn Star Dancing”

Beth would have been among the last girls at my high school I would have ever suspected of becoming a stripper. I snooped around online some more and discovered her erotic profile, which included the revelation that she lost her virginity in high school to a cadet at a military academy.

My head began to spin. While Beth was wearing her True Love Waits ring at school and piously intoning against the evils of premarital sex, she was getting banged over the weekends. Then she became a sex worker.

Curious about Beth’s erotic rebellion, I scoured my memory for clues. I recall her parents were rather strict. She was conspicuously prudish (again, even by the standards of our conservative Christian high school). Perhaps she cracked under the pressure of having to live up to such high standards of holiness. I can certainly relate.

I’ve never been to a strip club, but I would gladly pay to see Beth on stage. Images I sought to suppress as an adolescent came racing back. That round, pert ass. Her enhanced breasts. (Her bust was noticeably more prominent than back in 11th grade.) Those long legs. Unabashedly flaunting her sexuality.

I confess to jerking off to her online photos.

Reckoning with Lust

It was Friday night. I locked the door to my dorm room. My roommate was gone for the weekend. I took out of my backpack the copy of Maxim I had purchased at a local pharmacy. My purity pledge weighed heavily on me. I had refrained from masturbation since arriving at college. As I pulled the zipper down my pants, my sin was ever before me (cf. Ps 51:3).

Yet Avril beckoned.

My college’s Internet access was filtered, so I had no access to online pornography. This was my portal to sexual release. Unlike other girls of my acquaintance, who were sweet and (ostensibly) pure, Avril Lavigne radiated sex. As I furiously jerked off to Avril, my hypervigilant conscience, if only momentarily, was obliterated. It was only later that I was plunged into shame and tearful repentance.

“Self-gratification” was a sin, a grievous violation of my pledge to purity. Warnings that spilling my seed would invite divine displeasure (Gen 38:9-10) were still vivid in my mind. The same hands with which I hold the Bible should not be defiled by touching myself. I read and reread Every Man’s Battle to fortify myself. As my time in college progressed, however, my struggle against “the secret sin” intensified. Alone in my room, I succumbed again and again to sin. (Elizabeth in my English literature class was a frequent object of my ejaculatory fantasies.) I felt so dirty. But it felt so good.

I eventually summoned the nerve to purchase a copy of Playboy at Barnes & Noble. It all seems very tame in retrospect (Playboy was a relic even then), but possession of pornography, even in its soft-core form, was a serious offense at my school. Enjoying the company of Miss October was a transgressive act. I still recall the delight of discovering, as I unfolded the centerfold, the form of a woman’s naked body and the pleasure it invited. (Although my knowledge about female anatomy was so limited that I initially assumed that women naturally did not grow pubic hair.) A cycle that would becoming achingly familiar started to emerge: Yielding to concupiscence, I sought out sexual gratification, only to be tormented by guilt and regret afterwards. I’d recommit myself to purity and abstain for a period, only to fall yet again into sensuality. My sexual personality was beginning to fracture.

My girlfriend had no idea about my struggles with lust. She devoutly believed that True Love Waits®, so our relationship was resolutely chaste. (We refrained from kissing for a long time.) I strove to honor her purity; I suppressed any sexual desires that arose toward her. The fires of lust continued to smolder, though. It was with an exquisite mixture of arousal and guilt that one night I masturbated in my apartment while my girlfriend was touring with the school choir. I felt so unworthy of her. There she was singing hymns of praise while I lusted over Katy Perry and her two big talents. My commitment to purity was being battered by intense urges I could no longer corral.

There would soon be a reckoning.

Pure

I recently stumbled upon Linda Kay Klein’s Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free. It details the personal journey of a young women who came of age in the purity culture and how it warped her sexuality. While the book is narrated from a female perspective, I recognized much of the culture she described from my own personal experience. Girls were admonished to dress and behave modestly lest they become “stumbling blocks” for boys. An “impure” girl was considered to be damaged, akin to a chewed-up piece of gum. Sexual impurity isn’t confined to actions; inappropriate thoughts and feelings can also render one impure. There was even an Abstinence Study Bible. It all gave the impression that sexual abstinence was essential to living one’s Christian faith. As a young evangelical woman said, “Sex is the big issue that…marks your spiritual standing with God.”

Klein found that a common experience among women formed by the purity culture was sexual guilt and shame. (Klein recounts how, even after she had left the church, she thought she was a “slut” for attempting to have sex with her boyfriend.) Premarital sexual experimentation only exacerbated this. (“Masturbation is what got me through so many years of chastity,” one woman explained.) Sexual dysfunction was common among those who practiced abstinence before marriage. (A common theme in purity literature is that a woman devoted to chastity will turn into a tigress in the bedroom upon her wedding night.)

A couple of thoughts:

I recall that girls were taught to not be “stumbling blocks” because men were easily provoked to lust. The message I received is that women, at least in part, are triggers of temptation and responsible for a man’s fall. I remember one encounter with the Deaconess in which I felt surge of contempt for her because she had not guarded her purity and had led me into sin.
While it may be more keenly felt by women, I can also relate to conflating my identity as a Christian with sexual purity. As my sexual behavior has deviated from that rigid standard, I’ve struggled with doubt.
Sex cannot be separated from guilt for those formed in this culture. Some researchers have concluded: “It turns out that those who are sexually active and have experienced abstinence education and/or have stronger beliefs that the Bible should be literally translated [a core tenet of evangelicalism], have more sexual guilt.”

Youthful Passions

One of the Bible verses burned into my memory growing up in the “purity culture” was 2 Timothy 2:22: “Flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness.” With “a pure heart,” we were exhorted to battle lust (which I understood to be synonymous with sexual desire) and guard our chastity. We were not to give in to the desires of the flesh. A single sexual sin could jeopardize our relationship with God. We were encouraged to resist mounting pressure from our peers and the media to have sex. “Holiness” was synonymous with “purity.”

“But I see in my members another law waging war” (Rom 7:23).

My erection betrayed me.

In youth group, when I would shyly interact with “Summer,” I tried to honor her purity. I averted my eyes as best I could from her protruding bust, her round rear. I did my best to banish impure thoughts about her. We always behaved chastely when we were together.

But Summer made me hard.

Philosopher Alain de Botton observes, “[T]he wet vagina and the stiff penis function as unambiguous agents of sincerity.” My erection revealed, to my shame, the true depth of my lust. No matter how hard I tried to take those thoughts captive (cf. 2 Cor 10:5), those unforgivably dirty thoughts I had about Summer always came back. I believed that I was called to be pure in heart. If erections are “particularly true and honest indices of interest,” as Botton suggests, what did every hard-on, every dirty thought, every intense desire to violate my pledge to remain pure reveal about my heart’s intentions?

I had been invited to facilitate a Bible study one night for our parish’s support group for single moms. Somehow the discussion turned to sex. (Awkward. Despite my obsession with the matter, I find it hard to talk about sex in public.) One of the participants (young and pretty, she reminded me of Alexis Bledel) startled her peers by saying, “No normal human being can abstain from sex. And God doesn’t really expect us to. I know God will forgive me for having sex.”

My faith tradition continues to place severe restrictions on sexual expression. As one official Lutheran theological statement bluntly puts it: “Sexual intercourse engaged in outside of marriage is forbidden by the Scriptures and must be condemned by the church.” The New Testament explicitly condemns πορνεία (porneia), commonly translated as “sexual immorality.” Accordingly, I made a commitment to my church that as a single person I would “live a chaste life.”

“It was like entering a time warp back to the 1950’s,” she said, referring to encountering our denomination’s policy mandating celibacy for single persons seeking ordination. “There’s this assumption in the pews that you just don’t have sex.” She thought the prohibition patently unrealistic. “We’re not monks and nuns.”

She had spent time at a Lutheran seminary as well our mainline Protestant school. On each campus, she discovered that most unmarried seminarians are sexually active. Some were in committed relationships. Some were having casual sex. Monastic self-denial clearly was not characteristic of seminary life. “Seminarians have sex, too.”

She didn’t feel comfortable discussing sexual behavior with anyone in the church. In candidacy committee meetings, she dreaded the possibility of being asked if she was living in accord with our church’s teachings. She fantasized about announcing at the next meeting, “I have sex!” and seeing what the reaction would be. (Pastors and church leaders aren’t naive. During a developmental interview, she was advised to exercise “discretion.” In other words, she wouldn’t be pressed on her sexual activity as long as she kept up an appearance of propriety. Don’t ask, don’t tell.)

She wasn’t alone. Apparently a lot of unmarried Christians are, as one commentator tartly puts it, “saved and having sex.” One recent survey determined that among young evangelicals, 80% have had sex, 64% have had sex within the previous year, and 42% are in an ongoing sexual relationship. Adolescents who had made abstinence pledges were five years later no more likely to have refrained from sex than their peers who hadn’t. Anecdotal evidence seems to confirm this. One writer told of a friend who recently ventured into online dating. Apparently the Christian women he’s dated “want to jump right from a very public conversation and a vanilla latte at Starbucks to very private whispers and physical exchanges between the sheets.”

“Kylie” is an evangelical at a secular college. She was raised Lutheran but identifies as a nondenominational Christian. She’s active in her campus’ InterVarsity Fellowship. She enjoys engaging in spiritual conversations with her fellow believers and sharing her faith journey. There’s one thing she doesn’t disclose to her colleagues in InterVarsity, though.

Kylie has sex.

She’s sleeping with her boyfriend. She doesn’t see anything wrong with it. “I started to question a lot of the teachings of my church specifically about sexual impurity including sex before marriage and homosexuality,” she wrote in her journal. She dismisses the notion that “a line in the Bible” should determine her sexual conduct. Having sex doesn’t affect her relationship with God, she believes. Her religious life and her sex life are separate. Kylie’s double life, according to Donna Frietas in Sex and the Soul, is not uncommon “even within evangelical subcultures.” Frietas writes, “Because of the strong hold of purity culture, many students learn to practice sexual secrecy, professing chastity in public while keeping their honest feelings and often their actual experiences hidden.”

I used to know a girl from a church young adults group named “Rebecca.” I recall she used to sanctimoniously condemn premarital sex. I later heard whispered rumors that she had slept with other guys in the young adults group. It would be easy to judge Rebecca a pious fraud, a hypocrite. Viewed more sympathetically, Rebecca simply couldn’t live up to her ideals. A primitive impulse had seized her body and compelled her to violate her values.

The incongruence between my religious beliefs and my sexual behavior has been a source of anguish. There is a cost to violating deeply ingrained values. As a young Christian, I adopted a set of strict morals regarding sexual behavior (i.e. the only acceptable sexual expression is confined within the context of heterosexual marriage). Eventually my behavior could no longer align with that code. “The moment I knew sin, I fucked.” At the heart of my spiritual struggle was this dissonance between my religious commitments and my sexual sin. My lofty aspirations couldn’t overcome my carnal desires. Once while dating a “respectable” girl from the church who (because True Love Waits®) refrained from all sexual expression (we didn’t even kiss), I hooked up with some other girl from my “Old Testament Method” course and visited escorts because I just couldn’t help myself. As a spiritual leader, I feel pressured to be above temptation. But in the midst of moans and cries of pleasure, as I was overpowered by the sinful flesh, the truth was revealed: I was incapable of chastity.

Veritas in coitu. Foucault said, “At the bottom of sex, there is truth.” Sex is self-revelatory. In bed we expose our true selves. There is a raw honesty in the sexual act itself. Literally stripped naked, we abandon any pretensions when we fuck. Author John Hubner writes, “Sex strips away identities it takes a lifetime to build. A naked aroused man is not a brain surgeon or a university president or a Methodist bishop. He is an animal with an erection.”

An animal with an erection. When I stand naked before a woman, my hard-on blazing, it’s a moment of confession. Regardless of my efforts to control my sensuality, my sexual appetite has confounded my attempts at mastery of the flesh. My arousal deconstructs my personality. My other attributes and commitments wither away. The shy, quiet seminarian becomes uninhibited during sexual passion. (As Stephanie teased, “You’re not reserved during sex!”) My pledge to purity could not withstand the white heat of lust. And so I kissed purity goodbye.

According to one psychologist, sex is daimonic. That is, sex has the power to seize control of the individual, overwhelming one’s rational faculties and obliterating consciousness. Freud observed that we were compelled by subconscious primitive, irrational forces. Lust exposes the primal self beneath our civilized facades. D. H. Lawrence wrote, “My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh.” He meant that our instincts contain a primordial truth obscured by he called “cerebral consciousness.” The strongest natural impulse is the sexual instinct. “In sex we have our basic, most elemental being.” This instinct is not abstract. It seeks consummation in the fleshly union of male and female in the act of sexual intercourse. “Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges,” writes Camille Paglia. Whores, wrote Sade, are the “only authentic philosophers” because they see sexual desire at its rawest, denuded of sentiment and morality. The Dionysian pursuit of sexual satisfaction brooks no restraint.

“Sex is as important as eating or drinking, and we ought to allow the appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other.”
Marquis de Sade

I’ve lost the battle for purity. I haven’t been able to navigate between my sexuality and my faith. I haven’t fled youthful passions; I’ve succumbed to them.

True Lust Doesn’t Wait

“Of all sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity.”
Remy du Gourmont

“So how old were you when you lost your virginity?” she asked.

I admitted that I was 22.

I grew up in the “purity culture.” The purity culture suffuses much of conservative Christianity, placing a premium on sexual abstinence before marriage. True Love Waits®, we were told. “Sexual purity means saying no to sexual intercourse, oral sex, and even sexual touching. It means saying no to a physical relationship that causes you to be ‘turned on’ sexually. It means no looking at pornography or pictures that feed sexual thoughts,” explains one ministry. Even sexual desire seemed to be forbidden before marriage. Our sex “education” consisted of abstinence-only messages. Young women were admonished to dress modestly and avoid flirting lest they lead men into temptation. (Some girls wore only long dresses and skirts, believing that a girl whose skirt ended above the knee would be a “stumbling block.”) Girls who had succumbed to lust, I came to believe, were somehow soiled, “damaged goods” so to speak. (I heard one speaker compare a girl who has lost her virginity to chewed-up bubble gum.) Pregnancy was grounds for dismissal from my private Christian high school. Young men memorized “fighter verses” from the Bible to recite when inclined to sin. I was taught that if a pretty girl arouses sexual thoughts, I must immediately those thoughts captive (cf. 2 Cor 10:5). I taught myself to look away when I saw something arousing, whether it was a provocative billboard or a woman’s cleavage. Several girls I knew wore purity rings, placeholders for wedding bands, as they waited to save themselves for their future husbands, striving to become the woman exalted in Proverbs 31. I signed a card pledging that I would remain chaste for my future bride. Through it all sex was spoken of in hushed tones, shrouded in secrecy, and the message I received was, “Sex is dirty and you should save it for someone you love.”

I strove for purity during adolescence. It was central to my identity as a young believer. Although I was amazingly naive about sex, the intersection of my intense desire to remain pure and my active imagination produced angst. To compensate for the shame I felt, I tried extra hard to be “righteous” and keep the commandments. I suppressed my sexual impulses for a long time. I experienced the same flood of hormones any teenager does, yet I was extremely anxious around girls. I didn’t date. My lack of personal experience didn’t inhibit me from having a vivid fantasy life, although I had no detailed understanding of female anatomy. When I slipped, I was riddled with guilt and prayed for forgiveness. I attended a small Christian college, and my shyness and social awkwardness continued to inhibit me. Dating was hard. I did have a girlfriend in college for 6 months—she was the first girl I kissed—but we remained chaste. (She strongly believed that True Love Waits®). I believed in the sinfulness of premarital sex. To my surprise I discovered that even at my small evangelical college, many of my peers were having clandestine sex. My resolve was buckling under the pressure. What exactly was I waiting for? True love may wait, but lust doesn’t. I could not escape from the gravitational pull of sex, which is, in A.S. Neill’s words, “the most fascinating and mysterious thing in the world. To make fruit forbidden is to make it delectable and enticing.”

Shalom Auslander provides an interesting exegesis of the Fall in Genesis:

Having eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, Adam and Eve suddenly knew of good and of evil, of morality and of immorality, of sin and of virtue, and they were ashamed.

Genesis 3:11 – God busts them.

Genesis 3:14 – God curses them.

Genesis 3:24 – God chases them from Eden and bars the Gates of Paradise so that they may never return.

And what’s the first thing they do? What is the very first thing that they do?

Genesis 4:1 – And Adam knew Eve.

They fucked. The very next chapter. The very first verse.

And Adam knew Eve.

The very. First. Verse….

The moment they knew sin, they fucked.

(Shalom Auslander, “Where’s the Sin? An Anti-Sermon”)

The moment I knew sin, I fucked.