Pleasure After Purity Culture with Rachel Overvoll

Rachel Overvoll is a Somatic Sex and Intimacy Coach and published author of Finding Feminism. Using her credentials from the Somatica Institute and Kinsey Institute, she works through the mediums of embodiment and self-attunement to help clients step into the power of an authentic and pleasure-centered life.
The term “purity culture” is generally associated with the white, American, Evangelical Christian Purity Movement. However, evangelicals don’t have a monopoly on the ethics of purity culture. The specifics vary by religion and culture, but gender and sexual control upon which purity culture stands is global, cross-religious, and cross-cultural.
Rachel and Dr. Kate talk about the Purity Culture that conflates women’s worth with their virginity.
Couples don’t even hold hands til engaged. Any distractions to man’s path to God are a sin.
But actually, men keep control over women’s bodies in the form of sexual oppression.
Some see it as positive…but in the Purity Culture, it is embedded so deeply and really is oppression.
Rachel talks about how Purity culture instills in women a deep hatred of their bodies and mistrust of their bodies because they are taught it causes evil.
Women in this culture cannot enjoy their bodies as it causes themselves and men to sin.
The process of women trying to leave the Purity culture is also part of the conversation: Regaining love of your body, and knowing you deserve pleasure.
Dr. Kate and Rachel talk about:
1. What purity culture is and some of the lessons it teaches children growing up in it.
2. How did Rachel begin to unpack purity culture messaging?
3. How does purity culture impact how someone shows up for themselves? For a partner?
4. How can someone recovering from purity culture begin to explore what is pleasurable for them?
5. How can someone deal with the shame that's rooted in purity culture as they begin their exploration of pleasure?
And so much more. Join us.
Website: www.modernintimacy.com
Social: Dr. Kate: / drkatebalestrieri
The Modern Intimacy: / themodernintimacy
Rachel Overvoll @rachelovervoll

[@scoop1871]

Awesome discussion! 👏🏾 Wow this brings up so many feelings. Anger namely. I’m 31 years old and STILL recovering from the effects of purity culture. When I was thirteen, I was made to take a pledge that I promised to be abstinent until marriage in my youth group. At the time, not only did I not really know or understand what I was “promising” (I say that in quotes because it was clearly a coursed promise) and that it was indeed unrealistic but the shame and confusion that came out of it has very long lasting effects. Like when they told us girls don’t masturbate and if we do, we won’t be able to orgasm with our husbands later on when we get married because we have “trained” our bodies to do something unnatural.
I guess all sorts of reasons have to be made to justify something so ridiculous. Nevertheless, I began to feel guilty about something that was indeed very natural. It was only when I went to summer camp a few years later and one girl asked if we masturbate and nearly everyone in the room said yes that I started to see things differently.
Now I know better. Purity culture is garbage. It’s designed to make women feel ashamed about our bodies and our sexuality and that we are to blame for men’s actions, inclusion rape because they “can’t help themselves”. Even so, it’s amazing how hard it is to shake those beliefs you were brainwashed into. Until very recently I thought there was something wrong with me because I can’t reach climax without a vibrator etc during penetrative sex. As with everything else I’ve come to learn through the years, I am indeed in the majority, but purity culture would turn it around and have me to believe it is somehow my fault. So glad this trend is fading. My son is four months old and I’ll be sure he never gets taught that garbage, not from me or anyone I will let him be around anyway.

[@sayhello5377]

You posted this a year ago, so I doubt you’ll see this comment. Purity culture hurt my life and my relationships in so many ways, ways I’m still struggling to overcome at 36. My dad was a Southern Baptist pastor and my mom taught at a Christian school. Chastity was not a recommendation in my parents’ household; it was an absolute mandate. I grew up being told through church sermons, youth group, books, Christian music, and every resource available to me that the very most important part of my existence was my virginity. I remember my parents buying me these Christian books for teen girls that always had heavy virginity messaging. I was forced to participate in True Love Waits and wear a “promise ring.” I wasn’t allowed to date under the age of 18. I had a very strict dress code. While I knew a lot of girls who were only allowed to wear dresses and ankle-length skirts, my parents did allow me to wear jeans and knee-length shorts. Everything had to be baggy, nothing low cut, no writing or logos on the chest, just very frumpy uncool clothes. When I was 14, I had my first love, and I do mean I was absolutely in love with this boy. He was 16. He asked my dad if we could date, to which my dad chased him off. My mom caught us holding hands one day and told my dad, who marched into my room after school and yelled at me, “You will NOT ruin MY reputation, do you understand me?! If you run around acting like a slut, I could lose my job as pastor! And make no mistake about it, if you EVER get pregnant, I will kick you out of my house and you can be homeless on the streets for all I care. I will not aid and abet sin!” slammed the door, and didn’t speak to me for days. And let me repeat: this was all because I held a boy’s hand. We hadn’t even kissed and certainly had never slept together. Growing up, a lot of kids from my school would spread rumors that I was a lesbian (I wasn’t…) because I wasn’t allowed to date. It sucked. Then, I went to Liberty University, where are the purity culture and doctrine nation was at its worst. It was so weird… They put so much emphasis on virginity. It seemed as though if a person had committed both the sins of murder and premarital sex, murder would be the more forgivable one. We were constantly told that if we had sex before marriage, we were robbing our future spouse. I remember the analogy of chewed bubblegum. I remember being told that if I had sex before marriage, I would be absolutely worthless, no man would ever want to marry me, and then, if I was able to find some horrible man, the slow standards, he would mistreat me for the rest of my life, because he didn’t value me. I met my husband in college and all of our first experiences were completely awkward. He was *so* afraid of getting in trouble that he would barely touch me. Once, we were at his apartment, studying for an exam, and a few days later he received an anonymous letter in the mail from a “concerned member of student leadership,” which said we were hurting our testimony every time we were alone together (STUDYING), and that we should both leave school and beg God for his forgiveness because surely we had turned people away from him and straight to hell. We knew early on that we wanted to eventually get married one day, but purity culture had us so messed up that we rushed into marriage only a year and a half after meeting. We barely had two nickels to rub together, but at least we were “not sinning.” Sex was very awkward for the first few years of our marriage. I definitely had the stronger sex drive out of the two of us, and my husband‘s mind was so wrapped around purity culture that he just could not untangled those stats. Every time we had sex, he felt like he was sinning. It had to be boring vanilla missionary position with no foreplay or it was “sin.” We read Christian sex books before we got married, all of which said oral sex, pulling out, sex toys, porn, and all other positions were sin. 😵‍💫 We’ve been married 17 years and just had a conversation about it the other day. While we are much more free in our sexual relationship, there are experiences I’ve wanted to have with him for years that he absolutely cannot comprehend are not sinful. Yay, Christian purity culture.