. I’m your host,
.
Today on our episode, I have back with me Rachel Allen, who was my guest last episode, and we started a series talking about
. So if you haven’t listened to that one, back up, go listen to that one. This one will probably make more sense as we talk about it, and you’ll know who Rachel is, so welcome, Rachel.
Yeah, specifically like religions that are patriarchally structured or conservative sexually, I think would be a word that I would use there, and how that has shaped and defined sexuality in our culture and us as individuals. So one of the things, kind of the two common things that come out of this is the idea that we are not, we don’t own our sexuality, someone else owns our sexuality, as females. And sometimes as males, too, like we talk about that being gods or like for God or for to be set apart, though we do put a lot more of that focus on how women do that than how men do that. But really I want to, one of the things that has come up is the idea of purity culture, and that has kind of shaped America, at least for the last three decades, we know that it’s been pretty present and was kind of revamped and kind of got a new following and kind of became its own sort of cult belief system in the early 90s.
Which has impacted several generations and prior to that, I mean it may not have been the same purity culture that we see that kind of came to the forefront in the 90s, but there has been this purity culture in America for hundreds of years.
Yeah, ok, so we have to look at, too, we were part of our founding as a nation in America, and I’m assuming that most of your listeners are Americans, but we have to even look at the founding of America. There were a lot of Puritans that were moving here because of English exile because they were too strict. They were too rigid. The English church didn’t really like that. And the English church at that time was kind of moving towards a hey, we just had a really, really hard time in which a bunch of people died because of kings and overthrowing different hierarchies and things like that, and so England was kind of like, yeah, we don’t want any big rules, like, we just like wanting people being calm and “God is love,” and that’s kind of where England as a church was going, which is funny to think about England being the less strict one. But Puritans moved to America because of that and they were very structured sexually. They were very rigid in terms of their sexual beliefs. We get some interesting readings from
. Which really kind of shows us how that was shaping America, and like I just recently listened to a podcast that went in deep about the Salem witch trials and how much sexuality played a part in that.
Jackie Pack
Was that Unobscured?
Rachel Allen
Yes, it was. It was so good. And so we see those tenets kind of carrying through even though most of us would say like we weren’t raised by Puritans.
Jackie Pack
It was in our foundation.
Rachel Allen
It was very much in our foundation, and regardless of where we’ve kind of gone after that, that is our foundation, and so when we’re looking at the idea of purity and female sexuality and owning sexuality and being able to live in our sexuality, like that has not been allowed in America really ever.
Jackie Pack
Right. And just like we do with clients, a lot of times, we will say to them, you need to know your story, and your story didn’t just begin at birth. So we’re looking at your parents, your grandparents, whatever that looks like, right? We’re going back because if a change is going to happen, we have to know what the root foundation is. And once we can understand that, then we can understand what steps need to be taken to move the client wherever they’re wanting to go.
And so I think that’s similar to where were are at as a country, right? If we want to make progress or if you know, some people are like the sexual messages are not working or we’re too sexualized, I mean on some levels we’re too sexualized, on others we’re not enough, right? And so I think we can’t outpace or outgrow our foundational roots, and we have to go back and talk about that story.
Rachel Allen
Yeah, so one of the things that I like, I’m a linguist by nature, like I love words and I love understanding the meaning of words. I think there’s a big difference between a sexualized culture and a sexually healthy culture. Sexualized is kind of voyeuristic. It’s exhibitionistic. It’s very out there, and really it’s something that can be bartered or owned or used as currency. It’s salacious. It’s tempting. It’s seductive. It’s that other thing, that thing that we’re not supposed to do. It’s on the edge of what is taboo, and sexual health really says this is an integral part of human beings.
We literally cannot survive as a race without our sexuality, and there are whole cultures that have festivals around sex, that are open to what it means to be female, what it means to be male and anything kind of in-between. We know that Native Americans didn’t have two genders. That kind of came to America with the Puritans, and we’ve lost some of that in trying to control and mandate what sexuality is supposed to look like for individuals.
Jackie Pack
So let’s talk a little bit about the fear of sexuality.
Rachel Allen
Okay, I get super excited about that. So I think historically, and again, well not again because I haven’t actually stated this today, but when I’m looking at the history of patriarchal religions and patriarchal structures, I am looking at Christianity, Hebrew, and Islam, and that’s kind of my, like, I know more about that than other religions. I know way more about Christianity than I do Judaism and Islam, so as I’m talking, consider that I’m talking through a Christian lens, but I’m sure that there are variances in different denominations and sects like that, and I’m sure most of this is going to make sense.
But when the Christian church started taking over Europe, there are two things that I think happened at the same time that were really imperative to sexual health in religion. It also shaped our hierarchy, and one of those is Augustine was sexually anorexic.
Jackie Pack
Augustine was, just for listeners …
Rachel Allen
Augustine of Hippo was, he’s an Apostle, but he was a theologian, and he gave us a lot of the tenets that we think of as foundational theological beliefs in Christianity. They came from Augustine. So he put down the idea of what the Holy Spirit was, the idea that God was, like, we have a unified God. We’re a monotheistic religion, so we’re not polytheistic.
So before he came to Christianity, there are jokes in the theological world that Augustine slept with every prostitute within the Roman Empire. Like, he was known to be a ladies’ man; he was known to be very sexual. And then, when he came to Christianity, he felt this burden of what he had done and created the absence of that, which I would say that Augustine was a sex addict who then went into sexual anorexia and shame.
But a lot of Augustine’s writings were talking about how women were created by the devil. He’s the one that brought up the idea that original sin started with women, and like it, the fall of man was women’s fault. He put a lot off on women and that women tempt you out of purity or women tempt you out of your walk with God. And so you have these two things happening where he’s creating these huge leaps in the theological foundation, and he’s kind of a misogynist in big ways, and that got wrapped into his writings.
Jackie Pack
Because in early Christianity, I mean when we’re talking about females, right I mean, there had to be a big debate about whether or not females even had a soul. And then that evolved to whether they could be saved. So this is some of what you’re talking about; like this shifting the blame to women and externalizing their own desires or appetites and making that about somebody else. And otherwise, if it weren’t for them, they would have been in this great walk with God.
Rachel Allen
Right. Which in some ways, and I’m not comparing Augustine to Hitler. But in some ways, what he did with women and putting all the blame of sin on them is what Hitler did to the Jews in the Holocaust. Hitler said Jews are evil because they are the ones that crucified Jesus. Well, Jesus was a Jew, like, you know, so there is some of that when we shift the blame, that becomes a big problem.
We’re talking about huge things–sin and nature and all of that. So as that developed, there’s a lot of history in that too, and I’m a nerd so I could go into all of it, but we also saw polytheistic religion and pagan religions get attacked by the church, and most, and I mean, the church is trying to spread the gospel in very militant and bloody ways, which I do not agree with, but one of those things was to snuff out pagan religions, which tended to be very nurturing toward women, tended to be very goddess oriented. We know that a lot of power came from fertility and the maternal being, and also, we had herbalists and midwives, and things like that came from pagan religions that valued and, in some ways, worshipped the female body. So those two things are happening at once.
Jackie Pack
Pagan religions were also usually more like the people or the peasants. Whereas Christianity tended to be the royalty, the lords, the all of that kind of stuff.
Rachel Allen
Yeah, so when Constantine made Christianity the religion of Rome, Rome then got the backing of the elite, and the military, where pagans were hearth and home like this is what we practice within our four walls. So there wasn’t a lot of power with it in terms of militant power. So in that, a lot of femaleness specifically and the idea of purity, the idea of sexuality got lost or turned into something dark and dirty.
Fast forward 250 years, and you have the Salem witch trials. You know where we are present day, and you can see in our modern history, we did have the 70s when the feminist movement started and came to existence.
Jackie Pack
Or at least the second wave of feminism.
Rachel Allen
Yeah, second wave. The 60s was the first wave, in the 70s was the second wave. And like we started seeing that idea of sexual freedom in more liberal parts of the country. I don’t know that that ever happened in more conservative parts of the country, like the Southeast or the breadbasket, but I would say New York and California, those kinds of places got to experience that. I would guess that most farms and most rural towns in the United States didn’t experience as much of that, but in the 80s, we get a huge Christian backlash or a conservative backlash from that because women wanted birth control and women wanted to leave the home and start working and not have children as much, and it created a lot of financial freedom for women.
That’s when we first started looking at marital rape as actually being a thing, and the conservatives really started pushing against this idea of women owning their sexuality, and then we get the purity culture movement that kind of comes after that, which is this idea of giving your purity, which your virginity, not even purity.
Jackie Pack
Purity is seen as virginity.
Rachel Allen
Those things are very related, and the penis-to-vagina virginity is the only thing that counts in that, but that idea of virginity until marriage and giving it to your father or giving it to God or giving it to this male to hold until your wedding.
Jackie Pack
Which then your husband now owns it.
Rachel Allen
Yes. And then we’ve had the last 30 years of that showing up in our culture. Now we’re watching that shift because some of the front runners of the purity movement as it stands today are coming out and saying yeah, this was a bad idea. Like, we didn’t know what we were talking about when we did this, and it caused damage.
Jackie Pack
So I mean, that’s a good history timeline kind of bringing us to where we are and why I think it’s so difficult for us to look back and see sexual health in our history. I don’t even know that we were talking about sexual health. And so I think that’s newer, you know 21st Century kind of term, the latter half of the 21st Century kind of term in saying that sexual health is something …
Rachel Allen
Well, I think it says something that we didn’t ask women about sexual health until like 2005. Most sexual health books were written by men, for men, and men wrote most marital books for women. And so really until 2005, we didn’t even start getting good research about women saying, “It’s not that I don’t like sex, it’s that I’m not having good sex.”
Or it’s not that I’m exhausted. I don’t have any more time or any more space to give to this. Or I didn’t–I don’t even know, aside from the three positions that my husband likes, I don’t know. And there has been a kind of other backlash to that, where women think they need to get educated, but they’re going to porn for that, which is also made by men for men.
So again, it’s this idea of: Women haven’t had a space in American history or American culture to shape what healthy female sexuality looks like. And there’s a whole other side of this that which is about males, too, right? I think that that in and of itself, we have to talk about this because when it comes to the patriarchal structures, it’s not good for either person. Because it is structured as a hierarchy, there is a power dynamic.
Jackie Pack
And men in different ways than women, right, are told what their sexuality needs to look like, what it can’t look like, how much it needs to look like, all of that kind of stuff. Men are also told that as well, so they get a different message than females do, and in some ways, I think that might look like they get to be owners of their sexuality, and yet it’s a sexuality that was handed to them and often doesn’t serve them well.
Rachel Allen
And so one of the things that I think kind of shows up and I’m going to stop talking so fast, that kind of shows up with purity culture is this idea that like women are to remain virgins. Like, it’s that idea of like women don’t own their sexuality. But it’s also this idea that they’re the gatekeeper, right, like it does make me think of Ghostbusters with, like the very first Ghostbusters movie with Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis, where they’re the gatekeeper and the key master, and it’s a sexual scene. Like, the whole thing is kind of like they have sex and then, you know, this pagan God shows up to destroy New York, but that is such a powerful pop culture look at how we treat sexuality, that women are the gatekeepers that are holding, basically, holding the dam, right? Like you should have no sexual feelings because you’re gonna’ have to tame these sexual feelings of men, and if you break, like this water is just gonna’ go everywhere, and it’s gonna’ be uncontrolled and like it is your job to contain it because men can’t. It’s not their job to contain it. They literally can’t, which is super frustrating. I think for both sexes, right? Like the idea that you, as a male, have no self-control, should be insulting, I would think, like men run our world. They are the CEOs, they are the presidents, they are the world leaders, like if you have no self-control, why are we trusting you with that? And I’m not saying that that should be a good thing either. I think that should be kind of a 50/50 split like I believe everything should be.
Jackie Pack
I think that’s the choice that often we give to men is either your sexuality is too big for you and not even you can control it or you’re anorexic.
Rachel Allen
Yes, and at the same time, the choice that we give women is you don’t get to own your sexuality because you’ve gotta’ control his.
Jackie Pack
Right. But you need to be an object of his sexuality, right?
Rachel Allen
Yes.
Jackie Pack
You need to be desirable because if women aren’t desirable, then what good are they?
Rachel Allen
Right. But you aren’t allowed to have your own desires, or your desire should be that you be desirable.
Jackie Pack
Right. So women focus a lot on how they look, but a lot of times, you and I both see this with clients that we work with, when we start talking to them beyond looks, beyond physical appearance about sexual desire, they don’t know. They don’t even know how to have that conversation with us usually.
Rachel Allen
Right. Well, and I mean it shows up in our culture in multiple ways, like the idea of needing to be younger, thinner, fitter, more tan, have better eyelashes, like all of that is this idea that we should hold the desire of men, not necessarily …
Jackie Pack
And it’s a young desire.
Rachel Allen
Yeah. Right.
Jackie Pack
It’s a young-looking desire, I mean.
Rachel Allen
Yeah, right, I kind of love like Helen Mirren made a statement and I’m gonna’ quote, I’m gonna’ mess up the quote, but she was saying like I didn’t become non-sexual just because I hit 50. I’m having better sex now than I’ve had my entire life. And I think that some of that, as women grow into their own self and their own person, women do start to own their sexuality more. But that’s also when we start, society starts saying that women are unattractive, so they, again like if you’re no longer holding the dam for us, then we don’t want that. And kind of the flip side of this, too, is the idea of rape culture, and I think it’s always interesting when we talk about purity culture, like, I feel like we have to talk about rape culture because I feel like they are the exact same thing.
Jackie Pack
Just different sides of the same coin.
Rachel Allen
Different sides of the coin. And that’s the idea that if women can’t own their sexuality and if it’s their job to control men’s sexuality, then when they don’t succeed in doing that, then they get raped, and it’s their fault. Right, it’s that idea of if you don’t dress right, if you don’t present yourself right, if you don’t do all of the things that you’re supposed to, you know, if you don’t control men, then you deserve to be raped.
Jackie Pack
It’s your fault.
Rachel Allen
It’s your fault, which is the flip side of purity culture, too, that says like if you can’t be modest enough, if you can’t, you know, tell boys “no,” if you can’t hold your line, if you can’t know your boundaries, then you’re not pure. You’re not virginal. You’re not what God wants.
Jackie Pack
You’re not marriage material.
Rachel Allen
Yes. So it’s the same message. It’s just wrapped in different boxes.
Jackie Pack
And we have, what is that? Is it like a traveling display? I know it’s been here in Salt Lake City, different states. I think it’s called like, “What I Wore.”
Rachel Allen
Yes, “What She Wore.”
Jackie Pack
“What She Wore.” And it’s really the clothing of female rape victims, right, and they’re just hanging up, like, this is what she was wearing, and it’s like jeans and a hoodie and tennis shoes, right? It’s just regular clothes that you would see on any college campus when she, you know, gets out of bed and has to hurry to class and isn’t trying to like pretty herself up or dress herself up or be an object of sexual desire and she ends up getting assaulted, and I think it is challenging some of these notions that because a woman is dressed a certain way or not dressed a certain way that she’s increasing her likelihood of being raped.
Rachel Allen
Right. I mean, also the idea of modesty isn’t accurate. Like it doesn’t make women safer, and it doesn’t make men “lust less.” That’s on the men no matter what the woman is wearing, and like the only way to make women safe is to make men accountable, right, like that’s that piece of like if someone robs me, we want the robber to deal with the consequences. We don’t always want our rapists to deal with the consequences. We don’t even like using the word “rape” for what rape is. You know, like I tell people in my office all the time, which you know, it’s super fun, I keep saying I’m gonna’ put it up as a sign in my office, but like non-consensual sex is rape. If it’s … and coercion is not consent, so if you keep pushing and keep pushing and keep pushing and she says yes or she says uh or she says maybe, fine, whatever, I don’t know, okay, I guess, that’s not consent. That’s just not consent! And we have primed teenagers and early adults to get sex this way, and I’m not gonna’ say that it’s all on our males, like I think females buy into this narrative just as much as males do, right, like…
Jackie Pack
And females don’t know how to own their “no” either. And so I think a lot of times they don’t give clear messages because they don’t get a good response. If they say “no” with any firmness, and that’s not just sexually, right? But I mean, I think a lot of times we tell girls that they don’t know what they’re thinking or they are wrong or we don’t listen to them, so not surprising girls are also not clearly stating what they’re feeling.
Rachel Allen
We also tell women don’t be aggressive, don’t be mean to him, right? Like, don’t … Friendzone is a thing. I hear more guys complain about being in a friendzone with females, and I’m always like, women do that all the time. We don’t complain about it. Right, like I have male friends. But it’s that idea that like she should just be attracted to me because I’m an available male and therefore she should want me.
Jackie Pack
Or be flattered by my advances or my comments.
Rachel Allen
And the idea that she would just want to be friends and have no sexual interest is kind of like appalling, or like sometimes it’s made into a joke, although I think there’s a lot of bitterness that comes from that. When I hear, “I’m in the friendzone.” And again, I’m not trying to trash on men, like I don’t think that’s it at all. I think men have been given this narrative, too, and I don’t think it’s fair for them. And when I talk to men who step out of this narrative, their sex is a lot more fulfilling. They enjoy their partner more. They get to explore with their partner, which is this beautiful, messy, creative side of sex that I love, right, as we talked about that in episode one. Like sex isn’t supposed to be a box. And it’s supposed to be creative and messy and vulnerable and beautiful, and when we create so many rules around it that it becomes more anxiety-inducing than creative. Like, that’s a problem. And unfortunately, I think most conservative churches, to not sin, have created this idea of like, this is what sex is, and it’s in this small little box that is unattainable for anybody and doesn’t allow anybody to be complex human beings who own their own stuff, are accountable, and are desirable, like I think that men want to be desirable too. Like we … You and I have talked about that, where like men are desperate for their wives to want them.
Jackie Pack
Right. When we … A lot of times when we do talk to men, one of the things, I mean they can talk a lot about what their arousal template looks like or what turns them on or what kind of porn they like or whatever, but really when it comes down to it, when we have these conversations in our men’s group or with male clients, a lot of times what it comes down to is, “I like a woman I’m having sex with to like having sex with me.”
Rachel Allen
Yeah. And sometimes it just stops with “I want her to like having sex.” But if women are doing all of this to please men and they don’t know what they want, or they need, or they desire, like, they don’t know how to ask for that.
Jackie Pack
Right. And they can’t fully show up as a partner because they’re more to be acted upon and they kind of freeze or they go blank when we ask them to act.
Rachel Allen
Right. It’s funny when I start working with clients on sexual health, and like, we said in the last episode, this is advanced stuff, but I always ask, “Okay, so when you guys are trying to figure out where you’re going for dinner, who puts the options on the table? Like who decides this is where I want to go to dinner? Like how to do you do that?” And not always, but most of the husbands will say, “Well, she always says ‘Whatever you want.’” And that’s pretty much how sex goes, too.
Jackie Pack
Or I will have them say, too, “We can go here, or I don’t want to go here, and I don’t want to go here.” Right, so we call that leftover sex. I’m not willing to do this, and you don’t like this, and I’m not willing to do this, so we’ll do what’s leftover. And leftover sex, surprise, surprise, is not good sex.
Rachel Allen
Right, and here’s the thing. Going back to the original idea of how patriarchal structure has dealt with this or convoluted this, we don’t see a lot of good sexual health in religious text in Christian or Islam or Judaism, except for maybe the Song of Solomon. And you and I have talked about this; it’s not even Song of Solomon. That’s been misinterpreted. We don’t know who wrote it, so it depends on who wrote Song of Songs on whether or not it’s healthy sexuality or whether or not it’s patriarchal BS. Like, if you’re a king, you kind of get what you want anyway because you can kill the person that doesn’t give it to you.
Jackie Pack
Right. And we often recognize, right, or I don’t know that we’re recognizing, but I think we’ve bought into, historically people have bought into this idea that kings had these appetites, right? They had an appetite for wealth. They had an appetite for power. They had an appetite for land. And they had an appetite for sex that just the queen could not satisfy, right? So it was acceptable that he was going to have multiple sex partners.
Rachel Allen
Right. Well, even our term, like in psychology, we talk about entitlement a lot. Even the term “entitlement” comes from kingships. The idea that just because you are born who you are, you get these things. Like, no. I mean, like I don’t know that that should be how the world works, but that is how most of our history is structured. That is how power is structured in the United States right now. He who has the power makes the rules.
Jackie Pack
And writes the history.
Rachel Allen
And writes the history. And we can talk about revisionist history another time. But that’s another piece of that, right? No, you don’t get the right to a female’s body, or you don’t get the right to another person’s body just because of who you are or what title you hold. And we treat it that way, but I think the other piece of that is like, when it comes to patriarchal structures, especially when it comes to patriarchal religious structures, historically what has happened is he who has the gold makes the rules. Well, for a long time, women weren’t allowed to have the gold. And so some of that holds to women didn’t have a voice. They still don’t have a voice in most conservative religions. Women are treated as secondary citizens, even though every origin story, the Bible, the Koran, the Torah all state that God created male and female in his image, male and female he created them in his image. Like, at no point does he delineate that in creation, and yet, and that’s in all three books, just so that you’re aware. And so like when we look at that, that tells me that like we’ve created this structure. It works well for men in power until it doesn’t. Because I think that men in power can be very lonely. Like, we know that, and we see that, right? Because they have power, so they don’t need relationships, but that’s not …
Jackie Pack
And often, if we’re working with a sex addict client, it’s not just about more sex. And it’s not just about more sex with more people. I mean, somehow you were doing that, and you ended up in my office, so on some level, it wasn’t working for you, right? And so if we go back and start to challenge this idea that a king had this kingly appetite for sex and he just kept having more and more concubines, maybe that wasn’t what he was after all. Like, maybe, had he actually had a partnership with a queen who was more than just benefitting her family and the king’s family. Like that’s what marriage was, right? Sometimes we talk about the origin of marriage, that was the origin of marriage. It was an arrangement between families in which women were used as the bartering tool.
Rachel Allen
Yeah, and which women were bought and sold. Like it was a form of slavery. Maybe it was a different kind of slavery, but it was a form of slavery, and I think even in that, just looking at the marital laws in the United States are just insane to me that like men could beat their wives with rods up until like the 1950s in most states. That’s just insane. But even looking at that, we as people, we live in this weird dynamic as human beings. We’re built to grow and create and live in the unknown. We were created to be nomads. As tribes, we moved, we shifted, we created, and yet we so desire this structure and this foundation for people to tell us what to do. And I think that religion has capitalized on that kind of fear of the unknown–that fear of the dark. I know what rules keep me safe and keep me in good standing with whoever or whatever, then I’m good, and I’ll do that checklist, and it’s fine. But that doesn’t really work with humanity, and we’ve done that with sexuality, and it doesn’t work with sexuality.
Jackie Pack
Right. I was thinking when you were talking, I can’t remember, I should have looked this up before, but I didn’t know I was gonna’ have this thought, so I don’t remember who it is. I think it’s from a book, but also based on research, talking about how long it takes for like our blood to regenerate itself, right? How long it takes for our skin to regenerate itself. Sometimes some of these things are months, sometimes their things are like two years, right, like our body is literally regenerating parts of it, and when we look at how our body is continually reinventing itself, and yet we want to keep our sexuality in this box that is bounded and doesn’t grow out of that box or doesn’t evolve, I think that’s where we start to look at and see we have a lot of sexual messages that are not serving people and are breaking down, and I think that’s where we’re starting to look at, like what is the sexual health side of this?
Rachel Allen
Right, well, and I think the other piece of it is, okay, look, I get that when you have a 12-year-old who doesn’t know what to do with their body, and they’re scared, and they’re not in a relationship, and you know, STDs are a real thing, and sex is … I mean like 12 is young for sex, and you know you have all of this emotional immaturity happening. I get wanting to put some boundaries there and say like this is how we do that …
Jackie Pack
You might want to wait. That’s a big step.
Rachel Allen
But I don’t have as a 30-something-year-old, I don’t have the same rules that I had when I was 12. And yet in these conservative patriarchal structures, we do with sexuality.
Jackie Pack
And sometimes women are the biggest defenders of those.
Rachel Allen
Right. Well, and honestly like again, like when you look at the amount of things that women (this could be its own episode in and of itself), when you look at the number of things that women in their mind do every day to keep themselves sexually safe. Of course, they like the rules because they just want to be safe.
Jackie Pack
I think they also want to have a very clear roadmap to being good. And a lot of times, that good again goes back to the purity culture.
Rachel Allen
Yes, and when the entirety of “the fall of man” has been put on women’s sinful nature, you do feel like you have to kind of work your way out of that.
Jackie Pack
Well and I think if the belief right is if I’m a good girl, I will be protected from sexual assault, sexual abuse, all of that kind of stuff, like that happens to sinful women, so if I can be pure, if I can be good, if I can be righteous and spiritual, and all of those things. I’m somehow protecting myself. And that works until it’s completely shattered.
Rachel Allen
Right. And I was gonna’ say, and statistically speaking, that’s just inaccurate, and the flip side of that, okay, so statistics, it’s like 1 in 5 women have experienced sexual assault in their lifetime, right? And 1 in 16, you told me this the other day, 1 in 16 …
Jackie Pack
Their first sexual experience was unwanted.
Rachel Allen
Yeah. So like when we look at that, the flip side of that is that rape culture piece that says well that’s your fault, you weren’t good enough. You must have done something bad that you need to repent of, or that wouldn’t have happened.
Jackie Pack
Well I think also, I mean we, you know I think when we’re teaching kids, we’re starting to teach kids about sex, but for a lot of people who are doing the teaching, what they’re not thinking is that some of these kids have already been sexual. Not by choice.
But so when you start talking and educating kids about sexuality, and you’re saying, “You should wait. And you’re saying, “You know it’s not wise to have sex before this age.” And let’s say somebody’s first sexual experience was at four; they’re not going to raise their hand and say, “Wait a minute, what about me?” They’re gonna’ crawl inside themselves and start to think, well, where do I fit into this? And usually, they conclude that it’s not a good place that they fit in.
Rachel Allen
Right. Well, and I remember, so I was in the, like the first part of the purity movement, like I experienced that, and I remember they would talk about how gross it was and how dirty it was. They would use like flowers and pass it around the room, and everybody would take a petal, and then at the end, they were like, this is what you’re giving your husband, and like …
Jackie Pack
I think I’ve used the example with you, the chewing gum.
Rachel Allen
The gum, right, or like they would show like if you went to bed with your partner, like your partner is also going to bed with this person and that person, so it became dirty and shameful and like you shouldn’t do this. And then they would put this in this nice little caveat at the end of like, but if you’ve already done those things, God believes in the second virginity. Okay, that’s not helpful, right? Like especially when we’re putting in all the shame of don’t do it, and then they’re like, but if you have done it,
Jackie Pack
Don’t feel too bad.
Rachel Allen
Don’t feel too bad. Like you just spent an hour telling kids how dirty and terrible and horrible they are, and then you put in this great caveat at the end, like I don’t know that that’s how that works. Also again, like a lot of pressure is put on the girls, right? Like I remember, this was a thing, like growing up, and granted, I will say my mother did a great job at being like, yeah, I don’t know about all that. My mom did a great job at giving us like, she was a nurse, and so she gave us sexuality in medical terms, and so it’s like this is what that looks like, it’s your choice if you choose to please be safe, please be smart. My mom went the route of like, remember statistics show that if girls have babies outside of wedlock, they’re less likely to get degrees, and they’re … and so my mom pushed the education route on that. But in that, I remember in youth group or in girls retreats and things like that, there was always this, “Now remember, you need to be modest because you don’t want to make your brother stumble.” And so again, there’s a lot of this: “Okay, but why can’t he help keep himself from stumbling? Like he’s got 2 feet. He learned how to walk, right? Like I learned how to walk, he learned how to walk.”
Jackie Pack
I remember as a leader going to activities like as a church leader for the youth, going to church activities where boys and girls were gonna’ be there, and it’s like a beach/boating activity, right? And so it’s like, okay, girls, you have to wear a shirt, and you have to wear this over your bathing suit and no two-pieces and this and that, and I’m like these are drowning hazards. Like it’s not safe to put all these clothing over the top of her. Like, cotton doesn’t do well in the water. It becomes heavy. It’s … you know, and they were like, “Well, but what about the boys?” You know, and it’s like …
Rachel Allen
Make them wear blindfolds.
Jackie Pack
So we’re just gonna’ like put weights on the girls and like be like, “Don’t get in the water ‘cause you’ll drown!” But at least he won’t have to see shoulders.
Rachel Allen
Right. Well, and that also, kind of going into that, when I talked earlier about the sexualization of culture, when you make it salacious and nuanced and dirty and wrong and on the edge of taboo, you’re pushing the limits, right? We shame girls as young as six for being sexual in our culture.
Jackie Pack
Or younger.
Rachel Allen
Yeah, or younger.
Jackie Pack
You know, sometimes I, I mean, I do think there’s a non-sexual piece to flirting, right, but I’ve had people who will say, “My parents told me I was a very flirty baby,” and they mean it in a sexual way. And I’m like, oh no, no, no. Babies, it’s part of their development to see if they can engage people. Like they’re figuring out if their world is safe, and so they will make eye contact with you, and they will be flirtatious. It has nothing to do with sexuality, right? It’s “Can I get another person to notice me because my life and my survival is based on people noticing and caring for me?”
Rachel Allen
Right. And I think that that whole concept of women’s bodies being something that needs to be covered or are salacious or tempting, like one, if a 6-year-old’s body, if an infant’s body is tempting, we’ve got a problem with society because they didn’t put that on themselves, right? And we don’t want to talk about what society is doing. But like I think one of the things, and I was one of those kids, like, I refused to wear t-shirts when I was swimming because it sucks. No one wants to swim in a t-shirt.
Jackie Pack
It sticks to your skin.
Rachel Allen
It’s gross. Also, like just talking about the idea of wet cotton, like I’m having a visceral reaction. Like, I don’t like …
Jackie Pack
Might as well wear your jeans swimming.
Rachel Allen
Oh gosh. So that’s one of those things where it’s just like again, how uncomfortable can we make females so that men don’t have to be accountable? Which we’re … again, purity culture and rape culture are the flip sides to the same coin, and if we don’t start recognizing that, that’s some of what the “me too” movement is, right? The “me too” movement where women say like, “No, I’ve had enough.” And Harvey Weinstein was this man who felt untouchable. He felt …
Jackie Pack
For decades, he was.
Rachel Allen
And he was. And then you have like these reporters who start getting the stories, and they’re like, we need a spokesperson, and we need someone to come out because if one person comes out, the rest of them will. I mean, that’s scary to be the only, the first female to come out and say: “Yes, this happened!”
Jackie Pack
Because it’s not like females hadn’t tried before. I mean, this was another attempt, and it took. But women have been trying for a long time to say, hey, I don’t like being assaulted.
Rachel Allen
Yeah. I mean, women have been doing that for decades, right? Like I remember The Accused with Jodie Foster. It’s a really, really hard movie to watch, and it’s not one that I necessarily suggest people watching.
Jackie Pack
Well, high trigger content.
Rachel Allen
Really, really triggering. It’s about a rape, and it wasn’t really taken seriously because of who she was, and kind of what came out after that and her story. I watched that movie at a time when I was dealing with a lot of rape cases, and I remember her story now, which that would have been, I don’t know, ten years ago, but that was still being echoed 25 years later. And 25, like we made a movie about it, guys. If we made a movie about it, things should have changed, right? But that is one of those, like it has taken so long for women to be heard, and we’re starting to see culture move there, but we’re getting a lot of backlash from that, too, like men have stopped hiring women because …
Jackie Pack
I’ve had clients who are over-hiring or are an upper COO, CEO who have told me that that was the initial response by their company after the “me too” movement is we cannot hire or promote women.
Rachel Allen
And that’s not the real answer, right? So this, like again, we have a ton of this dialogue of what happens in sexual health? Like how do we get consent? How do we know what consent is? What does that look like? And those are messy conversations, but those are also the kind of conversations that take the religious or patriarchal structure out of the like “dos” and “don’ts” and “can’ts” and “cans” and world of sin and kind of move us into like, okay, if we’re all relational, and we’re all talking and functioning and like figuring this out. It’s not about if your penis enters the vagina. It’s a sin.
Jackie Pack
And everything else is a green light.
Rachel Allen
Everything else is fine and great, you know. It’s more about like, is this what you want? Is this what she wants? Are we making sure that that’s okay? And I don’t know, and I get like there’s a lot of religious kind of constructs and structures around this, like wait until marriage. Well people used to get married at 14, and usually she didn’t have a choice in it and he was 30. So like, there’s just a lot around that that like we need to start diving into as a culture of like, what did that mean then and what does that mean now? And how do we process that? The idea that like religion shouldn’t adapt with culture and society, I think it’s a really hard one because it has throughout time, right? Like if we look at what the evangelical, and I’m just saying evangelical because that’s what most Americans identify as, evangelical Christian churches now vs. what the early Christian church was with Paul, they are two very different things. They look very different. If we look at the American church vs. the European church, they are very different and hold very different things as important or valuable. If you look at the difference between Protestants and Catholics, if you look at the difference between Protestants and other Protestants, right? Like there’s just so many variations of what is allowed and what is not allowed and how that shows up, like they adapt so the idea that sexuality can’t and shouldn’t is just off.
Jackie Pack
Right. Initially, in a transition period, yes, more is going to be required of people, right? Like, yeah, it’s gonna take effort and energy to turn this ship in the direction that it works best. I said ship, not shit, just FYI. And so…
Rachel Allen
But you just said it.
Jackie Pack
Right. So I think it’s one of those where more is gonna be required of not just of men, but of women. Yeah. And it’s not going to be be… I tell people all the time, it’s not gonna be this drudgery. Like, the last thing we want is for sex to be even more burdensome and even more bogged down, right? Like what we want is to start to free it, and if we put some energy and some thought and some education, you know, and I’m like, the rules for sexual health are pretty simple, right? We talk about safe, sane, and consensual. And that’s a pretty broad net, but it’s also, and it’s, they’re pretty simple rules, but it allows for a lot of different people and their preferences and their likes. And yes, the other thing that I think we have learned as divorce has become more acceptable in the United States as the choice to not actually get married has become more acceptable in the United States, one of the things that we’re seeing, right, is that if you’re in a committed relationship, this person isn’t stuck with you. They can leave. And so, the need to keep the relationship working for both of you goes up. Right, it’s high. And it requires more effort. It requires you to keep working on yourself, and what we found is that the divorce rate is actually going down because people aren’t just like, I’m stuck here.
Rachel Allen
But it’s not in Christian communities.
Jackie Pack
Yeah.
Rachel Allen
And I think that that’s… that to me is a tell-tale sign that we’ve got to shift, we’ve got to adapt, we’ve got to move.
Jackie Pack
Because a lot of those marriages maybe shouldn’t be together.
Rachel Allen
Yeah, maybe they shouldn’t be, or maybe they’re giving, they’re being given tropes when what they really need is to be able to figure out the relationship, right, like I have two pet peeves that come like religiously. The first is I don’t believe in getting a divorce. I heard that my entire life growing up, and I heard it from different people in different religious communities. I still hear it. Here’s the thing, being a therapist changed my perspective on this. I believe in divorce. The only thing that you have to do to get a divorce is to stop trying. If you go into stasis, I guarantee you, it may not be tomorrow, it may not be in 10 years, but you are headed for divorce because stasis doesn’t work for humanity. So I do believe in divorce, and I think that we have to work our way away from that, like every day that I connect and reach for my husband and say “I love you” and I care for him and I step into that space and I’m a partner, and every day that he does that back for me, we’re working our way away from divorce. Like, and we’ve got a pretty big gap there now. Because we’ve been together so long and we do that for each other. One of the sayings that we use in our marriage a lot is “We stand back to back.” And that’s because we’re nerds, and on a battlefield, you stand back to back to protect each other, but you’re equals. And you have to pay attention to each other’s movements, you have to pay attention to each other, like where you’re going and what you’re doing, right? And you’re helping each other, you’re stabilizing each other. You are each other’s strength. You don’t get that in any other formation on a battlefield, and I’m not saying that the world is a battlefield necessarily, but I do think that often me and my husband have to come back and say like, “It’s us against the world,” like we chose each other. We’ve got each other’s… we don’t just have each other’s back, we’re standing back to back as equals. The other pet peeve I have… and I get that it works for some people. It does not work for me and it always messes things up in my office is the idea of the love languages. The five love languages, whatever. And again, like this was a religious construct created by religious people in order to like simplify and explain . how to love each other. And they’re all good…
Jackie Pack
Well, and I also think the premise of that idea that in a relationship, you’re gonna have to figure out the language of another person, right? Like, this other person has a way of being that is not yours. And that’s not a bad thing, and it is your responsibility to figure out what language they speak. I don’t have a problem with that.
Rachel Allen
I don’t either. So the premise of it, don’t necessarily disagree with, but here’s the thing. When a wife comes to me and she says that her love language is acts of service and he says that his love language is physical touch, I don’t believe it, and here’s why. We all need all of them. That is human connection.
Jackie Pack
And almost all the time, that’s what they say they are. Like let me predict. I have a really good…
Rachel Allen
I’m really good at this. You are one of these two things. But here’s the thing, and usually he’s talking about sex when he’s talking about physical touch, and usually she’s talking about she wants him to pick up his laundry off the floor. Like and so there is this like just the sum of this of like it’s so reductive, and these are incredibly complex creatures. We are incredibly complex. If you have a religious faith, you believe that, you believe that you are incredibly complex.
Jackie Pack
And that’s good news.
Rachel Allen
Yeah.
Jackie Pack
It’s good news because it means we can continually evolve.
Rachel Allen
And I mean, like so there’s a book series that I read, and they talk about, they describe God as infinity, and they describe human beings as slivers of infinity. And it’s a really neat like book and concept, but like I love that idea in terms of talking about human sexuality because if you, like a sliver of infinity is still infinity. You still have such like beautiful creative space to grow and build and develop, and okay, like have some constraints around that, have some rules. I’m all about rules and boundaries, right? like, again it needs to be consensual. We need to be on the same page. Let’s not have any like slips or accidents or like things going in the wrong place when the other person doesn’t know it’s coming, so it needs to be consensual. We need to be talking about that. And that doesn’t have to look like a board presentation, right? Like that can be flirtatious, that can be fun. But make sure it’s consensual. Understand what consent is. There’s great stuff out on YouTube right now. Just type in tea consent.
Jackie Pack
Right, T-E-A.
Rachel Allen
And it’s great, right? Like it will give you the roadmap of what consent is. Make sure it’s consensual. Make sure it’s sane, right? Like we want to know that we’re kind of on, we’re not just trying stuff that’s out there. Like we want to make sure that we’re creating a space that’s safe for both people, which is the third one, but we also, I mean like we kind of want to be present. We want to be together…
Jackie Pack
You don’t want to be like I mean, this goes along with safe, but I think it’s also part of sane, like sexual pleasure at the expense of your physical health, right? That’s not very sane.
Rachel Allen
Right. Like, don’t be breaking things or pulling muscles or like, know your limits. Not everybody is an extreme yogi, so don’t do weird things. Just don’t push yourself past the point that you’re supposed to. And yet, make sure it’s safe, right? Like, and we can talk about safety in many ways. We can talk about physical safety, emotional safety, we want to make sure that we’re not using sex as currency. We want to make sure that like if we’re using sex after a fight, it’s because we’ve come back together and we’ve resolved that fight. Not that sex is resolving the fight. We want to make sure that we’re having dialogue. Can you talk to your partner? If you can’t talk to your partner about sex, like that’s where we start because we’re not gonna have good sex if we can’t talk about it.
Jackie Pack
And if you can’t talk to your partner about your passions, your interests, your soul, you probably aren’t going to be very good at talking about sex either.
Rachel Allen
Or even talking… so here’s the other thing. Maybe I have three pet peeves. So the other thing that I really struggle with when it comes to like patriarchal religious structures and things that they say that need to happen in relationships is that like men need to be the head of the household and that women need to submit. I don’t really know what that means, I’ve never seen that actually work very often, and when I have, like I question whether or not it works, so that’s my own like bias, and I get that. But this idea that, and I hear men say it all the time. They’re like, “Well she wants me to be strong.” Maybe, but maybe she just wants you to talk to her about your weaknesses, right? Some of the best conversations that me and my husband have had have been around grief, when we don’t have a whole lot of control around what’s happening and we’re able to kind of sit and say like, “I get it. I know this person meant a lot to you, and I can just sit here with you and let you cry.”
Jackie Pack
Right. And I tell men if they say that like, “She wants me to be strong. She wants me to be…” I’m like, “Well don’t let her… why are you letting her do that?” I think you have to go back to her and say, “This isn’t working for me, and this is what I’m finding, this is the price that I’m paying personally, and I think this is the price on our relationship.”
Rachel Allen
And the other thing that we get into with that is like we have these gender roles and gender biases that are really perpetrated by the patriarchal structures. We like those. They work until the don’t, but the problem is like, the roles aren’t just about who cooks and cleans and who does lawn work. It becomes an emotional power struggle, and if we can’t talk about the fact that like, I don’t like to do dishes. I don’t want to do that. I personally, like I love power tools. I get excited about power tools. I had to learn how to change the oil in my car or to change my tire, like those were requirements. I grew up on a farm. I know how to run a tractor. I can back a horse trailer on a dime, right? And so it’s just some of those things that like were very masculine traits, but like I had to do them, so it wasn’t, it was out of necessity that I learned those things, but like we have to have conversations with our partner about what we like to do and what we don’t like to do. And like do those roles and expectations actually work for us? Do they make us happy? What are we giving up in the process, right? Like one of the things that we often talk about that women give up when they stay at home to be moms is a lot of freedom and self-reliance, which can have huge impacts on sexuality. When a woman doesn’t feel like she’s a functional adult contributing to the family or that that’s even being recognized as a contribution, she doesn’t want to have sex. She doesn’t feel like an equal, and vise versa, like if a man feels like he has to provide all of the safety because he’s the only one that can do it, like there’s a lot of pressure then to like have the right job, to have insurance, to make sure like he’s performing at his peak because he can’t afford to lose his job.
Jackie Pack
And he’s also what I find often feeling very lonely.
Rachel Allen
Yes. And those kind of conversations, and I know that it probably sounds crazy, but those kind of conversations lead to healthy sex.
Jackie Pack
Okay, so this is episode 2 in our series, and then we wanted to do another one specifically for the whole good girl / sex addict girl, and then I think we’ll wrap it up, just kind of talking a little bit more about like addict sex and what we talk about there vs. sexual health, and also talking more specifically what we see for males and how patriarchy robbed them as well.
Rachel Allen
Yeah. Yeah, ‘cause I mean like both of those … so we’re basically gonna take this overview and kind of dive in a little bit deeper because I think we have to recognize that we live in a patriarchal society in which gender roles and sex roles have been mandated, and then we can talk about all the nitty gritty, like how does this actually show up in clients that we see?
