Today, I’m over at No Shame Movement sharing my story about growing up in Christian purity culture. Check it out! Also, be sure to read the other stories at NSM, and follow No Shame Movement on Twitter! “What would happen if I bought this shirt three sizes too small?” I joked to my sister, as we waited for my mom to finish up her shopping at the Christian bookstore. The shirt in question was a woman’s tee shirt with the words... Read more
Until we live in a culture that not only respects but also upholds basic civil rights for children, most children will not know love. Love is as love does, and it is our responsibility to give children love. When we love children we acknowledge by our every action that they are not property, that they have rights–that we respect and uphold their rights. Without justice there can be no love. –bell hooks, All About Love Love and abuse cannot coexist. —bell... Read more
[Content Note: Mental Health Issues, Eating Problems] This post is part of a series in which I blog through my journey of dealing with an anxiety disorder that nearly took over my life for a few months. These posts are based off of journal entries from the past few months and don’t necessarily reflect how I am feeling write now. To learn more about this series, read the introduction post. On February 22, 2014, I started a journal about the... Read more
I haven’t been doing as much regular blogging as I used to. As I’ve talked about in other posts, I have been struggling with some serious mental health problems for the past few years. In the past six months or so, these problems managed to completely take over my life. That makes it hard to blog regularly. It’s hard to concentrate on writing a coherent post when your brain can’t stop panicking about other things, and when even the smallest activities–like... Read more
Last year, during Lent, I wrote what would turn out to be one of my most popular blog posts of all time. In this post, “Loving My Body for Lent,” I decided that for Lent, I would give up the harmful teachings I’d inherited from purity culture, and I would take on a new attitude toward my own body. I’m setting it free from the hatred that I have directed toward it for years and years. I’m setting it free from... Read more
[Content Note: Sexual and Spiritual Abuse] When I was 16, I dated an abuser who was constantly coercing me into having sex with him. I had been raised in fundamentalist purity culture, so I thought of sex as something gross and scary. My boyfriend at the time tried to combat those feelings by sending me on guilt trips and by holding me to his manipulative, subjective standards of “responsibility.” He’d say things like, “You hugging me turned me on. You’re... Read more
[Content Note: Rape, Victim Blaming, Unjust Arrest] This Monday, popular feminist writer Amanda Marcotte wrote a decent piece for Salon, describing victim blaming in conservative Christianity. In it, she pointed out that in many conservative Christian circles… “…[m]en’s choices, especially men’s sexual choices, are the responsibility of women. So if a man chooses to rape you, it’s understood not as him asserting dominance over you, but as the man taking the liberties you must have extended to him.” She’s right, of course.... Read more
Liberal/progressive/leftist Christians like to paint Jesus as an exceptional figure who fought for human rights centuries before anyone else did. You’ve probably heard, or said something like the following (I know I have): Jesus was the first feminist, the first Marxist, the ultimate humanist/democrat/anarchist. Jesus was [fill in the blank depending on your preferred political associations]. I’m sure most people who use these statements use them as attention grabbers and conversation starters and not literal statements. They know that we... Read more
Content Note: Rape, Sexual Assault Growing up expecting to go to Bob Jones University today was just another part of life as a member of an IFB (independent fundamental Baptist) church. Unless of course you were one of those heathens who went to Hyles-Anderson. Really, though, if you grew up in the IFB church and school that I grew up in, your options for acceptable colleges were limited. My choices were to go to Maranatha Baptist Bible College, Pensecola Christian... Read more
Content Note: Discussion of sexual assault, victim blaming This is my second piece in response to an article published on The Daily Beast by Robert B. Weide. My first piece on this topic can be found here. In my first response to Robert B. Weide’s defense of Woody Allen, I pointed out that Weide spent much of his piece painting Mia Farrow as an “unacceptable” woman. I pointed out how his framing of Mia’s consensual, adult sex life as “deviant”... Read more
Sarah Over the Moon
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