She Deserves Better by Sheila Wray Gregoire

Author:Sheila Wray Gregoire [Sheila Wray Gregoire, Rebecca Gregoire Lindenbach, and Joanna Sawatsky]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Old Testament, REL006090, REL006210
ISBN: 9781493437757
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group

She Should Know More about Sex than “Don’t Do It”

When I (Rebecca) was twelve, I read a Brio article that terrified me. It was written in the form of a letter from a woman to her younger teenage sister about how she had contracted herpes without actually having sex. The older sister cries out, “He gives me a disease he got while sleeping around, while I, still technically a virgin, suffer like crazy. It’s not even close to being fair!” It ended with this:

Well, I’ve done what I set out to do: cry out a warning to the dearest person in the world to me. I’m so ashamed I could crawl into a hole, but there’s no way I can let my shame and embarrassment stop me from begging you to commit to true sexual purity. This doesn’t simply mean virginity, but a pure lifestyle. Avoid skin-to-skin or oral sexual conduct like the plague, Jessie, because that’s exactly what it adds up to—a plague.4

From that moment, I was convinced that letting a boy kiss me or perhaps even just touch my stomach may lead to an incurable case of genital herpes.

Brio magazine did what we so often do in the church: it substituted spiritual language or euphemisms for actual words and definitions. Throw into the mix that the magazine had spent months teaching me that any touching counted as sexual activity—yes, even holding hands—and is it any wonder that I was so confused?

Sex ed has become a minefield in Christian circles because we’ve tried to avoid giving education around sex in favor of giving warnings not to do it. While many of us did not understand basic information about how sex works, we all knew one thing, loud and clear: never, ever do it until you’re married. When Rebecca was ten and close to puberty, I (Sheila) took her away on a weekend to work through FamilyLife’s Passport to Purity curriculum. Mixed with the sex talk and the teaching about body changes and puberty were exercises moms were to do with their daughters to tell them that sex would bond them to someone else. They were then to ask their daughters to make a pledge to remain pure.

I balked at that, and we ended up working through only about two of the exercises. The idea of sex grossed her out. I could have manipulated her into vowing never to touch a boy if I had tried! But asking her to take a purity pledge at ten was entirely inappropriate. She needed information; she didn’t need it overshadowed by apocalyptic threats. In fact, a decade later, when Rebecca and her sister Katie and I put together an online course for moms to teach their daughters about sex and puberty, we left out the “don’t do it” messages from the younger version of the course, introducing it only when we talked to young teenagers, not to girls needing a training bra.

Figure 7.5

Popularity of Purity Pledges in Past Generations

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