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Date: September 18, 2018 02:35PM
NPR Fresh Air Interview With Linda Kay Klein -- Evangelical soiled Oreos are regarded in the same way as Mormon licked cupcakes. Girls are taught to be intellectually inferior and sexually untempting to prevent "sexually weak" boys and young men from losing their way...
https://www.npr.org/2018/09/18/648737143/memoirist-evangelical-purity-movement-sees-womens-bodies-as-a-threatWhen Linda Kay Klein was 13, she joined an evangelical church that prized sexual "purity" and taught that men and boys were sexually weak.
According to Klein's faith, girls and women were responsible for keeping male sexual desire in check by wearing modest clothing, maintaining a sexless mind and body and taking a "purity pledge," in which they promised to remain virgins until marriage.
Looking back now, Klein says, "It was all about how [a woman] needed to be a good Christian by protecting them from the threat that is you — the threat that is your body. The threat that is your sexuality."
Klein says the central tenant of the purity movement is to delay the age at which young people first have sex. But in practice, she says, the movement is most effective at stifling women's sexuality and creating a "deep, long-lasting shame" among its practitioners.
Because she was a curvy teen, Klein was often chastised for not being modest enough. Even after leaving the church when she was in her 20s, Klein continued to experience anxiety and shame about her body and sexuality.
"When I left, I thought that I was going to be completely free of sexual shame and fear and anxiety," she says. Instead, she says, "I had so internalized the sexual shaming, that I no longer needed external shamers. ... I was more than capable of shaming myself."
Klein is the founder of Break Free Together, an organization that tries to help people escape the sexual shame from their upbringing. Her new memoir is Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/18/2018 02:36PM by anybody.