From Roe v. Wade to lesbianism to birth control, women’s liberation movements have made it their platform to give women a right over their own bodies.

Some good and some not so good have come out if it. But fast forward to today, and we see that women are once again in a fight for liberation.

But this time, it is a personal fight and one that is more often fought all alone. In the last ten years especially, our culture of sexually provocative advertising and media have aided in the trans- formation of women from sexually submissive into sexually aggressive...and sexually obsessed.

As such, this is resulting in a rapidly growing addiction to pornography and sexual promiscuity among women today.

In the New York Times last year an article was written about me, groups I lead, Dirty Girls Ministries, and this whole issue of women’s addiction to pornography.

If you are married and enjoying the rewards of a sexually fulfilling covenant marriage, then this post will merely be interesting. But if you’re a single adult who finds yourself caught between the convictions of your faith and the desire of your flesh, you will want to linger awhile longer. Abstinence is a major dilemma, but its message isn’t just for minors.

When one’s sexual identity is under construction—say, at age sixteen—abstinence is a much easier sell. We know, of course, that our culture encourages early sexuality, but most adults—Christian or not—agree with the abstinence message, a message that promotes maturity, self-respect, good health, and responsible decisions. The most mature teenagers will recognize these traits as persuasive selling points.

As a right of passage in my middle to upper class Western culture childhood, I was placed in ballet class at a very early age.  I learned first position, pirouettes, and how to point my toes.  I found friends and was quickly inducted into the wiles of feminine competition and cliques.  I looked up to the older girls in their glistening pointe shoes and see-through wraps that showed off their board-like muscular physique and their perfect turn-out.  With not a hair misplaced, the Sugar Plum Fairy would twirl across the stage and for just a moment, to a six-year-old, I thought of her as a real life doll - my jewelry box come to life.  

I walked away from dance for a while, but upon entering the awkward junior high years, I went back to my place of belonging, baby fat and all.  The memories of my six-year-old self becoming that twirling Barbie were dashed when my instructor told me I was going on pointe because I was old enough, but that I needed to lose weight.  Instead of losing weight, I turned to the ever-comforting solace of potatoes fried in various forms.  Eventually I left the dancing world to pursue soccer, track and field, and cheerleading, but I start the confession here because this coupled with my conservative Christian schooling shaped the realities of my body and my own sexuality.  It starts with your body. Whether you were young and rubbed up against something or saw something and curiously inquired, “Mommy, what’s that?”  These are the first moldings of a cultural mindset of sexuality.

For me, it was denial and miseducation, especially of my own body.  My hips have become the metaphor of my life and through said experiences I wasn’t sure what these “hips” were.  In ballet, the tighter the better; in gymnastics and cheerleading it was the same: “Pinch a penny;” and in the church it was just keep pinching everything.  This was reinforced through poor body education in the communities I personally was raised in and by the cultural activities I partook in.  Dress codes of long skirts and notions that boys and girls should exist without any kind of hormonal drives greatly helped as well.  My hips were being silenced, but oh how they were screaming inside.  

The little ballerina grew into the good Christian girl who was class president, honor society member, and homecoming princess.  I was captain of the cheer squad and soccer team all the while abiding by the dress code and school rules of don’t move your hips in cheer routines.  School dances were completely outlawed.  Meanwhile, understanding that across town there were the public schools and there were girls there that were definitely using their hips – snug bell bottom jeans and shirts that showed off your abs, and they had the school dances where you could “get jiggy with it.”

The point is, both of these extreme scenarios are misguided representations of sexuality for young women and of how we use our hips.  Going back to the abstinence pledges (see previous blog), I’m reading Lauren Winner’s Real Sex right now and in it she says,
“In 2001, a study of 6,800 students showed that virgins who took the pledge were likely to abstain from sex for eighteen months longer than those who did not take the pledge.  This was touted as good news by abstinence advocates, but actually it is troubling – it means simply that a lot of abstinence pledgers are having sex at nineteen instead of eighteen.”  She goes on, “The study, which was conducted by sociologists at Columbia and Yale, also showed that students who broke the pledge were less likely that their non-pledging peers to use birth control – presumably in part because the sue of birth control implies that one thought about sex beforehand; one planned for it; but the culture among Christian singles dictates that the sin is somehow less grave if one got swept up in the heat of the moment.” (page 17)  

The heat of the moment, the pledges, the boyfriends, the lack-of-boyfriend, it’s overwhelming… so what do we do? Our hips are talking, but no one is listening.  We are taught to deny we have hips at all, while other cultures fully embrace theirs.  Diets, fashion, TV still stylishly scream at us “lose weight to feel great.”  This is not about getting healthy, (which I am an advocate of) it’s about what we’re being taught from an early age – suck it in, pinch a penny.  (If you grew up in a household that avoided these messages, please pray for those of us who weren’t so lucky, there are a couple of us).  As I continued on with my good Christian girl routine, I needed the boyfriend to complete the picture.  That’s when I desperately needed an education and oh how I got it, but it was with a boy in his car or while our parents were gone or fill in the blank, we found places and time because we were 16.  Parents still think, “Oh that could never by my kid,” but as I recently confessed to my Bible teaching, Jesus loving mother, who is a great mom, what her youth group attending, church leader’s daughter was really doing, she couldn’t believe it.  Denial. No safe space – not in our communities, or in our bodies.

In the past two years I’ve taken up yoga and belly dancing and now my hips can sing.  Other cultures have been in tune for such a long time but we drowned them out.  I’m in classes with women of all shapes, sizes and ethnicities who have stories and beautiful hips that we’re all learning to use in our own way.  There’s no competition because at first we all felt awkward and goofy. “I’m sorry let your butt jiggle how?” No way!  But then class by class you laugh and do it more and the freedom that comes with that is truly breathtaking.

I wish I had been given Toni Weschler’s Cycle Savvy for Teens and learned how to chart my cycles, about ovulation and hormones and learned about my body in a real way.  Instead I went on birth control in high school and college because I was sent home due to my periods being terrible from ovarian cysts.  I wish my hips could have talked more with other women and not been made to hide because I will never know if that would’ve given me more courage to say no or to not go to his empty house or invite him to mine.  I wish I was taught to love my body and not hate my flesh earlier so that I didn’t look down at my purity ring after the “break-up” wondering what I did in the name of love.

So I am confessing.  I am confessing that my hips hurt so badly now that I have a sexual pain disorder (next blog).  I am confessing that I did things I was worried to tell my future husband about because I thought he would look at me as tainted, dirty, and gross, but he didn’t because he loved me as did others that I told. But I didn’t love myself for a long time because I was never invited into a conversation about sexuality and that it doesn’t mean sex – it means that it is part of who we are with or without a companion.  It’s our hips, our hormones, our hearts – it’s part of our identity.  So I confess, I might not have a doctorate, but I was a “bleeding woman” and Jesus found me sitting in the crowd, shamed, overwhelmed, yes redeemed and healed, but he said now you have to go tell your story.  

With the swine flu on its way off our radar and Sarah Palin’s book deal traipsing across the headlines, I happened to catch what her daughter was doing last week.  Bristol Palin and Hayden Panettiere were another cause celeb hitting the news waves.   What was their issue?  Abstinence.  The best way to prevent what happened to Bristol and a decision Hayden is telling people to be responsible about.

Here’s my question: What is abstinence?  This word is thrown around so much, but the sad reality is teens and twentysomethings are not paying much attention, much less anyone else.  It’s preached so much “don’t, don’t, don’t” that if anything is “done” it’s demonized.  And mostly it is the women who are carrying around this weight.  I’ve heard mainstream, celebrity, young women who have said they are virgins or “will wait,” but rarely (if ever) a guy.  The promise ring has become an early status symbol of this pledge, and then what happens?  As health surveys at Christian Colleges have revealed, more college students are having oral and anal sex because of these commitments and rings – they want to live up to the expectations…

A lot of the Christian women I talk to in their later twenties and early thirties fall into 2 camps: They are riddled with shame and guilt because of their escapades or they are sexually suppressed and confused because they never let themselves explore any form of their sexual identity.  I sit with these women because there aren’t a whole lot of safe places to do so in Christian circles.  We need a new conversation.

I admire Bristol and Hayden for doing what they are doing, but as quickly as they flashed across cnn.com, they are in and out of people’s minds and sadly the odds are stacked against them.  I dream and wish for a place where women can talk about their bodies and learn to love and respect themselves.  Only then can a woman say “no” with dignity and pride.  Women have historically been told their bodies are vessels of temptation and should be covered up, so then they do, or they rebel and have skin spilling everywhere to get noticed, to gain attention, or to feel loved.

We try to pretend we can so easily get a piece of jewelry and deny part of who God made us to be, but people are confused, hurt, broken and feel unloved.  I know because I was one who carried that shame and guilt for years.  I knew in my head I was forgiven, but I couldn’t forgive myself.  As I began my journey of healing and told my story, women opened up.  They needed recovery, they needed safe places, they needed love.

They didn’t need another abstinence revolution, they needed a non-condemning pair of arms to hold them.  The torture they had in their own souls was “don’t” enough.  They didn’t need another face of “here’s what a mistake looks like.”  They needed, as did I, to see faces of women who were strong, who knew themselves, and knew they were loved.

You might call it another inconvenient truth.

While condoms can reduce the possibility of contracting AIDS through sexual intercourse, the only way to completely avoid the disease is still the unpopular practice of abstinence.

Absintence is also the only way to avoid unwanted pregnancies. 

The Pope is in Africa right now, and he finally articulated for the press what everyone has known anyway: his stand on how to help eradicate AIDS is to counsel people to practice absinence and sex exclusively within a monogamous marriage.

The residents of California have not responded lightly to the recent gay marriage debate. In light of ConversantLife's ongoing dialogue about the need for a "third language," I'm offering again an essay I wrote earlier this year.

Along the north shore of Maui is a small highway winding past imperial colors of sea and land. With its mythological history, the Road to Hana is a place many have heard of but few really know. Each day, a host of American mainlanders in their convertible rental cars make the two-hour plus drive to Hana with picnic baskets and digital cameras. Several hours later, with just enough information to feed their wanderlust, they head back to the ruling shore and join the tourist crowds, believing, as it were, that they’ve experienced Hana without even spending one night.