Christian purity culture

    I think I was in high school when my older brother told me he used to have a porn addiction. It may have been later than high school--I may have been in college--but I do connect it in my brain with being not long after 8th grade, which was in I watched Fireproof. In recollecting these memories, I looked up when Fireproof came out, and apparently it came out while I was in 8th grade, which surprised me a little, since I know for sure it was 8th grade, in class, when I was shown that movie, and it seems that the teacher really shoved that down our throats quickly when it had just come out. In 8th grade, I didn't question being shown the movie Fireproof in class, but now I think that's kind of a weird movie to show 8th graders, let alone as course content. I also didn't think anything of it when my brother told me he used to have a porn addiction, besides that I was appreciative that he and I had grown so close that he could tell me that, and also, I probably thought at the time, that hey maybe I had struggled with porn addiction as well.

    I can't speak to my brother's actual experience, as I don't know much more and I only have his side of the story of course, but for my own experience, I do not and have never had a porn addiction. But yes, I have at times thought that I had a porn addiction. I kind of doubt that my brother had a porn addiction either, but clearly he thought that he did. I suspect that he watched or in some way consumed porn maybe once, maybe more, whatever, and decided that based on Christian views of porn, he had a porn addiction. My experience is that I sometimes read erotic novels, though I've never really watched traditional porn, i.e., porn videos, because they make me feel bad. Sure, sometimes I google porn for women, and maybe those types of things still also make me feel bad because of how ingrained Christian purity culture is in my consciousness, but the other thing is just that porn is often for, from, and by the male gaze, and it doesn't bring me any sort of pleasure.

    You can start to see that Christian purity culture is deeply entangled with my experiences around sex. There are things I don't enjoy or feel uncomfortable with, and I may never be able to fully disentangle the Christian messaging I was raised hearing and figure out what's really me and my preferences and what's coming from an external source.

    I don't even remember why the topic of porn addiction even came up in my conversation with my brother.

    It's also interesting for me to now deconstruct the influence Christian purity culture had on me, when, as a kid, I thought it wasn't having an effect on me. As a young child, I knew that I thought purity rings, purity father-daughter dances, and things like that were weird. I think I got this view from my parents, who I deeply appreciate, and I think they did a good job raising me, even though they were Christian and took me to church and enrolled me in Christian schools. Their views of Christianity were generally healthy, and I think they weren't and maybe will never be fully aware of the insidious ways that the harmful parts of Christianity still managed to get through to my developing brain. I know they wouldn't now and I think they wouldn't have then wanted childhood me to develop mental compulsions around any sort of thinking about sex, when young me was having no issues with sexual thoughts and frankly young me was thinking about sex, I think, abnormally infrequently.

    Among the pieces of my identity of which I'll probably never be able to fully determine the root, I realized I was on the asexual spectrum around age 23. I'm comfortable in this aspect of my identity, but I sometimes wonder if my sexual identity would be different if I hadn't been raised Christian.

    All in all, Christians think and talk so much about sex, while also telling you not to do that and that you're a bad, sinful person for doing that. I've come to terms with the fact that sexual pleasure is morally neutral, and I'm realizing that Christians weaponize a normal part of human life, making it out to be sinful and immoral, so that they can keep Christian followers feeling guilty and shameful, as a way of keeping people in the Christian bubble.