The Middle is a Big Place: Jumping into the Sex-and-Self-Control Fray

I usually don't get involved in the Christian/feminist blogosphere arguments, but this one is something I've written about extensively before, so I thought it might actually help to add my voice to the discussion this time.

Rachel Held Evans wrote a post explaining that because she rejects a shame-based purity culture, people assume she doesn't think saving sex for marriage is important, but in reality she thinks striving for holiness and self-control in relationships is important.

Libby Anne at Love Joy Feminism then responded that Rachel didn't actually make a case for saving sex for marriage and that her focus on sexual self-control seems to be limited to the time before marriage.

What's interesting is that both women describe -- and reject -- the same two ends of the spectrum: a purity culture in which your entire self-worth is dependent on what you do with your body, and a free-for-all in which you have sex with as many people as possible and it never has any effect on your life.

Yet both woman also seem to consider their own position to be "the middle ground" between these two extremes, and lump each other's position in with one of the other groups: Libby Anne groups Rachel's "self-control" position with the purity culture extremists ("what she's saying here really isn't that different from the purity culture rhetoric"), and Rachel emphasizes sexual holiness and warns those stepping away from purity culture to avoid "swinging to the opposite extreme to endorse an anything-goes sexual ethic."

In fact, there are a multitude of possible positions that fall somewhere in between the extremes.

Where distinctions can start to be made are in answers to these two questions:

1. Is saving sex for marriage a valid choice?
2. Is saving sex for marriage the best choice for everyone?

(You may remember from my previous posts that my own answers to these questions are Yes and No respectively.)

Rachel clearly answers Yes to the first question, but I'm not sure her answer to the second question is as clear-cut as Libby Anne implies. What Rachel does say is that "some have wrongly concluded that I don't value saving sex for marriage" and that she gets frustrated (as I do!) that TV shows "take it for granted that characters attracted to one another [will] sleep together after the first date."

In my view, she (or anyone else) could answer Yes to the second question and still not be anywhere near as extreme or damaging as the purity culture she's worked to combat. There's a big gulf between "this is the ideal situation" and "if you don't do this you are damaged for life and all of your relationships will be ruined." Ideally, Mike and I would always be loving and patient with one another, but that doesn't mean either of us thinks our marriage is destroyed if we fail to live up to this ideal.

What's interesting is that I don't think Rachel and Libby Anne are that far apart in their beliefs, even while painting each other as being on the far ends of the spectrum. They both agree that a healthy sexuality involves some measure of self-control, and that your overall approach to sexuality is far more important than any particular act that you do or don't do.

The main difference, it seems, is how they each interpreted the point of Rachel's post. Libby Anne seems to see Rachel's post as "Here is why saving sex for marriage is the right decision," and then points out that it really doesn't do a good job of making that argument. Which is true.

However, I read Rachel's post as having a different message, which was, "Here's why I haven't thrown out the idea of saving sex for marriage yet, even though I reject purity culture messages." Some of the criticism -- of equating self-control with abstinence-before-marriage -- still stands, but I think it's easier to know how to respond when you understand the angle Rachel is coming from.

I'll close with this: What Rachel is describing -- what she calls "holiness," in contrast to virginity or purity -- already has a term in the Catholic Church, which is chastity. Chastity is not the same as virginity; it's a kind of sexual ethic that applies whether you're married or not. You can disagree (and I do) that a healthy sexual ethic necessarily includes waiting for marriage to have sex, but the concept of chastity addresses Libby Anne's concern that these ideas about holiness and self-control deal only with what you do before marriage.

Here is the explanation of chastity from Catholic.net:

Chastity is a virtue that directs all our sexual desires, emotions, and attractions toward the dignity of the person and the real meaning of love.

That means that all of our sexual desires, emotions, and attractions to others are supposed to be at the service of the dignity of the other person and the real meaning of love -- not at the service of what we want! Chastity is a deep respect and admiration for the person AND for the gifts of our sexuality and sex.

That is a sexual ethic I can get behind.

Putting Money Back In Its Place

"Money is a good servant, a dangerous master." - Francis Bacon

On this week's This American Life podcast, there was a brief interview with a man named Jason Pittman. He had won multiple awards for teaching and just this past week won another one, and he clearly loved his job very much. The reason This American Life was interviewing him was because he'd decided to quit teaching to find something that paid more.

Now, I don't want to cast any judgment on whether Pittman is making the right choice for his life; clearly, it must be something he's given a lot of thought to, and he knows better than anyone else what he wants out of his life. The way his position was funded, he essentially had to campaign to secure his job every year, so I don't blame him for wanting to get out of that situation.

What I found interesting was why he said he wanted to leave this career he loved so much (to the point that he was crying about leaving) to make more money: "I want to be able to pay a mortgage and have a car payment."

Leaving aside for the moment whether that's possible on his current salary ($58,000), I was struck by how this wish was phrased. Not "I want to be able to afford a safe place to live and a reliable car," but a focus on wanting to be able to afford to have and pay off loans. These would be in addition to his student loans, which the program said he's still paying off at age 38.

Mike and I have talked a lot lately about our possible future plans, as I weigh my options for jobs and we look toward adopting our first child. In all our discussions, we focus on what is going to make each of us happiest in terms of how we spend our time, what's important to us in raising our kids, and where we would want to live that would make the most sense for both of those other factors.

Money plays a part in this equation, of course, but as a facilitator in creating the day-to-day life that we both want. Some of the paths would probably require us to take out loans, while others wouldn't. But getting to a financial position that would make it reasonable to take out loans is not a goal unto itself.

This may not be what Pittman meant exactly, but I felt like he put his finger on something I have struggled to understand about American culture. Just as getting married isn't necessary for being an adult, having a mortgage isn't either. Yet this has somehow become part of the narrow Path of Adulthood in so many people's minds, like a game of Life where you can't move on until you Stop and Buy a House.

There is such a huge emphasis on this that I don't think it's unreasonable to think someone would actually leave a career they love and are extremely good at in order to be able to secure that mortgage.

I worry that as a society we've lost touch with what money is for. As I said last week about the article on engagement rings, gaining more money is not, in and of itself, always the right path -- only to the extent that it aids in the creation of the life that we seek. This is why I like Ramit Sethi's work so much; he challenges people to define what a "rich" life means to them before working on gaining more money.

The fact that he even has to say this -- and that his message seems so unusual in the realm of personal finance -- points to the unspoken and often unquestioned message it is countering: that more money is always better.

As I'm evaluating my different job options right now, I have to constantly remind myself not to fall into this trap of thinking that the highest-paying job is necessarily the best one I should pick. Yes, more money would make some of our long-term goals more feasible more quickly, but recent experiences have taught me that a full-time job takes up a huge chunk of my time and thus has a huge impact on my overall life satisfaction. Picking the job that's the right fit for me, as long as it doesn't actively hinder our other life goals, will always be the best decision.

I'll finish with this excerpt from Laura Vanderkam's excellent book 168 Hours. It raises a question about whether Pittman may decide to go back to teaching down the road if his mortgage and his car payment don't bring him the same satisfaction his 10-year teaching career has.

If you take a job you don't like just to make money, there is a good chance you won't do it very well, and it will suck the life out of the rest of your 168 hours.

That's what Danny Kofke discovered. A few years ago, he was teaching first-graders to read and write in Sebastian, Florida. He loved seeing their eyes light up when they figured out the connections between letters and the concepts they represented. Unfortunately, as a teacher, he was earning only $35,000 a year, so when his first daughter was born, he decided to try something more lucrative that he felt would better support a family. A friend who managed a company that sold high-end floor coverings offered him a job. Some of the salesmen were making six figures.

Now, there is nothing wrong with selling flooring. In the case of high-end, hand-crafted rugs, it's like selling art. Plenty of people become obsessed with the intricacies of Oriental rugs, and would consider expertise in this art form to be a core competency.

Danny Kofke was not one of those people. He started out enthusiastic, but "I slowly realized I wasn't passionate about it. I made a pretty bad salesman," he says. When people came in wanting a four-thousand dollar rug, he'd find himself thinking, "I don't care if you like it." There was no way he was going to hit the top end of his potential income range, and looking forward, he realized that if he hated his job, he was going to be spending a lot of the additional salary he earned above his teaching income trying to make himself happy.

But he figured the opposite was true, too. "If you do have a job you like, if you're happy in life, you don't need those materialistic things to make you happy," he says.

So when a job working with autistic children opened up, he quit and went back to teaching. Now he's supporting his family on about $40,000 a year and has written a book called How to Survive (and Perhaps Thrive) on a Teacher's Salary. The Kofkes live frugally, but when you love what you do, it's a lot easier to come home and sit on a secondhand sofa than if you're miserable for 8 hours a day.

Thoughts?

A More Helpful Perspective on Diamond Engagement Rings

Many cultural norms, things we take for granted as "the ways things are done," are habits that didn't exist hundreds of years ago. Some of these, like regularly washing our hands, are positive developments. Others are more questionable or even negative developments.

One of these is the topic of a Business Insider article that's been making the social media rounds: Why Diamonds Are a Sham. The article essentially argues that the only reason diamond rings are expected as a symbol of engagement to be married is because the people who wanted to sell diamonds convinced everyone that they should spend their money on them. The article concludes that diamonds have no value and so we should stop buying diamond rings as a symbol of engagement.

Although everything in the article is, as far as I know, true, that doesn't mean that it's a particularly helpful or effective article.

One obvious issue is that, because diamond engagement rings are so prevalent, a large percentage of the people reading this article are going to be wearing diamond engagement rings. The writer, Rohin Dhar, doesn't provide any suggestions outside of not buying a diamond ring, basically communicating "Diamonds are bad, and everyone who buys them has been duped." Someone can't un-buy the ring they're wearing, so this immediately creates a kind of cognitive dissonance wherein the only resolution is defensiveness and trying to discredit the article's conclusions.

I want to separate the idea of "Diamonds have no intrinsic value" from "You are bad if you buy/own a diamond engagement ring." There's no point in shaming people for past purchases, and it doesn't help make changes for the future -- it may even hinder the effort.

Let's proceed on the assumption that the information in the article is true, and talk about what that actually means for us, today (whether or not you currently own a diamond ring or ever want one).

I'm in a unique position to facilitate this discussion, I think. I have a diamond engagement ring; however, the diamond is taken from an old ring, my grandmother's engagement ring. Although I wanted a single-diamond engagement ring, I was aware of the connection between the diamond industry and human rights issues (something that gets just a passing mention in Dhar's article) and didn't want to contribute to that. Also, Mike had little money, and it didn't seem like the cost of a ring should be a hindrance to our timeline for marriage. I can't say for sure what we would have done if my grandma's ring wasn't an option.

To my mind, the human rights issues are a far more pressing concern to changing the cultural expectations around diamond engagement rings than the idea that "You're only doing this because someone else convinced you to." That's true of many other things as well, most notably the oft-discussed commercialization of holidays. Yet I don't think the fact that my purchases are influenced by marketers and advertisers is inherently bad.

As I've said before, I don't think the commercialization of holidays necessarily undermines any spiritual/family/other non-purchase-related aspects of a holiday. It may be true that my family buys plastic Easter eggs because they've been convinced by the manufacturers that this purchase is necessary to the celebration of the holiday, when it's really not. But that fact in itself doesn't mean that purchasing the eggs is bad or that those who do so are bad people. I have many, many fond memories of the giant cousin Easter egg hunt that happened every year at my grandma's house. There is a social and cultural aspect to the Easter eggs that transcends whether or not the eggs themselves have "intrinsic value" or whether the tradition originated because of a marketing ploy.

So too are there social and cultural aspects to diamond engagement rings that cannot be easily ignored.

Here are just a few reasons that making a switch to not buying diamond engagement rings is not as simple as "Oh, I'm only doing this because some company wants me to? Never mind then."

• It is a social ritual among women that when someone gets engaged, every other person you talk to will ask to see your ring. There is an expectation to show interest in someone else's ring when they've just gotten engaged, and an expectation to let people examine your ring closely when you're the newly engaged one. Again, I'm not saying this ritual should exist, simply that it does and that this is one consideration people have when thinking about whether to have an engagement ring and what it should look like.
• There are all sorts of cultural expectations and etiquette surrounding all aspects of marriage. Depending on your social circle, you may face varying amounts of judgment for flouting any one of these expectations. Mike and I ignored a few traditions at our wedding, and while no one even noticed or cared the day of, some of those who found out ahead of time were horrified and tried to talk us out of it. So someone who chooses not to have an engagement ring or to have a non-diamond ring has to be comfortable facing some level of judgment, ranging from occasional passive-aggressive comments to a steady stream of outright criticism.
• An engagement ring is a symbol of a commitment, and a diamond engagement ring communicates this to others most clearly, given our cultural norms. During the year and a half we were engaged before getting married, Mike often remarked that he wished he also had a ring. He had no way of communicating to the larger world that he had selected a life partner.

I also don't think it's fair to say that simply because the money spent on a ring could be invested elsewhere and gain interest, etc., that that automatically makes it not a worthwhile purchase. What is gaining more money for, except to allow us to purchase the things that create the life we want? What Dhar says of rings is true of any number of non-essential purchases we make throughout our life, but this one is something that has strong emotional value and which you'll likely have and use (wear) for the rest of your life.

I would like to see a movement away from an expectation of diamond rings, for reasons mentioned earlier, but I don't think the answer is as simply as telling people, "Diamonds are bad, so stop buying them."

Here are some specific changes that could help make other types of rings, or no rings, more acceptable, and these are things that anyone (married or unmarried, diamond-ring owning or not) can do.

Before an engagement:

• Allowing couples to decide for themselves if they want a ring and what kind, without providing unsolicited advice about how much it should cost or what it should look like.
• If someone asks for your advice on buying a ring, encouraging them to talk with the person receiving the ring about what kind of ring they'd like, rather than pressuring them to choose a traditional diamond ring.

After an engagement:

• Not assuming that everyone who is engaged has a ring.
• Not asking to see people's engagement rings. (Not everyone will agree with this, as some people like showing off their rings, but you can gauge if someone is very excited to show it off. Personally I got tired of people grabbing my hand and examining my ring closely.)
• If someone does show off their ring, admiring it regardless of whether it is a "traditional" type of ring.
• Avoiding questions like, "Why didn't you get a ring?" and "Why isn't it a diamond?" that reinforce the diamond ring norm.

I don't think that the cultural habit of buying diamond rings to signify engagement is going to change overnight, no matter how much evidence there against it. But I think that changing the expectations and pressures on couples will allow alternatives to more easily flourish.

What are your thoughts on diamond engagement rings?

Surviving Your 5-Year College Reunion in 23 Easy Steps

Step 1: Get a single giant stress pimple on your face three days beforehand. Think how that hasn't happened since college. Think at least people will recognize you now.

Step 2: Fly from the West Coast to the East Coast to the Midwest, because apparently that's the most efficient route.

Step 3: Reunite with your husband, who's been traveling for the past two weeks.

Step 4: Arrive on campus and immediately see someone from your freshman year dorm floor. Suddenly get excited about the whole reunion thing.

Step 5: Check into your on-campus housing. Discover that the (two twin) beds appear to each be covered with one rough sheet and a tablecloth.

Step 6: Head over to the party tent for your class, where the music is approximately 1,000 times louder than it needs to be, so every conversation will consist of yelling directly into people's ears.

Step 7: Have the same conversation twenty times in a row, quickly perfecting your responses to, "So where are you living now?" and "What do you do?"

Step 8: Find that no one seems to care that you are unemployed, and that every single person has heard good things about the place you live. Invite approximately a dozen people to come visit you.

Step 9: Have the thought "Living well is the best revenge" on discovering that life has not been kind to certain people who were not kind to you. Then feel bad for thinking that.

Step 10: Never quite master the art of gracefully exiting a conversation after the two topics of conversation (where you live now and what you do) have been exhausted. Have a lot of awkward smiles/staring and saying it was so nice to see them and that you need to go find your husband.

Step 11: Say hello and hug people you were never really friends with because what the hell.

Step 12: Go in a desperate search for water because you're sure you're about to lose your voice from all the yelling. Find more people you know over by the bar.

Step 13: Head back to the dorm after midnight. Decide between sleeping in separate twin beds, sleeping on the uneven crack between the two pushed-together beds, or sleeping in the same twin bed. Opt for the latter because it's freezing in the room and you need all the body warmth you can get.

Step 14: Wake up at 2 in the morning to a drunk alum yelling and throwing things in the hallway. Be glad you don't live in a dorm anymore. Then remember that you do live in a dorm, and thank God that your students are way better behaved than this.

Step 15: Spend the day seeing the changes around campus. Realize how old you are when you think, "These kids don't know how good they have it! Back in my day..."

Step 16: Take a 4-hour nap.

Step 17: Go to another giant tent party, this one for all classes. Do the math and realize that because reunions are for every five years, you won't know a single person except those from your class, so the only benefit to throwing everyone together is that there's more oldies music.

Step 18: Figure out that wearing a skirt was a good decision after seeing every single other woman in a sundress or skirt.

Step 19: See a dozen more people you know who weren't there the night before. Yell your standard questions over the music and have some more awkward conversational exits.

Step 20: Hug a bunch of people goodbye.

Step 21: Stay up past midnight reminiscing with two friends who are staying across the hall from you.

Step 22: Spend another cold night in the tiny, tablecloth-covered twin bed.

Step 23: Bid farewell to campus for another five years.

Have you attended a high school or college reunion? How was it?

Everyday Bravery: Overcoming the Fear of Being Wrong

(TW for spiritual abuse related to sexual orientation)

Today I'm linking up with this synchroblog on Ordinary Courage.

For a while I was stumped about what to write about that wasn't cliche. As the prompt says, what Brené Brown calls ordinary courage -- being vulnerable, taking a risk, speaking up -- manifests in a myriad of ways every day. And I think you know that already. That's like every commencement speech ever, right?

But then I read some things that got me thinking about the opposite of ordinary courage. Sometimes because this kind of courage is so ordinary, it goes unnoticed. But you can recognize it in its absence.

First was in the book Does Jesus Really Love Me? in which Jeff Chu travels across the United States to interview people and capture the spectrum of ways Christianity and homosexuality can interact.

Throughout the book he shares parts of an e-mail exchange he had with a young man who is gay, Christian, and closeted at the start of the book. One of the most difficult parts to read was when this guy, Gideon, goes to talk with a Christian counselor, and the counselor keeps twisting his words and asking him the usual cringeworthy questions about his relationship with his parents. Then the counselor pulls out his Bible and starts rapid-fire going through the "clobber passages," as if he assumes Gideon hasn't read them and if there could be no other possible interpretation to them than his own.

We moved on to the verses in Leviticus that state "lying with a man as with a woman is an abomination" (Leviticus 18:22-24 and Leviticus 20:13). He began to talk about how holy and perfect the union between one man and one woman was. I agreed, but said, "This is not a verse about homosexual love, or being gay. This command is there with all kinds of connotations of adultery, promiscuity, and idol worship from the surrounding nations."

"Let's move on to 1 Corithians 6:9-10," he said, the passage which lists the types of of people who will not inherit the kingdom of God, the "unrighteous, sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers, or men who practice homosexuality."

Once again I asked to bring the context and cultural influences into play, but he interjected, "In every instance of scripture, homosexuality is spoken of in a very disapproving way. There is no 'good' homosexual mentioned. If we let ourselves think that way, does that mean there are good thieves? Good liars?"

Then this past week I read Registered Runaway's posts about how his mother wanted to meet with the pastor who had opened their church service by attacking same-sex marriage. The pastor refused and told them to read a book on homosexuality.

He did not want to sit face-to-face with them and listen to what they had to say.

In these instances, where people respond to disagreement with an attempt to silence others' voices, I see a lack of courage. I see people acting out of fear, doing the equivalent of putting their hands over their ears and talking louder so they don't have to even acknowledge that they could possibly be wrong. They are afraid of what they might hear, afraid of finding a crack in what they call truth, so they take the coward's way -- they refuse to even listen.

Listening with the honest possibility that you might be wrong takes ordinary courage.

Courage because it's difficult.

Ordinary because it should happen every day.

You don't need to change your mind to demonstrate this kind of courage. You can walk away from a conversation without the exact same views you walked into it with. The part that shows courage is really, truly making space for another person's words, and making space in your mind for the serious consideration of their perspective.

I struggle with this, and that was actually one of the best things I got from reading Does Jesus Really Love Me? -- not the part about the "Lalala I can't hear you" pastor, but the part where I actually heard the stories, in the own words, of people who were content in their decisions to be in a mixed-orientation marriage or live a celibate life. I might not have said it before, but I didn't believe in my heart of hearts that those were the right decisions for anyone to make.

Now, having taken the time to read and consider these stories, I can at least say, "I truly believe that you have chosen what you think is best for your life."

So I'm grateful to everyone who takes the time to listen with an open mind. It may be a small, everyday thing, but it takes a certain amount of courage. And for that I say thank you.

When has someone shown ordinary courage to you by taking the time to really listen?

Check out the other contributors to the synchroblog:

This Is Courage by Jen Bradbury

Being Vulnerable by Phil Lancaster

Moving Forward Takes Courage by Paul W. Meier

How to Become a Flasher by Glenn Hager

Ordinary Courage by Elaine Hansen

Courage, Hope, Generosity by Carol Kuniholm

The Courage to Fail by Wendy McCaig

The Greatest Act of Courage by Jeremy Myers

Sharing One's Heart by K. W. Leslie

All I See Is Rocks by Tim Nichols

I Wonder What Would Happen by Liz Dyer

What is Ordinary Courage? by Jennifer Stahl

Loving Courageously by Doreen A. Mannion

Heart Cry: The Courage to Confess by Elizabeth Chapin

The Act to the Miraculous by VisionHub

the spiritual practice of showing up & telling the truth by Kathy Escobar

It's What We Teach by Margaret Boelman

3BoT Vol. 20: Three Books to Harness Your Unconscious Mind

The first Thursday of every month, I share three related book recommendations with you. You are invited to link up at the end of the post with three recommendations of your own! Click here for more info about Three Books on Thursday.

I love books that take fascinating research studies in the social sciences and share them as easy-to-understand stories. There is so much great research being done on how humans think and interact with one another that it only makes sense to try to look for lessons we can apply to our daily lives.

What this month's recommendations have in common is similar to a previous 3BoT about creating change, except this time they all deal with the unconscious mind. All three authors make the argument that if you want to change something in your life, you have to start by becoming aware of things you normally don't think about. Then, when you better understand what's influencing you without your awareness, you can make adjustments so that the behavior you want comes more naturally.

Here are three books for understanding -- and taking advantage of -- your unconscious mind:

#1: Mindless Eating by Dr. Brian Wansink
The number of factors that influence what you eat and how much of it you eat is much higher than you might imagine. Wansink first introduces the concept of the "mindless margin": on either side of the point where you would exactly maintain your weight, there are a number of calories you can cut out or add without feeling starved or stuffed. This is why you can gain weight over time without feeling like you're overeating, and also how you can lose weight without feeling deprived. He then shares studies that have been done on every imaginable factor influencing what and how much we eat, from plate size to the number of food options to what you're doing and who you're with while eating. The idea? By changing your environment, you can start to eat less and/or healthier without having to consciously think about it.

#2: The Hidden Brain by Shankar Vedantam
Vedantam systematically dismantles the idea that we only do things because we want to do them. He illustrates through a large number of research studies and anecdotes how external forces we're not even aware of influence our behavior in a number of different ways. This book is perhaps most valuable in its invitation to empathy -- a better understanding of others who seem radically different from us but just have a different set of experiences and influences operating on them. But it is also a useful weapon against the problematic rationalizations we are all prone to. When we assume human beings always act rationally, then we may attribute our actions to conscious decisions we never actually made, and we may overlook the influences actually driving our behavior. This book gave me a sense of relief (thinking, "Why in the world did I do that?" is normal and doesn't mean I'm careless or stupid) but also challenged me to look for deeper assumptions and biases underlying my behavior and work to change them where necessary.

#3: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
Why do habits form, and how can we consciously form new ones? These are the questions tackled by Duhigg in this book. Through various stories and studies, he outlines a framework for thinking about the creation of habits at an individual, organizational, and societal level. While the stories of individuals building new habits are interesting and even inspiring, perhaps the most valuable part of this book comes at the end, when Duhigg explains how to use the information in the book to create new habits in your own life, and uses a case study from his own life to show what that would look like. I do think that at times he shoehorns certain examples into his framework, and I still recommend other books more for creating change on an individual or larger level. But this book will get you thinking more consciously about your existing habits, from why you use toothpaste to brush your teeth to whether you're able to stick to an exercise routine.



What other books have helped you understand the unconscious influences on your life and how to have them work in your favor?

Click here for other 3BoT posts, or check out my Goodreads account for more in-depth reviews and recommendations.

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