Sexvangelicals Newsletter 4/23: Men, Shame, and Sexuality
Plus, this week's episode with Zach Wagner, author of Non-Toxic Masculinity
Like all of our weekly newsletters, this article is free for everyone! Please subscribe and donate to Relationship 101 so Julia and I can continue to write about sex and relationship education that the church, and so many other systems, didn’t want you to have.
The foundation of Relationship 101 is that two-person relationships, the relationships that are most common in our lives (parent-child, partner-partner, partner-friend), start with the following roles:
Initiator: The person sharing information about themselves
Receiver: The person receiving information about the initiator.
Obviously, there are a lot of complexities and nuances that can build from the starting point, including:
How does the initiator communicate their experience in a way that’s accessible for the receiver?
How does the receiver psychologically and physiologically prepare themselves to hear from the person sharing?
At what point do the initiator and receiver switch roles, so that the initial receiver is now initiating and disclosing info about themselves?
How does this transition happen in a way that works for all people?
I could easily list thirty more bullet points. There’s a reason that couples therapy is the technically hardest of all of the therapy modalities.
At the risk of oversimplification, the initiator has to figure out four things:
What do I want to share about myself to you?
How do I want to share about myself to you?
What do I want to share about my perception or expectations about you to you?
How do I want to share about my perception or expectations about you to you?
For instance, Relationship 101 is a dyadic relationship, filtered through the intermediary of Substack, which hosts my content and provides a platform for you to sign up and receive this newsletter. I would answer the four questions the following ways:
Julia and I want to share that we have expertise in relationships and communication, that we are approachable, creative, and funny, and that we have a podcast, Sexvangelicals, that provides the sex education the church didn’t want you to have.
We want to share our expertise by delving into longer-form content, centered around research in communications and the wisdom of our podcast guests. We also want to show that we are reliable contributors by posting three times per week.
I honestly don’t have any perceptions or expectations about you. I do hope that you will share our posts with other people, and that you will donate to me and Julia so we can continue to write and develop a positive reputation for future business ventures. Hopes and expectations are not the same thing, however.
Substack has neat little buttons that I can put throughout the newsletter that encourages you to subscribe or share.
I assume (though maybe incorrectly) that you were drawn to this newsletter because of the title of our podcast, Sexvangelicals, and the work that we do around the intersection of American religion, sexuality, and relationships.
In the case of Evangelical, Mormon, and Pentecostal communities, many leaders initiate conversations and monologues with the assumption that you are innately bad, sinful, and prone to the snares of Satan, and as such, in need of a Savior, be that through the image of the deity being sold to you (it turns out, there are a lot of versions of Jesus being preached each Sunday) or through the programming and services that the particular congregation offers.
Relationally speaking, when you receive that message for so long, you ultimately have two options, though many people develop strategies to get the benefits of both of these options:
Stay in the religious system and attempt to adapt.
In the article, How Evangelicalism Fuels Defensiveness, we wrote about the Defensive Theology Scale from psychologist
, in which he explores how EMPish participants attempt to navigate the theology of total depravity.I wrote the following:
When something goes wrong, it’s not God’s fault, because God can do no wrong. It must be my fault. I must have sinned too much. I must have not tried hard enough.
And so I ask for forgiveness, even in situations where I actually haven’t done anything wrong. I try harder. I give more money to the church. I push boundaries that aren’t in my best interest to be pushed.
Beck writes, “All this is motivated to repress existential moments when we feel that we are, at times, small, frail creatures who find the universe, even with God in it, confusing and perplexing.”
Get out of the religious system and attempt to heal.
For a lot of folks, the decision to leave the EMPish religious system—be that a specific religious community or the religious tradition at large—comes with a lot of grief, from the goodbyes and ruptured relationships, to navigating the unresolved ruptures of being told that you’re a bad human being.
Criticism happens. Julia and I have both been the initiators of some fairly harsh feedback in the last week in which we’ve insinuated some untoward aspects of the other person’s character and efforts.
We also both apologized. We took accountability for the poor ways that we communicated, let each other know that we don’t actually think that, and talked about how both of us want to do better moving forward.
For folks who have been harmed by religious communities, myself included, the shaming messages about bodies, intentions, interests, and personality traits are all left unresolved. There are growing pockets of communities of makeshift support groups—
writes about this in her book Disobedient Women.But that’s not the same as having someone from that religious community say, “I screwed up. I don’t really think that you’re a terrible human being, and I can understand how the practice of the theology of total depravity negatively impacted you. I’m sorry. Will you forgive me? Here’s how I want to do better.”
Most of us are not going to receive that, and are left to navigate the wounds of shaming without the communities that reared us.
Podcast Episodes
Which gets us to this week’s episode of Sexvangelicals with Zach Wagner, author of the new book Non-Toxic Masculinity: Recovering Healthy Male Sexuality.
Zach says the following about shame,
“There's a social dynamic to shame. I think the shame that I’m interested in and that we’re talking about is the way that the experience of sexual desire, or the acting out of certain sexual behaviors, can cycle back on itself to a negative view of self as bad or evil or uniquely broken in some way. Curt Thompson's work, The Soul of Shame, I found helpful in various ways on this point.
And I think starting from the premise that an experience of a certain sexual desire, or even an acting out of a certain sexual behavior, does not compromise your value as a human being.
This is something that women I think got the worst of in Purity culture, but in my conversations with men, I think it's something that men experience as well.
There's a guy I talk about in the final chapter of my book whose fictional name is Trevor. He talked about how his earliest sexual experiences made him feel like, “Well, it's just kind of over, and the fact that I've already kissed a girl or I've already viewed pornography or I've already masturbated has compromised any value of my sexuality to myself or to another person.
I think we can work against those. I don't want to oversimplify it or make it seem like it's simpler than it is but just being chill about people's sexual experiences and giving up on this untainted ideal of getting to your marriage or your wedding day having never had a sexual thought or desire and experience before in your life. I don't think that's how human sexuality works."
Zach joins me and Julia in noting that ways that the shaming messages of total depravity and Purity Culture have significantly negatively impacted men as well:
Another underappreciated aspect of this is the way our sexuality closely intersects with the rest of our humanity and our deep core needs and feelings.
Men are not socialized well to be able to articulate what we're feeling, certainly not with other men. And sexuality is a very vulnerable thing. Men are not socialized to be vulnerable with one another except in this mode where you're confessing your sexual sins, and the response is, “Yeah, don't do that again, please.” And then next week you're like, “Yeah, I did it again.” This kind of addict language is not helpful.”
Picture of the Week
We’re trying a new section that intersects two of our favorite things.
Photography. And travel.
We went to the Dutch Flower Parade on Saturday. There’s a lot of photos from the fancy cam that I’m in the process of editing.
But on the way there, we caught a picture of the Keukenhof flower fields. Even from a bus, Keukenhof does not disappoint:
Books That We’re Reading
Jeremiah’s Recommendations:
The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Essays on Desire and Consumption by
From glass to porcelain, aromas to interior design, Kelleher delves into the complicated histories and narratives around the items that Western Culture defines as “beautiful”. I love a good micro-history, and there’s a lot that I learned from this book. This book could also easily have been 750 pages, and I’m wondering if this book would have been more enjoyable had she focused on one product (i.e. the history and sociological development of scent) rather than the larger, abstract concept of “beauty”. Incredibly ambitious project from a gifted writer. Check out her Substack, Color Stories. 3.5 stars.The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People by Walter Russell Mead. Before you post anything about Israel, Gaza, and the US’ role in Middle Eastern politics on social media, please read this book. Yes, the actions of Netanyahu and the Likud Party have been deplorable, so much so that many Israeli citizens want him out too. But foreign policy, like relationships, is incredibly complex. Mead’s book is one of the most systematic, thorough books on foreign policy that I’ve read, and I think is especially timely for American audiences.
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah and Julia