Damaged Goods

I know this isn't really news anymore, but it came up again recently on one of the other blogs I read, and upset me all over again. In addition to being totally batshit fucking crazy on the topic of birth control and abortion rights, the conservative Christian movement is also encouraging daughters to pledge their virginity to their dads, and their dads to pledge to protect it for them. One of the ideas behind this movement is that a properly loved little girl won't seek out other male attention, because she's getting it from her Daddy, thus enabling her to save it for marriage. Article and Video.

Now, I come from a conservative Christian family, and although my dad is a good man, a man that I like and respect a lot as well as love, I can't help but think he had similar ideas about my sexuality, that it ought to be repressed until a suitable time came for its expression, i.e. marriage. In my house, there was no talk about sex, ever. Everything I learned, I learned from books. We didn't talk about protection, we didn't talk about how to say no or why one might want to say yes, we only talked about WHY to say no, in the vaguest of terms--the idea being that sex before marriage made you a bad, weak-willed, dirty, damaged person, and no one would want to marry a vagina that someone else had been in.

Then, of course, I went away from home for the first time and got myself raped six ways to Sunday. Funny how this never fits into the talks, although it certainly fits into this paradigm of sexual activity: that it is the exclusive domain of males, for male control and male initiative. And afterwards, of course, I did two things: I set out to regain my sexuality for myself, by having a lot of sex with people I wanted to have sex with, and keeping it away from my parents. Then they found out, and the shit really hit the fan. As far as I'm concerned, they relinquished any say in my sex life when they failed to provide me with all the information I needed OR step in and rescue me if they wanted me to remain innocent. My mom has said to me in the past year, tenatively, because talking about sex is tantamount to admitting that we both (she, married, and I, 23) DO IT, "well, if you felt like...it needed to be yours....well, don't you feel like it is, now? ...Can't you stop?"

And the answer, of course, is no. No, it still isn't mine. Although I have gained control of my sexuality and sexual activity, I still have a lot of confusion and anger about everything sexually-related that is going to take a long time to figure out. I'm still unsure if it's possible for me to be loved without the sexual persona I've created for myself to hide the fact that sex still scares me, a little, and it takes very little for me to shut down completely. And no, Mom, in some ways it will never be mine, because there are some things you never completely get over, and for you to sit there and tell me to be over it because the thought of me having sex keeps you up at night is so wrong on so many levels.

I have come a long way with this, but I have a long way to go. And thinking about what's going to happen to 1 in 4 of these girls, and how their fathers will react to their loss of "purity"--whatever that means--breaks my heart in advance. I think my parents do feel that I am damaged goods, goods that willfully continue damaging themselves. But as long as distressed denim is still in style, I'm not worried. There's always going to be a market for women like me.