[image description: a hand with a silver band on the ring finger hovering over a book that appears to be a religious text]

As a writer who primarily writes creative nonfiction, I know how to put the “personal” in “personal essay.”

I’ve written about my mental health struggles, being queer, my father’s drug addiction, being abused by multiple people, growing up poor, and other deeply personal things. People say to me regularly, “Wow, it really takes a lot of courage to put yourself out there like that.” But the truth is, it never really felt brave. To me, I’m just telling the truth of my life, which oftentimes hasn’t been pretty. And I think the truth is the easiest thing to tell.

I’d never really written an essay that made my stomach churn until I wrote about navigating having sex amid Alabama’s problematic purity culture.

I’m a 29-year-old woman, so it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that I’ve had sex. But at 18, when I first had sex, it felt deeply shameful because my then-boyfriend and I weren’t married and the evangelical community I grew up in told me I’d get a disease and burn in hell.

Though I don’t believe that and have since become an atheist who’s been probably educated in safe sex practices, I’ve still avoided writing about sex for nearly a decade. I’ve even squirmed when writing sex scenes into my novel.

That’s the hold purity culture can have on you, even when you know how wrong that is.

Even now, I can’t help thinking to myself that I finally became okay writing about sex after I got married. After I acquired the trappings of a “respectable” life and a man has made an “honest woman” out of me. Who would dare call me a slut and a whore now when I’m happily married with a husband in tow?

At any rate, this essay is better late than never. Since no one is pure enough for purity culture, I hope you’ll read it and share it with any girls and women in your life who need to reframe their relationship with their sexuality and get out from under the grip of patriarchal evangelicalism.