evangelical

Zoloft Stole my Sex Drive: a brief history of my libido (sex + shame part eight)

September 18, 2017 by Lyndsey 1 Comment

YOU GUYS. I am so excited to introduce you to my friend Meredith Bazzoli, who is a kickass writer and mama and improviser near Chicago. Her piece made me laugh, it made me cry. OK I didn’t quite cry, but I did sigh with relief several times at not being alone—both in having a sex life disrupted by medical issues, and in my previous belief that nothing could possibly disrupt the married sex lives of the virtuous. I do hope you’ll follow her on Twitter or Instagram for more hilarity and also sometimes seriousness.

I saved myself for marriage.

Or however you want to say it. That particular turn of phrase reminds me of the soggy blueberry pancake and remnants of chorizo omelette I scraped off my plate and into a foil container last week at a breakfast restaurant in town. Carefully pinching the foil rim over the cardboard lid, I knew we’d never eat our scraps, and yet, as a rule, I always make sure to take home a doggy bag if we have at least a fistful of food leftover.

Maybe the wording works better than I give it credit for. I certainly felt like a soggy, forgotten pancake in the back of the fridge for most of my adolescence. In my spot towards the back of the shelf, saving myself remained a predominantly passive activity since I got asked out exactly five times from birth to age twenty five.

Two of the five asks were the same person at different ages, one was a guy who recently married a man, and number five is my husband Drew. But the point is, I waited, I saved myself, I protected my flower, I kept my virginity, remained pure, kept my legs closed, or however you want to word it.

The purity movement presented a fairly uncomplicated formula for sexual bliss: two people who shelved themselves until marriage would come together on their wedding night and receive their prize. I watched this promise propel friends down the aisle, accelerating towards the marriage bed after years of being pulled back from the genitals of the opposite sex. While creating a firm boundary at the zipper of their jeans, these couples seemed attached by every other limb, twining around each other, their horniness flowing out of their hands, hands whose digits never stopped moving around one another’s bodies.

But soon enough, the first down the aisle came back with reports of the wedding night. They told us not to get our hopes up. The process of two virgins coming together as one flesh for the first time in a Marriott hotel room paid for by their grandparents was perhaps something we could wait a little longer for.

“It can be too big!” One friend exclaimed of her elder sister’s wedding night. We stared wide eyed wondering if our own vaginas could support the girth of our future spouses.

Other friends in the know topped their Victoria’s Secret boxes at lingerie showers with bottles of lubricant sloshing back and forth under a gold curly cued ribbon. “You’ll need this,” their eyes seemed to say, “trust me.”

But what no one told me was that after years of waiting, I might not want “it” at all. Not as some purified call to celibacy, but as a side effect of a pill that was otherwise keeping me sane and alive.

————————-

I remember my sex drive. It was all fire and magnetism, a pull towards belt loops and back pockets, a sense of urgency to get closer, faster before the moment or the world ended. It was the jackal in an American Indian trickster tale darting into consciousness when least convenient around parents and grandparents and conservative Christians. It was an appetite with eyes bigger than it’s stomach, constantly convincing me that there was room for more, that the belt loop could move over a rung or two without too much guilt. And I’d take a little more, steal kisses in the next room or stop the truck to tumble into my lover’s arms, greedy for more of him.

It had me flipping through books like Every Young Woman’s Battle to see what God said about my urge to chase that certain feeling between my legs. Most of the purity materials for girls focused on the defense actions of chastity: guarding, covering, waiting. With a lack of information on having desires, let alone how to wield them, I came to understand myself as disordered for my gender.

But these instances are all memories, pre-antidepressant.

Many who suffer from anxiety and depression swallow a few SSRI’s each day (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors). I often forget the chemistry of what my Zoloft is doing; I know only that it raises rock bottom, that it creates small margins in my mind to think separately from the well-worn anxious paths. But nonetheless, to create this reality, my hormones get taken along for a ride.

While I’m tempted to spend a few thousand words justifying why I needed the SSRI’s in the first place and my journey to getting them and the sort of stigmas attached to such medication and mental illness, I will merely say that at times, my ability to live and function in the world was so inhibited by the misheard messages that very few options remained for me.

And so, the month I got engaged, my general practitioner wrote out my first prescription for an anti-depressant alongside my birth control pills. In passing, she mentioned my new pills might affect my sex drive. Increased Serotonin decreases your desire—not your sexual performance necessarily, like the men riding on boats with their golden retrievers in Viagra commercials—but it takes sex off my brain and gives me a neutral-leaning-to-negative feeling about it. Sex finally on the horizon, I had none of my primal fires burning, none of nature’s urgings to keep the species alive. After years of learning how to contain the flames, I barely had a smoldering match.

We talked about the medicated shift in my libido at our premarital counseling. At the time, we assumed the pills were temporary. I had a lot going against me depression/anxiety wise: an overly detailed wedding, a mother with cancer, a recent attack by a family dog. As a couple, we planned on doing it till our hips and knees and hearts gave out, so we took this blip on our sex timeline in stride.

But three years later, I still take one and half of the yellow tablets every morning; and with them, I swallow the bigger pill of shame, that I couldn’t fix myself with sun lamps, or exercise, or counseling, or that one kind of therapy where my counselor ushered me down the path of my memory with two little vibrating orbs alternating in my left and right hands. And most of all, the deep shame that, married to the good, good man I am—a 6’4” dreamboat who will text with me about my poop and never lets a day go by that he doesn’t express his love and desire for me—I don’t have a sex drive.

While we’ve rewritten the script for intimacy in our own marriage, the original version still sneaks through, a palimpsest layered with early 2000’s purity culture, sex talks with sassy married millennials at coffee shops, and a deep feeling down in my gut that I am defective, that I deserve this for some misstep of lust or pleasure in my past.

I keep silent on a walk with friends, one sharing how she decided against birth control pills since they curbed her sister in law’s sex drive, and again when friends sit around and give advice on the night before another friend’s wedding. They talk about pushing past tiredness and how many times a week they put out—men do really want sex all the time they say. I can’t help but hear a long-ago line about men looking for sex elsewhere if you don’t give it to them, if you don’t perform your wifely role and duty as God intended.

And I am sad for Drew. But I am also proud of him. For navigating this road with me, for never once entertaining any of my talk of sexual karma or my own grossness, for going above and beyond to ensure not only consent in our love making, but also volition, comfort and agency. For discovering intimacy where it can be found but still expressing desire for me—body, mind, soul.

And in all of this, we are both grateful to my Zoloft, because while I saved myself for marriage, my Zoloft saved me after that.

Hey, I told you you’d want to find Meredith on Twitter and Instagram!

What kinds of if…then promises did you grow up expecting to operate in your romantic life?

What messages have you encountered about women’s sex drives? How do they compare with your experience?

Who else gets excluded when we make sex the barometer for marital bliss?

catch up on the sex + shame series here:

5 Reasons Jesus Would Ask You to Un-Sign the Nashville Statement

September 1, 2017 by Lyndsey 2 Comments

After the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood issued their Nashville Statement on gender and sexuality this week, I tried not to care. Don’t we already know where they stand on these issues?

But I couldn’t let it go, if only because so many of my own friends carefully follow CBMW or John Piper. They are people who truly want more than anything to be faithful and loving. They don’t know or care much about the politically correct ways to say things; they might even read the statement as many commenters did—”compassionate,” “gracious.”

It was CBMW’s insistence that their position is central to the Gospel, I realized, that took my breath away with shock and a little fear. Do my friends think I oppose the Gospel? Will they think so after their spiritual heroes sign on to this sweeping declaration?

Whenever I have questions about the Gospel, I ask Jesus. Here are five things I could imagine him saying to those who signed.

The Nashville Statement is hurting people.

I know many people who might sign on to the statement with some sorrow. They worry about the state of world. They wish others didn’t have to struggle with their sexual identities. They want to have LGBT friends and serve them meals and “do life with them” until the day the friends realize how terrible their lives are and repent.

That is well-intentioned in a way, but it’s not compassionate. “Com + passion” equals suffering with. You are not with someone as long as you are drawing a line between sexual morality and sexual immorality with yourself squarely on the opposite side from the other person. You are not with someone as long as opposing a fundamental aspect of their self remains a fundamental aspect of your theology.

Instead, the language and tone of the Nashville Statement reveals that it was not written by people in real relationships with queer people. If it had, it wouldn’t use the made-up word “transgenderism” or insist at so very many points that people can change to fit “God’s design.” It would acknowledge the church’s utter failure of queer people, evident in the prevalence of depression, suicide, and self-harm among queer Christians.

It’s not Biblical.

The Nashville Statement’s conflation of beliefs about sexuality with salvific belief in the Gospel (Article X) is utterly unsupported by Scripture. Jesus never preached that fulfillment of narrow gender roles would signal the arrival of the kingdom of God.

It’s not holistic.

Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t make statements about gender and sexual identity in isolation from an understanding of sex and sexuality for straight people. In particular, it’s tone-deaf to trumpet the urgency of these issues for the Evangelical church, the vast majority of whose queer members have left, while ignoring the fact that rape culture, pornography, and abuse continue in the pews (and in the clergy) daily. This is the epitome of a plank-and-speck situation.

Likewise, a church that demands lifelong celibacy of its members is also rejecting the gospel if it does not expect to sacrifice just as heavily as the celibate members to support and include them in its life. Jesus said his followers would hate their mothers and brothers; perhaps he meant to suggest that there is no place in his kingdom for those who idolize the nuclear family.

It makes you look silly.

The Nashville Statement will not go down in history as a defining moment on par with the Nicene Creed. It may someday be a footnote illustrating how conservative evangelicalism died orchestrating a series of exercises in missing the point. The grandiosity of the name points to the hubris of the whole thing.

It reveals more about you than about God.

The fact is, no one reading the Bible—and especially the Gospels—for the first time would put it down and say, “that was a fascinating book about sex.” You’re revealing your own obsession with sex and the status quo. The Nashville Statement itself makes an attempt to look strong and decisive, but the preamble reveals that that attempt is just an impulse driven by fear—fear of change, fear of humanity, and most importantly, fear of those who are different.

I think if Jesus were here, he’d ask you about your own nuclear family. He would sit and his eyes would glow with yours as you told about the passion and steadfastness your spouse has shown you, the incomparable joy of raising children, how the best nights of your life were just all of you piled on a couch. Maybe he’d chime in—I have always loved how her hair catches the sun, too.

Jesus would ask you about sex. About what it meant to you to share all of yourself with someone; about what you learned about God and yourself in your own celibate seasons; about how your gender makes you who you are, places you on a team, invites and challenges you to be fully yourself.

Jesus would listen and listen and when you were done, when you had told all that made your own experience precious to you, he would wait a while. And I think he’d ask you to let go of the Nashville Statement. I think he’d say, here, let me hold that for you, and he’d promise to keep it safe.

I think if you were so sure of your beliefs and so close to Jesus, you’d be able to set them aside for a bit and listen, instead of alternately clutching them to your chest and brandishing them about. And Jesus might say:

Your love for your family is a beautiful and holy thing, a thing that makes you who you are. And my queer friends? Their gender identities and romantic relationships make them who they are, too. Precious, thrilling, and a little bit odd, with histories of mistakes and triumphs—just like everyone else.

Maybe you feel the need to police all of this precisely because your own identities mean so much to you. Is it so hard to believe that the people they love and the genders they express mean this much to others as well? That they are integral to their very being? That I made them that way?

Your family doesn’t need to be protected by rules and declarations. They need to see you model the servant leadership you talk about sometimes. They need you to wash the feet of your transgender neighbor and really hear the stories, start to finish, of the queer people who have quietly slipped out of your life. They need to see that you know how to repent and to make amends. That’s what would take courage. That’s how you would display integrity. That’s how you would be changed by imitating my love.

Decent Women, Sex, and Shame

August 8, 2017 by Lyndsey 2 Comments

The grass is not as soft as it looks, but cuddling in it seems to make my boyfriend happy. He is my first boyfriend, we are freshmen, and his affection for me is thrilling and overwhelming. I am certain he would do anything for me, so I am cuddling in this grass for him—though if I were to choose a scratchy patch of grass for this activity, it also wouldn’t be the university quad. In fact, when we sat down here, I hadn’t anticipated nearly this level of PDA. But my highest priority as a girlfriend is to be low-maintenance, and we’re certainly not making out like couples in movies about college, or couples I’ve seen in public parks in Atlanta and San Francisco; besides, Christian college is supposed to be a place where you have adventures, just safer and more moral ones than at other colleges. Having a boyfriend is an adventure. Spooning in public is an adventure. I put my discomfort aside. Sideways, I watch the frisbee game across the lawn; people trickle out of the dining hall; from my perspective, ants join up to follow in their wake, everyone busy. Maybe no one I know will even notice us.

Then a pair of boots blocks my view.

We scramble to a seated position and squint up at the Campus Safety officer who’s been dispatched to protect the campus from our obscenity. It is my nightmare. All the voices nagging that I was embarrassing myself are suddenly, solidly before me in this irritated young man and in the finger-wagging of the anonymous professor he says sent him. I cannot look at the officer or at my boyfriend; all I want is to scurry away like an ant and hide, maybe under a bush, the scratchier the better. I should have known better. I should have found some way to say no. Decent women do not even lay down in public, let alone with a boy. Decent women know how to make their boyfriends happy without scandalizing their professors. My face is flaring. People will gossip later, and I know I deserve it.

I don’t let on that I am this upset; pretending is something I’m good at. I make some jokes about the threat we pose to campus safety, and we take some aimless walk, as freshmen do. In the future, though, we won’t cuddle on campus. We’ve learned our relationship doesn’t belong there. We will make out in his car in dark parking lots because it seems to make my boyfriend happy. We still won’t be alone, though; a choir of voices will pull me farther and farther from my body, and I will learn every word to the single CD in his car, until the kissing involves him and a policeman and a professor and a pastor and Chris Carrabba, but not me. I will be hiding in shame.

When I was 18 I was not under the impression that making out in cars with boys you aren’t sure about is part of normal human development. My friends and I were raised in various strains of what has come to be called evangelical purity culture. We were generally under the impression that it would be, if not easy, at least fairly straightforward to arrive at our wedding days not only with our virginity, but with a record of very little physical interaction between ourselves and anyone other than our husbands. It had been impressed upon us that all physical contact beyond hand-holding had consequences for all of our future relationships, that “going too far” with the wrong boy could curse our marriages for years—and if we didn’t have good marriages, what would we have?

Now I’ve learned that making out in cars is, in fact, part of normal human development; but for me and my purity-seeking friends, what’s even more normal is feeling extreme shame about it. Whether we shut down our sexuality like we were told to, basically refusing to kiss before marriage, or we drew our lines elsewhere, we have all carried the weight of deep shock at ourselves, believing we’ve done far more than the respectable people around us. We have all sat in a church service feeling that if anyone knew, they would stage an intervention to rescue our integrity, our relationships, and potentially our salvation from the terrible things we hadn’t had the courage to refuse. But no one must find out. We might confess the sins of gossip, envy, cheating in school or spending too much, but sexual sin was another realm entirely. To do it was forbidden. To talk about it was impossible.

Now I’ve learned that the guilt we felt was not a healthy sense of regret at a genuinely bad choice. It was the inevitable consequence of a system that told women to be demure and compliant in every arena—including marriage—then made us the sole responsible guardians of that nebulous object, the “purity” of our bodies and souls. Shame was the inevitable consequence of encouraging dissociation from and fear of our bodies. It inevitably swelled like a cancer, replicating itself on all sides, feeding on itself, on the silence and fear and self-hatred it created.

Now I’ve learned that every single one of us has sat somewhere being torn apart by shame—and believing we were utterly alone.

This series has inspired me to invite you to share your stories about sex and shame, anonymously if you choose. It’s not because it’s sensationalist or cathartic to sit around and complain about our childhoods. It’s because I am coming to believe that in every place we can name our shame and fear, and then say something anyway, we are doing something to cauterize the cancer. We are learning that speaking the unspeakable is not nearly as catastrophic as we thought. We are inviting others out into the light. We might even find ways to grieve, or rebuild, or at least to laugh.

Beginning next week, I’ll publish stories about sex and shame, completely anonymously (or with your name and links if you specify). I’m hoping to hear from women and men, Christian and not-Christian, straight and not-straight. Tell us the thing you wish your 15-year-old self could hear. Tell us the thing you’re afraid of. Tell us where you’ve found healing or discovered a new sexual ethic. Tell us we are not alone.

Send your story to me at lyndseymedford[at]gmail.com, using the contact page of the website, or through a Facebook direct message. If you’re not sure where to start, grab one of the prompts below. Be prepared: I’ll probably have to edit for length or clarity. I’ll do everything I can to honor both your story and our readers.

Share a story like the one above of a specific time when a cultural norm about sex “happened” to you. What aspect of that culture does it illustrate?
How did you relate to your body as a child, teenager, or now? Tell about an event that changed this relationship for better or for worse.
Talk about a message about sexuality that has been particularly powerful in your life.
What embarrassing questions do you have about sex and sexuality? Or if you’re not Christian or evangelical, do you have questions you’re afraid to ask about purity culture?
If you met your 15-year-old self, what’s one specific thing you would tell him/her about sex? Or more generally, tell us about one thing you’ve learned as an adult about the ethics/responsibility of sex.

Thanks for being big and bright and brave with anything you want to share. I hope this conversation can be a sigh of relief, a lightened load, and a space for respectful disagreement; I can’t wait to share it with you!

Dear Conservative Relatives: I Think We Feel the Exact Same Way

October 14, 2016 by Lyndsey Leave a Comment

Dear Conservative Relatives:

I know we don’t talk about it much, but I hope you know I do think about your reactions when I post my “liberal” thoughts and ideas and memes. I can feel your disapproval and anxiety shimmering through the air at me. Even if you don’t mean for me to feel it—of course I do. I grew up watching you talk about people like me. I worry about you worrying about me.

I think, for instance, about whether your hearts sunk, reading my note this week to my LGBTQ friends that thanked them for being themselves.
“There are two genders,” I can imagine you saying. I imagine you play out scenarios in your minds—whether I’ve turned my back on God altogether, or just the Bible. Whether I have a grip on reality anymore. Whether too much pot-smoking with my weirdo Northern liberal friends has turned me into an impressionistic ivory-tower childishly naive egghead.
(No. I’ve never smoked pot.)

“Didn’t we teach her better than that?” I imagine you asking each other.
“Doesn’t she know what we believe?”
“Who told her these outrageous things?”
Maybe you pray for me.
Maybe you’ve blocked me.
Maybe you’ve given me up for lost.

Here’s the thing though: I feel that same utter lack of comprehension sometimes when I hear your political views; and never so much as this week when I’ve seen you defending Donald Trump.

I thought you were the people who taught me the word character. That even our most secret behavior matters because it forms who we are; because who we are when no one’s watching is who we will be when people are depending on us. And now you try to separate the office of the President from the person of the man who holds it.

I remember your outrage and vitriol demanding that Bill Clinton be convicted for his lying and womanizing ways. But the man you now support has done nothing but lie since he first stepped onto a political stage. And most recently he has demonstrated that the first thing he would likely do as President is find an intern who would give him a blowjob in the Oval Office. That is the ultimate power move, isn’t it? And Trump is all about power.

Sometimes I worry about using language you might think was vulgar in my writing. But when you let “locker room talk” like grab her by the pussy slide past your ears, I realize that propriety isn’t the most important thing to you.

—

You’ve told me before that the most important things to you are truth, family, and the love of God. Which of these things does Trump stand for?

You encouraged me to get an education, and my education has taught me a lot of truths. It has forced me, for instance, to understand that when the world is changing as fast as it is now, things are sometimes too complicated to operate under the principles of common sense. That’s why I can’t just base my vote on a “pro-life” position. To prevent abortion, we have to care for the lives of mothers and children, not just fetuses.

You taught me to prioritize family in life and in politics. And the more people I’ve met, the more I see we have to gain from honoring families that don’t look like ours. I don’t think the people who have praised and fought for these families are deluded at all. They are growing genuine, self-giving love between couples and making miraculous homes for children who need them. Their “agenda” is to be safe, to be respected, to be in most ways unremarkable. And in the process of achieving it, they are demonstrating creative and powerful and grace-filled love.

You taught me that the love of God conquers all. You taught me that compassion was the trait one should be proudest of in this life. You happily took the precious quarters I gave you as a child for the other children who needed help overseas. But today you call “naive” and “dangerous” those who want our country to provide safe haven for refugees.
People who have lost their families, their livelihoods, their homes, their towns, their churches, their neighbors and friends are asking the world for nothing more than not to spend the rest of their lives in tents. But you support a candidate who would prefer that our country cower behind its wide ocean, incredible military, and extreme prosperity rather than trust in God’s command to extend welcome to the stranger.

Don’t you know what we believe?
Who told you these outrageous things?

—

I wish that we could keep politics impersonal, but I can’t help taking it personally. The thing is, I defended our ideals for so long. I do understand that my stance on the issues above is not the only platform based on the values of truth, family, and compassion. I’ve spent days of my life, long after I no longer thought of myself as particularly Conservative, demanding respect for people who don’t fall into step with the liberal elite. We all have a lot of the same goals, I said, but different ideas about how to get there. People aren’t required to pursue change for its own sake. It’s lazy, lazy thinking to pretend that your political enemy is an amoral troglodyte; so I don’t sit and listen to redneck jokes, trailer park jokes, or Religious Right jokes. I’ve fought much more for your positions than for mine among my weirdo Northern liberal friends. Because I know you. Because I love you.

I’ve been on both sides, and I know that people on both sides can arrive at hard-fought, careful and prayerful, opposing positions. I know that casting all Conservatives as fear-driven, susceptible to hate-mongering, and respectful of nothing but money is unproductive and downright false. I tell people I know plenty of Conservatives who instead live principled and courageous lives, care deeply about protecting minorities, and practice extreme financial generosity.

But I can’t bring myself to believe that those people are voting for Trump.