Your virginity is a chocolate bar
My confusion, insecurity, and stunted development from years at Cole Valley (an anonymous story)
(A previous Cole Valley student requested I post this for them anonymously.)
I left Cole Valley completely happy
I’ll start by saying this: I left Cole Valley completely happy with my experiences there. I still do not regret that I went. I believe our experiences in life shape who we are, and I’m generally happy with who I’ve become, so I wouldn’t want to change that. However, I’ve come to the realization through the Cole Valley Speaks movement that I would not send any future children of mine to CVCS.
I also have to say that while I did not personally have overtly negative experiences while attending, and didn’t witness some of the terrible things that have been recently reported, I fully believe and support the victims who are speaking their silence, sharing their stories, and working together to improve CVCS for current and future students. Victims deserve to be heard, and victims deserve justice for the horrible wrongs done to them while attending CVCS. Current students deserve to be protected from these harms, and provided with care and resources if/when abuses happen.
Many have shared views and ideas they left CVCS with that were harmful. Some of these include ideas that “women are subservient to men”, “women are weak”, “women who dress provocatively deserve the assault that happened to them”. I have to admit that looking back I see how these views were taught and how students left feeling this way. I see how the reasoning behind our dress code perpetuated rape culture and slut shaming. I did not leave with these ideas, and I credit that to my parents and maybe my own strength of opinion more than to the school. So, just because I leave those ideas out does not mean I think these views weren’t promoted. They’re just simply not a part of my own story, so I will let others speak for themselves on these issues.
I also acknowledge that my story below could have happened at any institution. Any small institution that lacks oversight over what teachers and adults tell students could have these same problems. Not to mention, many other religious institutions (including CVCS) actively promote and espouse some of the ideas I present below. I hope my explanation of what these ideas result in for young students will encourage institutions to no longer teach or promote these views, and to monitor what staff are promoting. I want my story to be an encouragement to any small private (especially religious) school, that they can take steps to increase supervision and control over what personal opinions adults are allowed to teach to impressionable students as “facts”, and take control over what views the institution itself presents to students. I want my story to make parents think hard about what views they hope their students/children grow up with, what is taught at home, and consider what they would do if their views shared at home conflicted with the views taught at a school.
I was a model of “the Cole Valley girl”
So, here’s my story. My story is NOT the worst story — not even close. But this story is for all the people who read “extreme” blog posts like Cameron’s and think: “This can’t be true, nothing bad happened to me, I didn’t witness that”. I’m offering this perspective of someone who was not directly or extremely harmed by CVCS, and yet left with ideas and thoughts that had a negative impact on me decades later (and perhaps for a lifetime).
I was not a “rebel”. I was a goody-two-shoes. I never had a boyfriend in high school. I never violated the dress code. I’ve only ever dated one guy, and I married him. I chose to wait to have sex (and to this day really value the fact that I have only ever had sex with my husband). I am a model of “the Cole Valley girl”. And yet I still left with negative experiences.
Sex mis-education
Until I was probably 22, I learned everything I knew about sex from the LoveLine radio show and the Cosmo magazine website. Until probably freshman year of college, I thought condoms were made of glass, because all I knew about them is that they could break. From the radio show I eventually pieced together that they must be made of something like rubber gloves because a woman called in about having a latex allergy so I put two and two together.
I didn’t understand what an orgasm (male or female) was until I was probably 19.
Then I finally discovered resources on the internet that talked about these things.
When I first started using google to learn about sex in high school, I ran across pornography and that really bothered me. For a long time I only looked at the Cosmo website for information about sex to avoid this. I didn’t know about any safe, trustworthy resources to turn to that taught about sex in a matter-of-fact honest way. Cosmo is a very confusing place to try and learn anything useful or realistic about sex. By not teaching us the details about sex, my curiosity led me to seek out sources that were not accurate or age appropriate.
“Girls don’t think like that”
I left CVCS with misconceptions about my own gender and how I “should” feel about sex that still affect my intimacy with my husband today.
I present here a list of things I was directly taught at the school. Below each item I present how I felt, reacted to, and internalized these views. I use the term “girls” here often, because we are talking about minors: young girls in high school. But these views shared were considered to apply to adult women as well.
- Boys are visually, sexually attracted when they look at a woman. Girls care about how a guy dresses, not what he looks like.
As others have already shared, during a girls-only chapel, we were shown a picture of a shirtless guy wearing jeans. We were told: “when a guy sees a girl in a bikini, he immediately pictures having sex with her. Guys like looking at pictures of women’s bodies. You girls probably think that’s really weird huh? *laughs* All of us women, when we see this picture of this guy, we think “wow, I love those jeans, I wonder how much they cost? I really like that belt buckle”. Then maybe we notice that he’s shirtless. Women aren’t visual beings; we aren’t attracted to shirtless guys the way men are attracted to pictures of women.”
I thought the shirtless guy was hot! I thought Orlando Bloom was sexy. I had a poster of him in a tight shirt that showed off his muscles. I felt like something must be wrong with me that I cared more about what his body looked like than the shirt he was wearing. I felt like I was un-feminine for being interested in men in this way. I felt like there must be something wrong with me.
- Girls are emotional and sensitive
I have never been an emotionally sensitive person. I have a hard time picking up on cues of other women. I was bad at detecting the passive aggressive cues that are common in the culture of teenage girls. I felt like an outsider already. Then, these ideas that all women should be emotional and tender and sensitive were being taught to us by adults. I felt like even more of an outsider and more abnormal. In junior high I came home crying to my dad and told him I wished I was a boy! I told him that all the ways I felt were not like other girls so there must be something wrong with me. (I realize now that I definitely think I fall more on the masculine end of the feminine side of the spectrum than many women…and that’s okay! this is something I wish I had understood at a younger age. It’s okay to not want to fit into every stereotyped gender role presented to you as “normal”)
- Boys are clueless. They don’t understand emotions.
I felt I didn’t understand emotions well compared to my female peers. I was often clueless when girls were making fun of me. I felt like this made me an odd girl and that there was something wrong. That I was too boyish.
My now husband is attentive to the emotions of other people. He’s very caring and good at realizing when someone is upset. It took me a long time to recognize that this was actually normal. That men could be caring and attentive.
“If a boy really loves you he won’t try to have sex with you”
- When a boy wants to touch your body, it’s not because he loves you. Boys have sexual attraction without feelings of love.
We were taught that boys are visual creatures. They look at pictures of naked women and are attracted to those. The boys want to touch your body because you are a woman, not because of who you are as a person or because of his relationship and care for you.
We were not taught that physical touch can be a very important aspect of a romantic relationship and a way to communicate and show care and affection for your partner. We were taught that it was an uncontrollable instinct of all men to be attracted to all women, or images of women. We did not learn to associate physical touch with affection or love. Physical touch was something done by men when they were lusting after a woman.
I unconsciously processed through a lot of these negative feelings in the early stages of being physical with my now husband when we were dating. When we hugged…was he just trying to lure me into doing more? When I realized that I felt love from him through physical touch, I was confused. It didn’t jive with what I had been taught. How was I interpreting his physical touch as “love”? It must be something else. It must be temptation trying to deceive me and take hold.
- I was explicitly taught that “Women give sex to get love, men give love to get sex.” We were taught that boys will tell you they love you to try to convince you to push your boundaries or have sex, but you should say no. But, if a boy really loves you he won’t try to have sex with you.
I remember imagining getting my first boyfriend. I imagined him trying to touch me, and I imagined rebuffing him…wouldn’t that be great! We were presented with this heroic ideal of a righteous young woman turning away guys. I looked forward to having that opportunity to push a guy away and stick to my boundaries. I imagined that this is what a relationship was like: men trying to touch women (which was in a way a compliment because men are attracted to sexy bodies, although we didn’t talk about this) and then women pushing them away.
But then at the same time (and I never saw the contradiction here when I felt this way) I imagined my first boyfriend. We would hold hands. We would talk about wanting to kiss each other. Then we would decide not to kiss because we wanted our relationship to last. In a good relationship you don’t want to kiss the other person. That’s lustful and that would ruin it.
I basically held, at the same time, two conflicting beliefs:
If a boy is attracted to you, he will try to have sex with you. If a godly boy loves you, he won’t try to have sex with you and will respect you. That leads to a pretty confusing story when your first boyfriend both finds you attractive and loves you…
- Boys like touching girls’ bodies. The reason girls let boys touch them is that they want the boy to love them. It is your job as a girl to stop boys. It is your job to set boundaries (because you are not sex-crazed like boys are) and tell the boy your boundaries.
I’ve always been a pretty strong person. When I was taught this, I thought “that’s easy! I don’t want to have sex, I can tell guys to stop!” and never gave it another thought.
The exact messages I was given that led me to these thoughts included: “Boys will try to touch you”, “If you turn a boy down when he tries to touch you, he might threaten to stop dating you, so you need to be prepared and stay strong”, “just because you like a boy doesn’t mean you have to let him touch you”, “don’t give in to pressure to let boys touch you”, “girls who have low self-esteem let their boyfriends touch them to feel better about themselves”.
ALL of it was centered around the fact that boys might want to touch girls, and when girls let them it was because they were weak. I never considered that girls might actually want the same thing. I remember hearing that “boys will try to touch your breasts”. I remember thinking it was so silly that girls gave in and let them do it. I never had guys chasing after me in school, so I learned at an early age to not rely on male validation to feel good about myself. So I assumed I had nothing to worry about. Why would you need to get your self-worth from a guy? It seemed so obvious. If a boy tries to touch you, don’t let him. I had never set personal physical boundaries beyond “don’t have sex”. I had never thought it would be a problem. I had read Christian purity books about setting boundaries about “swimsuit areas” and other ideas, but had never taken it to heart because I believed in myself and knew that I would never give in to peer pressure if I didn’t want to.
I was wholly unprepared to handle the fact that I actually liked and wanted physical touch
The first time my (now husband) put his hand on my knee I about lost my mind! It felt nice. I wanted him to touch my knee. I had learned that a hand on the knee was okay. A hand on the thigh was bad. But I wanted him to touch my thigh! I made him stop and wouldn’t let him put his hand on my knee. I was really confused about why I enjoyed having him touch me. I thought that guys wanted to touch girls, but I had no idea that girls would actually enjoy being touched! I thought the only reason girls let guys touch them was because they wanted the guys to like them.
I wanted my boyfriend/husband to kiss me. That felt wrong. We dated an entire year before I would let him kiss me, because I was feeling these overwhelming pleasant feelings when we hugged or even came close to thinking about kissing. I thought the uncontrollable feelings of liking him were negative…women weren’t supposed to feel these. Only men. I also imagined that, because I was this odd woman who was interested in physical touch, that I must also have the uncontrollable male problem of wanting to have sex every moment. I imagined that if we kissed that I wouldn’t be able to control this male, unfeminine urge to have sex, and that I would immediately give in and lose my virginity.
I was wholly unprepared to handle the fact that I actually liked and wanted the physical advances that were happening in our relationship. I never knew that the reason people “got physical” was because both parties enjoyed it. It feels great when the guy you’re dating grabs your butt! It’s awesome when he holds your waist tightly! Because I was unprepared, I crossed a few physical boundaries that I might have waited a few months to cross if I had known and been prepared for how I would feel. We crossed some small boundaries (often because of my pushing, not his), then I regretted it because I was unprepared and it was too soon for me. We would stop. Then, when we re-crossed them again at a pace that I felt ready for, I felt conflicting feelings of guilt.
I stopped talking to my parents
Because I thought women weren’t supposed to feel this way and want physical touch, I didn’t feel like I could tell anyone about my feelings. I stopped talking to my parents about my relationship because I thought something was wrong with me. I stopped asking for their advice and help.
“Real Men” push boundaries
My very patient boyfriend, now husband, respected my boundaries and didn’t try to kiss me. I would get very close to kissing him and was shocked when he didn’t take advantage of these opportunities to kiss me. I basically did everything but kiss him, trying to lure him into kissing me, even though I had told him I didn’t want to kiss. Guys were supposed to push girls and cross boundaries. What was wrong with him? Where were these uncontrollable male urges I’d heard about? Why was he constantly respecting my boundaries, asking my consent, and not trying to push me? I must not be that attractive. When I finally decided I wanted to kiss him, it was in the “heat of the moment” when he had kissed my cheek and forehead. I told him I wanted him to kiss me and he hesitated. He asked me if I was sure. He recognized that I might not be thinking clearly and could regret my decision made in that moment, since he knew physical boundaries were important to me. Again…what was wrong with him? All this respect I wasn’t prepared for that he was giving me… it made me feel like I must not be that attractive.
I hope this message gets through to parents. If you want to help your daughter maintain the physical boundaries she chooses to set for relationships, it will actually help your daughters to know that they will experience pleasure when they do these things (with the right person, when they feel safe and not pressured). Keeping them ‘naïve’ is not helping.
Is something wrong with me?
- Men have uncontrollable sexual urges. When they see a woman’s body, they imagine having sex with them and can’t stop themselves.
I can recognize these thoughts described below (when I have them) for what they are. But to be honest I do still have these fleeting thoughts, left over from my time at CVCS. Sometimes I get out of the shower and my husband maybe just raises his eyebrows and whistles, but keeps brushing his teeth. Why isn’t he losing his mind? This doesn’t match with what I was taught about animal, uncontrollable men. What’s wrong with my naked body that he doesn’t come after me every second of the day? Am I less of a woman? Is he less of a man? I know these negative thoughts aren’t true, but I have to be honest that they still happen, and that they are a result of the things I was taught at CVCS.
- If you have sex outside of marriage, you will think about your past sexual partners all the time when you are with your husband.
My husband wasn’t a virgin when we met. I struggled with this fact. I wondered often if my now husband was thinking about other women when we were together (especially since they would have sex with him and I at the time would not). I used to have dreams about him and his ex girlfriends. What a sad, paranoid, and insecure way to live!
Your virginity is like a chocolate bar.
Thank goodness I overcame this mentality before I had sex! I think it’s so damaging and I can’t imagine the guilt and negativity I would have associated with sex if I had still thought this. As some others have shared in interviews, in chapel we were shown a Hershey bar. We were told “boys are hungry” and that when we break dress code, we are essentially waving an unwrapped chocolate bar in their face, teasing them. We were taught “of course boys will try to take the chocolate!”. We were taught that the worst thing we could do would be to give away our chocolate bar to a boy. That chocolate bar was to be saved and given to our husbands!
What an image to leave with girls: “You have something of value (your body/your self). When you have sex, you give that valuable thing away to another person. It is not yours. Your body belongs to you only until you give it away. Once you give it away, it’s gone forever”. This tactic relied on scare and guilt messages to keep girls “pure”. This tactic also never differentiated between giving your chocolate away to a boyfriend versus a husband. I left chapel feeling that when I got married I would lose or give something away. (I love my husband, but man, I still don’t like sharing my chocolate with him!). Why do we teach girls that sex is about sacrifice and giving up something, even within marriage? Sex is about partnership. Equally sharing yourselves with one another.
Boys are hungry and rape is okay
I won’t comment on it beyond this, because I think it’s painfully obvious, but you can see how the chocolate bar analogy also plays directly into rape culture. If your chocolate bar is unwrapped, you can’t blame the boys for taking it. If you are dressed scantily, of course you will be raped. Listen, your sons should be raised to know that violating another person, no matter what they’re wearing, is never right. I could write ten more pages on this along, but I’ll leave it at that.
Your virginity is like a stick of gum.
We were taught this analogy in chapel or church camp (I can’t remember which, but I attended Cole Church, the parent church of CVCS). We were shown a nice, perfect stick of gum, wrapped nicely in foil. First, the teacher just took the gum out of the wrapper, and tried to put it back in. It was difficult to do, and the wrapper didn’t look perfect anymore. It wasn’t the same. Then she took the gum out again and broke it in half. Then tried to stick it back together. It didn’t work. Then, she chewed up the gum. That’s what would happen to you if you had sex. You would be a gooey disgusting blob of gum, covered in saliva. The more the gum got chewed, the more boring it became. It lost its flavor. If you had sex with someone else who wasn’t a virgin, it would be like chewing up a wad of gum you found stuck to the bottom of a chair…covered in someone else’s spit. We were never given any other alternative analogy to what sex within marriage would be like. Just one, disgusting image for sex and how it would ruin us. This is what we were taught about sex: Once you have sex, you will never be the same. You will be disgusting. There’s no going back. You’ll never be “perfect” or “pristine” again. Again, even for girls who wait until their wedding night to have sex, what does this teach them? That on their wedding night they are losing something precious that they will never get back. That their husband is taking something from them, and making them less than they were before.
I waited to have sex
I made the personal choice to wait to have sex with the man who is now my husband. I hope this fact makes my message resonate particularly with CVCS supporters. Rather than the chocolate bar analogy or gum analogy, here are the reasons I will share with a future child about why I waited to have sex until I was in a loving committed adult relationship:
I love that I lost my virginity to someone I loved, cared about, and felt safe with.
I love that I didn’t feel pressured to have sex and waited for a time that felt right.
I love that I had a conversation about when, how, and why we were going to have sex, before it happened.
I love that “losing” my virginity didn’t mean I lost anything at all. I didn’t “give away” anything, but rather joined with someone I loved to share ourselves with each other.
I’m thankful I didn’t have any traumatic experiences at CVCS. But I left with plenty of negative feelings, many of which didn’t come to light until years after I had left high school. I’m thankful that these are slowly fading and that I am in a healthy relationship that nurtures positive feelings about sex, and helps erase the negative teachings that were engrained in me from a young age.
The impact of CVCS teachings about gender and sex will likely shape the rest of my life. So please, think about this with your children. And remember: my story is NOT the worst story…. and that’s the problem.
