When Good Girls Do It: A Memoir

By Edie Wright

Want to start a fight in America? Voice your opinion on teen sex. Christian leaders, parents, and policy makers are obsessed with it. Many decide that, for the young and unmarried, abstinence is best. Of course, the young and unmarried don’t always agree. Most disregard the pleas for purity, threats of damnation, and warnings about STDs and simply do what feels right. Others, however, take these things to heart. Encouraged by their religious leaders, many teens make the pledge to wait until marriage. They praise their Lord, wear abstinence rings, and surround themselves with like-minded people to temper temptation. Then one day, they fantasize. The next week, they masturbate. And after a few years, they head off to college, break up with their high school sweethearts and have sex for the first time.

Then the real mind-fuck begins.

When Good Girls Do It tells my individual experience as a growing American statistic: an Evangelical teen who pledges sexual abstinence, has sex anyway, and is forced to reconsider the holy identity she thought she had. Guilty feelings, sexual bargaining and religious questioning drive my story and define the shared experience of millions of Christian Americans. Written in a cohesive collection of lyrical prose vignettes, this memoir captures the tension between Evangelical dogma and individual desire without taking refuge in clichés.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edie Wright
• Release date: Aug 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301399420

Edie Wright

Edie Wright is a writer, editor and academic currently living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Emails are welcome at [e-mail].

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When Good Girls Do It

Edie Wright

Copyright 2013 by Edie Wright

Published at Smashwords

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This is something that was written a long time ago. Something that was written by somebody else. Something that was written by somebody who is no longer me.

But it was me who wrote it. The me then. The me then who I can’t go back and erase. The me then who I love, cherish, and have nurtured. Everything’s okay now. But for my reader who is me then, I hope you find this helpful.

I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. - Romans 8:38-39.

Amen.

Some names have been changed.

Introduction

Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. - Matthew 5:48

The thing is, I’m not an original. And if everything sounds cliché, I’m not surprised. But clichés come from somewhere and the origin of mine is this: girls like me, good Christian girls, who only want to do good and please God and be respectable are right now sitting in their rooms hating themselves for not knowing what to do or where they stand in regard to sex. And once these good Christian girls, who only want to do good and please God and be respectable, hear about sex, think about sex, masturbate in the shower or have sex, they feel guilty and yet are confused. They don’t know if they’re being seduced or not, tricked or not, because all the girls in their Bible study who warn them of these tricks are blonde and they aren’t blonde, and the other Bible study girls have married parents and they don’t have married parents, and the other Bible study girls listen to punk rock and don’t know who Chewy Gomez is and don’t really dance and don’t really like fashion because they say it’s frivolous, and because these girls, these confused good Christian girls, grew up in a town called Livermore where people are middle class and upper middle class and conservative and Republican and drive SUVs and have two kids and one dog and Pergo floors that they just installed, which was the better choice over hardwood considering the dog’s nails and the kid’s foot traffic, and the Christian girls don’t know what’s just conditioning and what’s just right.

These girls don’t know if their guilt is holy or not. They don’t know if they’re fighting against a conviction that exists or for a conviction that doesn’t. They don’t know. And since they don’t know, they feel like they can’t sit in church because someone will say the word repent, and even though they can go down a list of seven or eight or infinite things they’ve done wrong and want to change, they just don’t know if sex is one of them. Everyone at church is just waiting for them to say the words sex and brokenness and rose and start crying an honest cry, and the good girls want to please and make right, but they don’t want to be liars too, and nobody seems to care about that fact or understand that fact except for the people who already know that fact, except that these good girls don’t know who or where those people are inside the church because NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS.

These good girls—these good, honest, scared, ashamed, sexually frustrated, human women—want to talk about this. And not just the women, men too. I want to talk about this. I want to know this: in relation to premarital sex and sin, are we talking all or nothing? When we let go of one rule, do we lose them all? When the foundation of a house is shaken or a supporting beam extracted, the house crumbles. But, if you take off a single shingle, nothing really happens. So, what’s where? Is premarital sex a beam or a shingle? Is it the plumbing or the difference between an Ethan Allen faucet and that discount one at Kmart? Or is it the caulking of the window? Or Pergo floors? What if, even though your whole life everyone has pointed to the red table runner and said red, after further consideration you find it more maroon? What the hell happens then? Perhaps the rules for sex are different in different circumstances, unique in singular situations. But then that’s an awfully liberal viewpoint and somehow unsatisfactory to we good girls and boys. Maybe analogies only work for Jesus.

+

He said, I can feel you fighting against yourself, and that he would have stayed with me either way. I used to look at him sideways and skeptically, until the day that I realized it didn’t matter. He could be there when I didn’t want to think about anything, when I was tired, when I was done. He could be there when I thought I wanted to be bad, but didn’t want to get caught and couldn’t handle being judged. He could be there when I wanted to swear and I could tell him that fuck was one of my favorite words. He laughed and said, Just don’t say that around Sheila.

He called me Leggy Brunette that one time, when I leaned against the wall of Todai’s and he called, Who’s that leggy brunette? I looked down to blush, but didn’t know if I should. It was serious time and I kissed him, saying, We really need to talk. We walked outside to the F-150 and the key was already in my hand. I let us into the cab, where he held my hand to his mouth, running his lips up and back across my knuckles. My hands, his lips, his hands - and I thought of last night under the oak tree and the moon. It sounds like a fairytale, until I throw in the detail about the green pup-tent that kept falling down on us so many times that we finally just said fuck it (that’s not a euphemism). I had on the new bra and boy shorts my mom had bought me at JC Penny, and the guilt of having this encounter on her dollar did not make me feel sexy.

But he did when he undid my jeans and smiled and said, Mmm. We drove up to his friend’s property in his father’s yellow Corvette and got out and he was wearing a suit. And then he slid his hand into the boy shorts and I pushed him away at first and then didn’t again.

I’m stalling.

In the cab, I made eye contact with everything on the dashboard before I told him that last night was great, really, really great, but that it could never happen again. His eyes changed to a slight hurt and I wanted so badly never to have that affect. He paused only a little longer than he would have liked and said, Whatever you want. I’m just happy to hold your hand. I looked up at him to smile, as my eyes had been wandering about the center consul, but instead leaned over to kiss him. Lips on his lips, I kissed him absolutely harder than I was supposed to and pulled him into me, fingers sliding up the back of his neck. Even now, I can’t remember if we did the same thing in the cab that morning as we did in the tent the previous night, but it doesn’t really matter. I know that now. Standing leggy against the wall before, I had just wanted to avoid the lingering smell of memory while sitting in the church pew. I hoped he would take over my responsibility - share it, at least - and I could say, Hold this behind your back and don’t let me have it. And he would do that and want to participate in the game. Ah, it could be so easy, I would think, forgetting that he had said, Whatever you want. And that I had said…

It’s amazing how those few words, without poetry or precision (or perhaps words of pure poetry, the only precision), had the immediate power to change all the planned words against them. I said what I said and it turned into action, and I finally understood the difference between mere words and incantation, between promise and what I was actually capable of. Capable, that’s not what I mean. I’m capable of quite a bit, save perfection. And that’s the thing. But no, again it doesn’t feel right to even say that. I’m incapable of being perfect, of course. Fallen world, fallen children, I’m not suggesting an exemption from that. But breaking perfection into its parts (obedience, perseverance...well, obedience probably covers it all) makes it seem that it shouldn’t be so impossible. Don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t lie. Okay. Love thy neighbor and the Golden Rule. Simple. I can always do better, true, but the point is that I look back on my mistakes and can say, But, you know, I could have done right. I could have, that’s the thing. And since I could have, I am able to, which makes me think perfection in its parts to be attainable. But then, nobody is forcing me to do wrong at all, so why not do right? Maybe with perfection it isn’t a question of capability so much as one of will. Or of want. I don’t want to say want, but then what is will if not a conflict of wants? So, then, I do not want to be perfect, which is why I’m not. I am immediately disobedient.

But maybe that’s not the point. Maybe what I want isn’t supposed to be factor. Just do it. Or, in this case, don’t. Don’t have sex. Simple. You say, I’m saving myself for marriage, and then that makes it true. It should really be that simple, and yet the want creeps in. Well, it really doesn’t creep in so much as it is in and wants to creep out. Put it in, I told him, but what I meant was, Let it out.

I took later guilt to a therapist who asked me, Do you really think it’s possible to do all these things? and I paused before I said, Why shouldn’t it be? We talked about my childhood and how my aunties would say, Go to Stanford, and my grandpa, No, go to Cal! They would always agree on one thing, though, as I offered up preliminary professions for myself: singer, musician, archaeologist, model (I was six). Everything I wanted to do, I should do, they would say, After you cure cancer. And after you cure cancer was what I heard for the next twelve years, until I decided that I wasn’t altogether great at science or math and that I much more enjoyed reading than anything else. I decided that I wasn’t going to be a doctor, but it was never because I thought I couldn’t. I said, I guess I’m not going to cure cancer, but kept trying to think of ways that I could.

I laughed about these things with the therapist and he was laughing too, when he asked what I said he asked earlier and I replied much as I told you I did. He apologized that he wasn’t well-versed in religion, but that from other life experiences, he could tell me that an all-or-nothing attitude hardly ever works. I nodded with a down-turned smile but wondered why not? Never say never and You can do anything you set your mind to. These are the things I’ve been taught. And now I can’t say I can’t, but what’s the problem there? Cant’s get in the way of doing, and the doing is what needs to be done. I can’t say I can’t cure cancer; it would be denying a thing to be done.

Well, I’m a bitch, then. That’s the only possibility. Because if I do believe that