Kissing, desire, and shame

Masculine purity, masculine fears

Joseph Clover, Man and Woman in an Interior Playing Music

“Where women and girls were shamed for the sexual thoughts they caused in others’ bodies, men and boys often experienced shame for the sexual thoughts and feelings they experienced in their own bodies.”

-Zachary Wagner (Non-Toxic Masculinity: Recovering Healthy Male Sexuality, 69)

As I continue studying masculinity and getting my thoughts in order, I wanted to begin with my own story. A major theme of Is It Well? (the book I’ve been spending forever working on and recently finished) is my journey through shame for desiring a woman to date and to kiss. The excerpt I’m sharing today is from a later chapter of the book, when—as a nineteen-year-old—I finally get an opportunity to kiss the woman I’m in love with, the woman I met at a summer camp a year and a half prior.

Shame and purity culture trauma are terrible companions, but they are faithful.

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Is It Well? An Anxious Love Story, p. 243-248

We stand in the middle of the kitchen—all the lights off in the house—and kiss. We wrap our arms around each other’s bodies and press each other close, freezing time, backlit by desire and the green oven clock.

In this moment, I remember you looking sideways at me while cleaning tables at summer camp, laughing across the table from me in the aspen grove, hugging me goodbye in the thick air of bus exhaust. I remember going to sleep at night and imagining your laugh, intimating your voice and smile when they were fixated on me. Laying in bed remembering your skin and your body and the way your perfume followed you everywhere you went, just like me. I remember all of these memories, and all of these memories are filling my insides as our hands move over each others’ bodies, occasionally touching like electric shocks. All of those memories led to this. This culmination. This holiday. 

Your hands move to cradle each of my cheeks and brush the hair on the sides of my head behind my ears. My hands clutch your back, feeling the outline of your bra strap. I linger over both straps and meet my hands briefly together over the clasp. Right now, in this instant, ugly feelings arrive. Shame and fear. Different memories than the ones with you. I remember the youth pastor at the sixth grade lock-in who told stories about couples having sex and ruining their lives. Unwanted pregnancies, STDs, losing Christianity. Men filled with lust in pursuit of “seductresses.” The men with silent smoking hot wives in the audiences of giant stadiums. The modest-is-hottest conversations and the pedestaling of virginity, of feminine beauty. Notches on belts or bed posts or socks on doors. My first kiss at church camp three years ago. The night spent in that bathroom thinking I was going to throw up. The begging of God for forgiveness, the shame that drove me, the shame that drives me still. All of this. All of this is conspiring and igniting the adrenaline and the shame and the fear for having a crotch ignited by desire for the person I have dreamed of kissing for a year and a half.

One kiss was fine but anything more is betrayal.

But I don’t stop, I can’t stop. Between my arms is the woman I have imagined for so long, a distant memory and far-off longing come alive. I do not try to lift your shirt; my hands move away from your bra strap. But still, with every second that ticks off the oven clock, desire for this physical intimacy builds and coalesces with mounting shame. Another kiss, more desire, and more shame. I should stop. This can only go somewhere bad. This can only be bad. Hugging to holding hands to kissing to making out to wandering hands to sex. This can only go somewhere bad. This is bad.

I keep kissing and only feel uglier and uglier. It is only kissing, nothing more. But if I desire to have sex while kissing, even if I don’t act on it, does that make kissing bad?

We kiss a bit longer until you pull away and say goodnight.

You were the one to pull away. Not me.

Five Minutes Later

I stand in the guest bedroom and stare at my kneecaps as they shake uncontrollably. They jitter up and down and up and down and eventually my body gets unbearably cold and my teeth chatter for no reason. This house is not cold, there is no sudden January frost rushing through the window panes. I slowly crawl into bed and wrap myself in the sheets and comforter, but my teeth keep chattering, my knees keep shaking, and eventually my entire body begins shuddering.

Oh God, please forgive me. I breathe the prayer through a clenched jaw.

Oh Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.

Oh Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.

Oh Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.

Oh God, please forgive me.

My body shudders and my knees shake as my brain spins and trips and stutters and lurches around in tight circles, pirouetting and ricocheting around my skull, pressing and oozing and squeezing and careening.

I feel shame because I want to have sex with you. Kissing you makes my insides melt. It lights a fire in me as old as time, maybe, but a fire I’m supposed to board up and keep out of reach.

Lord, I want to have sex. I want to do more than kiss. Oh God please forgive me.

I curl my legs to my chest and close my eyes hard, willing heat to return to my body, willing my brain to stabilize enough to let me sleep. All the years since my first “Don’t have sex” talk in sixth grade have compiled and conspired and built up to this moment.

I’ve always been told that women don’t care about physicality. When they’re kissing a guy, they aren’t interested in having sex or tempted to go further. All they are doing is appeasing the man so that he will offer emotional intimacy in return. It’s a transaction; men go shopping for sex and women give it to them in order to collect emotion in return.

I tuck my chin against my chest and push my shoulders in, trying to take up as little space as possible on this bed. I imagine disappearing altogether into these sheets, erasing our kiss and my trip to see you and washing my hands of desire.

The smaller I get, the more space shame and fear take up in my body and on the bed. If women don’t want to have sex, if all they want is emotion, then to kiss or make out or imagine going further has to be a purely selfish act. I am being selfish for wanting you in those ways. Can’t I just be available emotionally? What is wrong with me?

I am a sinner. Impurity is shut up in my bones.

Oh Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.

Oh God, please forgive me.

Purity culture trauma.

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