PicoBlog

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of hosting Zachary Wagner at Truett Seminary on Baylor Campus. I first became aware of Zach through his book Non-Toxic Masculinity: Recovering Healthy Male Sexuality. I had the privilege of meeting Zach and his family this past July in Oxford and was so glad he was able to drive down to Waco for an afternoon while in San Antonio attending the American Academy of Religion/Evangelical Theological Society/Society for Biblical Literature conference. In case you missed it, I previewed our conversation with a post about Zach’s book as well as an excerpt from his book.

Below is a partial transcript of the conversation we had on November 15, 2023, with a link to our entire conversation. I think Zach’s book is one of the most important to start undoing the damage of purity culture. Indeed, I bought copies for all the young men in my family, including my son. I’m thankful for Dean Todd Still of Truett Seminary hosting the conversation with me.

A Conversation With Zachary Wagner

Beth Allison Barr: One thing I really appreciated about nontoxic masculinity is that you told us your personal story, which I like because that's what I did too. So tell us a little bit of your story, especially how it gave you the idea to write this book.

Zachary Wagner: Well on that I'll say that deciding to write this book in the first year of my Phd program at Oxford was a terrible idea, not least because this has nothing to do with my Phd research. But it is something I felt called to for a variety of reasons.

For one, there's the broader cultural conversation. Again, this is great to be here talking to you, Beth, about this. Because I think there's that intersection of the cultural conversation in the personal story that is true of your book. And I think it's also true of mine, but in the broader context, I think coming out of a few things. The #metoo movement, 2016, and then soon after that the #churchtoo movement, which highlights experiences of sexual violence, abuse, and things like this in the church. Any number of things that I could laundry list them and I won't waste our time doing that. But I talked about it in the introduction of my chapter that I'm sure many people will be aware of. It was highlighted for me, and I think for a lot of people, the way masculinity, sexuality, sexual abuse in the church was a real problem that we needed to grapple with.

Then, on the personal side, which I think is more what you're getting at with your question is that I found myself with my wife Shelby, about six or seven years into our marriage, in 2020. There's some other stuff going on in 2020 that you may remember that made things more emotionally difficult. But we were at a crisis point in our marriage that had to do with our intimate life. It had always been a struggle, but after the birth of our second child, it was just just not working. Long story short, and I share a little bit more about this in the book, we came to realize that my wife Shelby (and she gives her consent for me to share in a space like this and also in the book) that she's a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, church based sexual abuse.

This broader conversation became very personal all of a sudden. We hadn't been thinking about it in those categories; she hadn't understood it that way, but through some marriage counseling, personal counseling, things like that, and just really crazy pieces coming together from her story when she was younger…

and I was finding that I was ill prepared to love and care for my wife well…not least because of the way that I was discipled around my sexuality: I had been led to believe that marriage was not a place where you would experience sexual frustration, but rather only sexual fulfillment.

This intersects with what is often described today as purity culture. I grew up at the height or came of age, in terms of my sexuality, at the height of the purity movement of the late '90s or the early 2000s. Some people may be familiar with resources like Joshua Harris: I Kissed Dating Goodbye. I think for me in particular Every Man’s Battle which still sells like crazy, participates in this…..

Beth Allison Barr: Often when we think about purity culture, we often think about how it harms women. One of the things that I think Zach does so well in his book is that he talks about how it harms men. I think I want to start off with one of your own sentences and then let you talk a little bit more about how purity culture harms men. So this is one of the things you wrote:

“Purity culture dehumanizes women and girls by oversexualizing their bodies. It dehumanizes men and boys by over sexualizing their minds.”

So could you maybe talk to us a little bit about the harm that purity culture does to men?

Zachary Wagner: I'm going to go straight at Every Man’s Battle by Stephen Arterburn. This was the first in a series…..that I think collectively have sold something like 4 million copies. Like very, very massively influential. And almost the thesis of Every Man’s Battle is if you're a dude and you experience your sexuality through the lens of….visually undressing everyone around you and having this erotic edge to the way you interact with the world. That is the language in the book is we simply got there by being male, right? That's a normal part, an essence of masculinity and maleness is this hyper erotic lens through which you view the world. Now these are messages that I was receiving, reading, hearing about in my formative years as a young man, like before puberty and heading into puberty. And I think a lot of people, if you grew up in a church context similar to mine, I'm sure in various contexts may have heard this idea like men are quote visual and that's just the way men are All straps. All invitations. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yoga pants debate and no one calls them yoga pants except evangelical Christians.

Beth Allison Barr: No spandex in public.

Zachary Wagner: Absolutely. But it all participates. And this is what I wanted to try to highlight. A vision of what it means to be male, what it means to be masculine, is a hypersexual vision. My book is one of many books that are these post purity culture books. But to my knowledge, it's the first one that's written by a man. Women have called attention to [the harm of purity culture] and called attention to the way women experience shame policing around their clothes and things like this…..

Culture is like women had it really hard and like men got off scot free. And I was like, I beg to differ, the experiences of shame are very different. And not everybody experienced purity culture the same way or experiences those messaging the same way. But I think for men, uniquely, you are given this script and this vision of what it means to be a man that is hypersexual in a different way than the vision of being a woman as hypersexual. But then on the other side have this intense weight of a shame oriented approach to discipleship that is all about suppressing your sexual urges, which are kind of an unavoidable part of being a man. And more or less keeping it in your pants until you get married and then go nuts. Right? Not a really robust vision of discipleship, but this is the way that it is framed up….

I think there were also unique challenges for men of my generation and for young people of my generation. I don't like to generalize this around the male experience, although I think many men experience it. But the advent of high speed internet smartphones like access to pornography exploded right around when I was like 15. And then all of a sudden you're given access to unlimited amounts of sexually explicit conduct. And then you're also told this is going to eat you alive and ruin your life, and you'll never have a happy marriage if you go anywhere near this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You can see how those things, I think, come together to create, I think, a perfect storm for young people. And I think men in particular, because they receive the script of being hypersexual. So it creates this ambivalence where you're like, oh yeah, like I'm tempted to fool around with my significant other or watch porn or ********** or whatever the case maybe because I'm a guy.

Like that's part of being a guy, but it's also like the worst, most terrible sin that I could ever possibly commit. And it's going to ruin my life. And I'll never get married and I'll never be able to enjoy like sexual intimacy with my partner.

Something I say in the book is I worry that this language around men being very erotically oriented in the way that they view the world. Or men being hypersexual and like men only think about one thing and it's disgusting. All this stuff, I worry in Christian spaces in particular that it can become a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy…I experienced my sexuality as like heading into puberty as this thing that was like coming over the hill that was going to destroy me. Mm hm. And sure enough it came over the hill, over the hill. And I struggled mightily like many young men I think, to develop healthy habits around myself. Right. So I'll stop there. We created our own problem, to some extent.

Beth Allison Barr: Yes, that's great. So there's so many different ways we could go with this. But one of the things that I still remember when I was teaching a graduate class, and I talk about this in The Making of Biblical Womanhood, where I'm talking about the medieval attitudes towards sex…women in the medieval world are seen as overly sexualized creatures, and so they are the ones that have to be controlled. And I have this wonderful medieval sermon story where this husband refuses to have sex with his wife, and his wife kills his brother in law as a result. It's this whole long story. And, at the end, the woman says to her husband, this is your fault. And the sermon story is like, yeah, it is your fault because you didn't give your wife what she needed and she couldn't control herself. Yet in the modern world, it's the opposite. Men are the overly sexualized creatures. So what does it tell us about this idea we have that sexuality is biblical. Yes. But we also see how it is culturally and historically situated.

Zachary Wagner: Yeah, And I would just add to that if what you had said just about the medieval kind of conceptions and cultural stereotypes around gender, if you had said that to me as like a 19 year old, it would have blown my mind. But it is also true of the ancient world, post classical world, which is where my research situates me more. This idea that to have to struggle with self control and to indulge your bodily passions, in the Greek philosophical traditions, is considered to be a womanish vice if you're indulging in sexual gratification, at least in the philosophical discourse of the ancient world, that is like the word womanish will actually be highlighted there. Which is quite the opposite of the way we think about it in our culture today, where a woman is acting in a sexually virile or promiscuous way. A lot of times that will be she's acting like a man is the way that it's sometimes thought about. I think that highlights something really important that maybe our assumptions about who is, who is more erotically oriented versus men and women is not as clear or biblical. Maybe men aren't made this way. Maybe women are naturally this way too. To be sexual is not male, it’s human.

To be sexual is not male, it's human.

You can watch (or listen) to our entire conversation here:

Beth Allison Barr in Conversation with Zachary Wagner

I highly recommend reading Zach’s book too.

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