Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free

by Linda Kay Klein

I remember thinking about this message when reading evangelical Christian Dr. James Dobson’s book Life on the Edge: The Next Generation’s Guide to a Meaningful Future as a teenager. Dobson cites zoologist Dr. Desmond Morris’s twelve stages of intimacy as described in his book Intimate Behaviour. The first stage of intimacy, Dobson summarizes Morris’s findings, is eye to body. The couple sees one another from afar. The second stage is eye to eye. Then voice to voice, hand to hand, hand to shoulder, hand to waist, face to face, hand to head, hand to body. However, the tenth stage suddenly becomes decidedly more intense, at least to the ear of a teenager like me: Mouth to breast. Now there are just two stages left: touching below the waist and sexual intercourse.1 So you see? Although those first stages all seem to be safe, when a couple indulges in them, they find themselves just three stages away from having sex, and as it is often said among purity movement authors, speakers, youth pastors, and small group leaders, those last three stages fly by: