No matter how hard she tried, Katie couldn’t stop her sexual feelings, her sexual thoughts, and, most upsetting of all, her sexual expression through masturbation. She set her fork down and looked at me seriously. “I began to feel like, ‘This is probably something terrible in me and I’m just—’ ” She struggled for words. “ ‘I must be the only terrible, black-hearted, black-minded person. I must be weird; I’m a freak of nature; I must be a man.’ ” Katie was tripping over the purity culture stumbling block that tells girls they are to blame for their inability to meet a set of nearly unattainable
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