When Virtue Means Vanishing

Anna Rollins' Famished Explores the Intersection of Purity Culture and Diet Culture

I recently had the best time speaking online with Anna J. Rollins. We discussed her debut memoir, Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl, which comes out this Tuesday, December 9th. Our full interview will be published in January at Electric Literature.

I loved Famished, which interrogates how diet culture and evangelical purity culture teach women to fear their bodies and their natural appetites. As a Gen X reader, it was especially fascinating to track how these twin cultures have mutated (Rollins is a millenial) in the decade-plus that separates us.

If you don’t know what purity culture is—I wrote about an extreme manifestation in this recent excerpt from UNREFORMED, my forthcoming memoir—it’s a movement which became weaponized against women in the 1990s and 2000s. Purity culture is hyperfocused on sexual abstinence before marriage, placing the onus of responsibility on women. It teaches that women don’t have the same sexual drive as men, which is why women are “supposed” to set boundaries in relationships.

Guess what happens when women are responsible for setting boundaries? Women are blamed, even when the man in question is a predator.

In modern evangelical culture, dating is hyper-controlled. Women are constantly instructed to manage their appearance and behavior—literally making themselves smaller, physically and sexually—to ‘make sure they don’t lead men into sin.’

Famished shows how this directly impacts how women experience sex, how they view themselves, and whether they possess the agency to advocate for themselves when preyed upon. As Rollins illustrates in one chilling scene, when you are told your entire life to submit, you’re effectively stripped of the language and capacity to speak up.

In Famished, Rollins particularly explores how the intersection of diet culture and purity culture made her unhealthily obsessed with her weight, widening the lens to explore how fatphobia was racialized during Reconstruction.

In Famished, Rollins, still a believer, bravely questions the toxicity of the modern white evangelical evangelical church’s political and social priorities—from its inherent misogyny and hyper-focus on sex trafficking and abortion, to its unconditional support for Israel, and the dangerous marriage of the flag and the cross.”

Famished is a must read for anyone trying to understand how gender operates in 21st century America, evangelical or not. As Anna explained to me, evangelicals have, in many ways, become the dominant culture. Order your copy today!