Last fall, Dianna E. Anderson wrote an article for a women's website about losing her virginity and realizing that sex outside of marriage can be holy. Commenters around the Internet "started calling me the temple prostitute," she said.
For a woman writing on the Internet, particularly about sexuality, this is kind of reaction is normal; shocking, yes, but totally unsurprising. What's interesting about Anderson's case is the flavor of the antagonism: She writes about feminism and gender identity, but she's also a committed evangelical Christian. Theoretically, these two aspects of her identity aren't mutually exclusive, but in practice, balancing them requires a lot of translating. "As I began to study [sexuality] more, I received a flurry of messages from family members that I was choosing feminism over Christianity and justifying sinful living," she writes in her recently released book, Damaged Goods. "One message said I was questioning the Scripture about sex because I couldn't get Christian men to sleep with me."
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