RESEARCH_FILE
Amy DeRogatis
Michigan State University
Known for:Scholarly analysis of evangelical popular literature on sexuality, documenting how purity teaching for young women coexists with an idealized vision of marital sex — creating a sharp identity switch that many find psychologically difficult
Key findings
- 2014
American evangelical popular literature promotes an idealized vision of married sex as spiritual and fulfilling, while simultaneously teaching girls from adolescence that their bodies and desires are moral dangers — a contradiction that structures later sexual difficulty. Saving Sex: Sexuality and Salvation in American Evangelicalism ↗
- 2014
Evangelical sex manuals for married couples frame sexual pleasure as divinely sanctioned — but the prerequisite is the strict gender roles and shame architecture that purity culture built during adolescence, making the 'marital switch' psychologically complex. Saving Sex: Sexuality and Salvation in American Evangelicalism ↗