NEW YORK (NY)
Daily Beast

July 23, 2020

By Kyndall Cunningham

Karen Maine’s new film explores the coming-of-age of a Catholic schoolgirl (“Stranger Things” star Natalia Dyer). And it’s pretty spot-on.

Growing up in Christian spaces, I heard all types of bad analogies and gender-essentialist arguments about human sexuality—but none like the one I heard at my Catholic high school. In an unofficial sex ed course, we received a lecture from a teacher on the sacredness of female virginity. He spoke about the confined nature of female genitalia, comparing a vagina to a cave and virginity to treasure. He said that the interiority of a woman’s genitalia compared to the exteriority of a man’s signified a special need for privacy and protection. Girls had to be careful about who they let inside their “caves”—ideally only their husbands—but boys, by nature, would end up sticking their penises wherever they wanted.

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