Episode 317: Famished--How Purity Culture Taught Women to Shrink with Anna Rollins

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Anna Rollins grew up as the kind of girl who took her faith seriously — and that's exactly why it hurt her so much. In this conversation, Anna and I dig into her memoir Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl, where she traces how purity culture's messages about desire, self-denial, and the body quietly fueled decades of disordered eating, compulsive exercise, and sexual pain. What strikes me most is that Anna's parents were loving, her church wasn't overtly abusive — and yet the cumulative message she absorbed was shrink yourself.  I think...