Bare Marriage
Bare Marriage
Sheila Gregoire
Episode 317: Famished--How Purity Culture Taught Women to Shrink with Anna Rollins
55 minutes Posted Feb 26, 2026 at 12:00 pm.
Introduction, Meet Anna Rollins & the book Famished
When Did It Start and what Anna’s research Shows About Young Girls and Diet Culture
The impact of 90s pop culture:Britney Spears, and a Thousand Crunches a Night
Two Messages from the Church About Your Body & Your Desires
Purity Culture, Vaginismus, and Being Dismissed by Doctors
The Breaking Point: Postpartum Crisis and Reaching for Help
Anger, Powerlessness, and What Disordered Eating Was Really About
Addressing and Healing Church Trauma through EMDR therapy
Choosing to Stay: Anna's Decision About Faith and Church
Are things getting better for the next generation of Christians?
Anna’s parting message to Sheila’s audience
Announcement on new book translations!
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Show notes
Send us Fan Mail 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 abu...