I’m saying it can feel like a massive relief - which ultimately says less about the specific relationship and more about the way society conceives of women’s sexuality and general value, both in and outside of devout religious communities.

I’m not saying that women in these situations don’t love their future husbands. As the sweatshirt for that college dorm made clear, engagement was a sort of checklist item to complete: a mission accomplished. In my experience, these marriages were rarely figured as the culmination of an “ M-R-S Degree ” - women would still graduate, still find jobs afterwards, at least until they started having kids. When you grow up devout and dedicated to whatever version of purity culture your religion espouses, women in particular spend a lot of time anticipating the hinge moment in their lives: when sex turns from something bad to something good, when their future transforms from unknown to known, when desperation and fear of an uncoupled, child-less future is replaced by certainty and future value. If you think this is weird, well you have obviously not been around college-age Christians desperate to have sex and/or desperate to keep having sex but not feel bad about it! (Brooklyn and Bailey are Latter-Day Saints they chose to attend Baylor in part because of the school’s evangelical Baptist culture). Get a “Ring by Spring” of their senior year, if not before. 2001?) screenprinted with the three tasks residents of this dorm were supposed to complete before graduating:Īccidentally drop their tray in food serviceĬatch a “virgin” pinecone (aka, catch a pinecone falling from the hundreds of evergreens on campus before it hit the ground) They had sweatshirts (the one I remember was red, c.

(Every lifestyle needs ambassadors - it’s just that some, like NCAA athletes and the people of color recruited to be on the cover of the school magazine, don’t receive monetary compensation, and others, like Brooklyn and Bailey, get “paid partnerships.”)Īt the Presbyterian college near where I grew up, the college of choice for many members of my church and fellow church camp counselors, there was a women’s dorm on campus known for its engagements. At that point, I was interested in how influencer life intersected with various institutions’ desire to bring students back on campus - and the difficulty of squaring the reality of COVID with higher ed’s marketing of itself as a lifestyle. I first wrote about them last summer, when they caught COVID upon their return to Waco, Texas for their senior year at Baylor University. For me, that’s Brooklyn and Bailey, whose Instagram has become a rich text right at the intersection of Christian youth culture and influencer capitalism.

Listen, there are people you encounter, however briefly, and end up living rent-free in your head for years. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing. This is the midweek edition of Culture Study - the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here.

Brooklyn and bailey