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The LW could heat up a curling iron, stick it in, and sear her own flesh clean of the evil sin, and thus by her suffering, atone and cleanse herself. Or she could mix a solution of acid and scrub up in there with a scrub-brush.
I'm only half-facetious. I don't know what happens in _A_Tree_Grows_in_Brooklyn and google isn't cooperating today, but when I was little my mother told me a girl gets raped in that book and her father either scrubs her with acid or scalding hot water or something painful to "make her feel clean" and this was presented to me as a GOOD thing. I am old enough now to realize the writer of that book meant no such thing. My mother apparently thought it was a good thing and told me this when I was I don't know...8?
There's a reason there are scenes like this in novels and people's mothers told them stories like this in the 60's as if it was a GOOD answer to the damaged goods problem. The damaged goods problem comes from a very deep dark place in people's psyche. Men AND women, or my mother wouldn't have told me that Tree Grows in Brooklyn story at such a young age. In Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, it was presented as customary in Roman times for a rape victim's father to kill her. I 'm not sure how widespread that custom was and when it died out in the western world but google around and you will find it still goes on in the world.
Another thing the LW could do if she wants to hold onto this man that badly is hop up to Mark Driscoll's church in Seattle and get baptized by immersion or find another fundie church that baptizes by full immersion and maybe the boyfriend will feel that the religious atonement rite has washed her "clean" and taken her sins away like some fundamentalist Christians believe. Before everyone hits the ceiling, other Christians believe that sins like anger, selfishness, greed, hatefulness, etc. are every bit as damning as sexual slips, only it is harder to keep those at bay and the struggle only begins when one converts. And that baptism is only a symbol. But a fundie baptism might just set this boyfriend back on his rocker, for a time. There are churches where they can keep going to confession to keep the sins washed away, and this may be good enough to satisfy the boyfriend if she keeps it up the rest of her life.
I am being facetious there. That's not how I view sins, forgiveness, and the Christian life but that is how fundies view it. So run up to Mars Hill or find one of those kinds of churches in your neighborhood and get baptized in a nice white robe if it will wash it away in the boyfriend's mind once and for all. THEN leave him, ha!
