Unchained. Unbothered.

Chief content contributor for UnfitChristain.com, D. Danyelle Thomas, grew up as a preacher's kid. She assumed homophobia, sexism and the pursuit of respectability were just unquestionable tenets of the gospel of Jesus Christ. As she evolved in her spirituality so did her theology. In this episode, she shares how she chose to remove the belief in an actual hell from her theology and to fight against purity culture that is prevalent in many evangelical churches. This culture, exclusively aimed at Christian women, encourages single women to connect abstinence and conservative sexual mores to a closeness to God. Or more precisely an effective link to marriage. A crucial reason why Danyelle fights against purity culture is her discovery of the real story of the consummate good girl: Ruth. Once Danyelle researched the translation of a key word in the biblical text of Ruth and Boaz's romance (as calculated by her mother-in-law, Naomi), she found that the way the story had been pitched to many a young single Christian woman was in direct contrast to the actual way Ruth and Naomi got down. "Basically, Naomi needed to secure that bag," Danyelle quips. "So, Ruth had survival sex with Boaz." The moral of this real Ruth story, according to Danyelle, is just as different as the way the story has been sold to generations of godly women.

Creater of the blog, The Childfree African, Doreen Yomoah shares her journey to non-motherhood. At 23, she realized that she did not want what a good Ghanaian girl was supposed to want: children. Though she only spent the first year of her life in Ghana, Doreen was well aware of the cultural pressure African women experienced to give their husbands babies. This pressure did not escape any African woman regardless of where she lived throughout the diaspora. She speaks about creating the blog as a way to connect with other young African women who felt as she did and to bring awareness of the African voice to the Childfree blogosphere – a world that remains overwhelmingly white. Doreen shares anecdotes of aunties and uncles demanding she have babies and potential suitors telling her she had no right to decide she would not have children without first having a husband. She connects these encounters to other patriarchal expectations she flouted when she chose to go back to Ghana as an adult. "I will not concern myself with who African patriarchy believes I should be," Doreen says. "I will just be me."

Shira Obasuyi chats with Keturah Kendrick about growing up in a polyamorous family. She shares stories of the women in her family teaching her to value her relationship with herself over her relationships with any and all of her partners. She also explains why even though she never tried to force herself into the box of monogamy, entering the adult world where this structure was largely practiced did create struggles to relate to people she cared about, but could not understand. "I discovered that in monogamy, a partner will have lots of insecurities that they want you to fix," she says. "My parents never talked about love the way I was hearing monogamous people define it."