What is Purity Culture?
Warning: Purity Culture is not just about religion. It negatively impacted two entire generations of Americans.
Last week, Julia and I were in Antalya, Turkey, host of the 2023 World Association of Sexual Health Congress. It was…interesting. More on that in upcoming Substacks in the next few weeks.
Tomorrow, we’re hanging out with the great folks at the Sex Ed Debunked podcast. And we’re starting by answering the question, “What is Purity Culture?”
Linda Kay Klein, author of Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Shamed a Generation of Young Women, and How I Broke Free, writes:
“The term “purity culture” is generally associated with the white, American, Evangelical Christian Purity Movement and the corollary Purity Industry launched in the early 1990s. However, evangelicals don’t have a monopoly on the ethics that undergird purity culture. The specifics vary by religion and culture, but gender- and sexual-control upon which purity culture stands is global, cross-religious, and cross-cultural.
In purity culture, gender expectations are based on a strict, stereotype-based binary. Men are expected to be strong, “masculine” leaders of the household, church, and (to a lesser extent) society. Women are expected to support them—to be pretty, “feminine,” sweet, supportive wives and mothers.”
The mandates of purity culture are rooted in rigid, fixed performances of gender, and coinciding rigid, fixed practices of sexuality, both in terms of context (marriage-only), relationship structure (monogamous and straight only), and form (vaginal penetration).
Emma Cieslik reminds us that, during the 80s and 90s, Purity Culture infiltrated multiple facets of our lives, including public and educational policy:
“Different Christian communities enforce this guilt and shame surrounding the female body and sexuality in different ways, through commercial products, such as signed purity pledges and rings inscribed with Bible verses, and with church- and school-wide events, these include Father-Daughter purity balls and youth ministry lock-ins, which grew in popularity in the late 1990s and early 2000s as part of the Purity Movement.
At the height of its popularity, purity culture involved government-funded abstinence-only sex education programs, which were initiated by the Clinton administration in 1996 and then solidified into the Community-Based Abstinence Education Program by the Bush administration in 2000.”
It’s easy to think of Purity Culture through the relics that represented the multi-million dollar businesses that fueled Purity Culture, from purity rings and pledges to the thousands of nonsensical relationship and sexuality books published by Focus on the Family, Zondervan, and Thomas Nelson.
However, the last sentence of the Cieslik quote reminds us that the biggest wound from Purity Culture is its immersion into larger public life.
In 1996, following a demonstration that involved hundreds of thousands of Purity pledges being planted onto the Capitol Hill lawn, the Clinton administration signed the Title V Abstinence Only Until Marriage act. Recipients of these funds, which include state education departments and local school districts, are required to exclusively teach:
Abstinence of sexuality before marriage has social, psychological, and biological gains.
Abstinence of sexuality before marriage is the expected standard.
Abstinence of sexuality is the only (italics added) way to avoid out-of-wedlock pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, and other “associated” health problems.
A mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard for sexual activity.
Sex outside of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.
Bearing children out of wedlock is likely to have harmful consequences for the child, parents, and society. (Perhaps this is true for 18 year olds. Not so true for 30 year olds who have children in non-marital contexts.)
Young children how to say no to sexual advances of all kinds.
Self-sufficiency is expected before engaging in sexual activity.
Purity Culture isn’t just something that impacted Christians. It impacted two generations (gen-X and millennials) of Americans everywhere, and, though there’s less funding for public schools in the 2020s around abstinence only education, funding hasn’t been entirely eliminated, and its remnants are being promoted to gen-Z and gen-alpha populations through social media.
You don’t have to have grown up in the church to have been fucked over by the church.
Because these policies spread into the development of a larger American culture in the 90s and 00s that enacted the values, and coinciding criticizing, slut-shaming, and shaming messages, especially directed at women, of 90s and 00s pop culture. Read Britney Spears’ new memoir The Woman in Me for a glimpse into how Purity Culture took over American pop culture for the majority of millennials’ adolescent years.
Sexvangelicals is about putting the pieces back together for two generations of folks—Christians and non-Christians—who learned that sex is something to be feared, surveilled, and ultimately avoided, with grave consequences for all people.