Purity culture

I love that we get to have so many different coaches in the program so that we can best match people based on where they are and where they've come from.

So a lot of the Christian ladies come and they are matched with you or matched with another coach that have such a great specialization into Christian upbringing, Christian purity culture, and how to align your Christian values with modern dating.

Because sometimes they can like rub up against each other.

um which is really hard one thing that i wanted to mention that we were just talking about is the fact that you know i can already hear some of the girls they hear christian and they start to cringe and they're like oh girl this podcast is not for me uh-uh i'm let me turn this off right now um Everyone that is listening to this podcast is a Christian girl in one way or another.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah.

So when we, when we frame marriage, What church teaching has been, at least in the US, in the 80s, 90s and beyond, we really have to orient ourselves to a movement, we talked about it, mentioned the title already, purity culture.

What is this? This is a unique time in American culture in particular, where inside the church and outside of the church, people were freaking out because of two things in particular.

important stuff.

For millions and millions of Christian girls, Christianity itself was presented to them through the framework of purity culture.

Being a faithful Christian was reduced to a small number of things.

One of the primary things was not having sex, staying pure, but it wasn't just a restriction.

And so tragedy upon tragedy, right? What was the point? What is the end result? The result tended to be shame.

overwhelming shame and control.

And that I think is the clearest takeaway from purity culture.

And that makes a lot more sense if you see that purity culture in the context of the bigger story that I tell.

Personal autonomy of sexuality is still incredibly taboo, especially for women.

Purity culture is a great example of all of this.

As we've talked about lots before, purity culture makes sex the center of your life by focusing on not having sex.

And that tension is so often destructive.

And in purity culture, especially for women, your sexuality isn't for you.

And while there's unique flavors of this in American culture and in evangelicalism, this weirdness is not at all unique to either of those.

You can find weird sex stuff in pretty much any society throughout the history of the world.

And if you're listening to this and you're like, yeah, I don't actually need to be convinced of that, just skip forward a few seconds, minutes.

So, because purity culture is now a bad word.

Wait, I think you should probably explain it because I'm imagining when we're talking to a bunch of 19-year-olds, they're like, I know what purity culture is.

And of course, it's a bad word.

Oh, sure.

But thinking about like a mixed audience, what is purity culture?

Yeah, yeah.

So purity culture is the name given to a purity movement that happened in the 90s, early 2000s.

But when there were significant things shifting in culture begin, I started teaching this class in '92.

So we began to see some significant shifts in the United States of what was happening, and I can talk about those later, but they have everything to do with the rise of the purity culture and rise of evangelical fri- far-right, really authoritarian, very oppressive parenting.

And so kids were taught to be afraid of their bodies and afraid of their desires, and that they were to, they s- many times saw those as bad.

And other kids wouldn't have had that, just them, so they really saw themselves as perverted.

And the shame and the guilt and all the, I'm c- committing a thought crime against God, and I'm, you know, what Jesus says in the Gospels, if you look at a woman lustfully, you know, it's as good as just having an affair, and, you know, these are all the things.

God is always watching.

I mean, take us through the purity culture 'cause, I mean, that's, that's the stuff I was raised in.

And, and maybe it wasn't even as extreme as what some other people have had to deal with.

Like, if I really believe that God is a Black woman, then why doesn't that show up in my everyday life? Like, why am I staying in relationships that are patriarchal and I'm still seeking approval? From other people, right? Like, why do I have hangups around my body and purity? Like, why do I still, you know, like this conditioning runs deep.

So what, you know, why do I, you know, I had lots of, I've had lots of issues with like eating disorders, which is so closely connected to purity culture, of

course.

Yeah.

really, yeah, we are reborn through death and grief.

Yeah.

And I think that's also an application of purity culture, right? This idea that life and death are completely separate.

They're binary.

So this is as good a time capsule of Y2K culture and the attitudes people had towards certain issues as you can get.

And one of the most pervasive and hard to escape and suffocating parts of Y2K and 2000s culture was purity culture.

For the younger people who might be watching, who are encountering this horrible term for the first time, when purity culture is the law of the land, or it's the winning narrative in the zeitgeist, if you will, That means that the sexuality specifically of women and girls are not just being held to extremely strict and restrictive standards in the media and by adults and other people around them, but it also means that the way that women choose to dress, choose to present themselves, choose to speak, act, choose to behave around boys and men, all of that is judged, examined, litigated, and prosecuted.

Essentially, in purity culture, if you are a girl, no matter how young you are, and it does start young, you need to be thinking about how people, specifically boys and men, might be perceiving your actions.

You need to think about, am I dressing in a way that elicits sexual excitement in men? It sounds insane, right? Like when you just say it out loud like that, it sounds crazy, but this is truly how your brain will be wired.

Did I say something to suggest or am I acting in a way which might suggest or did I move in a way and on and on.

Your body, your existence, your personality is all revolving around around being as small and as unseen and as quiet as possible so as not to become the subject of a man's sexual desire, which is, in purity culture, the worst possible thing you can be.

And if you do become the subject of a man's sexual desire, any harm that could befall you at the hands of a man would be your fault.

If a man watches pornography, he's an abuser.

But what happens when we take a legitimate concern about porn and turn it into a vacant, blanket statement about every person who has ever watched it? And then what happens if our sons grew up hearing that their sexual desire makes them dangerous? We talk so much about the damage of purity culture on girls, but there's damaging messages that boys can internalize, too.

And please believe me when I say this conversation is not about making porn okay.

But we're gonna have a nuanced conversation about porn, abuse, faithfulness, and what we're actually teaching our kids about sexuality, because I want us to be able to protect our daughters while not demonizing our sons.

You flip the genders and all of a sudden we're like, "Whoa, wait a second, we can't do that." Okay.

But let's take this a step deeper.

And in order to do that, we need to go back a generation to when we were kids, and purity culture.

When we were growing up, and I think we're pretty much the same generation, maybe even the same birth year.