When the sexual revolution unleashed chaos and confusion in our culture, it was difficult to find a response that felt sufficient. In a world where the highest virtue in sexuality became autonomy and self-expression, how was one supposed to communicate the sacredness and sensitivity of sexuality?
As often happens, an extreme situation bred an extreme response. Purity culture, enter stage right.
Someone recently told me they believe “purity culture” is a meaningless term people throw around when they dislike sexual ethics. Even if we don’t believe that explicitly, perhaps we’ve absorbed it implicitly. While the term can certainly be misused, the harmful effects of purity culture—especially on young women—are too real and too serious to ignore.
Here are a few ways purity culture has misstepped, and how we can begin to build something better.
When sexuality becomes your whole identity
If I were to create the most basic, operating definition of purity culture, I would say that it’s “a set of principles, teachings, or beliefs that define a person’s worth by their sexual experience or inexperience.” I think a true definition would need more than that, but at a basic level, purity culture truly does make sexual purity the end-all, be-all of a person’s value.
If someone hasn’t lived up to moral standards regarding sexuality, they may be shamed for doing so and relegated to a kind of “second-tier” happiness and virtue, specifically within relationships. This message is reinforced through metaphors many of us heard growing up: a flower losing its petals, a gift losing its wrapping, or gum that’s already been chewed. These analogies don’t teach the beauty of sex within marriage—they teach shame, damage, and that purity, once “lost,” is unrecoverable.
These metaphors fail to communicate what they intend, which is that sex should be reserved for marriage. Instead, they and messages similar to them communicate that sex within marriage is only good if we have succeeded in reserving it. No matter how a person might try to heal and recover from their mistakes, purity culture can make them seem permanently damaged.
Ironically, both purity culture and hookup culture define people’s value by their sexuality. In hookup culture, your value is defined by how sexually available, enjoyable, and attractive you are. In purity culture, it’s by how sexually unavailable you are.
Purity culture leans on harmful stereotypes.
One of the most damaging aspects of purity culture is how it divides men and women through harmful, oversimplified stereotypes.
Men are expected to struggle with lust. Women, we’re told, must be the gatekeepers. Growing up, all the talks I heard as a young woman focused on how to help men—not how I might struggle myself.
Today, I work with women in recovery from sexual addiction. I’m often met with surprise that “women even struggle with that.” That reaction is rooted in the false belief that women don’t face sexual temptation—or shouldn’t. One person literally asked me, “If women are struggling with purity, then who is going to help the men?”
That mindset helps no one. Women are left ashamed and unsupported. Men are robbed of the dignity of pursuing virtue for its own sake, not just to live up to a woman’s standard. It doesn’t help the cause of chastity to nickel and dime anyone who might be struggling more. The expectation that women cannot struggle with chastity puts undue pressure on them and only causes them to hide when they fall. Conversely, it does an injustice to the masculine ability to pursue virtue for its own sake with the help of God, not because women hold a standard.
Purity culture doesn’t help anyone grow.
One of the most interesting pieces of purity culture is that it demands we treat sexual purity differently than any other virtue. For other virtues, we understand that we’re not born with them. We talk about how courage, honesty, patience, and other virtues are cultivated over time—but sexual purity? Purity culture treats it like a glass vase: once broken, never restored.
The truth is that in all aspects of the Chrsitian life we are chiseled and refined over time by our commitment to the right path—especially when we recover from a mistake. We can communicate this about sexuality too—we can be honest about the pitfalls present in our culture, and that many, if not all of us, will fall in one way or another.
Instead of using fear and intimidation tactics that threaten people into purity or shame them if they don’t uphold it, we can teach sexual integrity through positive reinforcement and honesty. We can teach that it’s about recovery from those mistakes and an ongoing commitment to the recognition of our own inherent dignity and that of others; that chastity is truly integration, and therefore takes time and effort.