As usual, I want to write a little disclaimer before you start reading. When I tackle subjects like this for my blog, it’s because I’m genuinely fascinated with them. Despite the fact that I, of course, have opinions of my own, it’s always really important to me to try and present information in as unbiased a way as possible. I believe that everyone’s story should be listened to and respected. In this series of essays, you’ll hear from a lot of people about a lot of things - some I agree with, some I don’t. Through conducting an anonymous survey and talking to people by phone, I’ve collected a lot of research on this topic. Ultimately, my goal is to answer the question: “What lasting effects does growing up in purity culture have on young people?”
Working hard on this very post!
When I was 16, I visited another church’s youth group. I grew up in a United Methodist congregation in Decatur, Alabama, but I often hopped around to various Wednesday night services because I had friends who attended churches all over town (and in Decatur there are a lot of churches).
The youth minister, a cool, tall guy in his 40’s, gathered the group of 50 or so male and female 9-12 graders together to start his lesson. Some of us were seated on the floor or on folding chairs, others draped over the very loved, donated overstuffed armchairs and squeezed next to friends on couches. He held up a pristine sheet of white printer paper for us all to take a good look, then passed it to the student to his right.
“Pass this around the circle while we talk. When it gets back to me, I want to show you something,” he said.
While the sheet of paper made its rounds around the circle, the youth minister began his lesson on sexual purity. I don’t remember exactly what he said, so I won’t attempt to quote it, but I do remember, vividly, what happened when the sheet of paper got back to him.
“Okay,” he said, as the last student passed him the paper. “Take a look at the difference between these two sheets.”
He reached into his bag and extracted yet another perfectly untouched piece of printer paper, then held it up next to the sheet we’d all been passing around. The one we’d all handled was smudged, bent, dented, even crumpled in some places. Some rebel had torn off a corner to deposit their used chewing gum into.
“This is the difference between a virgin and someone who’s had sex before marriage. One is untouched, and the other has already been used. Which do you think is more desirable to a future partner?”
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It is with great surprise and delight that I report: this essay series was inspired by The Bachelorette.
I am rarely presented with the opportunity to discuss all the issues at the nexus of my interests (religion and God, television, pop culture, and feminism), but these last few months have given me just that. If you added food to the list, I’d be in hog heaven.
Last summer, Hannah Brown, an Alabama girl with a twang to boot, was cast as the lead of The Bachelorette. She entered the season guns blazing and unapologetic for whatever decision she was making in any given moment, causing her to become a quick fan favorite and hero for outspoken women everywhere. But her real breakout was on the episode devotees will recognize as “Fantasy Suites;” an entire television block dedicated to letting viewers watch our protagonist sexually explore their relationships with the (typically three, but this season, four) remaining contestants.
As a viewership, the typical response is to turn a blind eye to the rather sordid and, in any other case, maybe even promiscuous dealings of our hero or heroine. We see them go into beautiful hotel suites and the cameras allow us to see the lights turning off as our various couples lie down and start making out. We smash-cut to the next morning, where couples are usually cozied up in bed, drinking coffee and basking in the afterglow. It’s just part of the show. We accept it as a necessary part of the “journey,” as do the contestants, who aren’t sure if they’re first or last in the lineup of one-night encounters.
But this year, Hannah had a suitor who wouldn’t leave well enough alone. A born-again virgin and hyper-evangelical Christian, Luke Parker, the villain of this season, demanded to know whether Hannah had had sex or planned to have sex with any of the other contestants. When she bristled at the invasiveness of this question, he hit back with a plea about thinking they were both on the same religious page; that he couldn’t imagine she’d do anything like that if she truly believed what she said she believed. After weeks of being hot and cold about him, she finally came down on a side, putting Luke in a limo and closing what was to be the most click-baity moment of the season with the now famous line: “I f-cked in a windmill. Twice. ...I’ve had sex, and Jesus still loves me.”
Image courtesy of Bustle.com
When I covered this on my (embarrassing to type this out) Instagram recap show (oh, God), I got more responses than I’d ever received. Dozens of direct messages poured in from women expressing horror in Luke’s approach, defensiveness of Hannah, and sharing stories and experiences dealing with controlling men who shamed them for their sex lives.
The kind of support for Hannah’s sexual autonomy that my mostly-Southern Instagram audience was communicating to me represented a marked shift in the narrative within which we all grew up. In the South, sex is not openly discussed. Sure, part of that is because of a focus on decency. But mostly, the topic is avoided because the topic, by nature, is scandalous. Sex, especially sex before or outside of marriage, is believed by the general Southern consciousness to be not only conversationally indecent, but sinful.
Having been raised in Alabama my whole life up to my 25th year, I am deeply familiar with the culture of religious purity and the idea of saving your virginity for your future spouse (an idea that I’ve always respected). It’s a second language to me. But seeing it represented on a national stage, even listening to Hannah go on NPR to discuss it, caused me to realize that for thousands of other non-Southern folks, these ideas about sexual purity and religious code seemed incredibly old-fashioned. The show brought these two spheres of my life into crystal clear focus. It was a Venn diagram: in one circle, the world both Hannah Brown and I grew up in; in the other, the #metoo movement; in the center, national consciousness and conversation.
These issues began to fascinate me, so I decided to conduct a little research. I wanted to hear from people who were raised in the South (or, more broadly, raised in the church) about how the culture, specifically “purity culture,” or the idea that your sexual purity is tantamount to your spiritual worthiness, had affected them as adults - and, if something needs to change about how we discuss it, how do we change it?
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Of the 240 people (most of whom were straight, white, Southern women) who responded to an anonymous survey I wrote about purity culture, 191 answered “Yes” to this question:
“Have you ever been taught a lesson, at church or school, that compared a person who’s had sex to an object that’s been used?”
Here are some of the things that their leaders at school and in their youth groups used as tools for comparison:
Broken tile (school sex ed)
A rose or flower with the petals picked off (cotillion)
A piece of Scotch tape that had been stuck to every student’s skin and showed hair, oil, dirt (public school sex ed)
A used car
Stained clothing
A licked lollipop
Toothpaste that had been pushed out of the tube
An already-opened gift
Here are some anecdotes from the survey that particularly stuck out to me. I found it interesting to note the ways in which many of these lessons were geared toward young women specifically. Each paragraph is from a different survey participant:
“A teacher brought in an empty suitcase and filled it with heavy items to symbolize each act of sexual immorality and then had each of us pick it up. ...She said we would stand there on our wedding day with a metaphorical suitcase full of heavy feelings and that we would have to share that weight with our husband and hope that he would be willing to carry it (and whatever came with it, i.e. a child, STD, emotional baggage) with us.”
“My 7th grade abstinence-only sex education class in PUBLIC SCHOOL had us all pass around a piece of red construction paper in the shape of a heart. As we passed, we tore a little piece off. When it got back to the teacher, she said, “And that’s what it’s like to have sex. You leave little pieces of your heart with everyone you have sex with and it leaves you torn and broken and not whole.” And then she had us all sign our abstinence cards. This was the final lesson.”
“Yes; we were told we (girls specifically) were like old running shoes. That we all had nice, new, pure white shoes for our weddings, but if we let one person go running in them first, they’re going to get a little dirty. If we let several people run in them first, they’ll become disgusting. And then when our wedding rolls around, everyone will talk about how our shoes are filthy because everyone got a chance to run in them, and our husbands will feel cheated because he thought he was going to to receive a spotless pair of wedding shoes, but we’re giving him disgusting, worn out wedding shoes.”
“Was...taught that if I had sex before I was married, then on my wedding day my husband would be seeing all of the men I'd had sex with beside me instead of my bridesmaids. That it would be like bringing all of those men into our marriage with us because my husband wouldn't be able to get over it.”
“My church used to have purity nights, and one year (the event’s agenda was that the girls in our youth group)...listened to videos (recorded by) the guys in our grade about why they valued a pure partner.”
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Asking people in the South to discuss purity culture is a little like asking a fish to describe the water it’s swimming around in.
What is it? Where did it come from? What are its effects?
We’ve already talked a little about what purity culture is - the idea that your sexual purity and your salvation/worthiness as a person or Christian are inextricably linked - but to paint a richer picture of the messages people get and choices people make as a result of being raised in this sort of culture, I think it might be helpful to go to the data I collected in my survey results. We get a little anatomical here, so strap in!
(I mentioned that 240 people participated in the survey, but participants were able to choose which questions they answered - you won’t see 240 participants in each question, as many of them were write-in and not multiple choice.)
Of the 205 people who answered, 190 reported lying about their level of sexual activity as a young person for fear of sullying their reputation, whether it was their own idea or their partner’s.
Of 214 responses, almost 30% of people report having been taught in church that they should “deliver sex to their husbands whenever they requested or demanded it, whether or not they were personally in the mood.”
Out of 240 answers, 47% of people reported having been in an “everything but” relationship where some sex acts were on the table, but vaginal/penetrative sex was forbidden, in order to preserve the technical idea of virginity.
Out of 236 responses, 67% reported having been taught that women should be “virginal before marriage, but able to satisfy their husband’s every sexual need after marriage.”
Out of 201 responses, 149 women reported having “irrational fears about getting pregnant” because of the damage it would do to their reputations. Some of the women who answered this question were virgins who still took pregnancy tests to ensure they weren’t pregnant.
Okay, so where did modern purity culture come from? Time to get historical!
Linda Kay Klein, the author of Pure, puts forward that the purity movement pushed its way into the mainstream largely in response to the AIDS epidemic. As a response to the sexual revolution and as thousands of Americans were dying of AIDS, the federal government began funding abstinence-only education - “first under Reagan, then more under Clinton, then still more under Bush” (22).
“According to the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States,” Klein writes, “over $2 billion in federal funding has been allocated for abstinence-only programs in the United States since 1981” (22, 23).
And that lines up with the data I saw. Of 212 responders, almost 40% answered that if they did have sex education in their schools, it was strictly abstinence-only (including in public schools). We’ll talk about whether it was effective and why later in this series (spoiler alert: it was not).
“...With money like that just waiting to be spent, purity purveyors previously focused on small religious audiences moved into the mainstream marketplace. ...This is when we began to see purity-themed rings, bracelets, ...books, journals, devotional, magazines, Bible studies...Within the evangelical Christian subculture, the purity industry gave many adolescents the impression that sexual abstinence before marriage was the way for them to live out their faith” (22, 23).
It makes sense, then, that growing up in the church (especially the church in the South, especially especially the evangelical South) meant that sexual purity and abstinence until marriage were hallmarks of what made up a person’s identity as a young Christian, rivaled only by choices around drugs and drinking alcohol. But because young people are also extremely eager to talk about or hear about sex, it also tracks that young Christians would become deeply invested in abstinence constituting a major, and very visible, tenet of their faith.
The third question - what are the effects of purity culture? That’s what these essays are meant to explore.
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I remember attending a True Love Waits rally with my youth group when I was in either late middle school or early high school. It was a multi-denominational event featuring a speaker and a praise band comprised of cool, floppy-haired guys. The speaker, a man in his thirties, focused on how treating sex casually in his younger years had contributed to his life derailing (drugs, children outside of marriage, etc.), and he encouraged all the youth at the event to “guard their hearts” and save themselves for marriage.
At the end of the event, there was an altar call as the praise band played emotionally evocative music in minor keys and dozens of kids went down front to hug, cry, and pray. Toward the back of the dimly lit room, there was a giant banner that each of us was encouraged to sign pledging that we would remain abstinent until marriage. As I looked around at the kids my age weeping around me, I remember feeling anger bubble up inside me. I didn’t feel contempt toward my peers, who were experiencing normal emotions under the circumstances. Instead, I felt suspicion and indignance toward the adults in the room.
It wasn’t the idea of saving yourself for marriage, which I’ve always admired. It was the expectation - insistence, really - that a group of young teenagers could conceivably make that kind of lifelong commitment after a one-hour event (or at all). Even at that age, it seemed to me like the leaders of the rally were just trying to rack up signatures to prove something. No one was talking about sexual activity in any kind of meaningful way, or offering to follow up to make sure we understood what was going on. I didn’t sign the banner and couldn’t wait to leave.
In a phone conversation with Emily (not her real name), a 29-year-old Southern woman who grew up in a very evangelical church, we talked about this very thing. Here’s Emily in her own words:
“Here’s the thing - looking back, I was so bought in. I was so bought in because I love rules and frameworks, and I love being told what is right and good. In retrospect, thinking about the conversations that I had with my small groups as a middle and high school student, and then reflecting years later with my guy friends who were in these same situations, we were just told, ‘Don’t be a stumbling block.’ I had to go home and change from youth group because I was wearing shorts and I couldn’t lead worship in shorts from the stage because I might cause some of the guys to stumble. ...and the guys, it was pretty much just, ‘Don’t be complete and total animals. Don’t masturbate.’”
Lots of my friends did sign the banner, and understandably so - they were being told by the grown ups in the room that being abstinent, and making that decision RIGHT NOW in front of everyone, was the way to be good, acceptable, and desirable, both to God and to a future partner.
The more I thought about this idea, the more I thought about the girls in that room who’d already had sex. What must they have been feeling?
——
Culturally speaking, no matter how progressive we think we are, we continue to be fascinated with virtue.
As I was collecting data for this series of essays, I started to see purity culture everywhere, almost like you do when you’re thinking of buying a car and start to see it on every corner. As I listened to Jessica Simpson’s audiobook (like the hard-hitting journalist that I am), I was struck by just how affected her early career was by men telling her she was “too sexy” to sing in church. Before graduating high school, Jessica tells a story about singing at a church convention where she was angrily ripped off the stage by a male religious leader and told that her outfit (some biking shorts and an oversized top) was causing men in the crowd to lust. Cut to: years of speculation and questions about the status of her virginity until she married then-husband Nick Lachey.
Image source: Getty Images
Virginity was a huge focus of pop culture in the 90’s. I remember magazines constantly asking Britney Spears whether she was also saving herself for marriage, like Jessica Simpson did. As an adult woman, it now strikes me as unbelievably invasive and frankly, creepy, that these young girls’ sex lives were considered completely acceptable topics of interviews. More recently, the Jonas Brothers brought the somewhat passe purity ring back into the forefront with their commitments not to have sex before marriage.
And of course, returning to where it all began, The Bachelor and The Bachelorette have always brought sex into the national conversation because of the inclusion of Fantasy Suites, though the conversation has definitely evolved.
In 2012, The Bachelorette lead Emily Maynard, a single mom, was lauded by viewers when she chose not to spend the night with any of her three remaining suitors. Sean Lowe, who appeared the following year on The Bachelor, was also famously a born-again virgin (AKA, decided at age 24 to stop having sex until marriage) and he took all three women to their overnight dates, but had sex with none of them. When he eventually married his now-wife Catherine on an ABC-streamed TV wedding, there was a thumbnail in the bottom of the screen live broadcasting the empty honeymoon suite where the couple would later spend the night. It was about as subtle as a punch in the face.
——
In the course of this research, so many different themes have jumped out. And frankly, it’s difficult to talk about some of this stuff without coming across like I have a judgment toward anyone who goes to a conservative or evangelical church. I promise you, that’s not the case.
Though they’re a minority, some people who talked to me have had a beautiful experience within parameters of purity culture, have chosen to remain abstinent, and had positive, healthy sexual experiences as a result. I can report with no qualms that these people exist and are thriving.
Many women - the majority who responded to my survey and reached out to talk to me - report the opposite. I’ve read through stories of shame. LGBTQ folks wrote in to tell me they left the church after feeling like what they were being taught about sex could never apply to them. Men talk about feeling trapped within a strict set of prescribed standards around gender expectations, and the pressure to fulfill them. Lots of women talked about feeling dirty or sinful during sex, even within the confines of marriage, because those early lessons were so hard to un-learn. Most disturbingly, I’ve read account after account of sexual abuse and rape (whether this has any correlation to purity culture itself will be explored in my third essay).
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When I told my dad about this first essay and described to him the object lesson with the two sheets of paper, he was floored. He told me he had no idea that was going on that night, or that we were getting messages consistent with that at any point in ours or other church’s youth groups. We’d probably never talked about it - though that surprised me, because one of my parents’ biggest victories is stymying the idea that Southern parents don’t talk to their kids about sex.
But his reaction made me wonder about all the moments that Mac, my son, and our new baby will have in rooms where the doors are closed to me. What messages will they be receiving? Sure, from our media - but also from leaders and role models in whom they’ve put their trust?
If we talk about the damage that was done - the damage that no one talked about, maybe because we haven’t thought to ask about it - then we can get to the business of correcting our processes. There are so many healthy, productive ways to talk about sex with young people that emphasize its importance, significance, and (if this is your belief, as it is mine) holiness that have nothing to do with shame or fear.
Overall, the biggest consistency I’ve seen is that young women are being taught that the state of their bodies, and what they choose to do with those bodies, are the most accurate indicators of whether or not they’re a good person. And they’re largely receiving this message in their churches, being given a set of hard and fast rules which, when broken, can never be erased. If that sounds dark (and it does get a little grizzly, especially in the third essay), then you’re reading it right.
Next up: we tackle complementarianism (a new word to describe a very familiar concept), gender roles and expectations, and what happens when evangelical women are expected to make the split-second jump from virgin to vixen once there’s a ring involved.
See you there.