The Weight We Carry

How Purity Culture Continues To Stunt Us

Written and designed by Annie Levy

Maybe a year or so ago, in a candid but light conversation with my boyfriend, I asked at what age he realized what masturbation was. He looked puzzled. “Jerking off is in movies and shows and everywhere,” he replied casually. “There’s no ‘figuring it out.’ I always knew.”

This conversation may have been nothing to him, but to me, it was a revelation. I had assumed it took everyone a long time to understand their bodies. My close girlfriends and I had always laughed about figuring ourselves out as young teens and the guilt we had carried for feeling at all sexual. One friend of mine even told us once, dying of laughter, that after experimenting with masturbation just slightly, she sobbed to her mom that she felt so awful about it that she wanted to harm herself. It’s awful, and a little morbid, but I always figured this sexual shame and misunderstanding had to be a common human experience.

But, no. Even in our supposed progressive, “girl-power world,” generations of women continue to grow up with little understanding of their bodies due to a disproportionate purity culture that treats the female body as though it’s built to expire. If our goal is to progress and defy this dominating culture, our media, education, and intrapersonal dialogues must evolve rapidly.

Women are often not taught about the inner workings of their bodies and sexualities due to what’s considered taboo; however, when what’s taboo for women is not the same for men, that seems to indicate that taboo stems from misogyny. In this case, it is.

Historically, women were encouraged to be “virgins” to promote loyalty to their husbands and prevent adultery. In the Bible, the image of Mary, who gave birth to Jesus supposedly without having sex, is celebrated and idolized — an impossible and enduring standard ingrained in society for generations. The aesthetics and morals associated with a nonsexual woman giving birth to history’s most powerful figure continue to show themselves in our world. Western societies expected women to devote themselves entirely to their husbands, just as Mary did to God.

A woman devoted to her husband, thus, should do so entirely to that impending life partner. Therefore, she should not have sex until she is married. Laws held this societal standard in place through property and inheritance legal protocols that ensured women only gave birth to their husband’s children.

We may not have these outdated laws today, but virginity culture still has a chokehold on our lives. The idea of the young, virgin girl is sexualized heavily in songs, media, and, of course, pornography. The language surrounding virginity is almost always negative. Additionally, the ways in which people view losing one’s virginity: when heteronormative, reproductive sex occurs, is out-of-date. To many, virginity is limited to traditional confines and is only relevant to women. However, there is many different types of sex that exist between many people.

Regardless, virginity culture continues to find steam, most notably during the rise of purity culture in the 1990s. With intense fear circulating the AIDS epidemic and teen pregnancy rates, the evangelical church took hold of impressionable teens with the allure of purity. Church purity pledges encouraged teens to save themselves for their future spouses. Many young people wore purity rings as an indicator of chastity. Celebrities like Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato, and The Jonas Brothers even sported them through the 2000s. The estimated reach of the movement was over 2.5 million teens worldwide, according to the New York Times.

This culture is damaging, and the values instilled by purity culture often impact women for the rest of their lives. Even those who eventually denounce the church and its values find it hard to stop associating sex and sexuality with the principles they internalized early on.

Linda Kay Klein, the author of Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free, explained in a 2018 interview with Elle that purity culture teaches women to be entirely non-sexual until marriage and then become incredibly sexual to reproduce and to meet her husband’s needs.

“People don’t have a light switch,” Klein explained. “You can’t have internalized all of this deep sexual shame your entire life and then all of a sudden, snap your fingers… Releasing all of that shame takes a tremendous amount of hard work.”

It’s fair to assume, though, that many do not do the hard work to correct past teachings and that many men and women never end up believing purity is wrong in the first place. Our world has become infiltrated with these ideals and their remnants. Many no longer refrain from sex until marriage or use the word “virginity” with as much emphasis, but we all —women in particular — feel the weight of sexual shame on our shoulders. We don’t yet live in a world where sexuality, sex, and masturbation are celebrated or even talked about neutrally. If anything, purity culture has made discussing sex and sexuality all the more taboo. Those who are truly progressive and care about ensuring a better experience for our children must look at this truth head-on and figure out what a world without our current connotation of sex looks like.

The most powerful tool to combat our sexually frustrated world is undoubtedly education. Sex education in the United States is unbelievably lacking for a country that’s supposed to be the world’s trailblazer.

According to Planned Parenthood, only 39 states mandate some form of sex education in their curricula, and within each state, individual school districts decide when and how to teach sex education. Of those 39 states, 37 require some mention of abstinence as a means of preventing pregnancy. Teachings about birth control is a requirement in only 18 states. Encouraging abstinence as the only means of birth control has been not only proven to be ineffective but also shown to be unethical and shame-inducing, according to Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. And, of course, the burden of birth control falls on the shoulders of women, even when their state can’t do them the decency of educating them on it.

The CDC recommends schools to instruct on 20 general topics, and less than half of high schools and fewer than 20% of all middle schools touch on all 20. These subjects are not revolutionary in the slightest; basic information on STDS, puberty, and intercourse is not reaching teens nationwide at a proportional rate or even at all. The scariest part is that sex education is now statistically worse than in the 1990s, coincidentally when purity culture reignited.

Sex education within schools must improve. There is no other feasible way for our culture to evolve to be sex-positive or sex-neutral. When we decide whether these topics are taboo, sensitive, or private, teenagers fail to learn about their bodies and become at much higher risk for sexual assault, pregnancy, and sexuallytransmitted diseases — especially young women. Sexual education does not necessarily need to be nationally standardized, but it needs to be taught everywhere with some degree of thoroughness.

The legislative future is not promising, but the dialogue surrounding sex education can and should evolve. We should all make the individual choice to change the way we’re used to talking about sex and the way we teach our children about sex. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, only a third of American teenagers have ever been asked about sexual wellness by their doctor. And those conversations usually last less than 40 seconds. Why are we so scared to talk about sex?

When a child asks about something related to sex and receives an answer communicating some hesitancy, they’re learning that something they’re asking must be wrong. When a child is taught nicknames for their body parts, they perceive that the real names for their organs are too vulgar to be said aloud. Sex and sexuality are a part of our wellness as humans. The culture we exist in should not be allowed to dominate this fact. A sense of honesty surrounding sexual dialogue could do wonders for the individual’s experience with sex and wellness if only we allow it.

Women do not share a common sense of sexual guilt because it is inherent; we share it because it is taught. Compounded over centuries and all the fads within them, women — and men, to an extent — receive the message that sex is unnatural and undiscussable. But it’s not. We must acknowledge this reality and actively choose to raise a new generation educated on their bodies and the true beauty they are capable of.