What Is Purity Culture?
Starting the Conversation
I started writing about deconstruction at the start of 2020. I started sharing about harmful ideologies and toxic religious spaces throughout the last couple of years, with a fair few pauses in between. Heavy content and all that. But I’ve been thinking about it again, and what has struck me the most hasn’t been the stories about people leaving and deconstructing their former belief systems. Although those stories, those people, are undoubtedly brave and bold and beautiful.
What has struck me are the stories I’ve heard about the policing of bodies.
The designation of appropriate vs inappropriate clothing.
The control of adult consensual relationships.
The ways that these toxic messages continue to infiltrate our minds even after we have left.
The way we sometimes forget to even deconstruct these ones.
The way this messaging has permeated our culture so that we can barely escape it.
What has struck me most is the complexity and toxicity of purity culture.
I’ve read a lot about purity culture, a lot about church spaces and the way they have continued to police women and their bodies. However so much of that writing is centred in the United States — in experiences that share a similar thread but all the same, are so different from my own.
So I’m going to use this next few pieces of writing to talk about love, relationships, sex, and purity culture. It’s going to be a good time.
It’s going to be the juicy good time we never got to talk about.
Buckle up.
defining purity culture
or, trying to.
There’s a lot of different takes on purity culture, which is why I find it all the more toxic. My first introduction to it was Christianity. Religion in general is probably the most well-known example… But there’s also versions of purity culture in wellness woo-woo spaces. In schools where childrens bodies are objectified and policed for their attire. In social media influencer spaces. In fitness spaces. In politics…
So while I talk about purity culture a lot from my previous religious experiences, know it exists in so many spaces, and chances are — you’ve come across some level of it.
Chances are, a lot of it might even stem from religion. But I’ll leave that can unopened for now.
Purity culture dictates behaviours and attitudes. For women, it deduces us to be nothing more than our dress, and how we are perceived sexually. Women are often devoid of any form of identity, our worth found only in our sexual expression (or, lack thereof).
Purity culture effects men, too, as they are reduced to nothing more than their own sexual needs. Their own lustful wants. Their uncontrollable urges. While women ought to be pure, they ought to be pure for the man. The man who is sexual above all else. Whose desires are uncontainable.
He couldn’t help himself, look at how she’s dressed.
How many times have you heard something like that?
The gender expectations overall of the more intense versions of purity culture are based on a strict binary. Men are strong and masculine. Men lead the household and, of course, the churches they are a part of. Men therefore, lead society. Women, on the other hand, are expected to be supportive. They are the helper. They are to be kind-natured and pretty, feminine, sweet. They are good mothers and supportive wives. They are seen and rarely heard.
And it’s never taught explicitly.
And it’s rarely taught in its extremes. At least, in Australian cultures I have seen.
Instead, women’s dress codes are policed. Instead, mens leadership is prioritised. Instead, relationships are micromanaged by those “higher up”. Instead, sex is never talked about just in case until you’re married and on the pulpit and then as a man you can talk as much as you want about banging your hot wife.
That’s purity culture, babes. And if you can’t tell already, it’s pretty fucked. Purity culture excuses rape because “he couldn’t help himself”, it has young people getting married in their teens because how else will they experience their sexuality (which is innate and good and damn I hate the messaging that tells us it’s wrong). Purity culture doesn’t talk about “it” and if it does it’s only to talk about how disgusting “it” is and to avoid people getting tangled up in “it” all the while senior leaders of huge-ass churches are getting very tangled up in people who aren’t their wives despite controlling the narrative on sex and sexuality for their congregations… but hey, that’s been covered enough in the news of late.
The point of all this?
Purity culture is wrapped up in Christianity but can’t you see it all around us? In Christian Porter escaping any real ramifications for the accusations against him, with Scott Morrison requiring an empathy coach to understand the rape of a woman but not the slap of a man, with school dress codes and sometimes even corporate dress codes and societal norms of what to wear and why.
Yeah, things are changing. We are starting to see it. But there’s always more room to grow. Always more space to untangle it. And for as long as I am still hearing stories of women (and men) who have experienced this — I’ll keep writing about it.
