Let's Talk About Purity Culture (from an Asexual)

1 Timothy 4:12, NIV

Don't let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity.

CW: sex, conservative Christian theology/judgement (mentioned, not given, obviously), acephobia

Purity Culture is something you hear a lot about from conservative Christians, although usually not by name. It’s this idea that people, specifically women, should keep themselves “pure” by waiting until marriage to have sex. Additionally, most of the time sex is viewed as something necessary for reproduction only. A lot of Christians who buy into purity culture are also against things like birth control because they believe that if you’re going to have sex, you should be willing to accept whatever is created from that.

I’ve heard a couple different metaphors to support this ideology, but the most common one is as follows: Imagine a room full of people, and one person is handed a flower. Each person is told to appreciate the flower as it goes around the room. By the time the flower reaches the last person, the petals are beginning to fall off and the rose is in poor shame from all the touching. Would you still want the flower? In this metaphor, the flower is someone (again, usually a woman) having sex. The more someone has sex, the less valuable they will be for their future partner. Therefore, people should remain abstinent until they are married, when they will be committed to one person forever.

Hopefully I don’t have to explain to you why this metaphor is really gross, but I’m going to do it anyway. First of all, it’s deeply misogynistic. While purity culture is directed at everyone, women face the full force of it: we’re the ones who have dress codes at church events designed to not tempt the boys, we’re the ones who are taught about how our worth is directly tied to our virginity, etc. Women are also constantly compared to different objects to show how our worth is diminished over time, which is incredibly dehumanizing. Virginity is a social construct, and safety should be the biggest concern.

While purity culture is wildly misogynistic, it’s also just ridiculous. I remember a mission trip that I went on one summer where a local church decided to invite us to listen to a sermon from the youth pastor. He had about 30 teenagers’ full attention, and he decided to spend over half of our time talking about how we shouldn’t have sex. My dear reader, I don't know if you're familiar with the Bible, but let me tell you: there's a lot of content in there to talk about. Matthew 25:31-46. Mark 10:17-31. So many good options to discuss with youth. But instead you think it's the best use of your time to talk about sex? I mean, really! If someone is a good person and tries to do their best to take care of others, does it matter if they have sex before they’re married? Spoiler alert: no it doesn’t. And, realistically, you're not going to convince people against having sex just because "the Bible." This narrative being pushed on teenagers is just simply unproductive -- all it does is shame people for their autonomy and sexuality.

And frankly, purity culture is just a bunch of heteronormative nonsense. It enforces really harmful gender roles on young people, as well as the expectation of a traditionally straight relationship. “You’re doing something wrong if you're not in a male/female marriage with kids. Women should stay home and take care of those kids, sacrificing their careers and lives to do so.” Children being told that this is the future they must have or else they’ll be damned to an eternity of burning in hell can only cause harm. These messages get internalized by kids, but it's not making kids straight. It's just traumatizing them.

Anyway, now that we’re all on the same page about how horrible purity culture is and how much damage it can do to kids, I have a confession I’d like to make. I bought into purity culture a lot when I was a kid.

Okay, listen. It wasn’t pushed on me by anyone, and I never pushed it on anyone else. I just told myself that’s what I would do personally. And can you really blame me? Consider who I was at the time: 13-or-something years old, believing that sexual attraction is fake (or at least made up for drama on TV), and largely grossed out by the idea of doing anything sexual in a way that was different from the other kids. I wasn’t attracted to purity culture (no pun intended) because of the actual ideology, but because of what it did for me as someone who was asexual and just didn’t realize it.

For as many flaws as purity culture has -- and it has many -- the one thing it kind of does well is normalize the lack of sex in a relationship. Purity culture creates a space for people who are not interested in sex to be accepted in the greater society. Even the idea of only having sex to reproduce helps. When you’ve convinced yourself that you’re broken for the way you experience attraction to people, something like this just feels right. At the very least, it let me put off worrying about it. I could tell people that I was “saving myself for marriage” instead of having to unpack the fact that I just wasn’t interested in that part of a relationship at all.

Not that I needed to be that worried about this at that age, but that’s the Asexual Experience for you, I guess. ((As I experienced it, of course; asexuals are not a hive mind.)) Now that I’m an adult who has bothered to unpack that part of my identity, I have more specific complaints about purity culture. This time, they’re from someone who is aggressively asexual.

I do have a hypothesis that there is a correlation between unrecognized asexuality and purity culture. Like I described from my own experiences, I believe that purity culture attracts people trying to find a way to make their diversion from heteronormativity seem “normal," or at least accepted in greater society. I have no statistics to back this up, but I believe I can’t be the only one who has felt this way. And when people don't know what asexuality is -- that there's a whole community of people like themselves, and they're not just broken -- I could believe that they would drift towards this ideology, no matter how harmful it is, just to grasp onto something that makes things make sense.

That all being said, I’m so tired of my sexual orientation being mistaken for purity culture or abstinence. People who don’t understand asexuality think that it’s just “not wanting to have sex,” which is not at all accurate. But aphobes don’t care, and they’ll happily just lump me in with all the conservative Christians. We had a really big issue with this concerning demisexuality a while back. It was hard to be acespec online while this was all happening. These misconceptions about asexuality (and all other sexualities that fall under the umbrella) make it significantly harder for aces to come out and be proud of our identities. And when you just blindly equate “asexuality” with “intentional abstinence,” you’re missing a lot of the fascinating aspects of what asexuality actually is.

Additionally, I think that people who are really strong believers in purity culture are some of the people I’d be most scared to talk about my asexuality with. I’m hesitant with everyone who’s a stranger -- exclusionists and aphobes come from all communities -- but honestly? Nobody claims to love sex as much as church leaders trying to tell you to not have sex. It’s weird. They love to talk about how great and wonderful it is, and how it really makes their relationship stronger ... just don’t do it until you’re married or else you're going to hell. I feel like if I told someone who’s really conservative that I’m not sexually attracted to anyone and generally uninterested in ever having sex, they’d start spouting off a bunch of reasons why that’s super unnatural and wrong of me. Perhaps this just proves that purity culture isn’t actually concern over whether or not someone has sex, it’s about control over autonomy.

For as many problems as I have with purity culture itself, I also have some issues with how people fight against it. A lot of the time, people will argue against the effectiveness of purity culture by describing how sex is necessary in a relationship, and that you have to have sex before marriage if you want a healthy connection. Gee, I wonder why Baby Ace Kendall really liked purity culture. As I just said, purity culture is really about having control over a person’s autonomy. Yes, sex is necessary in some relationships, but not in all. And waiting until you’re married to have sex is not inherently bad. The toxicity that surrounds this ideology is the problem. Therefore, the counterargument should be that it doesn’t matter what choices someone makes about their sexuality as long as they’re being safe. You want to have sex? Great! Make sure you prevent unwanted pregnancy and STDs, and I hope you have fun. You don’t want to have sex? That’s rad too. It just doesn’t matter either way. But when the narrative becomes that people must have sex in order to have a fulfilling relationship, you’re still doing harm. Just in the other direction.

As someone who is asexual, my complaints about purity culture are more personal. But really, it's just a different perspective on an ideology that does harm to everyone involved. Unfortunately, the concept of purity culture is so prevalent in society that it won't magically disappear any time soon. So, what can we do to make it better for everyone?

Don't shame people for their sexuality. The details of how, when, and with whom someone chooses to have sex with are none of your business. Stay out of other people's sex lives, and let them make decisions for themselves.

You should also try to reframe the way you talk about relationships. Things like sex, kids, marriage, and heck, even a relationship itself, are not necessary for someone to have a happy and fulfilling life. As a society, we have a tendency to see someone who lacks these things as just that -- someone who is missing something that will hopefully be obtained later. But that's not true. Just because someone's life if being lived outside of our traditional standards doesn't make it wrong, it's just different. And that's okay.

And because my thing is talking about asexuality, I have one final note: please remember that asexuality is not just a fancier way to describe abstinence. Asexuality is about sexual attraction, not sexual action. Asexuality is a full and wonderful identity all on its own, and it has nothing to do with purity culture or any other sexual choices.

From yours truly,

Kendall