Pure

I recently stumbled upon Linda Kay Klein’s Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free. It details the personal journey of a young women who came of age in the purity culture and how it warped her sexuality. While the book is narrated from a female perspective, I recognized much of the culture she described from my own personal experience. Girls were admonished to dress and behave modestly lest they become “stumbling blocks” for boys. An “impure” girl was considered to be damaged, akin to a chewed-up piece of gum. Sexual impurity isn’t confined to actions; inappropriate thoughts and feelings can also render one impure. There was even an Abstinence Study Bible. It all gave the impression that sexual abstinence was essential to living one’s Christian faith. As a young evangelical woman said, “Sex is the big issue that…marks your spiritual standing with God.”

Klein found that a common experience among women formed by the purity culture was sexual guilt and shame. (Klein recounts how, even after she had left the church, she thought she was a “slut” for attempting to have sex with her boyfriend.) Premarital sexual experimentation only exacerbated this. (“Masturbation is what got me through so many years of chastity,” one woman explained.) Sexual dysfunction was common among those who practiced abstinence before marriage. (A common theme in purity literature is that a woman devoted to chastity will turn into a tigress in the bedroom upon her wedding night.)

A couple of thoughts:

• I recall that girls were taught to not be “stumbling blocks” because men were easily provoked to lust. The message I received is that women, at least in part, are triggers of temptation and responsible for a man’s fall. I remember one encounter with the Deaconess in which I felt surge of contempt for her because she had not guarded her purity and had led me into sin.
• While it may be more keenly felt by women, I can also relate to conflating my identity as a Christian with sexual purity. As my sexual behavior has deviated from that rigid standard, I’ve struggled with doubt.
• Sex cannot be separated from guilt for those formed in this culture. Some researchers have concluded: “It turns out that those who are sexually active and have experienced abstinence education and/or have stronger beliefs that the Bible should be literally translated [a core tenet of evangelicalism], have more sexual guilt.”