What is purity culture?

If you'd asked me this many years ago I would have confidently told you that it meant 'saving yourself for marriage'. That's what I was brought up with in my church denomination. Saving sex for marriage was idealised (as it should be) but little to nothing was said about the challenges of achieving that. You could buy commitment rings which you could wear on your wedding ring finger as a sign that you were saving sex for marriage but I wonder how many of those trinkets survived the trip home. Looking back, they could have done this so much better and given us far more clarity. Show me a teenager and I'll show you a master at exposing loopholes in an instruction. My lasting impression is that of adults who were scared to talk about sex, presumably because they thought if they mentioned it, we might want to do it.

While youth leaders lacked courage to face the challenge head on, they still wanted to get the message out there. And nowhere have I seen this demonstrated more clearly, and in an underhand way, as through kit lists. Kit lists for camps had directives for no strappy tops or bikinis. No mini skirts. No cleavage revealing tops. The boys lists were devoid of any such instruction. I hadn't realised I was a feminist at that point but it bothered me that the boys had no rules. In smaller groups we started to talk about being aware that we needed to be mindful of what the boys will be thinking when they see our bodies. We also needed to be mindful that boys didn't see what would later belong only to our husbands. We also needed to be mindful that we shouldn't cause boys to stumble with lustful thoughts. It didn't occur to me at the time to ask what the boys were being told, or perhaps I knew already, seeing as the boys tended to be playing football whilst we had our 'chats'.

I have lost count of the amount of times over the years I've heard variations on the phrase "save something for the wedding love!" directed at young women in bikinis or strappy tops just going about their business. From men in senior leadership too. The message I received was that my body was a problem to be 'solved' by marriage. Also that I was responsible for the thoughts in men and boys heads. If they made a comment, then that was my fault for wearing something provocative. Girls were responsible for the sexual purity of boys. The crazy thing is that as a young woman I could be wearing the baggiest of jeans and sweaters and my body would still be commented on and grabbed at. Including by 'christian' boys. It's taken me many years to realise that my clothes were absolutely nothing to do with it and absolutely everything to do with the sense of entitlement possessed by many men and boys about women and girls bodies. Women and girls were instructed to censor their bodies but no-one told boys and men to censor their thoughts and yet Matthew 5:28 makes nothing so clear as this.

Purity culture taught me nothing positive. My Christian upbringing taught me that boys and men were predators who had no control over their thoughts and actions. My experience of the world did little to disavow me of that belief. And this is what purity culture does. It dehumanises men and objectifies women. It reduces women down to their 'parts'. It's horrifying to know that in some countries, when a woman is raped, she is then considered 'defiled', her 'purity' now gone and she is now considered worthless and spoilt for marriage. It reduces a woman's purity to her vagina and the current/future husband's possession of that body part. 

Further down the line purity culture can lead to dysfunctional sexual relationships between spouses as one or other of them fight to overcome feelings of guilt and shame about their bodies. Purity culture ultimately perpetuates rape culture as through focusing on what she looks like, and through viewing her through her relationship to either her male relatives or husband, women and girls are objectified and dehumanised. There is nothing to commend it and is a prime example of the need to control women and girls, justified by using biblical texts. 

This is not to say that when you go looking for passages about modesty that you won't find them. However when you look closely, they are far more concerned with character. The passages in 1 Timothy 2 verse 9 for example says that women should dress themselves modestly. However to read that one verse out to context robs us of understanding the concern Paul had for the state of worship in the church at that time. If you miss the following verse that says that good deeds are more appropriate clothing than fancy clothes, then you'll also miss the preceding verse telling men to lift their hands and pray rather than squabble amongst themselves. It paints a poor picture of the church at that time and should certainly cause us to pause and consider what it is that is distracting us in worship. However, to focus the message on the women's clothing is almost as unfortunate as taking the final verse of that chapter on face value and out of context. To do do will have you believing that women will only get to heaven if they have babies and we know this not to be true. 

To summarise, women and girls are no more possessions than men are monsters incapable of policing their thoughts. Both sexes are equally responsible for their own lustful thoughts and are commanded to take those thoughts captive (2 Corinthians 10:5, Matthew 5:28). Neither are responsible for the others thoughts; this is not a sci-fi movie. Teaching young people within the church context to honour one another as brothers and sisters in Christ is vital. Reducing that to teaching girls to cover up for the sake of the boys is a gross representation of scripture and dehumanises us all.