thoughts on purity & culture
The last time I mentioned “purity culture” tangentially in a post I got a pretty dismissive response from someone nominally progressive. I was really surprised by how much this startled and cut me.
It got me thinking about what I actually mean when I use the term– not just the simpler, more widely used definition that focuses on the roots of sexual puritanism in our culture (although that’s a big part of it), but also the broad cultural patterns I keep noticing, the all-or-nothing, virtue-signaling mindsets many people have, and the ways it has been an integral part of abuse dynamics towards myself and people I love.
So, in no particular order, some unfocused observations:
Purity culture is abstinence-only education, because the only possible reason you could have to want information about sex would be to ~do something unclean~ with it.
Purity culture is a popular artist getting harassed off tumblr for the “crime” of shipping Dirk/Jake, which, by several complicated steps of reasoning, made her an “abuse apologist.” (Because they broke up in canon, you see, and break-ups always mean that somebody is an irredeemable bad guy.)
Purity culture is “Hillary is indistinguishable from Trump”, because any deviation from your values is equivalent to total deviation from your values.
Purity culture is telling teenage girls that their bodies are shameful objects which must be hidden to avoid “distracting” people–because female bodies are inherently sexual and sex is inherently immoral.
Purity culture is emphasizing the naivete and chasteness of potential victims, because it’s the moral and sexual purity of a person that determines whether they have been abused, not their consent.
(Purity culture is rape culture.)
Purity culture is the weird fixation on sex-as-the-ultimate-impurity that lead to the blurring out of the breasts of historical artwork depicting a decapitated, impaled woman.
Purity culture is enshrining the unwillingness to compromise so intensely that politicians actually shut down the government.
Purity culture is sweeping generalizations about people, ideas, topics, actions, and motivations, because purity means things are either pure or they are impure.
Purity culture is “the only way to protect you is to limit your access to information, because I can’t be sure you’ll make the right choice unless I MAKE you.”
(Purity culture is “they’re teaching our kids to be gay in school.”)
Purity culture is teenage-me feeling smug over a friend-of-a-friend’s bad sexual experience because “she shouldn’t have been having sex in the first place.“
Purity culture is suicide-baiting a CSA survivor because they wrote about the thing they survived.
Purity culture is believing abuse is okay as long as it’s aimed at the RIGHT group of impure people.
Purity culture is popular authoritarian parenting books like “To Train Up a Child” and “The Danger of Peer-Dependency” that advocate physical abuse and emotional isolation as long term tactics to control children’s values.
Purity culture is the demand for purity-of-association, because you might be contaminated by people, or ideas, or topics and: “why would you need to know anything about that thing unless you were going to do something unclean with it?”
…Purity culture is toxic.
“…any deviation from your values is equivalent to total deviation from your values.”
This, THIS is the utterly absurd conflation that drives me up the goddamn wall on Tumblr.