Purity - Part I

Whenever humans (who are made in the image of God) are viewed as mere objects, degrading treatment and outright oppression surely follow.  Our culture's obsession with sex has separated sexuality from intimacy and is one of the main reasons that the objectification of women continues in this modern era.  It is right and natural that the church would be concerned about such abuses and the needless suffering they cause.  However as I have been looking deeper into our “purity” movement, I have come to understand that our “solution” can be just as objectifying and damaging to women as the hyper-sexualized culture we so readily condemn.  

I teach at a Christian high school where every female student knows what the word “purity” means.  They know how to maintain their purity.  They know how to lose it.  They know the value that their parents/church/school put on it.  They know how important it is to their self-esteem and who they will disappoint and hurt if they fail to protect it.

And this is what I've realized that these young women all "know":

Purity is the absence of any sexual activity.  Purity is the absence of any sexual thoughts or desires.  A girl maintains her purity by guarding against any hint of sexuality.  She flees from temptation by thinking on holy things (anything other than sex).  Not only must she maintain her purity by these actions, but she needs to help her “brothers in Christ” maintain their purity by dressing modestly.  And they know that “modestly” means “unattractive to boys”.  If boys are attracted to them, they are causing them to stumble – causing them to sin. 

If she views herself or allows others to view her as a sexual being she is certainly not being pure, and if she participates in any sexual acts, then she has lost her purity.  She knows it can never be regained.  It is lost forever.  She knows that she is now “used” goods.  Her value, like a new car driven off the lot, has dramatically depreciated.  She knows she has taken the greatest joy a man can ever have (marrying a virgin) away from her future husband.  This future husband will never be able to fully appreciate or be fully intimate with her.  She may find a man that loves her, but he will never fully respect her.  He will always have a sense of self-pity and she will always have a sense of indebtedness because he has sacrificed and settled for a woman who has been used and discarded.

The problem is that each and every one of these statements is crap.

Purity is not the absence of sexuality, rather it is the absence of evil.  This verbal sleight of hand creates the powerful subtext, “sexuality is evil”.  God created us as sexual beings and has made sexuality fundamental to our identity.  A tremendous intellectual and emotional dissonance occurs when we teach these contradictory messages.  It shouldn’t have surprised me when I recently read that women raised in the “True Love Waits”/“Kiss Dating Goodbye” frenzy are now dealing with feelings of shame and guilt on a par with victims of childhood sexual abuse.  Rather than being free to fully experience “sex as God designed it to be”, these women are dealing with deep emotional scars distorting any sense of a healthy sexuality.  And why would we expect a woman to be able to enjoy sex when they have been told for years (or decades) to not just abstain from intercourse, but also to suppress those “evil” desires in the first place?  What sort of dark, twisted compartmentalization goes on in any individual who is forced to fearfully kill off their natural sexuality?

How can we simultaneously point to the shallowness of the world's glorification of women based upon their sexuality while at the same time teach girls that their value to their future husband depends upon their lack of sexuality?  A girl’s virginity has been somehow elevated from a simple statement of a girl’s sexual experience to some sort of material/emotional/spiritual “gift” that she gives away to men.  The metaphor has been stretched too far when we use words that pretend that an actual object of value has changed hands. On first thought the notion seems pleasant enough (who doesn’t like gifts?) but can we at least be loving enough to stop for a moment and consider the implications of viewing a woman’s sexual status as a tradable commodity?  And what kind of man (maybe a pimp?) determines a human's value based on the condition of a hymen?

What happens to the woman taught to believe this?  Upon bequeathing her prized possession to another, she must immediately feel devalued (whether or not within a marriage).  She no longer has the worth she once did (as they say, she “gave it away”) while the man has apparently become enriched.  It is disheartening to realize that there are followers of Christ that actually view sex in these terms.  I know a beautiful Christian woman who spent her wedding night locked in the bathroom crying as her groom gently tried to talk her out.  How can this be considered a healthy view of sex?  Does this not just reinforce the world’s ugly imagery of “deflowering” a woman?  Isn’t it the world’s perversion that says that a man’s success can be measured by how many conquests he achieves?  

One of our chapel speakers this year exhorted the girls in the audience to make the boys “earn” them.  He said that the girls should respect themselves and not make it easy on the boys.  If the boys didn’t treat them right, then the boys didn’t “deserve it”.  This is purity?  This is how a girl respects herself??  The world says that women are sex objects and we say “No, you should respect yourselves, you are expensive sex objects!”  This is the Christian message???  Would this speaker have ever thought to tell the boys to make sure the girls earned them?   This speaker (one of many that will inform these student’s views of sexuality) subtly but unambiguously told the girls that they were objects to be won, and he told the men that the competition is on.  Men must “earn” women.  The men who play the best will score the most.  Game on.

I also recently attended a “purity talk” given at a local Christian college given to about 100 college-aged Christian men.  The speaker repeatedly and emphatically exhorted these young men to “Keep your hands off your girlfriends!”  He laid out his logic clearly.  He explained that even if they loved their girlfriends, there was still a chance that someday they would break up and their girlfriend would end up marrying someone else.  If this were to happen it would create tension and awkwardness between themselves and the new husband.  Why?  Because they would be guilty of stealing something that belonged to the future husband.  His whole argument for “purity” had nothing to do with love or intimacy between a man and a woman, rather it centered on conflicting ownership claims of two men over the sexuality of the same woman.  The husband was entitled to the full value of his wife’s sexuality and the speaker assumed that some of this value would literally have been taken away if the woman had had any sexual thoughts/feelings/experiences before they met.  I’m sure this would have sounded right to me years ago if I said it fast and didn’t think about it too long.  But now when I stop and see the blatant objectification of it all, I am grieved and angered.

We are reinforcing rather than rejecting the world’s objectification of women.  We are burdening women with the responsibility of eliminating not only their own sexual thoughts, desires, and actions, but their “brothers” as well.  And this burden will not be born without failures and the ensuing shame and guilt that come from all the “purity” talks they have endured predicting the condemnation of their peers, their future spouse, and their Lord.  We are defining sex as some sort of zero-sum game where women start with a fixed amount of physical intimacy that they rapidly and irredeemably lose whenever they express their sexuality.  We are perverting what should be a beautiful, expansive, and enriching part of life and jamming it into a little tiny space between our unrealistic religious restrictions and the world’s glandular self-gratification.  

We must finally acknowledge that sexuality exists in single Christian men and women (the average age before first marriage in the U.S. is now 29 for men, 27 for women).  We should be promoting a healthy, Godly sexuality. One that helps men move beyond our natural tendency to objectify women (instead of one that excuses that tendency and casts the blame on women).  One that helps men and women embrace sexual desires as a natural part of godliness.  A view that celebrates gender differences (vive le difference!) not as a means to subjugate women, but rather as a means to more fully enjoy intimacy with a complementary partner.  A view that accepts, respects, and loves individuals not only as emotional, intellectual, and spiritual beings, but also as sexual beings.  

Until we can accomplish this, how foolish we will look proudly walking around with a plank in our own eye as we loudly decry the sexual destructiveness of the world.