15 VOLUME 11 |ISSUE 2 |2020
Purity culture taught me that my worth was in my virginity.
On a subconscious level, losing my virginity meant losing my
worth.
I know I’m one of the lucky ones. I may have found myself
facing an arranged marriage at 17, and I may have suffered
anxiety attacks after sex as a young adult but I know my
struggles, though valid, pale in comparison to some of the
sexual traumas others go through. The reason I am choosing
to share my experiences is because I also know I’m not alone.
If you grew up like me, with every aspect of your sexual purity
being controlled, and if, like me, you have downplayed the
aftereffects of purity culture because you worry no one will take
you seriously, I hope it might validate you, as it validated me, to
know that symptoms of religious trauma and sexual trauma can
often go hand in hand.
Religion is not always benign. Abuse is not always invasive.
Effects of Abuse
What purity culture and sexual abuse have in common is the
violation of your sexual agency. Both teach you that your body
belongs to someone else, that your needs and wants don’t
matter, and that the consequences of resistance could be high,
even death. Is it any wonder, then, to learn that the side effects
of purity culture and the side effects of sexual abuse can be so
similar?
In the early 2000s, therapy offices across the United States saw
a sudden spike of young adults seeking treatment for what has
since been described as an “epidemic of shame.”7 One of the first
therapists to notice this epidemic was Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers.
I first learned of Dr. Tina in a book by Linda Kay Klein called Pure:
Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of
Young Women and How I Broke Free. Dr. Tina told Klein that the
symptoms she was seeing were exactly the same symptoms
she might see in someone who had been sexually abused.
What made it so puzzling to her was that many of these young
people said they had never been sexually abused.
The timing of this surge of people seeking help for sexual
trauma, sometimes with no sexual experience at all, pointed Dr.
Tina to the boom of purity culture in the mid to late ’90s. This
was the era of promise rings and purity retreats, of abstinence-
only sex ed, and books such as Joshua Harris’s I Kissed Dating
Goodbye. This was the era of my youth. Klein describes in Pure…
how my generation was bombarded at home, at church, and
at school with the message that sex was wrong and our bodies
were sinful.8 We became adults in the early and mid 2000s, and
it was then that therapists such as Dr. Tina began to see the
repercussions of what is now called purity culture.
Some of these repercussions resemble post-traumatic stress
disorder: Panic attacks. Paranoia. Nightmares. Dissociative
states. Depression. Eating disorders. Self-harm. Many of
these symptoms remain dormant until they’re triggered by
something—sometimes something as light as kissing, or
even just talking about sex. One of the most devastating
repercussions is a condition some women get called
vaginismus. Vaginismus causes an involuntary tightening of
the muscles around the vagina, making sex extremely painful
and often impossible. Sometimes vaginismus is a symptom of
sexual assault. Other times it’s a symptom of purity culture.
I know the story of one virgin bride who discovered she had
vaginismus. She was very much looking forward to having
sex with her husband, but every time they tried in the months
following their wedding, her body shut down in pain, blocking
him from entering her. She had unwittingly trained her body to
shut down this way through years of shutting down any sexual
thoughts or sensations whatsoever. Sex was so painful that she
ended up having to have surgery.
Then there’s the story of a girl who had surgery because she
wanted sex with her husband to be painful. She’d lost her
virginity in college, and when she became engaged, she opted
to have hymen reconstruction surgery. She wanted to be a
born-again virgin on her wedding night and have the blood
from a newly torn hymen to prove it.
Religion often teaches girls that purity means pain, one way or
another.
Of course, women aren’t the only ones affected by the more
harmful teachings of purity culture. In Pure…, Klein shares an
observation from one of her interviewees, who pointed out
that, if women are told their bodies are evil, men are taught
that their minds are. The Bible teaches that simply looking at a
woman lustfully is the same as committing adultery with her.9
The punishment Jesus advises? Gouging out your eyes if they
cause you to lust, and chopping off your hand if it causes you to
sin.10 Though these verses are often interpreted as metaphors
in the modern-day church, their construal as dictates against
lust and masturbation are valid. When boys and men fail to
suppress their natural urges, many believe themselves worthy
of punishment, including checking themselves into months’-
long rehabilitation centers, convinced they have sex addictions.
Others struggle for years with what one guy I know simply
describes as “crippling shame.” After being kicked out of his
religious university for having sex with his girlfriend, another
man I know of committed suicide.11 Shame can be deadly.
The psychological and physical effects of purity culture are
still being brought to light. Certainly not everyone raised in an
environment that promotes sexual abstinence feels harmed by
it and psychological observations suggest that people sharing
the same experience may be affected in vastly different ways—
one may feel unscathed while another feels traumatized.
Trauma is not an event itself, but the subjective experience of
Purity culture had programmed
me, the way it has programmed
so many others, to fuse shame
and fear with sex.
Purity culture taught me that my worth was in my virginity.
On a subconscious level, losing my virginity meant losing my
worth.
I know I’m one of the lucky ones. I may have found myself
facing an arranged marriage at 17, and I may have suffered
anxiety attacks after sex as a young adult but I know my
struggles, though valid, pale in comparison to some of the
sexual traumas others go through. The reason I am choosing
to share my experiences is because I also know I’m not alone.
If you grew up like me, with every aspect of your sexual purity
being controlled, and if, like me, you have downplayed the
aftereffects of purity culture because you worry no one will take
you seriously, I hope it might validate you, as it validated me, to
know that symptoms of religious trauma and sexual trauma can
often go hand in hand.
Religion is not always benign. Abuse is not always invasive.
Effects of Abuse
What purity culture and sexual abuse have in common is the
violation of your sexual agency. Both teach you that your body
belongs to someone else, that your needs and wants don’t
matter, and that the consequences of resistance could be high,
even death. Is it any wonder, then, to learn that the side effects
of purity culture and the side effects of sexual abuse can be so
similar?
In the early 2000s, therapy offices across the United States saw
a sudden spike of young adults seeking treatment for what has
since been described as an “epidemic of shame.”7 One of the first
therapists to notice this epidemic was Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers.
I first learned of Dr. Tina in a book by Linda Kay Klein called Pure:
Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of
Young Women and How I Broke Free. Dr. Tina told Klein that the
symptoms she was seeing were exactly the same symptoms
she might see in someone who had been sexually abused.
What made it so puzzling to her was that many of these young
people said they had never been sexually abused.
The timing of this surge of people seeking help for sexual
trauma, sometimes with no sexual experience at all, pointed Dr.
Tina to the boom of purity culture in the mid to late ’90s. This
was the era of promise rings and purity retreats, of abstinence-
only sex ed, and books such as Joshua Harris’s I Kissed Dating
Goodbye. This was the era of my youth. Klein describes in Pure…
how my generation was bombarded at home, at church, and
at school with the message that sex was wrong and our bodies
were sinful.8 We became adults in the early and mid 2000s, and
it was then that therapists such as Dr. Tina began to see the
repercussions of what is now called purity culture.
Some of these repercussions resemble post-traumatic stress
disorder: Panic attacks. Paranoia. Nightmares. Dissociative
states. Depression. Eating disorders. Self-harm. Many of
these symptoms remain dormant until they’re triggered by
something—sometimes something as light as kissing, or
even just talking about sex. One of the most devastating
repercussions is a condition some women get called
vaginismus. Vaginismus causes an involuntary tightening of
the muscles around the vagina, making sex extremely painful
and often impossible. Sometimes vaginismus is a symptom of
sexual assault. Other times it’s a symptom of purity culture.
I know the story of one virgin bride who discovered she had
vaginismus. She was very much looking forward to having
sex with her husband, but every time they tried in the months
following their wedding, her body shut down in pain, blocking
him from entering her. She had unwittingly trained her body to
shut down this way through years of shutting down any sexual
thoughts or sensations whatsoever. Sex was so painful that she
ended up having to have surgery.
Then there’s the story of a girl who had surgery because she
wanted sex with her husband to be painful. She’d lost her
virginity in college, and when she became engaged, she opted
to have hymen reconstruction surgery. She wanted to be a
born-again virgin on her wedding night and have the blood
from a newly torn hymen to prove it.
Religion often teaches girls that purity means pain, one way or
another.
Of course, women aren’t the only ones affected by the more
harmful teachings of purity culture. In Pure…, Klein shares an
observation from one of her interviewees, who pointed out
that, if women are told their bodies are evil, men are taught
that their minds are. The Bible teaches that simply looking at a
woman lustfully is the same as committing adultery with her.9
The punishment Jesus advises? Gouging out your eyes if they
cause you to lust, and chopping off your hand if it causes you to
sin.10 Though these verses are often interpreted as metaphors
in the modern-day church, their construal as dictates against
lust and masturbation are valid. When boys and men fail to
suppress their natural urges, many believe themselves worthy
of punishment, including checking themselves into months’-
long rehabilitation centers, convinced they have sex addictions.
Others struggle for years with what one guy I know simply
describes as “crippling shame.” After being kicked out of his
religious university for having sex with his girlfriend, another
man I know of committed suicide.11 Shame can be deadly.
The psychological and physical effects of purity culture are
still being brought to light. Certainly not everyone raised in an
environment that promotes sexual abstinence feels harmed by
it and psychological observations suggest that people sharing
the same experience may be affected in vastly different ways—
one may feel unscathed while another feels traumatized.
Trauma is not an event itself, but the subjective experience of
Purity culture had programmed
me, the way it has programmed
so many others, to fuse shame
and fear with sex.
