Virtue and Sexism in Purity Culture

One Sunday during the years of my adolescence I attended the morning worship service all by my lonesome. I forget the reason why. I sat down in a pew to the left of the altar, awaiting the start of Mass with the other early arrivers. A few minutes before the prayers began, a young very attractive woman sat down in the pew just before me. She had short, cropped strawberry blonde hair and wore the sort of dress Alicia Silverstone wears in the movie Clueless to entice the new student who turns out to be gay. Bare neck and bare arms and a mostly bare back. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her flawless skin. Whether sitting, standing, or kneeling, I was transfixed. Ogle me this, Batman.

After Mass, while on my way through the gathering area, a friend of my mom’s approached me. I didn’t recognize her, but she knew me and introduced herself, telling me how she had seen me during the service. I gulped, figuring she had noticed my not sporadic staring. Instead she complimented me.

“You were so focused and attentive. I’m very impressed. Such a good example for your peers.”

She was sincere. At least, I took her as sincere. She gave no smirk or wink or any other tell of irony. I didn’t have the heart or the courage to correct her.

Many years later, in college, a friend admitted to a group of us that he really struggled at church to avoid gazing at women in the congregation. He preferred to sit in the front row to avoid temptation as best he could. To his credit, he blamed only himself for his weakness, but others at our school were eager to lecture their fellow students, particularly women, on the importance of modesty. Men were instructed on abstaining from ogling and entertaining lustful thoughts and desires, and women were told they must exercise modesty in manner and dress. Women were expected to be virtuous so the men didn’t sin. You’ll note the double standard.

The toxicity of “purity culture” has been under discussion a lot this past week. See Elizabeth Smart, Calah Alexander, and Richard Beck. I want here to emphasis one point in particular. Not being able to handle the sight of skin, or any other erotic sensation, isn’t a sign of virtue. It indicates immaturity and perhaps an unhealthy fear of the body. Obsessive staring and obsessive averting the eyes are, well, obsessive, and not the signs of mature sexuality. You mature sexually by being sexual. Temperance takes practice. We’re sexual beings: we’re supposed to find bodies pleasing and attractive to our senses. No shame or sin there. Goes with being an animal. As rational animals, we have some control over our passions and appetites, but you don’t learn to master your passions and appetites by running from the body or keeping it out of sight, sense, and mind.

On this point, purity culture tends to be irrational. It focuses on abstinence, and not just abstinence from sexual intercourse. Consider this holy advice column by Barbara Kralis: none of her guidance has anything to do with maturing in one’s sexuality. She counsels prayer, being cheerful, wearing holy objects, modest dress for women–writing, “a women’s husband is the only person who should see and receive the joy of her body”(!)–avoiding inappropriate conversations, avoiding entertainment deemed unfit for moral consumption by a religious authority, avoiding occasions of sin, and avoiding useless activities. This is a recipe for disaster. It won’t make you pure or modest or chaste, even if you succeed at each one. You’ll have done nothing to master the sexual passions and appetites because you’ll have done nothing with your sexuality. You don’t learn to look without lechery merely by averting your eyes.  You have to practice seeing attractive people in a way that respects them and respects the attraction.* If you want to master your sexuality, then you have to exercise it. This is true whether or not you are waiting until marriage to have sex.

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*Added for some clarity.

Kyle Cupp

Kyle Cupp is a freelance writer who blogs about culture, philosophy, politics, postmodernism, and religion. He is a contributor to the group Catholic blog Vox Nova. Kyle lives with his wife, son, and daughter in North Texas. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

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42 Responses

  1. Morat20 says:

    You can see the same sorts of concepts floating through, well, “rape culture” is probably not a good term — “rape excuses”?

    The notion that men are slaves to their sexuality, that women “entice and flaunt” — that women have the power, and men are helpless before it.

    Which is…sad, pathetic, horrifying and a lot of other things all at once.

    The purity culture, as you describe it, buys into the root excuses but at least seems to be trying to steer away from the unambiguously immoral ends.

    But it’s really the same refrain I’ve heard from others, in other places — who blame women for their own urges, their own actions, their own excesses — like women are some sort of vile sexual telepath.

    It’s conversations like that, and the realization that these men are utterly blind to what they’re saying, what they’re excusing, the way they’re shifting blame for their own sexual urges, trying to make themselves the victim rather than the perpetrator….well, it’s time’s like that that the whole “patriarchy” stuff — I start to sort of really see what they’re talking about.

    I might not agree with them on it’s extent, but….to see the same twisted victimization logic on what is technically the opposite end of the spectrum……

    *sigh*. We’re a screwed up species. At least we’ve stopped drinking so much lead.

  2. Murali says:

    This is a recipe for disaster. It won’t make you pure or modest or chaste, even if you succeed at each one. You’ll have done nothing to master the sexual passions and appetites because you’ll have done nothing with your sexuality.

    I’m going to disagree with you here. A good part of avoiding sin is in avoiding occasions of it. One of the common cultural tropes that I have seen among Americans is their overconfidence in their ability to withstand temptation when said object of temptation is right in front of them. To illustrate:

    Joe, in general is a decent guy. He normally wouldn’t hurt anyone or pressure anyone to have sex with him. But, when Joe gets drunk, he tends to become an angry drunk. He gets into fights and he ends up being a jerk to women and even gets involved in some date rape-ish behaviour. Joe regrets all of this when he is sober and always swears to himself that he won’t do it again, but he continues to go out drinking with his friends and the whole cycle repeats itself. Part of being virtuous is to avoid such situations in the first place. It is also more psychologically realistic. People have a limited amount of willpower. Placing ourselves in situations where we have to continuously exert willpower and self-discipline over extended periods of time places unrealistic expectations on us. This means sometimes creating mechanisms which allow you to completely avoid the situation in the first place. Other times the confucians have got it right in terms of habituating ourselves into behaving in a certain way through ritual.

    • Murali,

      I’m inclined to agree, and your comment is a better stated version of my own below.

    • Kyle Cupp says:

      I wouldn’t advise someone to put themselves into a situation in which they have good cause to think they would violate their principles. And, yes, like Boromir, a lot of people are presumptuous about their ability to overcome temptation. If you know something may cause you to sin, might be best to avoid it. But this, on its own, doesn’t develop virtue. Eros or any other. If you don’t take a step, you might not stumble, but you won’t get anywhere either.

    • Murali says:

      Let me use a less tendentious example. One does not as a teenager, avoid fornication by having a girlfriend and engaging in various escalating levels of intimate acts. One just does not date.

      • Kyle Cupp says:

        But the aim of the ethical life should be more than avoiding immoral actions, right?

        • Murali says:

          Avoiding immoral actions can be thought of as a minimum standard. It is worse to attempt more than the minimum and end up failing to achieve even the minimum than to just successfully achieve a minimal standard of one’s moral goals.

          • Kyle Cupp says:

            This is much too lukewarm for my liking. The moral life means risks. It means falling. The important thing is to get back up and continue on.

          • I’m with Kyle on this. First, we’re all going to falter, at times, so committing an immoral act doesn’t mean you can’t still strive for a moral life.

            And considering how flawed our world is, we’d have to really remove ourselves from the outside world in order to remove as many temptations as possible. I don’t think that sort of thing is what we should be striving for.

      • Kimsie says:

        gee. whiz. My how untutored you sound. Perhaps you ought to consult the statistics, if they aren’t illegal in your country.

    • Nob Akimoto says:

      People have a limited amount of willpower.

      Speak for yourself…

      …in Brightest Day, in Blackest Night….

    • Morat20 says:

      In this case, Joe is not only avoiding bars — he’s in a position where he’s badgering coworkers first not to drink around him, not to talk about drinking — and then to taking sobriety pledges so that he knows they’re not drinking when he’s home.

      Because he sits around, fantasizing about having a few beers with his friends, and until he knows they’ll never touch the demon rum again, he’s fighting against the temptation.

      Especially if Joe is so far gone into temptation that drinking a coke in front of him makes him think “Rum and coke has alcohol in it, WHY MUST YOU TEMPT ME WITH BOOZE”, which is sorta where this ends up.

      The world can’t cater to your lack of willpower. If your issues with sexuality are such that normally dressed women are a problem for you — the solution isn’t to put them in burqas. It’s for you to get some therapy. Or join a monastery.

    • Considering North America still has fairly puritanical views about drinking and about sex, this might not be the most enlightening example.

  3. I agree that purity culture is largely irrational and I agree that it’s sexist, for the reasons you and Morat state.

    You critique, rightly, Kralis’s advice, but how, really, does one mature in one’s sexuality?

    Now, before I get the inevitable jokes about “maturing” into a healthy sexuality, I’ll just say it’s not easy. How does one square the process of maturing with a religious tradition that calls certain decisions about engaging with sexuality intrinsically immoral?

    Is it simply an acknowledgement that we’re responsible for our own actions? All well and good, but then isn’t right action sometimes informed by doing the equivalent of averting one’s eyes? If one is in a committed relationship, for example, and one knows one isn’t quite as mature as one should be, it’s seems to me a relatively more mature move would be to avoid situations where one is in a position to be tempted to transgress one’s commitment.

    • zic says:

      If one is in a committed relationship, for example, and one knows one isn’t quite as mature as one should be, it’s seems to me a relatively more mature move would be to avoid situations where one is in a position to be tempted to transgress one’s commitment.

      The problem here is that the effort to avoid situations where one is in a position to be tempted or transgress often turns into telling women not to be tempting. Quoting Kyle, Women were expected to be virtuous so the men didn’t sin. You’ll note the double standard.

      • Oh, I agree that’s a problem. I’m all for people taking personal responsibilities for their own actions and not passing the blame onto others.

      • Murali says:

        The problem here is that the effort to avoid situations where one is in a position to be tempted or transgress often turns into telling women not to be tempting.

        Two points:

        1. It need not turn into this. And it doesn’t particularly require much constant vigilance to keep from turning into this.

        2. That said, sexual purity* is not just about avoiding fornication by men, it is also about avoiding fornication by women.** Presumably, part of virtuous behaviour involves not falsely signalling a readiness or disposition to engage in the various mating rituals of the larger society.

        *Let’s assume we are not talking about rape, but mutually consensual behaviour.
        **I know that there has historically been a double standard where men’s transgressions are forgiven while women’s are not. But assume that the strictures here are equally unforgiving.

        • zic says:

          As you pointed out, history is quite lurid with the double standard; so you’ll forgive me if I protest comments a sentiment like It doesn’t particularly require much constant vigilance to keep from turning to this. Based on thousands of years of evidence, I think that vigilance is exactly what’s required.

          I would presume that Kyle’s call to understand your sexuality pertains to women, too.

          I know, from 36 years of experience (perhaps longer then you’ve been alive?), that understanding your sexuality and fidelity are not mutually exclusive endeavors.

        • Kimsie says:

          Sexual purity was defined ethically as population control (just like marriage in general). It didn’t serve much purpose beyond “enabling a society to survive.”

    • Kyle Cupp says:

      If one is in a committed relationship, for example, and one knows one isn’t quite as mature as one should be, it’s seems to me a relatively more mature move would be to avoid situations where one is in a position to be tempted to transgress one’s commitment.

      Sure. Avoiding temptations is an important part of the moral life. You’ll get no disagreement from me. But on its own, avoidance of near occasions of sin is insufficient for the development of virtue. You don’t form good habits simply by avoiding bad ones. Virtue is more than the mere avoidance of vice.

      …but how, really, does one mature in one’s sexuality?

      Having a mature, scientifically and morally grounded attitude about it is a good place to start. From there, the course of maturity may depend on the person. If someone can’t look at an attractive person without ogling or stressing out about lustful thoughts, it would be good for this person to ask why. What’s going on? Why these reactions? What would be needed for these reactions to change? In this case, the objective might be to learn to notice attractive people without feeling compelled to objectify them.
      None of this is easy, as you say, and can take a long time and even help from others, but self-control isn’t, as a rule, an impossibility.

      • Kyle,

        Thanks for your thoughtful answer, and it, along with your answer to Murali’s comments, makes a lot of sense.

        I do think prudence is a virtue, and knowing when to avoid temptation plays a role in prudence, as I see it. But I agree that even prudence (and even if we accept my definition) doesn’t by itself lead to other virtues.

      • Kimsie says:

        One can also take a different tact, and ogle where you won’t be hurting someone else (pictures, primarily), until the novelty wears off, and only the appreciation remains.

    • Kimsie says:

      Pierre,
      One is allowed to call on one’s friends, allies, and yes, even partners to help one. If you’re having trouble being mature, relying on your partner to give you a discrete elbow in the gut (if it bothers her…), might be one tactic.
      I don’t hold with this “guys keep their problems locked away” business. Shared burdens are easier to handle (and, ya know, solutions are allowed to be multivariate).

  4. LeeEsq says:

    Is there a difference between purity culture and modesty culture? Under Orthodox Judaism, modesty (tzniut) is considered to be an important virtue. Its why all Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Jews adhere to a strict dress code that encourages covering up. However, this applies equally to men and women. One could argue that this is less sexist than other cultures because both genders have to cover up and its technically not about sexuality in the strictest sense. Yet, one could argue that its just an alternative form of toxic purity culture. What I guess I’m trying to say is if both genders have to cover up, is it still sexist?

    • Morat20 says:

      It would…depend. I can’t speak for Orthodox Jews (I simply haven’t personally met enough) — but I’ve met a number of folks from some of the Christian sects with strict norms on dress codes.

      What it boiled down to was men were expected to dress in a way that exemplified seriousness, sobriety, professionalism, responsibility. (Slacks, ties, no jeans, etc). Their dress was meant to reflect they were serious, upstanding members of the community.

      Women were expected to…cover up. Their attire was to exemplify chastity and purity, and did so by hiding their bodies from the sight of men. Skirts and dresses, never pants. Ankle length, long sleeves, form-fitting clothes were avoided.

      And while both were quite covered up, it’s not for the same reasons or the same goals.

      • NewDealer says:

        “What it boiled down to was men were expected to dress in a way that exemplified seriousness, sobriety, professionalism, responsibility. (Slacks, ties, no jeans, etc). Their dress was meant to reflect they were serious, upstanding members of the community.”

        All the time? I don’t really get the logic behind this. I’m a fairly serious person* but I don’t think that is reflected by wearing ties and not wearing jeans.

        *Seriously I am. I get annoyed when people can’t seem to take things seriously. Class clowns tend to annoy me when dealt with in great numbers.

        • Morat20 says:

          When in public, basically. In private? I dunno. I wasn’t that close. I’d imagine they (the men) were allowed jeans or shorts or appropriate garb for whatever.

          The women? I’m less sanguine that they had as relaxed a ruleset. For instance, pretty much all the ones I knew had a very strict “no pants ever” rule that also applied to shorts. It was skirts and dresses period. (Although shorts worn under dresses, for modesty’s sake — like bike shorts — was acceptable).

          But yeah, in public? Oh yeah. The most dressed down you’d see was buttoned shirts and khackis. That was ‘casual’ in public.

          But by and large, a man’s dress code wasn’t quite as strict unless he was representing the Church. (Think Mormon missionaries, as an example. In public? There’s basically no slack there) — it varied a bit from group to group.

          My experience was mostly with Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, some rather strict Pentacostals, and the like. Anecdotally, it was more likely there was a dress code — either formal or culturally imposed — for women than for men, but the rules always fell the same way: Men dressed to look respectable, women dressed to hide their form.

          Which was also called ‘respectable’ but for entirely different reasons.

          • Kimsie says:

            Islam says that both men and women should hide themselves. But men wear beards, and women wear veils (note: yes I know that’s cultural).

    • Kimsie says:

      Yes. Just as sexist as Muslim culture, where, again, both sexes are forced to cover up. You’ll note who gets to break the modesty laws, and who doesn’t.

      And yes it is fucking about sexuality when women aren’t allowed to read from the Torah because they’ll give men naughty thoughts in their pants. (yes, this is the given reason).

    • Kimsie says:

      Just as a general note: it tends to irritate me when Jews try and sell Judaism “as it was” as being “good and awesome”. At best, Orthodox Judaism (and even more particularly that practiced in the shtetls) ought to be understood as Lawful Neutral. (Christianity often managed to clear the bar up to Lawful Good. Not always, and certainly the Middle Ages were dire…)

      • LeeEsq says:

        I strongly disagree with this and I’m by no means an Orthodox Jew. However, I believe that the Orthodox conviction that the ritual law supports the ethical law and helps create a sacred life is a sound one. This is just the same old argument that the Christians used to attack Rabbinic Judaism in the past. It wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now.

        • Kimsie says:

          Unlikely, but I suppose it could be possible, seeing as I haven’t read the Christian arguments.

          I’m certain you can cite the interpretations on why it’s morally okay to break commandments to save a Jewish life, but not morally obligatory to break commandments to save a non-Jewish life.

          Is this the type of argument you’re talking about?

        • Kimsie says:

          Ahh… is this the part where I get into women being exempted from all positive commandments? How exactly does that support the ethical law again?

    • Kimsie says:

      I assure you, it does not apply equally to men and women.
      I get glared at, my husband does not.
      I get glared at MORE when I’m in the lead, heading up the hill.

  5. LeeEsq says:

    Wouldn’t the best solution be not placing an important role on virginity? Judaism technically believes that you should be a virgin at the time of your first marriage but at the same time being a virgin is not seen as something special. Your supposed to be a virgin at the time of your first marriage just because. Its kind of silly but it seems to create a less toxically sexist culture than the ones that make virginity out to be something special.

    • Kimsie says:

      LOL. “Judaism technically believes that you should be a virgin at the time of your first marriage but at the same time being a virgin is not seen as something special.”
      LOL.
      Oy vai. this is funny.
      (a strong brand of Judaism had the tradition of letting the father-in-law boff his daughter before she got married(sameday)).