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Purity Culture
Jan. 9th, 2019 11:52 amNot the tumblr kind.
This article on Bust hit me hard this morning.
I was this kid! I grew up with crazy parents (whole other story) and in a very conservative evangelical circle. I went to the "passport to purity" conference! It's so bizarre to read about my own experience.
And it has had lasting consequences. In my case, I'm somewhere on the ace spectrum, but guilt, shame, and self-consciousness have pervaded my personal life, let alone my sex life. There's so much you internalise about your body: how to present it, which parts are 'dirty' and which parts are 'pure', how you're somehow responsible for the way others look at it. It's a huge, terrifying nightmare of neuroses that I'm working through, constantly.
I don't think evangelicals are the only ones with fucked-up ideas of sex. Even if you're not in the 'purity' group, there's a lot of pain and damage done by media, photoshopping, gossip: I've had plenty of friends who struggle with their own sets of neuroses about their bodies, without having ever grown up in the church.
But recognising the amount of pain done by this 'purity' culture is so healing for me, and so validating. This article was a lot to process but I'm glad it's there.
This article on Bust hit me hard this morning.
I was this kid! I grew up with crazy parents (whole other story) and in a very conservative evangelical circle. I went to the "passport to purity" conference! It's so bizarre to read about my own experience.
And it has had lasting consequences. In my case, I'm somewhere on the ace spectrum, but guilt, shame, and self-consciousness have pervaded my personal life, let alone my sex life. There's so much you internalise about your body: how to present it, which parts are 'dirty' and which parts are 'pure', how you're somehow responsible for the way others look at it. It's a huge, terrifying nightmare of neuroses that I'm working through, constantly.
I don't think evangelicals are the only ones with fucked-up ideas of sex. Even if you're not in the 'purity' group, there's a lot of pain and damage done by media, photoshopping, gossip: I've had plenty of friends who struggle with their own sets of neuroses about their bodies, without having ever grown up in the church.
But recognising the amount of pain done by this 'purity' culture is so healing for me, and so validating. This article was a lot to process but I'm glad it's there.
