Purity Culture hurts women even after they get married, say researchers

The beliefs, widespread in the world of evangelical Christianity, have ruined countless lives

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A new research paper aims to shine a light on the harm evangelical Christian “Purity Culture” has on women after they get married.

These are women who were raised in purity environments, believed wholeheartedly that they needed to remain “pure” until they got married, and willingly submitted to their husbands after the wedding. And yet their sex lives rarely focused on their own pleasure (why would it?) and, in many ways, downplayed abuse they suffered within the marriage.

(Image via Adobe Spark)

To make sense of it, it’s important to recognize just how awful Purity Culture is.

(In this case, as well as in the paper, the focus is on white American women because racism adds different variables into the equation.)

If you’re not familiar with Purity Culture, it may be shocking to realize how abstinence is taught to millions of young Christians in their churches and religious schools—and even in public schools in states where conservative Christians are brought in to teach sex education.

Girls are told their virginity is like gum—and that doing anything sexual means offering their future husbands gum that’s already been chewed. Virginity can also be compared to water that’s been spat in by multiple people—because no one will want to drink it. Or tape that’s been applied, then ripped off, over and over until it’s useless. Or a rose that has its petals removed until only the thorns remain. The goal is to make the girls feel like they’re worthless without their virginity.

You can imagine the message that sends to girls who have been physically assaulted or just wanted to explore their bodies with someone else.

It can get worse.

Consider a sermon once delivered by Kris Vallotton, a popular leader at Bethel Church in California. It caused a kerfuffle in 2021 when he re-uploaded it for a new audience… only to quickly take it down after receiving backlash.

The sermon perpetuated sexist tropes, victim-blaming, and bad science. He claimed with total confidence, “Guys are stimulated sexually through the eyes, women through the touch,” and that anyone who disagreed was “a freak.” He told the crowd, “If it’s not for sale, girls, don’t advertise,” with no analog for the boys. He referred to someone who once attended one of his ministry programs as “my most promiscuous girl.” And he insisted, “I’ve seen thousands of people’s virginity restored. I have hundreds of emails about girls’ hymens being restored.”

That’s not the only bit of anti-science bullshit these people have spread. Just consider this absolutely real passage from 1975’s What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women by Dr. James Dobson. He wrote that when men aren’t getting sex, their semen literally builds up inside to the point that his body needs a release “and if she loves him, she will seek to satisfy those needs as meaningfully and as regularly as possible.” Her sexual needs, of course, are not considered an equal priority.

The 72-hour rule is a myth.

Or consider this excerpt from 2002’s Sheet Music: Uncovering the Secrets of Sexual Intimacy in Marriage by Kevin Leman in which he rhapsodized about the need for Christian wives to have sex with their husbands even when they didn’t want to because it was “acting out of love.”

Or consider the Christian wife who said sex with her husband was painful and unsatisfying for years into her marriage… and then confided in her friend that it must have been because she didn’t have a clitoris. Her friend later showed her where it was… using her newborn baby girl. (Her husband, by the way, is a “Clinical Sexologist” with a Ph.D.)

Or consider Purity Balls, where little girls make promises to their fathers to remain virgins until they’re married, or porn monitoring software that alerts someone else when you visit an adult website, or everything else Speaker Mike Johnson promotes.

This is what Purity Culture is.

It’s the confident blind leading the gullible blind, all under the guise that this is what Jesus expects of them.

It’s no wonder more and more Christians have spoken out about the damage of this rhetoric. Hell, in 2018, Joshua Harris—the one-time unofficial Christian spokesperson for abstinence, courtship, and waiting until marriage to do everything as a result of his book I Kissed Dating Goodbye—apologized for the harm he caused and renounced his own book.

That’s the thing about Purity Culture: There’s no nice way to spread those Christian beliefs without falling into harmful generalizations, sexist language, and rejecting the very notion that sex before marriage can be enjoyable and useful and even empowering. Proponents of Purity Culture can’t bring themselves to admit other people have healthy and active sex lives outside of marriage and that there’s no reason to be ashamed of it. For them, it’s abstinence or death. There are no other options. Anything that occurs on the road to sex is also prohibited; it’s all temptation that must be avoided at all costs.

We know these beliefs lead to unhealthy sexual repression, a deeply misogynistic culture, and a church environment in which sexual assault victims can’t even tell anyone what happened to them because they’ll be seen as the instigators (“Well, what were you wearing?”).

That’s the backdrop for this new paper, published in Sociology of Religion, that discusses the “effects of Purity Culture tropes on white Christian women’s marital and sexual satisfaction and experience of sexual pain.”

Researchers Joanna Sawatsky, Rebecca Lindenbach, Sheila Wray Gregoire, and Keith Gregoire explain what we already know about the harm of Purity Culture on girls—some of which I’ve highlighted above—before setting the stage for how it affects them after marriage. It’s a focus, they say, that has rarely been explored in depth.

They specifically looked at white Christian women’s beliefs regarding six purity tropes:

• Gatekeeping: Guys all want one thing, and girls have a responsibility to make sure they never stumble.

• Perpetual lust: Guys are always horny. It’s a battle for them!

• Soul ties: If you have sex before marriage, you’re giving a piece of yourself to each partner and therefore withholding those things from your future husband.

• Obligation sex: A wife needs to give her husband sex whenever he wants it… no matter what.

• No divorce: You’re stuck in a marriage even if your sex life sucks or there’s abuse in the relationship. (An affair or a spouse leaving Christianity are the only exceptions to life-long marriage.)

• Sexual methadone: A wife has to give her husband sex frequently or else he’ll stumble.

The first three involve restricting sex. The last three involve coercing sex.

And what did the researchers find?

Women who grew up with certain purity beliefs had higher levels of sexual pain:

… we found past belief in purity culture tropes was associated with higher rates of severe primary sexual pain for three of the six tropes investigated (soul ties, obligation sex, and sexual methadone). The largest effect size was for the “soul ties” trope (that a part of a person’s soul becomes attached to each sexual partner).

They went on to say that women who dealt with sexual pain were more likely to ditch those once-sacrosanct purity tropes as a result (with the exception of Gatekeeping).

It got a little more confusing around marital and sexual satisfaction.

The researchers found that women who currently believed in Gatekeeping, Perpetual lust, and Soul ties had “lower marital satisfaction” and “lower sexual satisfaction.” Believers in Obligation sex were also likely to have “lower current sexual satisfaction.” No surprises there. But those who believe in No divorce and Sexual methadone have higher marital satisfaction. (It’s possible, though I’m just speculating, that many women in those situations convince themselves their marriages are wonderful when they’re anything but that from the outside.)

You know who had better marriages and sex lives? Women who ditched these beliefs entirely, now or in the past.

Women were more likely to deconstruct sexually restrictive tropes if their marital satisfaction was high. Never believing tropes were associated with higher marital satisfaction (compared with still believing) for four of the sex tropes evaluated (gatekeeping, perpetual lust, obligation sex, and no divorce).

Women who no longer believe tropes regarding the nature of men (gate-keeping, perpetual lust) or sex (soul ties) had higher sexual satisfaction on average than those who still believed. Those who did not believe in the past had higher sexual satisfaction than those who still believed it for all models except for the soul ties trope (univariate).

The most harmful of the tropes may be Soul ties, the idea that women become “used” if they have any kind of sex before marriage. If they grow up believing that, the researchers said, their bodies “may trigger trauma responses” when they finally end up having sex, even with someone they love and who isn’t a threat.

But ditching these beliefs may ultimately be good for their health:

… Believing misogynistic religious tropes in high school was highly correlated to later development of primary sexual pain. This suggests that the women who believed in misogynistic tropes at an early age and then experienced negative effects were more motivated to change their belief system than those who experienced no negative effects…

…

… Considering the number of beliefs identified in bestselling evangelical literature that limit women’s autonomy regarding their sexuality and lived experience of gender, we suggest that viewing sexual pain disorders as a form of complex trauma should extend to the experience of women growing up in religious spaces that methodically work to remove their sexual autonomy over their lifespan.

The more we learn about Purity Culture, the more we find out how much harm it’s done. Whatever religious standards pastors and authors were hoping to meet by spouting these baseless beliefs about sex, they weren’t worth the cost to countless women whose lives have been ruined because of them.

If Christians don’t have the guts to confront the mess they’ve created, then it’s up to the rest of us to call them out on it. The pressure from the outside—pointing out the weirdness of Purity Culture—has helped. So have the courageous stories from Christians who wore their Silver Rings and believed sex would be amazing and perfect after their wedding only to learn that sex, like everything else in a relationship, requires work and self-awareness and the understanding that not everyone is compatible. They want other Christian women to know they don’t have to go down this path.

“I think there’s this misconception that the problem with purity culture is that people become prudish or don’t like sex,” researcher Joanna Sawatsky told me via email. “What we have found is that for many women, their ability to consent has been systematically chipped away. It’s not that they’re prudes—it’s that they’re not able to say ‘no’ so they can’t freely say ‘yes.’” 

To put it another way, if you don’t think of your (current or future) husband as a horny monster who must constantly be fed, and you don’t think of sex as something that must always be suppressed until marriage (at which point it will immediately be unleashed), you’re going to have a happier marriage and a healthier sex life.

And if you have a happy marriage and happy sex life, you’re more likely to ditch the beliefs that suggested those things were obligatory.

A woman in a good marriage is likely to reject tropes believed earlier in her life that paint men or sex as bad. Her lived experience counters what she was taught. Conversely, a woman in a bad marriage is likely to reject tropes that are currently harming her, leaving her without sexual autonomy or means to escape. Her deconstruction of these ideas is a result of her unhappiness, not its cause.

…

We posit that a key component of the correlation between sexual pain disorders and conservative Christian women is that (1) structurally sexist churches teach a view of sex that robs women of their autonomy; (2) their first time having sex is more likely to be perfunctory following a ceremony rather than spontaneous due to arousal; and so (3) their sexual debut is more likely to be uncomfortable, painful, and feel forced, causing trauma even in relationships where there is no intent to use or abuse.

It’s long past time, Sawatsky added, that Christian leaders stop treating sex as a “male need and a female obligation.” Focus on consent. Ditch the sexist language. Stop comparing girls to chewed up gum.

It’s a fascinating topic that is worthy of a lot more research. Maybe, eventually, Purity advocates will put away the bibles and read about the real-life impact their sermons and books about sex are having.

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