Is there a creepier word in the lexicon than “purity”?
NZ Christian outfit Focus on the Family is planning a Purity Camp where girls will learn to “stand up for purity”. Meaning, of course, sexual purity. The camp was apparently inspired by Purity Balls in the U.S., where Christian fathers pledge to ensure their daughter doesn’t lose her virginity before she is married. It looks like the inspiration was general, not specific, and the camp will do its own thing with the idea.
I’m not going to write about the pros and cons of preserving your virginity until marriage, or even of recruiting your father to keep your hymen intact. Today I’m just interested in the word purity. What a horrible, horrible word. Decode it with me for a second.
Purity originally referred only to an aspect of the physical world – the amount to which a mineral or a liquid was mixed with other substances. Purity was heavily associated with value; pure substances are valuable; the less pure they are, the less valuable they are. (According to this dictionary the word was first applied to morality and moral corruption in the 14th century.)
“Purity” in terms of sexuality is a metaphorical construct. This metaphor claims that morality or selfhood or godliness is like a substance that can be diluted by another (bad) substance, namely sexuality. Sexual behaviour makes you impure, like a drop of ink into a glass of water. Sexual behaviour makes you less valuable.
All of this means that the metaphor of “purity”, like in the Purely Girls Camp, implies two unpleasant things.
1) As a young girl, your sexuality is not really part of you, but something apart from your pure self that you can and should battle to control and strive to escape. You are less valuable if you don’t.
2) As a young girl, your value should be and will be evaluated and judged by an external observer. Purity is not a statement of self-assessment, but an evaluation made from without.
I hate the word “purity”. It has little to do with Christian values – a loving and forgiving God could not begin to engage with the condemnatory underpinning of the word. Instead, I think the word is in such common use – particularly in the U.S. – because of its associations with traditional views of women as property. Fathers signing purity pledges aren’t so much worried that God will see their daughters as impure; they’re worried that other fathers will.
The Purely Girls camp is its own thing. It won’t, I hope, be echoing the deeply disturbing aspects of the Purity Balls. Still, the language in use suggests that a troubling ideology will be part of what is conveyed at the camp. Girls won’t just learn how to say no; they’ll learn that their sexuality is their enemy, and that it is right and proper for them to be judged for their purity.
They’ll probably wait a few years longer before having sex, though. That makes it all seem worthwhile.
==
(Further reading: from everyone’s favourite official White House website, Operation Infinite Purity.)
10 thoughts on “On Purity”
Comments are closed.
Why aren’t there purity camps for boys?
So, boys don’t have to worry about not being sexual? It’s all up to the girls (and their Dads?) to fend off the sexually curious boys?
If you read through the rhetoric of purity as a goal for young people, you do find that it is for boys as well as girls. However, in practice it is almost without exception constructed as a female quality. Certainly it is seen as more crucial for girls to remain pure.
So, no, boys do have to worry about not being sexual. They just have to worry about it much, much less. Secret reason: there is much less at stake.
Wait a few years longer, maybe.
Know less about how to tell good reasons for having sex from bad reasons for having sex, quite probably.
Know less about how to avoid STDs and prevent unchosen pregnancies, also quite probably.
My parents made it really clear to me that any nice, likeminded young person who I chose to have sex with was lucky and that it was important that I should make sure I enjoyed myself a great deal and had reason to feel happy about the whole experience afterwards. Purity was never mentioned.
(This seems to have worked — today is the eleventh anniversary of my relationship (seventh wedding anniversary) with the lovely guy who is the father of my daughter, and I’m still on excellent terms with my former lovers.)
Excellent post. Although I have to say, I can envisage Jack in a few years’ time on our front porch with a shotgun 😉
More seriously, though: you touch on the notion of young girls (and their purity) as property and for me this is one of the more worrisome aspects of the whole thing – if they’re sexual property, then whose sexual property? Their fathers’, presumably. There is certainly, to my mind, a rather sickly Freudian-incestuous edge to the Purity Balls. And to follow up on Jenni’s point, do mothers accompany their sons to Purity Balls?
Incidentally, a propos of the virginity pledge link, have you heard of the Silver Ring Thing? http://www.silverringthing.com/
One of the more worrying aspects of the SRT, according to sexual health educators in the US, is that teenagers who take the pledge interpret the chastity vow, whether out of wilful ignorance or more innocent cluelessness, in strictly literal terms. So, while eschewing boy-girl vaginal intercourse, they’ll engage in other sorts of sexual contact, penetrative or otherwise, that might be risky if undertaken unsafely. Because anal sex ‘doesn’t count’, apparently.
Yeah, the pledge movement is a huge waste of energy even on its own terms. Its sole success, delaying sexual activity for a few years, is made worthless by the stuff you guys point out so accurately. (Although technically it ain’t the pledge causing problems, its the ignorance that universally accompanies the pledge that causes the problems.)
The whole thing just makes me angry if I start thinking about it.
My favourite bit in the research I linked to:
“The researchers theorized that the pledge may appeal to some students because it gives them a unique identity, apart from the crowd. After too many of their fellow students joined them in pledging, abstinence lost its special appeal.”
My laughter is bitter.
As a parent, I would be more worried about this statement from the NIH report you’ve linked to… ie “Although the analysis showed that pledgers delayed sexual intercourse, it also indicated that among those teens who eventually did begin to have intercourse, pledgers were less likely to use contraception than were non-pledgers.”
This doesn’t surprise me… as a teen in a Baptist youth group (and NZ Baptists are much less scary than US ones) I frequently heard “There is no contraception that is 100% effective against pregnancy or disease” (something I do intend to discuss with my kids) warped to something like “Contraception is not effective against pregnancy or disease”… if its not effective, why use it?:)
When I read the words “purity balls” I started sniggering like a schoolboy.
Oh, dear. I am going to hell.
Here was me hoping it was all organic food and herbal tea. So disappointed.
Maybe it makes ’em wait a bit longer but it also increases the chance they’ll marry early, and precipitously, for the sake of a fuck.
I’d like to draw your attention to the Eight “I’d Really Rather You Didn’t”s of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. In particular, number 2:
I’d really rather you didn’t use my existence as a means to oppress, subjugate, punish, eviscerate, and/or, you know, be mean to others. I don’t require sacrifices, and purity is for drinking water, not people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_the_Flying_Spaghetti_Monster