Purity culture
I thought I was Christian. Apparently not. Apparently loving Jesus in your heart and trying to do fair by your fellow man isn’t enough. Apparently you need to be celibate too.
The hilarious thing is that I AM CELIBATE. But not for the correct reasons. Apparently being naturally conservative (literally the way God made me) is not a good enough reason to be celibate. I need to be doing this to “honor God”
Not only that, I found out that there is a movement in “Purity culture” where girls and guys wait until marriage to KISS. Are you in fact serious??? Why??? Do you hate sex? Do you hate yourselves>?
So let’s talk about sex. The Bible loves poking its nose into good peoples bedrooms because it is right, how you do one thing is how you do everything, so if you are sexually immoral, then you will be immoral in other ways too.
Warning- the next part of this post gets graphic, so if you are 16 and under. Go get your parents and for heaven’s sake stop reading. Being a grown up isn’t fun and traumatising yourself isn’t in fact part of growing up. Stay young and stay safe.
Warning aside. My view on sexual immorality is doing something that may hurt another person.
· Sleeping around is sexually immoral because a minimum of one of those people is going to get hurt.
· Paedophilia is immoral because you are hurting a child by taking away their innocence.
· Rape is immoral because it hurts and scars another person for life.
Other than that… mind your own business. If you’re not doing anything to hurt another person then you probably aren’t doing anything wrong. Because ultimately God wants you to honour his creation and other people are in fact his creation. So following those guildline hopefully gets me into heaven.
But lets’ talk about “purity culture” and let’s call a spade a spade here. Purity culture is far more a black thing than a white thing. I have never heard my white friends talk about purity culture, but “the black church” seems obsessed with it and the new levels of control and shame it brings. Remember, jackasses it didn’t work for the established church and its not going to work for you. People eventually get tired of feeling shame.
Purity culture is only important because we encourage men to “sow wild oats” Why, in God’s name do we do that? That man’s “wild oats” is someone’s daughter, someone’s precious child who gave her body to this man only for him to leave her because of “wild oats” he may get her pregnant= easy abortion or he may leave her with a nasty STI, but we don’t think about the consequences for her, we only think about the man and his “main character energy” they are “supporting characters” and a “notch in the bedpost” thus demeaning their value as people.
Women meanwhile are encouraged to wait for a husband. I did. The smartest and dumbest thing I ever did. It was smart because it meant if he wanted to have sex with me he had to marry me… It was dumb because he did in fact marry me and he was a nightmare husband. I also plan to wait to have sex until marriage when I remarry. This is because I am a very sensitive person and I consider sex a very intimate act that I wouldn’t do with just anyone. I’d need to love them and they’d need to love me. The main way I expect to be shown love is to be protected, and to be cherished in marriage. So its not just no sex before marriage. Its no sex until I’m cherished, protected and cared for in the marriage. I held that standard in my first marriage too and it meant…No sex, but a lot of sexual assault.
Now we have purity culture, because we’ve sexualised men and then told men that the ultimate show of manliness is to wait until marriage.
Literally the equivalent of pouring water down their throats then telling them to hold their pee for 6 hours. A lot of guys are going to pee their pants. You’ve spent the rest of their lives conditioning them to do the exact opposite of what you’ve just asked them to do.
I’m not saying that men shouldn’t wait until marriage to have sex. In fact I would encourage it in men. Love yourself a bit more. Honour yourself, its not just that you should sleep with every woman who you can. Try and satisfy one woman well, that involves getting to know her personally, sexually and non sexually and involves a deeper connection than casual sex can offer. Because I can’t imagine casual sex being very much better than your right hand. Let’s be honest.
I actually think that we’ve made it too hard for men. A certain level of maturity needs to be reached in order for you to enjoy sex. And I posted some thoughts on this on the “should the legal age of consent be 30?” post. We’ve literally set them up to fail. Told them to splurge in their youth but when its time to get a good woman, you have to abstain. You’ll go from gluttony to starvation in one fell swoop.
But to add to this, we’ve now got purity culture telling people to wait to marriage to kiss. I’m not talking frenching, I mean a peck. This basically means you have no idea if you are sexually compatible to someone until you are legally bound. Which is madness because guess what ladies? If a man can wait 6 months to kiss. HE IS NOT THAT INTO YOU HONEY. Or he’s gay.
We always talk about red flags in a relationship. Let’s talk about green ones. If a man respects your boundaries, green flag. If he respects his own boundaries, green flag. If he loves and cherishes you, green flag. If he is willing to communicate how he feels, green flag. But waiting to marriage to kiss? Darling, its not got any purpose other than showing this man has iron clad self control, which means he may not be affectionate in marriage. But there’s nothing in the Bible that says you can’t kiss. And remember the Bible was written in a time when there were only arranged marriages, so you did wait to marriage to kiss because that was the first time you met your spouse.
I know for me personally. I want lots of love and affection. I want a man to be sexually attracted to me and I want him to be red blooded. I’m not going to have sex with him until marriage because that’s who I am. If he wants to have sex with me the formula is as follows.
1. Make your way to Hatton Gardens in London.
2. Buy me a beautiful radiant diamond.
3. Go to my mum’s house and ask her permission.
4. Pour some libations out for my father. (Lambrini was his favourite)
5. Ask my permission to marry me. Unless you have arthritis, you’d better be on one knee when you do it.
6. Get a priest to read the banns for 4 weeks
7. Go back to Hatton Gardens and get a wedding ring.
8. Get to the church on time (if you’re late, I’m not showing up for a lifetime of disgrace)
9. Marry me.
10. Cherish me, Love me, appreciate me and honour me. Take great care of me in all ways.
11. Then, and only then, will you get sex.
Grace and Courage.
Annetta Mother Smith.