Floating Brains

A reflection on purity culture

From the age of thirteen to about seventeen, I wore a lot of sweatshirts. In western Washington this was effortless, even for half the total hours of summer. No one bats an eye at you for wearing a sweatshirt.

But I may as well have draped myself in a security blanket.

Alexandra Klein recently wrote a piece called “Something is Keeping Christian Women Single: Alex Cooper’s Pregnancy Exposed It.” It’s an excellent essay on how evangelical purity culture can suppress women’s natural charm, desire, and “embodied femininity,” and then these women wonder why they’re still single into their late twenties despite being faithful and “waiting on God’s timing.”

I feel for these women because I narrowly escaped their fate. Sweatshirt Girl still met Good Christian Guy who didn’t carry the shame that purity culture can bestow on men, despite his similar upbringing. I say “escape,” but really purity culture impacted me negatively in at least three ways: an inability to assess my own attractiveness on the dating market, a demotivation to learn how to flirt, and a lasting reticence to allow myself to be desired.

Modesty culture

Purity culture has a lot of lofty spiritual rhetoric about how glorious it is to save oneself for marriage and to be modest and godly, but when you boil it down to praxis, it crystallizes into a set of rules. Almost all of them are for women, almost all of them pertain to modesty. You can’t wear shirts that show your midriff. You can’t wear spaghetti straps. Necklines should be high enough that nobody can see anything, even if you bend over. Bikinis? Literally the devil’s work.

There are even unspoken rules about how you can move your body. Evangelical and Baptist churches do not hold dances, because dancing can be seductive. We don’t talk about it, nobody says outright, “no dancing—too sexy.” We just don’t do those things. Nobody from the Christian and Missionary Alliance knows how to dance.

Church leadership might be forgiven for blanket rules that keep boys and girls from grinding up on each other, but it comes through in other restrictive attitudes. At one point—one of those rare times I was not wearing a sweatshirt—I stretched my arms up and then tucked them behind my chair during a youth activity. I was maybe 14 or 15. A middle-aged mom helping out gave me such a stern look I immediately went back to slouching. She literally imbued me with shame just by catching my gaze.

Purity culture is mostly modesty culture, and modesty is pretty much exclusively a female problem. Men don’t have to change anything, for obvious reasons. They dress modestly anyway, and nobody expects them to cover up their abs on lake day. Thus, the purity of the entire cohort of young adults in a church is hung like a ball and chain around the necks of girls. Do you know what happens when you give good Christian girls rules to follow and tell them it’s a great and godly responsibility to uphold them? They take it to heart. Girls who are good at school, which is most girls, are going to be good at purity culture, because it’s a framework for conformity. You can get so good at it, in fact, that you never even awaken to your God-given feminine charm, much less your sexuality.

“Do not open.”

Honestly, for a lot of us, it was weight off our necks—at least in the younger years. We didn’t have to worry about crushes, or if so-and-so thought we were cute. They weren’t likely to speak up anyway (which is an area where purity culture can do a number on young men). You became content in the unknowing, where your sexuality was a little black box that could remain sealed, tucked under the bed for “when the right guy comes along” (how will you know it’s the right guy? Lol just pray about it). Girls who were overweight or had other physical shortcomings liked purity culture, because it brought all the teen girls down to an even, sexless playing field. Girls love an even playing field, and so protecting the legalism of purity was self-reinforcing.

This culture masked a lot of insecurity and social shortcomings, especially for me. I didn’t have to learn how to flirt, because flirting was antithetical to purity culture and the great, godly Waiting. It didn’t stop me from subtly envying girls who were natural flirts, but it was nothing I couldn’t brush aside. There are no external pressures to learn how to use your charm in purity culture. No friend takes you aside and says, “Hey, do you like [that boy over there]? Why don’t you go talk to him?” No friend is there to advise you on how to subtly invade personal space or touch someone with an innocent but pleasing sort of spark. I didn’t have to learn any of this, and by not learning any of this, I was being a Very Good Christian.

I also didn’t have to worry about whether guys thought I was attractive, because it didn’t matter. Don’t Date in High School was another unspoken purity culture rule, so what was the point? Again, no helpful friend says, “Hey, you’d look really pretty if you curled your hair this way,” or “Have you tried blending eyeshadow above your crease so you can actually see it?” Because those things weren’t supposed to matter to us. I genuinely didn’t know how I measured up for guys, though in the absence of feedback, my natural inclination was to overestimate my flaws. As we will see shortly, this lack of knowledge did not pay dividends.

But in a real sense, this was a burden averted, at least for a while. I could focus on school, on my hobbies, on My Relationship with God (“dating Jesus” was very popular in my adolescence). Worrying about the male gaze was a problem for other girls. When my mother casually floated to me that my sister was having trouble fielding all the male attention, and that I was pretty, how did I handle it? I just shrugged.

Topline thought: not my area of expertise.

Underlying thought: I am not attractive.

Follow-up thought: I’ll figure this out later. I have time.

(Of course I didn’t stop to think that maybe my lack of male attention had more to do with my lack of openness and willingness to flirt, not my physical characteristics. But who in my Christian world would have possibly dropped that suggestion on me? No one.)

Satisfactory, until it’s not.

In any case, this brings us back to the sweatshirts. Sweatshirts were kosher. Sweatshirts let me hide my body. Sweatshirts kept nagging middle-aged women with outdated hairstyles from drilling me with their prudish gaze.

For a while, modesty and ultra-conservative, completely de-sexed social interactions worked. They worked until I was about seventeen, and then I suddenly went into crisis mode. I realized that parents tried to keep me around other teens to keep them accountable, like some kind of chaperone. Georgi is not a sexual being. Georgi will keep them on the straight and narrow. Her presence alone is enough to kill any kind of mood.

And I let it sink in that I hadn’t been flirted with, ever, at least not in ways overt enough for my purity brain to detect. A potential reality hit me like the wake of speedboat: I could be single forever. Nobody wants me. What is wrong with me? What is the standard for being desired and loved, and how far am I from meeting it? These suddenly became urgent questions, and I was anxious for answers.

That, in short, is an important preface to how I ended up dating an alcoholic eight years my senior with no life prospects. Yes, depression and loneliness played a huge role, but all the issues above primed me perfectly to reciprocate enthusiasm with virtually any man with a modicum of charm would finally give me attention. I regret to inform my most prudish and legalistic brothers and sisters in Christ that if you do not let young women flirt and get rejected, flirt and be accepted, be flirted with and told they are pretty or even (God forbid!) sexy, they will eat from the palm of whatever low-quality man comes along to validate them.

Unzipped.

This brings me to the third harm, which I will try to speak to as delicately as I can. It turns out that even when you find and marry an amazing guy who treasures you and thinks you’re hot, the sweatshirt is still embedded in your psyche. It wants to stick around. If, for years, you were stitched through with the idea that it is not good and proper to be sexually desired, wholly and nakedly, then covering up stays your default mode even when it is no longer appropriate. You tell yourself you are not hiding, that you are not ashamed, and that nobody told you that. Intellectually, you know you have no reason to be shy. But reality is unfortunately more complicated.

To be clear, it wasn’t anything truly serious. It was subtle, like a speedbump. Still, it took me years to fully unwind this mentality. Years. It is only looking back fourteen years later that I can see just how far I’ve come. And you know what? I’m a little mad about it. I’m frustrated that I had to rewire my brain out of something that didn’t need to be there in the first place. I’m ticked that I could have had better and freer intimacy had I not been helped into the Sweatshirt Mentality by the church blindly following legalism with no regard for its potential long-term consequences.

The telos of purity culture as I experienced it is not actually saving sex for marriage. It’s floating brains, cut off from any hint of carnal desire or erotic love until an appointed time, at which these brains are suddenly dropped into a God-given body with hormones and pheromones and nerve endings and told, “Godspeed.” It’s generations of women with their sexuality tucked into sealed black boxes marked “Someday.” It’s young men receiving the message that there is something wrong with them because they recognize the female form even in inanimate objects, and think about sex, and want to do that with a woman someday, preferably as soon as possible.

It’s sweatshirts that even in their shapelessness, cling to you like the all rules they represent.