Purity culture is a concept that is foreign to some and much too familiar to others. For me personally, these fallacies were not introduced to me until I started attending a Christian school. Object-oriented metaphors were the core of my school’s sex education and after 6 years going to a Christian school, the most important message I left with was “don’t have sex before marriage”. Literally...out of all the things a religious school could have drilled in my brain, not love, not grace, not acceptance, but instead “sex bad”. But abstinence based sex education isn’t the most harmful part. It’s the fact that we were taught that our purity was the most important quality a woman can have. That our virginity (whatever the fuck that means) is what makes us whole and worthy. And they may have not outright said these things or presented them as harshly, but when you compare a naive 15-year-old and her changing body to a piece of gum or an Oreo cookie, it is internalized as the idea that she is nothing but an object, a vessel or sorts, and her greatest aspiration is to be a hole for a man to fill so that she may please him.

 

The lie that is purity culture is something I have been so passionate about for the past couple of years as I have had to deconstruct my belief system and re-evaluate everything I was taught. I have noticed how it has affected me and my views on sex and intimacy, how it instilled a fear in me that I have yet to outgrow, and how that has affected my relationships or even more often prevented relationships. I have also seen how these lies have negatively affected my friends, their relationships, and most importantly their self-worth. I have been trying to figure out a way to turn this trauma into art (as I always do) but I was struggling with a way to express everything I wanted to say in a singular body of work or project. for this I needed help. I needed stories. I needed to expose open wounds and those that are healing, not just my own. I reached out to the girls that I went to high school with as well as other people I knew grew up in the church, and I was blown away by the amount of hurt that was lying underneath the surface. I was even surprise of the certain people that reached out to me to tell their thoughts and stories. I want to thank everyone who contacted me to share, even if they were not featured in the final project. I compiled the stories of these incredibly smart and strong women as the narration of this piece and let it naturally oppose the visual representation of object-based analogies used throughout different Christian circles.