Why I Can’t Trust You With The Term “Purity Culture”

A brief note about the title: the “you” here may not be you personally, and it’s not that the term “purity culture” doesn’t have its place. Rather, there are specific uses of this term that have put a dent in a speaker’s credibility for me and impeded their argument. In those moments, I’ve wished for the words to explain to them what I thought they were doing wrong. This post is my attempt to put together those words: first by explaining the origins of “purity culture,” leading into my understanding of its key traits, and then contrasting that against the kind of usage I see a problem with.

[Crossposted to Pillowfort.]

Christianity and Growing up Gray-Ace

Sometimes I think about my experiences in the context of what other aces have been through and have to wonder why I turned out the way I did.

Though the pressures were there, it seems like other environmental factors, modern Christianity being one, formed a kind of buffer against them — not enough to make things a cakewalk, but enough to change the course of things away from how they could have gone.  I don’t want to cast it in too flattering a light, but at the same time, this post has to acknowledge its influence, for me at least, on why I don’t hate myself as much as I might have.