Purity rings, abstinence pledges, courting— Evangelical Christianity has a particular and peculiar stance on human sexuality. If you’re like me, you grew up surrounded by this “Purity Culture,” which relies on poorly sourced data, psychologically harmful misinformation, and carefully prooftexted bible verses. The effects of Purity Culture have been almost universally negative, and I wonder what it would look like for Christians to talk about sex more healthily. In each post in this series, I’ll give a misconception I heard growing up and offer a healthier counterpoint.

This week’s Purity Culture misconception:
“Women who have multiple partners are immoral, while men who have multiple partners are just caving in to their sin nature and deserve our sympathy. Men are such slaves to their desire, unlike women, who we expect to be paragons of virtue.”

Once (and only once) in my very early twenties, I used the word “slut” to describe an acquaintance who had multiple sexual partners. My sister-in-law overheard my comment and deservedly let me have it. “How dare you,” she admonished, “You don’t know her experience or understand her desires or have any idea about her relationships with these guys, and here you’re throwing this accusatory word at her— a word which has no male equivalent by the way. Don’t let me hear that word out of your mouth ever again.” And I haven’t said it since because she was absolutely right. Our culture judges women differently than it judges men, and there aren’t even male equivalents for most of the slurs we lob at women. (And yeah, I’m going to shoot down “man-whore” right now since it’s just an insult traditionally reserved for women but with the word “man” in front. Besides, can you honestly think of a time where “man-whore” has ever been said without a hint of facetiousness? It’s practically a term of endearment in many circles. Okay, tangent over.) The larger culture already has issues on this topic, but Purity Culture ups the ante.

Purity Culture’s mistreatment of female sexuality is perhaps its greatest double-standard (and once again, I strongly urge you to listen to some female voices on this issue since I’m writing from a male perspective). The abstinence-only programs from my upbringing always centered around male pleasure, and I don’t know that female desire was ever even acknowledged, let alone celebrated. Instead, female virginity was placed on a pedestal as this thing to be sought after through a church-sanctioned courting process. Listen, if you’re an Evangelical man reading this, I have some surprising news for you: sex isn’t just about you, and it turns out women can enjoy it too. To approach sex and sexuality from such a male-centric perspective is to ignore half the population, and shaming women for even having sex drives? Yeah, no. We need to do better.

Maybe instead, we should say…
As we discuss one another’s desires, we should always be wary of setting different expectations of different sexes and genders— especially when it means shaming one group for the desires we treat as “natural” in another.

If we’re going to stigmatize sexual desire, treat people equally.
If we’re going to give free passes on sexual desire, treat people equally.
If we’re going to impose abstinence, treat people equally.
If we’re going to allow young people to explore their sexualities, treat people equally.
Don’t impose a standard on one group you’re unwilling to impose on another. When we allow double standards of this nature, we reinforce centuries of oppression and send the message to young women their desires don’t matter. We reduce women down to a single quality (whether or not they’ve had sex), and we also create entitled men who lack empathy, as I exhibited when my sister-in-law set me straight.

So regardless of sex or gender,
treat people equally,
with love and encouragement
as they discover who they are,
as they experience their desires,
and as they determine how to act on them.