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:
“All men desire women, and anything else is unnatural.”

Yeah, no.
I know plenty of men for whom “natural” is loving another man;
loving a woman, if possible at all, would be an extreme cognitive dissonance.
I know plenty of men who don’t obsess over sex every minute of every day;
they simply have other priorities.
I know plenty of men who are just fine being single;
they’re comfortable in their own skins.
I know plenty of men who have voluntarily chosen celibacy;
they have other commitments of greater importance to them.
Sure, statistically speaking, the majority of men are heterosexual and a little predatory because society has given us a free pass for so long, but it’s not all men. (Crap, did I really just write the words “not all men” in a post? I feel unclean. Moving on.) One of Purity Culture’s not-so-subtle agendas is the erasure of anyone who doesn’t fit the mold of a hyper-sexual straight cisgender man. In truth, sexuality is more fluid, and the Purity Culture mold is a more recent invention.

A handful of pre-Christian cultures like the Sumerians and ancient Greeks didn’t view sexuality through the lens of strict heteronormativity, and classic literature like The Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s Iliad, and Plato’s Symposium celebrate same-sex relationships with varying levels of explicitness. To these cultures, love of someone of the same sex or gender could be perfectly natural. Of course, they also practiced pederasty and ritual prostitution, so they weren’t total bastions of sexual progress either, but the point stands: cisgender heterosexuality as the only “natural” path is a fairly new innovation in the big picture of history.

Maybe instead, we should say…
“Natural” isn’t the same for everyone, so don’t make assumptions about the people around you. Start from a place of listening and learning, not judgment.

Human sexuality is fairly fluid throughout childhood and adolescence, and there’s even some gray area in adulthood too. (At this point, it may be helpful to take a few seconds to google the Kinsey Scale and related research.) There are a lot of shades of sexuality, and we can’t expect everyone to fit Purity Culture’s hyper-sexualized cisgender heterosexual mold. The popular culture is beginning to acknowledge this, as evidenced by increased representation in media, strides forward in the fight for marriage equality, and the growing number of major businesses changing their H.R. practices and pouring support into Pride events. Purity Culture, on the other hand, denies what modern psychology and sociology increasingly confirm: there’s a whole wide spectrum of sexuality.

For LGBTQ folks, these different expressions of sexual identity are completely natural.
It would seem Purity Culture’s rigid stance is the unnatural one.