I am going to say something very uncomfortable. Read before you react please.

Purity culture encourages pedophilia, a thread:

Purity culture encourages pedophilia.

Some of the standards of purity culture are innocence (pretty much ignorance about sex), submission (for women), virginity as the ultimate standard, and “modesty” (for women that is wearing clothes that don’t reveal their adult curves)*
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Purity culture makes the desirable standard a child. It makes child likeness desirable in regards to sexuality. It makes virginity, and innocence, and submission; what the male brain should want most in a partner. And your brain doesn’t rewire just because you get married.
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This doesn’t mean every man raised in purity culture is a pedophile, that’s not what I am saying. What I am saying is that purity culture wires the brain of men to desire child likeness, which encourages pedophilia. After all desire and objectification happen in our brain.

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Now if you are a pedophile who wants to act on those desires, purity culture does a lot of the grooming for you. Purity culture discourages comprehensive sex education leaving children without the ability to know what’s appropriate and what’s not.

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It shames people for any sexual thoughts or behaviors, which makes children who may be vulnerable not want to tell their caregivers or anybody else if something happens to them.

Its emphasis on virginity makes abused children prefer to lie to not be seen as less than.

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It teaches children not to “trust their own heart,” and to trust authority figures, which makes any pedophile’s voice more important than their own intuition.

It puts responsibility on women to protect men; causing abused girls to blame themselves for abuse.

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If as a society we really are concerned about vulnerable children, then we need to toss purity culture, advocate for comprehensive sex-education, stop pushing narratives of what desirable women/men should look/behave like, normalize sexuality as a part of the human experience,
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teach consent to children, talk about sex as a coping mechanism vs. a healthy experience, give children agency over their own bodies (which means allowing them to say ‘no’ to things you may thing they want), dismantle the absurd notion that virginity and worth are connected.

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*I didn’t mention this as part of purity culture because it isn’t precisely, but isn’t it curious that women are expected to shave their body including their vulva? That women aren’t allowed to look like we’ve aged, that relationships where men are older is what’s normal?
**Women inside of fundamentalist Christianity are also expected to depend financially on men, to be home while men are out in the world, to not get formal education... they are expected to be grown children. Assertive, educated women are “problematic,” “not attractive.”

More from Jo Luehmann

TW: suicidal ideation.

At the darkest days of the abuse I was being subjected to I decided to attend a conference for women in Los Angeles. I convinced my mother in law to pay for it because I couldn’t afford it. @ChristineCaine was preaching. I was desperate...
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I wanted to die, I didn’t see a way out and I had tried everything. I imagined many ways to die daily. The most recurring one was throwing my car down a bridge I had to drive over every day. I never did it because my kids were in the car and I was afraid one of them would...

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survive or I’d kill someone on the way down.

Christine spoke about honoring your pastors even when they weren’t great, she spoke of us expecting too much of pastors and how wrong that was. She said God would use our testimony if we submitted to our pastors.

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She said “honor your pastors, God will honor you.” She said more about having disagreed with her pastors but she submitted and God honored her and now she’s blessed. How if they are faithfully serving God, we need to support them and not forfeit what God has for us.

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I felt my heart drop into my stomach. I got up and went to the bathroom because I couldn’t breath and I felt like I was going to faint if I didn’t scream. I now know I was having a panic attack. I sat on the toilet w/my head between my legs, breathed and wept..
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More from Culture

@bellingcat's attempt in their new book, published by
@BloomsburyBooks, to coverup the @OPCW #Douma controversy, promote US and UK gov. war narratives, and whitewash fraudulent conduct within the OPCW, is an exercise in deception through omission. @BloomsburyPub @Tim_Hayward_


1) 2000 words are devoted to the OPCW controversy regarding the alleged chemical weapon attack in #Douma, Syria in 2018 but critical material is omitted from the book. Reading it, one would never know the following:

2) That the controversy started when the original interim report, drafted and agreed by Douma inspection team members, was secretly modified by an unknown OPCW person who had manipulated the findings to suggest an attack had occurred. https://t.co/QtAAyH9WyX… @RobertF40396660


3) This act of attempted deception was only derailed because an inspector discovered the secret changes. The manipulations were reported by @ClarkeMicah
and can be readily observed in documents now available https://t.co/2BUNlD8ZUv….

4) @bellingcat's book also makes no mention of the @couragefoundation panel, attended by the @opcw's first Director General, Jose Bustani, at which an OPCW official detailed key procedural irregularities and scientific flaws with the Final Douma Report:

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