The Problem with Purity, Part 2: How Pressure for Sexual Purity is Abusive (A Male Perspective)

I was probably 8 years old the first time I noticed our minister talking about the problem of sexual desire. He was standing in the pulpit. I, like everyone else, was sitting in the pews. 

I might have budded a little earlier than children. In any case, I remember having my first little crush when I was in preschool. I could have told you by then that I thought girls were super pretty. Awkward as I was, I had my first kiss when I was 6 years old. By 8, I was definitely fantasizing about sex, though I didn't quite understand the process just yet. I KNEW in my inner most being (or something like that) that I wanted to see women naked. I still do.

So, imagine my surprise when my minister informed me that imagining seeing women naked if you weren't already married to them was a terrible sin, that it made God very unhappy and that the most we were allowed to fantasize about before marriage was kissing someone we weren't married to. I WAS DEVASTED. 

To be honest, I don't recall exactly how I felt in that moment, but this sort of message was sent over and over again. Sexual thoughts crimes were punishable by eternal damnation and I was guilty. I wanted so badly to have a sexually pure mind, but those ladies and their sexy butts - I just couldn't get them out of my head. 

I make light of it now, but honestly, up until my mid-twenties and maybe until I became an Atheist, I was absolutely tortured by my competing desires to be a good Christian and my natural desire to mate. I was disgusted with myself. I'd find myself feeling incredibly horny and as soon as the climax came, I'd feel immediate horrified regret. I'd failed and hurt my Savior! How could I be so unfaithful to God. How could I shit on my faith?!? I made resolutions every day. And every day I broke them, usually more than once. If I had been diligent enough to count every 'wicked' thought I'd had... I definitely sinned several times every waking hour. Anyway, more than once, I cried myself to sleep. More than once, I confessed my shame publicly. I just wanted to be pure! And this came with consequences not only for me. 

It took me a long time after marriage to learn to enjoy sex. I feel like, even now, I don't enjoy it as well as I would had I not been traumatized by my desire for moral purity.

Looking back, it's bad enough that I felt so much shame for feelings that are natural for all animals to have, and without which we would not procreate. I shouldn't have spent so much time feeling so much guilt and so much shame for having been born human. What's worse is that it had a negative effect on my marriage and my various romantic partners over the years. I was so ashamed of my desire, that in my early years of marriage it was difficult for me spend time thinking about my partners needs, because even thinking about my own needs was shameful. The truth is, I didn't think about my own needs. Instead, I thought about the guilt I was carrying and the cause of it. 

And while this never happened to me, one can look at societies where this kind of guilt is common. In these societies and communities, men learn to hate women. They hate women because the desire they have for women's bodies make them feel guilty. And then, their attitude often makes women feel guilty for having bodies. The schizophrenic attitude this causes men to have towards women can lead while societies to send women the message both that they must be beautiful and show it and also that they are shameful for doing so. This is an absurd and harmful burden for both women and men to bare - it's antihuman and not the best way to deal with the complexities of sexual desire.

And this is just one example of how purity is corrosive. 

The Problem with Purity, Part 1: It's Inherently Divisive and Distracts from Common Goals

I grew up in the Churches of Christ, where we believed in something called Patternism. What this meant was that God wanted our churches to be patterned off of the Christian churches that existed in the first century. The assumption was that the first century Christians were given specific instructions on how to worship God and organize their churches, that these instructions could be found in the New Testament and that deviating from them would lead a congregation and its members away from being members of God's true church, the Churches of Christ. And it was believed that any group that didn't both worship correctly and organize its church polity correctly was most likely destined to hell. 

What did that mean for us? Well, for starters it meant singing our worship songs without instruments and sharing communion (The Eucharist) every Sunday. We we taught that churches that didn't do this loved entertainment and convenience more than they loved Jesus and that would be condemned. We were taught that believers needed to be fully immersed during baptism and that the baptism wasn't just a sign of faith, but that it was for the remission of sins. If it didn't happen this way, it didn't count. This led to people getting rebaptized because they'd been baptized for the wrong reasons or because, perhaps, an elbow hadn't gone under water - How embarrassing would it be find yourself in heaven when you're right elbow is in hell??? Weird, right?
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But the Patternist obsession got weirder from there. The more conservatively minded among us believed that anything not specifically dictated in scripture should be avoided. So, if the New Testament didn't mention having a fellowship hall, there there shouldn't be a fellowship hall. If it didn't mention using a projector then we weren't supposed to use a projector. Since the first century Christians used one cup during communion, people who used a variety of tiny cups for sanitations sake might be destined to hell, etc. Our churches divided endlessly over this nonsense because...

One of the problems with purity is that it's completely impossible to be 100% consistent. In our churches, we almost never asked if it was okay to use a church building, even though both the New Testament and church history indicate that the earliest Christians worshipped in homes. Most of our churches had pulpit ministers, even youth ministers, even though these things did not exist in 1st Century. We had hymnals, microphones.... Need I go on? The truth is that each particular local church decided what was central to the 1st Century pattern and what wasn't. 

And that's how it always is with purity. Those groups that are tend to focus on ideological purity necessarily bend towards infighting and self-cannibalization especially during moments when they aren't focused on an outsider, even less pure, adversary. The reason for this isn't because some members of the group are less pure than others, but because ideological standards of purity are necessarily subjective. Take the contemporary fight between some advocates of transgendered rights and some advocates of women in sports. Should a transgendered woman be allowed to participate in women's sports? I'm not here to offer an opinion, just to say that when ideological purity is valued more than conversation and overall progress, you're going to have people who used to be on the same side condemning each other as if the two groups had little to nothing in common. 

I used a rift within the feminist movement, because I expect most of my readers will be sympathetic to the movement as whole and I wanted to demonstrate that groups whose mission we generally agree with can start having problems once purity of ideology becomes a a dominant focus within a group or movement. 

We can see more radical versions of this with groups that probably more obviously come to mind. You'd think that the Taliban and ISIS would get along. They don't. ISIS thinks the Taliban is too liberal.... The Leninists banned a number of socialist groups from operating in Russia during the revolution, because they viewed those groups as not being revolutionary enough - weirdly, the revolution probably would have been a lot more successful in the long-term if they'd brought those people in and made it work (Also, how it often goes). Imagine a world where ISIS, Al Qaeda and the Taliban get along. That wouldn't be great for the world, but it would help them forward their vision. Puritans cut off their nose to spite their face.

To go back to my point on Feminism. I think it's clear to see that the Feminist movement is suffering a somewhat successful onslaught from the right at the moment. How successful, time will tell - I'm hoping that it won't be too successful. To whatever degree the neo-traditionalists (my own term) win out, the current state of ideological puritanism among many Feminists will certainly be a huge contributor. Afterall, it's not as though the US is less Feminist than it was 20 years ago. Quite to the contrary - the neo-traditionalists have an abundance of female leadership. But, the Feminists movement is more fractured than it was 20 years ago and that leaves it vulnerable. It little less ideological purity and a little more cooperation would go a long way in handing the Feminist movement important victories.

If we want to move any relationship, group, cause, or municipality forward towards a shared goal, we should not be so focused on purity that we are unable to work alongside people who mostly agree with us. Obsessing over ideological purity makes such cooperate difficult. And that's our first problem with purity.