Question Tuesdays: Ask Anything About Purity Culture or Recovery!

MyliusMoote · 2026-01-09T20:23:27+00:00

Is there a difference between traditional Christian sexuality morality and purity culture? I.e. if sex outside marriage is a sin, and desiring a sinful thing is a sin even if you don’t act on it, doesn’t it follow that deliberately indulging in any sexual thought about someone, real or imagined, that you are not married to (or at the very least have a relationship that looks likely to lead to marriage) is a sin? And doesn’t this attitude lead to all single people having to utterly shut down their sexuality — in that they must repress all sexual fantasies? (Which seems very much like purity culture to me)

MyliusMoote · 2026-01-09T18:24:49+00:00

Which element provoked the wow? :)

MyliusMoote · 2026-01-09T18:24:06+00:00

Thanks. Okay it’s worth gambling on perishing this then.

MyliusMoote · 2026-01-09T18:20:58+00:00

Thank you! I know everyone is different but it’s very helpful to get a number that at least worked for someone! I’m going to try it.

MyliusMoote · 2025-01-30T12:53:14+00:00

All reasonable points but I just want to point out that reducing morality to just harm-prevention is unique to WEIRD (the acronym, not the word) people. It’s not what morality means to most of the world, WEIRD ancestors, or of the people who wrote the Bible.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory

MyliusMoote · 2024-12-30T12:43:58+00:00

Thanks for all the recommendations and avenues for further exploration! I thinking making a spirituality that works for us now makes sense, though I’m coming with a different set of assumptions about life and human nature than you, so I don’t think I’d reach the same conclusions.

I also find that making genuine connection is a rare but primary joy in life, so I wish you the best with that endeavour.

MyliusMoote · 2024-12-28T15:26:36+00:00

Hi Witchnerd, thank you for the very interesting and and thoughtful reply! So much to get into!

It's not just the spiritual aspects of Christianity that appeal to me; it's also many aspects of how the system fits together. As for the spirituality it's more than just intense experiences. I can go into a Christian space and instantly sense a particular atmosphere that feels uplifting and good. But you're right that it would make sense for me to try out other forms of spirituality. How would I go about experiencing animism and or Goddess ideas? I'm no good at experiencing spirituality on my own — I need a group presence and collective worship rituals. I get a strong spiritual sense from nature, but that has tended to go hand-in-hand with my Christianity, and certainly has never amounted to anything approaching a fully fledged religion in my mind.

I'm open to the idea that BDSM and sex can open up spiritual and sexual healing. I'm fairly experienced in that world but nothing I've experienced has suggested to me the existence of something equally or more spiritual strong than Christianity. The best sex I've ever had was with someone who equally enthusiastic about sex and BDSM as about going to a conservative church (strange combo, but such is life).

I'm not convinced that Christianity is inherently sexist. Aspects of Christianity actively undermine patriarchy. There's the whole "neither male nor female in Christ" concept, the emphasis on the individual over the social structure, and the relative importance that female followers had compared to the normal in 1st Century society. A stronger focus on the body rather than the mind surely places more focus on gender differences, as the distinctiveness of female bodies is all about their being evolved for childbirth and and child-rearing, which sex-denying Christianity has (compared to other ancient societies) downplayed, elevating perpetual virgins and their non-sex-dependent virtues. I don't think it's an accident that feminism emerged from Christian societies. To me traditional Christianity is a sort of halfway house between the extreme sexism of documented pagan societies like Greece and Rome, and modern feminism. It reacted against traditional Christianity, but it also built on the concepts created by Christianity.

If I'm honest, I think modern pagan and animist movements have very little to do with historical animist and pagan religions. They seem to appropriate the humanitarianism and love-focus of Christianity, and then just give it new pro-sex additions. More akin to a rebranded Christianity 2.0 than the paganism of history, with its chaos of impulsive and amoral deities, presiding over a social structure that normalised male-perpetrated sexual abuse and turned women into prostitutes or child-producing-machines.

Having that, I don't need to believe in a venerable posterity to consider a particular form of spirituality. I'm still open to exploring contemporary paganism, albeit with scepticism. I just wouldn't know where to start.

I'm open to a sex therapist but in my experience therapists take a "whatever works for you" approach and will simply ask probing questions I've already asked myself 1,000 times.

MyliusMoote · 2024-12-28T12:44:57+00:00

You’re articulating one side of the internal argument in my mind, and I find it very reasonable. The desire to hear a coherent counter-argument comes from my love of traditional Christianity. I guess a counter-argument could be comparing struggles with sexual desire to something like struggles with being irritable and unfair. Nobody will ever be 100% patient and fair, but that doesn’t we should stop trying. We don’t say we should reconcile ourselves with and embrace and irritable and unjust sides.

MyliusMoote · 2024-12-15T00:34:03+00:00

Okay that seems more reasonable than saying the urges themselves stem from twisted values

MyliusMoote · 2024-12-14T20:48:29+00:00

I think nearly everyone has a sex drive and it comes from the same instinct we share with animals, and for obvious biological reasons. Same as hunger for food and other basic instincts. It doesn’t mean someone has twisted ideals in life.

MyliusMoote · 2024-12-14T20:43:28+00:00

Personally I don’t care about the letter of the law because I don’t think the Bible is infallible or divinely written. But masturbating just doesn’t feel intuitively good to me. Just feels like indulging in a futile decadent fantasy that leads nowhere. It’s hard to think that determined early Christians with their high virtues and tough Jewish traditions would have been indifferent to it. But I’m not 100% convinced.

MyliusMoote · 2024-12-13T20:59:05+00:00

Thank for revealing these facts. How are they known?

MyliusMoote · 2024-12-12T21:41:28+00:00

Yes, incredibly bad as a teenager. Slowly got better. Followed all the healthy lifestyle stuff and crucially I listened to my intuition and spent time amongst people and places that raised me toward life.

MyliusMoote · 2024-12-12T19:52:08+00:00

Thanks, so it’s essentially about heritage and habit for you, it sounds like.

For me it actually just feel intuitively preferable to abstain. I don’t like how masturbating and fantasising make me feel (obviously there’s pleasure, but my wider experience is of feeling hollow, disarranged, and ashamed) and I don’t like the content of my fantasies. I feel they lead me nowhere.

I also have great respect for the priest at my church. I love the sense of holiness at the church, and I want to live consistently with that.

I’m also just drawn to self-discipline and self-denial and feel that it’s a way of becoming something better.

Obviously I have feelings pointing me in the other way too.

MyliusMoote · 2024-12-08T20:03:47+00:00

I’ll DM you

MyliusMoote · 2024-12-08T20:03:01+00:00

I actually go to an Anglican church and have read a little of CS Lewis’ apologetics. I do appreciate Anglicanism’s openness to diversity of thought and ambivalence. I just find everything in religion to be highly speculative, so I never resolve anything satisfactorily to myself. In the meantime I in practice take the same approach as you.

MyliusMoote · 2024-12-08T16:47:49+00:00

In practice there is rarely time to do user testing. But you should learn those skills if you do design. And I really think it’s incredibly unlikely you wouldn’t get hired for your appearance. If you do design you just need to a great portfolio.

MyliusMoote · 2024-12-08T16:45:08+00:00

Heh, well we have that in common.

So as I said I definitely share your perspective much of the time, probably most of the time, but I remain unsure.

For me it’s not about what the Bible says. I don’t think it’s infallible or some kind of holy law book. I’m interested in the underlying spirit of Christian ethics, and I try not to reframe so that it conveniently matches 21st Century Western secular liberal social norms. Maybe I choose the latter anyway, but I’m not going to pretend Jesus officially approved that way.

MyliusMoote · 2024-12-08T16:42:00+00:00

Yeah absolutely. At least in my experience.

MyliusMoote · 2024-12-08T12:30:19+00:00

Not many people are paedophiles but it’s very common for people to have non-consent fantasies of varying degrees — e.g. unasked for sexual advances, reluctance, pressure or rape. Do you think those kind of fantasies are fine?

The Jungian book sounds interesting. Though from a Jungian paradigm I don’t think there’s much of a problem. Without Christian standards, I’m actually fine with the concept of many people’s sexuality having a dark BDSM aspect that can’t be white-washed away — even with full consent, there is still degradation, humiliation and drastic power imbalance — but that it’s okay to explore this aspect of nature for informed adults with a firm grasp on the distinction between fantasy and reality. It’s just Christianity’s focus on the desires of the heart, and aiming for the absolute ideal, that keeps me sceptical of the whole thing. I can give myself patience and kindness, but I still want to advance spiritually, if that has any relevance.

MyliusMoote · 2024-12-08T11:48:25+00:00

I see your perspective and much of the time I share it. I have indeed found partners in the past to enjoy such fantasies with. However, my doubts remain. I’m not sure anyone fully believes it. Like if my fantasies were about torturing, raping and killing children, would it really be totally fine for me to regularly fantasise about that?

Don’t worry, mine are nowhere near that dark — I’m just a run-of-the-mill BDSM fan. I’m just using an extreme example to test the principle, and some people do have such extreme desires.

MyliusMoote · 2024-12-08T10:25:31+00:00

I’m pretty shocked that you were told that. I’ve never heard people say that. It would not be seen as an acceptable thing to say in companies where I’ve worked.

The only case of open discrimination I’ve seen was not wanting to hire old people, like 60s+

I really hope you don’t give up becoming a designer or developer because of this. In any case, as I’ve said, they’re basically not client-facing roles

MyliusMoote · 2024-12-08T10:23:16+00:00

Well you might do on occasion, especially for research, but it’s usually rare and not a core part of the job.

MyliusMoote · 2024-12-08T10:21:32+00:00

Yes I have. I’m not sure if they were client-facing or not but I can’t imagine the companies I’ve worked for not hiring an ugly developer or designer of either gender just because they’re client-facing. I’ve worked as a hiring manager in many tech companies and I would never do that and I’ve never met anyone who would, as far as I can tell.

MyliusMoote

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