Sexual Purity Quotes

Weren't you wearing a purity ring when we got here? Aren't you supposed to be saving yourself?" Shanti asked. "Yeah," Mary Lou answered. "And then I thought, for what? You save leftovers. My sex is not a leftover, and it is not a Christmas present.

The desirable virgin is sexy but not sexual. She's young, white, and skinny. She's a cheerleader, a babysitter; she's accessible and eager to please (remember those ethics of passivity!). She's never a woman of color. SHe's never a low-income girl or a fat girl. She's never disabled. "Virgin" is a designation for those who meet a certain standard of what women, especially young women, are supposed to look like. As for how these young women are supposed to act? A blank slate is best.

Making women the sexual gatekeepers and telling men they just can't help themselves not only drives home the point that women's sexuality is unnatural, but also sets up a disturbing dynamic in which women are expected to be responsible for men's sexual behavior.

The first time someone else touched me with the intent to pleasure, I fell in love. Not with that person, but with the act itself. Such intimacy and accord. Even with the awkwardness of first time lovers there was a grace and purity, carnal and beautiful that I knew from that moment on I could never live without.

What’s the difference between venerating women for being fuckable and putting them on a purity pedestal? In both cases, women’s worth is contingent upon their ability to please men and to shape their sexual identities around what men want.

..the hope I have for women: that we can start to see ourselves-and encourage men to see us-as more than just the sum of our sexual parts: not as virgins or whores, as mothers or girlfriends, or as existing only in relation to men, but as people with independent desires, hopes and abilities. But I know that this can't happen as long as American culture continues to inundate us with gender-role messages that place everyone-men and women-in an unnatural hierarchical order that's impossible to maintain without strife. For women to move forward, and for men to break free, we need to overcome the masculinity status quo-together.

Sex for pleasure, for fun, or even for building relationships is completely absent from our national conversation. Yet taking the joy out of sexuality is a surefire way to ensure not that young women won't have sex, but rather that they'll have it without pleasure.

When women's sexuality is imagined to be passive or "dirty," it also means that men's sexuality is automatically positioned as aggressive and right-no matter what form it takes. And when one of the conditions of masculinity, a concept that is already so fragile in men's minds, is that men dissociate from women and prove their manliness through aggression, we're encouraging a culture of violence and sexuality that's detrimental to both men and women.

Girls “going wild” aren’t damaging a generation of women, the myth of sexual purity is. The lie of virginity—the idea that such a thing even exists—is ensuring that young women’s perception of themselves is inextricable from their bodies, and that their ability to be moral actors is absolutely dependent on their sexuality. It’s time to teach our daughters that their ability to be good people depends on their being good people , not on whether or not they’re sexually active…so while young women are subject to overt sexual messages everyday, they’re simultaneously being taught—by the people who are supposed to care for their personal and moral development, no less—that their only real worth is their virginity and ability to remain “pure”.

If you spend any amount of time doing media analysis, it’s clear that the most frenzied moral panic surrounding young women’s sexuality comes from the mainstream media, which loves to report about how promiscuous girls are, whether they’re acting up on spring break, getting caught topless on camera, or catching all kinds of STIs. Unsurprisingly, these types of articles and stories generally fail to mention that women are attending college at the highest rates in history, and that we’re the majority of undergraduate and master’s students. Well-educated and socially engaged women just don’t make for good headlines, it seems.

So what is the difference between someone who willfully indulges in sexual pleasures while ignoring the Bible on moral purity and someone who willfully indulges in the selfish pursuit of more and more material possessions while ignoring the Bible on caring for the poor? The difference is that one involves a social taboo in the church and the other involves the social norm in the church.

Purity most often leads to pride or to despair, not to holiness. Because holiness is about union with, and purity is about separation from.

I think virginity is fine, just as I think having sex is fine. I don't really care what women do sexually, and neither should you. In fact, that's the point. I believe that a young woman's decision to have sex, or not, shouldn't impact how she's seen as a moral actor.

If we start electing presidents on the basis of their sexual purity, some real monsters will get into the White House.

In addition to shaming sexual-assault victims, positioning abstinence as women's domain further promotes the notion that it's women's morality that's on the line when it comes to sex, men just can't help themselves, so their ethics are safe from criticism.

According to the virginity movement, men have no self-control when it comes to anything sexual.

Women who are harassed, at work, on the street, or even online, are subject to the same rigid purity standards as women who are sexually assaulted, Just by virtue of being out in public, we're overstepping certain boundaries.

Anyone can give away something expensive, but only those who understand sacrifice can give away something valuable.

The religiosity of the prohibition movement was stoked by a genuine desire to lead holy lives pleasing to God. But purity is easier to regulate than holiness.

The price the Virgin demanded was purity, and the way the educators of Catholic children have interpreted this for nearly two thousand years is sexual chastity. Impurity, we were taught, follows from many sins, but all are secondary to the principal impulse of the devil in the soul--lust.

There is lovemaking that is bad for a person, just as there is eating that is bad. That boysenberry cream pie from the Thrift-E Mart may appear inviting, may, in fact, cause all nine hundred taste buds to carol from the tongue, but in the end, the sugars, the additives, the empty calories clog arteries, disrupt cells, generate fat, and rot teeth. Even potentially nourishing foods can be improperly prepared. There are wrong combinations and improper preparations in sex as well. Yes, one must prepare for a fuck--the way an enlightened priest prepares to celebrate mass, the way a great matador prepares for the ring: with intensification, with purification, with a conscious summoning of sacred power. And even that won't work if the ingredients are poorly matched: oysters are delectable, so are strawberries, but mashed together ... (?!) Every nutritious sexual recipe calls for at least a pinch of love, and the fucks that rate four-star rankings from both gourmets and health-food nuts use cupfuls. Not that sex should be regarded as therapeutic or to be taken for medicinal purposes--only a dullard would hang such a millstone around the nibbled neck of a lay--but to approach sex carelessly, shallowly, with detachment and without warmth is to dine night after night in erotic greasy spoons. In time, one's palate will become insensitive, one will suffer (without knowing it) emotional malnutrition, the skin of the soul will fester with scurvy, the teeth of the heart will decay. Neither duration nor proclamation of commitment is necessarily the measure--there are ephemeral explosions of passion between strangers that make more erotic sense than lengthy marriages, there are one-night stands in Jersey City more glorious than six-months affairs in Paris--but finally there is a commitment, however brief; a purity, however threatened; a vulnerability, however concealed; a generosity of spirit, however marbled with need; and honest caring, however singled by lust, that must be present if couplings are to be salubrious and not slow poison.

By erasing any nuance and complexity about porn and sexuality, the virginity movement gives young women only two choices of who they can be sexually: sluts or not sluts. While the first choice doesn't seem attractive, I can guarantee you that most young women are going to go with the option that allows them to have sex. And there's no in-between identity for young women who are making smart, healthy choices in their sexual lives.

I don't see anything other than pretensions and low mentality in women who make a man run after a hole that would soon be inhabited by termites and worms.

I couldn't tell anyone how I felt because I knew they wouldn't understand. Oh, poor little Christina, falling for the bad man who treats her like dirt because she didn't know any better. And isn't it a pity that they don't still teach sex-ed in schools? Or, oh, Christina, that filthy slut, if she puts out for a man like that, I imagine she puts out for anyone. You stay away from her. It wasn't like that at all. Maybe it would have been easier if it was, just like ticking a box. Are you the Madonna, or the whore? The victim, or the vixen? The Sabine, or the skank? But nothing in life is ever that simple.

When abstinence curricula contain information about sexual abuse or assault (though they often don't), the message is similar: The onus of preventing sexual assault is on girls, not on men.

And so “white damsel” as an archetype was one of racial purity, Christian morality, sexual innocence, demureness, and financial dependence on men all rolled into one. A privilege, yes, but a perilous one, for to step off this pedestal meant no longer being regarded as a “woman.

The journey was brutal, the results were glorious.

The pursuit of purity is not about the suppression of lust, but about the reorientation of one’s life to a larger goal. —DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

Your purity is not based on what you've done with your body. It's based on what Jesus did with His.

There is no circumstance that He can’t change, no hand dealt to you with which He can’t win, and no mistake so bad or sin so great that He can’t fully restore you!

When we think of the past we tend to assume that people were simpler in their functions, and shaped by forces that were primary and irreducible. We take for granted that our forbears were imbued with a deeper purity of purpose than we possess nowadays, and a more singular set of mind, believing, for example, that early scientists pursued their ends with unbroken „dedication“ and that artists worked in the flame of some perpetual „inspiration“. But none of this is true. Those who went before us were every bit as wayward and unaccountable and unsteady in their longings as people are today. The least breeze, whether it be sexual or psychological – or even a real breeze, carrying with it the refreshment of oxygene and energy – has the power to turn us from our path.

As bell hooks wrote in a 1998 essay, "Naked Without Shame," about black women's bodies and politics, "Marked by shame, projected as inherent and therefore precluding any possibility of innocence, the black female body was beyond redemption." She points out that since the time of U.S. slavery, men have benefited from positioning black women as naturally promiscuous because it absolves them of guilt when they sexually assault and rape women of color. "[I]t was impossible to ruin that which was received as inherently unworthy, tainted, and soiled," hooks wrote. Women of color, low-income women, immigrant women- these are the women who are not seen as worthy of being placed on a pedestal. It's only our perfect virgins who are valuable, worthy of discourse and worship.

Lovemaking is the ultimate Namaste.

Our purity systems, even those established with the best of intentions, do not make us holy.*4 They only create insiders and outsiders.

We girls are supposed to at least have these amazing sexual powers, but in my recent experience this is just a lie told by men to make them feel better about having ALL the power.

Sacred sexuality is a dance of offering rather than demanding. A dance of giving and receiving, one with the other, and back again.

Both parties can consent to one-sided sex, but that should not be the bar set for a healthy relationship. Just because it's not rape doesn't mean it isn't dehumanizing.

If we talk about sexual purity apart from the gospel, we will create chaste Pharisees instead of imperfect disciples. Obedience is a response to grace, not a ladder to heaven.

Every nutritious sexual recipe calls for at least a pinch of love, and the fucks that rate four-star rankings from both gourmets and health-food nuts used cupfuls. Not that sex should be regarded as therapeutic or to be taken for medicinal purposes - only a dullard would hang such a millstone around the nibbled neck of a lay - but to approach sex carelessly, shallowly, with detachment and without warmth is to dine night after night in erotic greasy spoons. In time, one's palate will become insensitive, one will suffer (without knowing it) emotional malnutrition, the skin of the soul will fester with scurvy, the teeth of the heart will decay. Neither duration nor proclamation of commitment is necessarily the measure - there are ephemeral explosions of passion between strangers that make more erotic sense than many lengthy marriages, there are one-night stands in Jersey City more glorious than six-months affairs in Paris - but finally there is a commitment, however brief; a purity, however threatened; a vulnerability, however concealed; a generosity of spirit, however marbled with need; an honest caring, however singed by lust, that must be present if couplings are to be salubrious and not slow poison.

Nothing has stolen more dreams, dashed more hopes, broken up more families, and messed up more people psychologically than our propensity to disregard God's commands regarding sexual purity.

Chastity and moral purity were qualities McCandless mulled over long and often. Indeed, one of the books found in the bus with his remains was a collection of stories that included Tol¬stoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata,” in which the nobleman-turned-ascetic denounces “the demands of the flesh.” Several such passages are starred and highlighted in the dog-eared text, the margins filled with cryptic notes printed in McCandless’s distinc¬tive hand. And in the chapter on “Higher Laws” in Thoreau’s Walden, a copy of which was also discovered in the bus, McCand¬less circled “Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.” We Americans are titillated by sex, obsessed by it, horrified by it. When an apparently healthy person, especially a healthy young man, elects to forgo the enticements of the flesh, it shocks us, and we leer. Suspicions are aroused. McCandless’s apparent sexual innocence, however, is a corol¬lary of a personality type that our culture purports to admire, at least in the case of its more famous adherents. His ambivalence toward sex echoes that of celebrated others who embraced wilderness with single-minded passion—Thoreau (who was a lifelong virgin) and the naturalist John Muir, most prominently— to say nothing of countless lesser-known pilgrims, seekers, mis¬fits, and adventurers. Like not a few of those seduced by the wild, McCandless seems to have been driven by a variety of lust that supplanted sexual desire. His yearning, in a sense, was too pow¬erful to be quenched by human contact. McCandless may have been tempted by the succor offered by women, but it paled beside the prospect of rough congress with nature, with the cosmos it¬self. And thus was he drawn north, to Alaska.

Control of sexuality is a classic tool of domination, used by men against women, by white people against people of color, by the abled against the disabled—or, to cut a long list short, by the powerful against the less powerful. It can be expressed in many ways, like rape as a form of political conquest or slave owners marrying off their slaves and splitting families apart. It can look like enforcing purity rules only for women, perpetuating racist sexual stereotypes, or assuming that some groups have no sexual desires at all.

Lower caste males whose sexuality is a threat to upper-caste purity of blood has to be institutionally prevented from having sexual access to women of the higher castes, so such women have to be carefully guarded.’48

° I no longer saw God's commandments concerning sex and marriage as a prohibition, but as His loving protection. ° I no longer thought of sexual purity as a rule, but as a desired virtue. °I no longer was attracted to the guys that treated girls like commodities, but was now attracted to men of character who modeled Jesus' humility and self-sacrifice. °I no longer saw my body as something to use to gain a guys attention; I now viewed it as God's holy temple.

If you take one lesson and one lesson only from this book, I want it to be this: God doesn’t function in a currency of shame. Shame isn’t from God, it isn’t of God, and it isn’t something Christians should engage in. Shame is not nor will it ever be a useful response to a person’s experience of the world, especially when it comes to sexual experiences.

Nothing was as revolting to American southerners (and many northerners) as sexual relations and marriage between black men and white women. Sex between the races became the greatest taboo and any violation, or suspected violation, was viewed as deserving immediate and summary punishment in the form of lynching. The Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist secret society, perpetrated many such killings. They could have taught the Hindu Brahmins a thing or two about purity laws.

[Robert] Jensen calls for an end to our current understanding of masculinity. He says, "We men can settle for being men, or we can strive to be human beings." What's funny is that that statement essentially echoes the same hope I have for women: that we can start to see ourselves, and encourage men to see us, as more than just the sum of our sexual parts: not as virgins or whores, as mothers or girlfriends, or as existing only in relation to men, but as people with independent desires, hopes and abilities.

Trusting women means also trusting them to find their way. This isn’t to say, of course, that I think women’s sexual choices are intrinsically “empowered” or “feminist.” I just believe that in a world that values women so little, and so specifically for their sexuality, we should be giving them the benefit of the doubt. Because in this kind of hostile culture, trusting women is a radical act.

Trusting women means also trusting them to find their way. This isn’t to say, of course, that I think women’s sexual choices are intrinsically 'empowered' or 'feminist.' I just believe that in a world that values women so little, and so specifically for their sexuality, we should be giving them the benefit of the doubt. Because in this kind of hostile culture, trusting women is a radical act.

When “fundamentalism” takes root within a religious movement, emphasis shifts away from love of God and love of neighbor in order to be replaced by an obsessive fear that infractions of the sexual purity code are responsible for dragging modern society down to hell.

Women had to discard the doctrines of sexual purity that so often led to frigidity in marriage. Entrepreneurs were glad to help. For just ten cents a woman could buy a discreetly wrapped book titled How I Kept My Husband, which instructed her in how to give oral sex.32

If you are where I was before my process began, you can't imagine the place of victory, the place you can be free from the dominating desire for sexual stimuli. I am here to tell you that there is a place of freedom that you can know--a place where your desire for purity will subdue the lust of the flesh.

Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails that: great mortification. For a Christian man there is no escape. Marriage may help to sanctify and direct to its proper object his sexual desires; its grace may help him in the struggle; but the struggle remains. It will not satisfy him–as hunger may be kept off by regular meals. It will offer as many difficulties to the purity proper to that state, as it provides easements. No man, however truly he loved his betrothed and bride as a young man, has lived faithful to her as a wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will, without self-denial.

The cornerstone of the purity myth is the expectation that girls and women, in particular, will be utterly and absolutely nonsexual until the day they marry a man, at which point they will naturally and easily become his sexual satisfier, ensuring the couple will have children and never divorce: one man, one woman, in marriage, forever. For this formula to work, my girlfriends and I knew we had to follow a slew of rules. Unfortunately, none of us knew what they were.

First, if you are a homosexual or feel that inclination, keep yourself pure. If you are unmarried, you should practice abstinence from all sexual activity. I know this is difficult, but really what God is asking you to do is pretty much the same thing that he requires of all single people. That means not only keeping your body pure, but especially your mind. Just as heterosexual men should avoid pornography and fantasizing, you, too, need to keep your thought-life clean. Resist the temptation to rationalize sin by saying, “God made me this way.” God has made it very clear that He does not want you to indulge your desires, but to honor Him by keeping your mind and body pure. Finally, seek professional Christian counseling. With time and effort, you can come to enjoy normal, heterosexual relations with your spouse. There is hope.

I am concerned about the failure of our moral computers of honesty, integrity, decency, civility, and sexual purity. How many people today are truly incorruptible? So many get caught up in waves of popular issues and tides of rhetoric. This breakdown of moral values is happening because we are separating the teachings of God from personal conduct. An honorable man or woman will personally commit to live up to certain self-imposed expectations, with no need of an outside check or control. I would hope that we can load our moral computers with three elements of integrity: dealing justly with oneself, dealing justly with others, and recognizing the law of the harvest.

their mission to protect White women from the hypersexual Black-faced animals that, if freed, would ravage the exemplars of human purity and beauty. In fact, after 1830, young, single, and White working-class women earning wages outside the home were growing less dependent on men financially and becoming more sexually free. White male gang rapes of White women began to appear around the same time as the gang assaults by White men on Black people. Both were desperate attempts to maintain White male supremacy.

Given the deeply rooted Christian suspicion of sexuality, however, the new view of women as intrinsically asexual improved their reputation. Whereas women had once been considered snares of the devil, they were now viewed as sexual innocents whose purity should inspire all decent men to control their own sexual impulses and baser appetites.

The unchurched kids laughed at the Bible studies based on television shows or songs of the moment. They weren't impressed at all by the video clips provided by the denomination's publisher, or by the knock-off Christian boy bands crooning about the hotness of sexual purity. What riveted their attention wasn't what was relatable to them but what wasn't.

If being premenstrual is “innocence,” does that make those of us with periods guilty? And this really gets to the heart of the matter: These concerns aren't about lost innocence; they're about lost girlhood. The virginity movement doesn't want women to be adults. Despite the movement's protestations about how this focus on innocence or preserving virginity is just a way of protecting girls, the truth is, it isn't a way to desexualize them. It simply positions their sexuality as “good”— worth talking about, protecting, and valuing—and women's sexuality, adult sexuality, as bad and wrong. The (perhaps) unintended consequences of this focus is that girl's sexuality is sexualized and fetishized even further.

Gay male and lesbian culture is obsessed with purity of identity as the only basis for figuring out who you can trust or dance with. -Pat Califia

A chastity device won't put out the flames of burning flesh. The Ultimate Guide to Chastity Removing the Iron Panties

Shame based on sexual status, whether it is because of lots of sexual activity or none at all, is wrong. All

Shame based on sexual status, whether it is because of lots of sexual activity or none at all, is wrong.

The watershed of the sexual revolution was when women started to become individuals who claimed they were different in no essential way from men.

It's easy to blame the patriarchy, to rightfully point at the men who rape and hold them accountable. What's harder is to notice the women who sometimes passively direct rapists toward their victims by contributing to the hypersexualization of women of color under the guise of empowerment... Feminist white women who think "sexy Pocahontas" is an empowering look instead of lingering fetishization of the rape of a child. The same imagery they claim to find sexually empowering is rooted in the myth of white women's purity and every other woman's sexual availability.

Why is the superficial, legalistic approach of purity culture often so ineffective in curbing toxic masculinity in Christian men? Because it deals in a truncated, false gospel. Rules and regulations for sexual behavior don't make men new. Rather, the renewal of our minds and bodies by the Holy Spirit is the solution to the broken masculinity that plagues our culture and churches.

Sexual purity was to be the special virtue of a woman. It was assumed that men, as a matter of biological nature, would sin, but woman must not surrender. As one male author said: “If you do, you will be left in silent sadness to bewail your credulity, imbecility, duplicity, and premature prostitution.” A woman wrote that females would get into trouble if they were “high spirited not prudent.

At the present time the institution of the whorehouse seems to a certain extent to be dying out. Scholars have various reasons to give. Some say that the decay of morality among girls has dealt the whorehouse its deathblow. Others, perhaps more idealistic, maintain that police supervision on an increased scale is driving the houses out of existence. In the late days of the last century and the early part of this one, the whorehouse was an accepted if not openly discussed institution. It was said that its existence protected decent women. An unmarried man could go to one of these houses and evacuate the sexual energy which was making him uneasy and at the same time maintain the popular attitudes about the purity and loveliness of women. It was a mystery, but then there are many mysterious things in our social thinking.

Suppose then that you began with the proposition that boredom was a kind of pain caused by unused powers, the pain of wasted possibilities or talents, and was accompanied by expectations of the optimum utilization of capacities. Nothing actual ever suits pure expectation and such purity of expectation is a great source of tedium. People rich in abilities, in sexual feeling, rich in mind and in invention - all the highly gifted see themselves shunted for decades onto dull sidings, banished exiled nailed up in chicken coops. Imagination has even tried to surmount the problem by forcing boredom itself to yield interest.

Touch is not empty; it contains all the elements of the universe, and the full force of both yourself and the Spirit which inhabits you. Remember this when you are making love, in holy moments of sexual union.

In church, sexual purity was always something portrayed through abstaining rather than valuing something deeper. I learned how to avoid sexaul immorality but rarely did I learn why in a way that captivated my heart. The why was always, God wants that for you, or the bible says it's a sin. It's no wonder so many have sexual relationships when the argument against doing so has nothing to do with our affections for God.

By limiting their moral concerns to domestic and sexual behavior, many members of the middle class were able to ignore the harsh realities of life for the lower classes or even to blame working people’s problems on their not being sufficiently committed to domesticity and female purity. Yet the establishment of a male breadwinner/female homemaker family in the middle and upper classes often required large sections of the lower class to be unable to do so.

The main point is not pursuing sexual purity but recog- nizing our impurity and our desperate need for Christ. So many of us walked right past the gospel on our way to a purity conference. Our parents and youth leaders were so concerned about our budding sexuality, scrambling for direction and wis- dom, that some of us ended up signing abstinence pledges before falling on our knees in repentance. We wore purity rings as badges of honor, forgetting that it is Jesus who cleanses us from all unrighteousness.

birch – hope butterflies – change, transformation, inner growth cypress – mourning daisies – innocence, purity dragonflies – ancestors fireflies – life, sexuality hummingbirds – hope and beauty, the sun in disguise, infinity in the flight of their wings phoenix – rebirth poppies – remembrance raven – in some cultures death, in some cultures a bringer of light associated with Creation rose (red) – romantic love rose (yellow) – friendship sage – powerful cleansing sweetgrass – a grandmother medicine sycamore – hidden treasure

Once married, the woman was supposed to let down her sexual barriers, but this put new pressures on wives. The nineteenth-century focus on female purity had inhibited sexual openness between husband and wife, but it had also accorded women a high moral stature that made it difficult for a man to insist on sex if his wife was unwilling. The twentieth-century preoccupation with the orgasm, by contrast, entitled a woman to more sexual consideration in lovemaking but increased the pressure on her to have sex whenever it was suggested.

Some would argue that aggressive displays of sexuality by black female performers such as Nicki Minaj and Beyonce are empowering precisely because of historical perceptions of female sexuality and black women's sexuality in America. The idea that women cannot be overt about their sexuality is rooted in sexist notions of female purity. The idea that black women must prove their worth and disprove centuries of propaganda against their sexuality is buying into racism and sexism and making the oppressed responsible for adapting to oppression - instead of demanding that society stop treating women's sexual desires differently from those of men.

God is calling us to so greatly love others that we do not desire for them anything that might separate them from God. Holy sexuality is a love so big that it treasures the purity of another, exonerating that person's status as an image bearer or a daughter or son of the King, and not dehumanizing him or her through manipulating lust.

Sexual climax has many similarities to the omega/alpha concept. At orgasm there is an intensity of focus so extreme that all other awareness disappears. In that moment we cease to be anything other than the experience itself. Our beings are consumed so that all our senses fall away and we have little or no control over what is happening.

It was said that its existence protected decent women. An unmarried man could go to one of these houses and evacuate the sexual energy which was making him uneasy and at the same time maintain the popular attitudes about the purity and loveliness of women. It was a mystery, but then there are many mysterious things in our social thinking.

Asexuality isn't a complex. It's not a sickness. It's not an automatic sign of trauma. It's not a behaviour. It's not the result of a decision. It's not a chastity vow or an expression that we are 'saving ourselves'. We aren't by definition religious. We aren't calling ourselves asexual as a statement of purity or moral superiority. We're not amoebas or plants. We aren't automatically gender confused, anti-gay, anti-straight, anti-any-sexual orientation, anti-woman, anti-man, anti-any-gender or anti sex. We aren't automatically going through a phase, following a trend, or trying to rebel. We aren't defined by prudishness. We aren't calling ourselves asexual because we failed to find a suitable partner. We aren't necessarily afraid of intimacy. And we aren't asking for anyone to 'fix' us.

1. List your own top three lust triggers. How can you avoid them? 2. What time of day or week are you most tempted by lust? What can you do to prepare for those times? 3. Which locations are the most tempting for you? How can you limit your time in those places? 4. What five little battles do you need to be fighting more faithfully? Describe in detail what it looks like for you to fight—and win—these battles.

There can have been no doubt in Eleanor's mind as to what was expected of her as a wife. In her day, women were supposed to be chaste both inside and outside marriage, virginity and celibacy being highly prized states. When it came to fornication, women were usually apportioned the blame, because they were the descendants of Eve, who had tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden, with such dire consequences. Women, the Church taught, were the weaker vessel, the gateway to the Devil, and therefore the source of all lechery. St. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote: "To live with a woman without danger is more difficult than raising the dead to life." Noblewomen, he felt, were the most dangerous so fall. Women were therefore kept firmly in their place in order to prevent them from luring men away from the paths of righteousness. Promiscuity--and its often inevitable consequence, illicit pregnancy--brought great shame upon a woman and her family, and was punishable by fines, social ostracism, and even, in the case of aristocratic and royal women, execution. Unmarried women who indulged in fornication devalued themselves on the marriage market. In England, women who were sexually experienced were not permitted to accuse men of rape in the King's court. Female adultery was seen as a particularly serious offence, since it jeopardized the laws of inheritance. Men, however, often indulged in casual sex and adultery with impunity. Because the virtue of high-born women was jealously guarded, many men sought sexual adventures with lower-class women. Prostitution was common and official brothels were licensed and subject to inspection in many areas. There was no effective contraception apart from withdrawal, and the Church frowned upon that anyway: this was why so many aristocratic and royal bastards were born during this period.

To summarize, first, the researchers are finding that purity teachings do not meaningfully delay sex. Second, they are finding that they do increase shame, especially among females. And third, they report that this increased shame is leading to higher levels of sexual anxiety, lower levels of sexual pleasure, and the feeling among those experiencing shame that they are stuck feeling this way forever. Oh, and it doesn’t get better with time . . . it gets worse!

The path of self-mastery is not easy, especially for a person who has grown accustomed to giving in to his impulses rather than controlling them. If he perseveres, though, such a person will feel a growing sense of his own dignity. He will begin to experience the body as a gift, and sexuality as a sign of communion—a reflection of God’s love. Freedom, the fruit of self-control, is the foundation for love between persons. This is why love can only flourish where there is purity of heart.

Medieval anatomists called women’s external genitals the “pudendum,” a word derived from the Latin pudere, meaning “to make ashamed.” Our genitalia were thus named “from the shamefacedness that is in women to have them seen.”1 Wait: what? The reasoning went like this: Women’s genitals are tucked away between their legs, as if they wanted to be hidden, whereas male genitals face forward, for all to see. And why would men’s and women’s genitals be different in this way? If you’re a medieval anatomist, steeped in a sexual ethic of purity, it’s because: shame.

To connect to the holy is to access the deepest, juiciest part of our spirits. Perhaps this is why we set up so many boundaries, protections, and rules around both sex and religion. Both pursuits expose such a large surface area of the self, which can then be either hurt or healed. But when the boundaries, protections, and rules become more important than the sacred thing they are intended to protect, casualties ensue. But no matter how much we strive for purity in our minds, bodies, spirits, or ideologies, purity is not the same as holiness. It's just easier to define what is pure than what is holy, so we pretend they are interchangeable.

I'm going to throw some suggestions at you now in rapid succession, assuming you are a father of one or more boys. Here we go: If you speak disparagingly of the opposite sex, or if you refer to females as sex objects, those attitudes will translate directly into dating and marital relationships later on. Remember that your goal is to prepare a boy to lead a family when he's grown and to show him how to earn the respect of those he serves. Tell him it is great to laugh and have fun with his friends, but advise him not to be "goofy." Guys who are goofy are not respected, and people, especially girls and women, do not follow boys and men whom they disrespect. Also, tell your son that he is never to hit a girl under any circumstances. Remind him that she is not as strong as he is and that she is deserving of his respect. Not only should he not hurt her, but he should protect her if she is threatened. When he is strolling along with a girl on the street, he should walk on the outside, nearer the cars. That is symbolic of his responsibility to take care of her. When he is on a date, he should pay for her food and entertainment. Also (and this is simply my opinion), girls should not call boys on the telephone-at least not until a committed relationship has developed. Guys must be the initiators, planning the dates and asking for the girl's company. Teach your son to open doors for girls and to help them with their coats or their chairs in a restaurant. When a guy goes to her house to pick up his date, tell him to get out of the car and knock on the door. Never honk. Teach him to stand, in formal situations, when a woman leaves the room or a table or when she returns. This is a way of showing respect for her. If he treats her like a lady, she will treat him like a man. It's a great plan. Make a concerted effort to teach sexual abstinence to your teenagers, just as you teach them to abstain from drug and alcohol usage and other harmful behavior. Of course you can do it! Young people are fully capable of understanding that irresponsible sex is not in their best interest and that it leads to disease, unwanted pregnancy, rejection, etc. In many cases today, no one is sharing this truth with teenagers. Parents are embarrassed to talk about sex, and, it disturbs me to say, churches are often unwilling to address the issue. That creates a vacuum into which liberal sex counselors have intruded to say, "We know you're going to have sex anyway, so why not do it right?" What a damning message that is. It is why herpes and other sexually transmitted diseases are spreading exponentially through the population and why unwanted pregnancies stalk school campuses. Despite these terrible social consequences, very little support is provided even for young people who are desperately looking for a valid reason to say no. They're told that "safe sex" is fine if they just use the right equipment. You as a father must counterbalance those messages at home. Tell your sons that there is no safety-no place to hide-when one lives in contradiction to the laws of God! Remind them repeatedly and emphatically of the biblical teaching about sexual immorality-and why someone who violates those laws not only hurts himself, but also wounds the girl and cheats the man she will eventually marry. Tell them not to take anything that doesn't belong to them-especially the moral purity of a woman.

It is not difficult for an unwise mother quite unintentionally to centre the heterosexual feelings of a young son upon herself, and it is true that, if this is done, the evil consequences pointed out by Freud will probably ensue. This is, however, much less likely to occur if the mother's sexual life is satisfying to her, for in that case she will not look to her child for a type of emotional satisfaction which ought to be sought only from adults. The parental impulse in its purity is an impulse to care for the young, not to demand affection from them, and if a woman is happy in her sexual life she will abstain spontaneously from all improper demands for emotional response from her child.

BELIEVE IN ONE LOVE: Bonding of love between polygamous is nothing but only delusion & seductive-shots called sexuality breeds cynicism, despising, criticism and condemnation; each always looks other through the negative lens and creates separation and hatred. Conversely bonding of love between monogamous is everything full of integrity, purity and heartfelt mingling like diluting of hard clout of soil with pristine rain breeds serenity, bliss and lure like magnetism each always looks other through positive lens and creates union and frequently electrify each other to share and care each other feelings of life for the sole purpose of a shared vision; a road-map of life between two bodies into one soul creating success in life through enacting commitment and trust each on other for a win-win situation is called soul-mate-ship. Therefore, each man and woman should choose a path of monogamous making life enjoyable and praiseworthy at the shake of adultery. I earnestly urge of the mankind to believe in one-love making life fullest.

in their struggle to be heard and in the reluctance of their communities to listen. Across cultures, the opposition to contraceptives shares an underlying hostility to women. The judge who convicted Margaret Sanger said that women did not have “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception.” Really? Why? That judge, who sentenced Sanger to thirty days in a workhouse, was expressing the widespread view that a woman’s sexual activity was immoral if it was separated from her function of bearing children. If a woman acquired contraceptives to avoid bearing children, that was illegal in the United States, thanks to the work of Anthony Comstock. Comstock, who was born in Connecticut and served for the Union in the Civil War, was the creator, in 1873, of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and pushed for the laws, later named for him, that made it illegal—among other things—to send information or advertisements on contraceptives, or contraceptives themselves, through the mail. The Comstock Laws also established the new position of Special Agent of the Post Office, who was authorized to carry handcuffs and a gun and arrest violators of the law—a position created for Comstock, who relished his role. He rented a post office box and sent phony appeals to people he suspected. When he got an answer, he would descend on the sender and make an arrest. Some women caught in his trap committed suicide, preferring death to the shame of a public trial. Comstock was a creation of his times and his views were amplified by people in power. The member of Congress who introduced the legislation said during the congressional debate, “The good men of this country … will act with determined energy to protect what they hold most precious in life—the holiness and purity of their firesides.” The bill passed easily, and state legislatures passed their own versions, which were often more stringent. In New York, it was illegal to talk about contraceptives, even for doctors. Of course, no women voted for this legislation, and no women voted for the men who voted for it. Women’s suffrage was decades away.

He perceived too in these still hours how little he had understood her hitherto. He had been blinded, — obsessed. He had been seeing her and himself and the whole world far too much as a display of the eternal dualism of sex, the incessant pursuit. Now with his sexual imaginings newly humbled and hopeless, with a realization of her own tremendous minimization of that fundamental of romance, he began to see all that there was in her personality and their possible relations outside that. He saw how gravely and deeply serious was her fine philanthropy, how honest and simple and impersonal her desire for knowledge and understandings. There is the brain of her at least, he thought, far out of Sir Isaac's reach. She wasn't abased by her surrenders, their simplicity exalted her, showed her innocent and himself a flushed and congested soul. He perceived now with the astonishment of a man newly awakened just how the great obsession of sex had dominated him — for how many years? Since his early undergraduate days. Had he anything to put beside her own fine detachment? Had he ever since his manhood touched philosophy, touched a social question, thought of anything human, thought of art, or literature or belief, without a glancing reference of the whole question to the uses of this eternal hunt? During that time had he ever talked to a girl or woman with an unembarrassed sincerity? He stripped his pretences bare; the answer was no. His very refinements had been no more than indicative fig-leaves. His conservatism and morality had been a mere dalliance with interests that too brutal a simplicity might have exhausted prematurely. And indeed hadn't the whole period of literature that had produced him been, in its straining purity and refinement, as it were one glowing, one illuminated fig-leaf, a vast conspiracy to keep certain matters always in mind by conspicuously covering them away? But this wonderful woman — it seemed — she hadn't them in mind! She shamed him if only by her trustful unsuspiciousness of the ancient selfish game of Him and Her that he had been so ardently playing.... He idealized and worshipped this clean blindness. He abased himself before it.

Missy When I think of generations, I think about the legacy and influence the people in each generation pass to the next one. Jase and I started dating when we were very young and had the opportunity to basically grow into adulthood together. Because of this, we have shared many “firsts” together. When our dating relationship started to become more serious, we made a commitment to stay sexually pure until our wedding night. Each of us had this goal before we started dating, but when we fell in love, that goal became one for each other as well. I knew that God expected this purity from His children, and I trusted God enough, even at my young age, to understand that His way was the best way. Jase and I reached our goal after dating two years, ten months, and two days. But who’s counting? We were! Whew! We made it! That night was the first sexual experience either of us had ever had, and we have only known each other since then. Being pure and faithful to each other and to God is a top priority for us to this day. Our decision to remain pure is something we have not been silent to our children about. The older we get and the older our children get the more we realize how hard accomplishing that was and still is for kids today. We built our relationship on a spiritual foundation many years ago, and we feel a great responsibility to pass that spiritual foundation on to our children.

Liberal capitalism has extended its grip on consciences: walking hand and hand with it come the mercenary attitude, advertising, the absurd and sneering cult of economic efficiency, the exclusive and unrestrained appetite for material wealth. Even worse, liberalism has extended from the economic domain to the sexual domain. All the sentimental fictions have been shattered. Purity, chastity, fidelity, decency have become ridiculous stigmas. The value of a human being is measured today by his economic efficiency and his erotic potential.

Sexual purity is youth’s most precious possession,” official Church doctrine declared. “Better dead and clean than alive and unclean.

I don’t know if now, having lived and died the life of a man, I can write about little-boy love, but remembering it now, it seems the cleanest pain I’ve known. Love without desire, or conditions, or limits—a pure and radiant glow in the heart that could make me giddy and sad and glorious all at once. Where does it go? Why, in all their experiments, did the Magi never try to capture that purity in a bottle? Perhaps they couldn’t. Perhaps it is lost to us when we become sexual creatures, and no magic can bring it back.

Growing up, I heard a lot of talk about how evangelical Christians were better people than secular or other religious people (funnily enough, I now hear the exact same self-congratulatory message from secular liberal people. But the truth was, I couldn't always tell the difference between a Christian and a non-Christian. I saw both lie, both steal, both love, and both unselfishly give to others. But one tangible thing we could point to as evangelicals was that we didn't have sex before marriage. There was that. There was always that. Which is why, I believe, the threat of losing that so-called sexual purity seemed so grave. Were we to have sex outside of marriage, could we even call ourselves Christians anymore? What if we made out? Kissed? Held hands? Had a crush? How close to sex could we come before we were no longer Christians?

In the social turbulence following the Civil War, thousands of men and women enlisted in a purity campaign. They sought to establish a single standard of sexual morality for both sexes. This was not a drive for greater freedom; it was a puritanical campaign to narrow the choices of individuals down to socially acceptable ones.

holiness laws identify sins, like sexual immorality (see Lev. 18:1–30), while purity laws identify life’s brokenness due to human sinfulness.

Is it possible that we misread appropriate feelings due to the overly sexualized messages we hear, don't know how to recognize or maturely handle them, and resist the intimacy that we could experience as brothers and sisters?

Zealous to protect their purity, many have put such a weight on sexual temptation and have sexualized their peers to such a degree that, having never been on dates or developed cross-sex friendships, they haven't found the perfect spouse they were promised. Others have rushed into courtships that ended in divorce and are ashamed of their failure in this whole Christian purity venture.

The cat's sophisticated personae are masks of an advanced theatricality. Priests and god its own cult, the cat follows a code of ritual purity, cleaning itself religiously. Priest and god of its own cult, the car sacrifices to itself and may share its ceremonies with the elect. [...] The cat is the least Christian inhabitant of the entire home.

Beloved, do not be deceived by such thinking. The gospel of self is everywhere, and it tastes sweet, like wine. Which is why we must drink all the more deeply of God’s Word—so that our hearts are not deceived: God is about his glory. God loves you, and your highest good is to be about his glory too.

The steps of a man are established by the LORD, when he [the Lord] delights in his way; though he fall, he shall not be cast headlong, for the LORD upholds his hand” (37:23-24).

Once the purging has taken place, the woman often dreams of a black goddess who becomes her bridge between spirit and body. As one aspect of Sophia, such an image can open her to the mystery of life being enacted in her own body. Her "mysterious and exotic darkness" inspires a particular depth of wonderment and love. For a woman without a positive mother, this "dark" side of the Virgin can bring freedom, the security of freedom, because she is a natural home for the rejected child. The child born from the rejected side of the mother can bring her own rebel to rest in the outcast state of Mary. In loving the abandoned child within herself, a woman becomes pregnant with herself. The child her mother did not nourish, she will now nourish, not as the pure white biblical Virgin who knew no Joseph, but as the dark Montserrat Virgin who presides over "marriage and sex, pregnancy and childbirth." The Black Madonna is nature impregnated by spirit, accepting the human body as the chalice of the spirit. She is the redemption of matter, the intersection of sexuality and spirituality. Connecting to this archetypal image may result in dreams of a huge serpent, mysterious, cold­blooded, inaccessible to human feeling. Seen as an appendage of the negative mother, it is the phallus stolen from the father and used to guard inviolate purity. Yet this same snake, when seen in relation to the moon, symbolizes the dark, impersonal side of femininity and at the same time its capacity to renew itself. The daughter who can come out from under the skin of the negative mother will not perpetuate her but redeem her. The Black Madonna is the patron saint of abandoned daughters who rejoice in their outcast state and can use it to renew the world.

I’ve always yearned to be a black man, to have a black man’s soul, a black man's laughter. You know why? Because I thought you were diflFerent from us. Yes, I thought you were something special, something difiFerent on this sad earth of ours. I wanted to escape with you from the white man’s hollow materialism, from his lack of faith, his humble and frustrated sexuality, from his lack of joy, of laughter, of magic, of faith in the richness of after-life. encouragement and signs of gratitude or recognition have been very few, if any, along my road. If humanity can be compared to a tribe, then you may say I’m completely de-tribalized. You love Negroes out of sheer misanthropy, because you think they aren’t really men. in the end all human faces look alike with nothing bright or hopeful around me, except those distant stars— and even there, let’s be frank: it’s only their distance that gives them that purity and beauty ideals don't die— obliged to live on shit sometimes, but don’t die! the company a great cause always keeps: men of good will and those who exploit them your skin, you know, is worth no more than the elephants’ hide. In Gennany, at Belsen, during the war, it seems we used to make lampshades out of human skin— for your information. And don’t forget, Monsieur Saint- Denis, that we Germans have always been forerunners in everything ‘Women,’ I concluded rather bitterly, ‘have at their command certain means of persuasion which the best- organized police forces do not possess.’ The number of animals who lived in cruel suffering, sometimes for years, with bullets in their bodies, wounds growing deeper and deeper, gangrenous and swarming with ticks and flies, could not be estimated to change species, to come over to the elephants and live in the wilds among honest animals Always cheerful, with the cheerfulness of a man who has gone deep down into things and come back reassured. No one knew the desert better than Scholscher, who had spent so many nights alone there on the starlit dunes, and no one understood better than he did that need for protection which sometimes grips men’s hearts and drives them to give a dog the affection they dream so desperately of receiving themselves. by ‘defending the splendors of nature . . .’ He meant liberty.” Islam calls that ’the roots of heaven.’ and to the Mexican Indians it is of life’— the thing that makes both of them fall on their knees and raise their eyes and beat their tormented breasts. A need for protection and company, from which obstinate people like Morel try to escape by means of petitions, fighting committees, by trying to take the protection of species in their own hands. Our needs- for justice, for freedom and dignity— are roots of heaven that are deeply imbedded in our hearts, but of heaven itself men know nothing but the gripping roots ...” . . . And that girl sitting there in front of him with her legs crossed, with her nylon stockings and cigarette and that silent gaze, in which could be read that stubborn need, not so different from what Morel had seen in the eyes of the stray dogs at the pound. but not even all that was comic and childish about him could deprive him of the dignity conferred upon him by his love for his Maker. that human mass whose physical strength was nothing compared to the faith and spirit that dwelt in him. Three quarters of the Oul6 traditions and magic rites had to do with war or hunting while it's easy to suppress a magic tradition it's difficult to fill up the strange voids which it leaves in what you call the primitive psychology and what I call the human soul The roots of heaven are forever planted in their hearts, yet of heaven itself they seem to know nothing but the gripping roots It must be very consoling to take refuge in cynicism and to try and drown your own remorse in a consoling vision of universal swinishness, and you can always

We live in a culture that desires intimacy without responsibility and pleasure without commitment.

Listen to what Peter is saying: men, you may be stronger than your wives, but you had better honor them as fellow heirs, or God won't hear your prayers! Did you get that? God won't listen to your prayers if you don't treat your wife with honor. Women are to be treated with respect and honor, as people who are inheriting the throne along with men.

While it may seem safe to impose rules that separate us from ordinary encounters with the other sex, this isn't the virtue of purity. It is overly sexualizing of others. Rejecting impurity or sexual transgression should never lead to rejecting the value of another person.

A man and a woman can't be friends if one or both of them are deadlocked in immaturity and fear. Without spiritual maturity, we are back to catering to immature notions of sexuality.

The same imagery they claim to find sexually empowering is rooted in the myth of white women’s purity and every other woman’s sexual availability.

Can we say that Middle Eastern men who are murderously obsessed with female sexual purity actually love their wives, daughters, and sisters less than American or European men do?

THE EVANGELICAL MEN’S MOVEMENT of the 1990s was marked by experimentation and laden with contradictions. “Soft patriarchy” papered over tensions between a harsher, authoritarian masculinity and a more egalitarian posture; the motif of the tender warrior reconciled militancy with a kinder, gentler, more emotive bearing. Inconsistencies within the evangelical men’s movement reflected those within evangelicalism as a whole in the post–Cold War years. Earlier in the decade, it might have appeared that the more egalitarian and emotive impulses had the upper hand. It was a new era for America, and for American evangelicals. Rhetoric of culture wars persisted, but evangelicals’ interests had expanded to include a broader array of issues, including racial reconciliation, antitrafficking activism, and addressing the persecution of the global church. At the end of the decade, however, the more militant movement would begin to reassert itself. When it did, this resurgent militancy would become intertwined both with the sexual purity movement and with the assertion of complementarianism within evangelical circles. In time it would become clear that the combination of all three could produce toxic outcomes.

The idea is that women are supposed to do all they can to limit men's access to female sexuality (and women themselves, really), and men are meant to do all they can to convince women otherwise. This sets up a sexual dynamic that assumes women don't want to have sex and therefore need to be convinced to do so--and that this "convincing" is a natural part of seduction. But too often, underlying this model, what is called "seduction" is actually coercion.

Let's face it--the beauty queens and young girls touting virginity pledges are simply purity porn stars. Whether it's actual porn or mythologized purity, the end goal is to be desirable to men, and what women may actually want for themselves, sexually or otherwise, is lost.

This illustration is picture-perfect purity culture. In short, women's sexuality must be just right, so that men can spiritually thrive.

But when the purity and community equations proved to be bad math, everything 'just crumbled.' How could she believe anything evangelicalism taught her if the one thing they said was most important - remain pure before marriage and you will have a blissful sexual life after marriage and be supported by the larger community - wasn't true? "To me, it meant there was no God," Muriel said[.]

Despite its emphasis on purity culture and the importance of abstinence, religion is not entirely free from compulsory sexuality or the belief that lust is universal and to be otherwise is to be abnormal.

When instead we regard one another as temptations, as means merely of gratifying sexual desires, or as threats to our image, and we do not regard one another honorably as brothers and sisters, we are not loving deeply.

Let us turn now to a study of a small Newfoundland fishing village. Fishing is, in England at any rate – more hazardous even than mining. Cat Harbour, a community in Newfoundland, is very complex. Its social relationships occur in terms of a densely elaborate series of interrelated conceptual universes one important consequence of which is that virtually all permanent members of the community are kin, ‘cunny kin’, or economic associates of all other of the 285 permanent members. The primary activity of the community is cod fishing. Salmon, lobster, and squid provide additional sources of revenue. Woodcutting is necessary in off-seasons. Domestic gardening, and stints in lumber camps when money is needed, are the two other profitable activities. The community's religion is reactionary. Women assume the main roles in the operation though not the government of the churches in the town. A complicated system of ‘jinking’ – curses, magic, and witchcraft – governs and modulates social relationships. Successful cod fishing in the area depends upon highly developed skills of navigation, knowledge of fish movements, and familiarity with local nautical conditions. Lore is passed down by word of mouth, and literacy among older fishermen is not universal by any means. ‘Stranger’ males cannot easily assume dominant positions in the fishing systems and may only hire on for salary or percentage. Because women in the community are not paid for their labour, there has been a pattern of female migration out of the area. Significantly, two thirds of the wives in the community are from outside the area. This has a predictable effect on the community's concept of ‘the feminine’. An elaborate anti-female symbolism is woven into the fabric of male communal life, e.g. strong boats are male and older leaky ones are female. Women ‘are regarded as polluting “on the water” and the more traditional men would not consider going out if a woman had set foot in the boat that day – they are “jinker” (i.e., a jinx), even unwittingly'. (It is not only relatively unsophisticated workers such as those fishermen who insist on sexual purity. The very skilled technicians drilling for natural gas in the North Sea affirm the same taboo: women are not permitted on their drilling platform rigs.) It would be, however, a rare Cat Harbour woman who would consider such an act, for they are aware of their structural position in the outport society and the cognition surrounding their sex….Cat Harbour is a male-dominated society….Only men can normally inherit property, or smoke or drink, and the increasingly frequent breach of this by women is the source of much gossip (and not a negligible amount of conflict and resentment). Men are seated first at meals and eat together – women and children eating afterwards. Men are given the choicest and largest portions, and sit at the same table with a ‘stranger’ or guest. Women work extremely demanding and long hours, ‘especially during the fishing season, for not only do they have to fix up to 5 to 6 meals each day for the fishermen, but do all their household chores, mind the children and help “put away fish”. They seldom have time to visit extensively, usually only a few minutes to and from the shop or Post Office….Men on the other hand, spend each evening arguing, gossiping, and “telling cuffers”, in the shop, and have numerous “blows” (i.e., breaks) during the day.’ Pre-adolescents are separated on sexual lines. Boys play exclusively male games and identify strongly with fathers or older brothers. Girls perform light women's work, though Faris indicates '. . . often openly aspire to be male and do male things. By this time they can clearly see the privileged position of the Cat Harbour male….’. Girls are advised not to marry a fisherman, and are encouraged to leave the community if they wish to avoid a hard life. Boys are told it is better to leave Cat Harbour than become fishermen....

If you feel betrayed, you should write out why you feel that way, mourn over it, think about it, and when you are all done, ask God what He thinks about it. Once you have done that, ask God how He sees the person who you feel betrayed you. By seeing that person through God's eyes, you can connect to the compassion He has for him or her despite what he or she did to you. This is the perfect time to forgive that person for all the things that you just wrote down. This is the process of forgiveness.

Despite its encouragement of illegitimate children, the legislation of Nazi Germany was extremely puritanical with continual emphasis on sexual and racial purity; and the charge of sexual misdemeanours was regularly raised against people whom it was desired to discredit. No country is more prudish to-day, both in its legislation and public behaviour, than the U.S.S.R. under Stalin; all the liberal concessions which were made in the first years of the revolution have been withdrawn; homosexuality, abortion, common law concubinage and frequent divorce are all penalized; the regulation of sexual behaviour is more savage than it ever was under the Czars. It is improbable that the late George Orwell consciously remembered this passage (I know he read it when it first came out) when he invented the Junior Anti-Sex League for all the girls in Nineteen Eighty-Four;

the Judas spirit always want intimacy without covenant!

Remember, God made us different because we needed suitable helpers. The more we understand and appreciate how we are different, the better we can draw on and receive the help that we need from one another.

When purity culture becomes synonymous with surveillance culture, it must be seen as bordering on heresy.

I suggest that we should deal with sex, not from the standpoint of its wickedness, nor of its commonplaceness, but of its sacredness.

While murder causes the physical death of one's body, sexual immorality brings other kinds of death- the death of innocence, health, stability, fidelity, faithfulness, trust, joy, peace, and security.

Sex works a lot like fire. When removed from its protective boundaries, it burns us and leaves scars. When brought and kept inside those covenanted boundaries, a sweet foretaste of the ultimate love feast between Christ and his Bride, the Church, is given.

Related to this first reason is the fear that a passion for holiness makes you some kind of weird holdover from a bygone era. As soon as you share your concern about swearing or about avoiding certain movies or about modesty or sexual purity or self-control or just plain godliness, people look at you like you have a moralistic dab of cream cheese on your face from the 1950s. Believers get nervous that their friends will call them legalistic, prudish, narrow-minded, old fashioned, holier-than-thou—or worst of all, a fundamentalist.

you end up feeling successful at sanctification because you stayed away from drugs, lost weight, served at the soup kitchen, and renounced Styrofoam. But you’ve ignored gentleness, humility, joy, and sexual purity. God has not really gotten to your heart.

Why should you buy the cow, if you can get the milk for free?” Answer: There is no reason, no incentive, no need to buy the cow. If the cow continues to supply free milk, the milk’s value and the cow’s value are greatly reduced and free milk will keep that cow feeling empty, misused and unwanted. This is the harsh reality of giving out discounts. Of course, we are not cows, but rather sons and daughters of the Most High God, so let’s be mindful not to discount the price that was paid for us on Calvary.

DAY 25: What specific instructions did Paul give Timothy that would apply to a young person? A young person seeking to live as a disciple of Jesus Christ can find essential guidelines in 4:12–16, where Paul listed five areas (verse 12) in which Timothy was to be an example to the church: 1. In “word” or speech—see also Matthew 12:34–37; Ephesians 4:25, 29, 31. 2. In “conduct” or righteous living—see also Titus 2:10; 1 Peter 1:15; 2:12; 3:16. 3. In “love” or self-sacrificial service for others—see also John 15:13. 4. In “faith” or faithfulness or commitment, not belief—see also 1 Corinthians 4:2. 5. In “purity” and particularly sexual purity—see also 4:2. The verses that follow hold several other building blocks to a life of discipleship: 1. Timothy was to be involved in the public reading, study, and application of Scripture (v. 13). 2. Timothy was to diligently use his spiritual gift that others had confirmed and affirmed in a public way (v. 14). 3. Timothy was to be committed to a process of progress in his walk with Christ (v. 15). 4. Timothy was to “take heed” to pay careful attention to “yourself and to the doctrine” (v. 16). The priorities of a godly leader should be summed up in Timothy’s personal holiness and public teaching. All of Paul’s exhortations in vv. 6–16 fit into one or the other of those two categories. By careful attention to his own godly life and faithful preaching of the Word, Timothy would continue to be the human instrument God would use to bring the gospel and to save some who heard him. Though salvation is God’s work, it is His pleasure to do it through human instruments.

Disciplined In Purity There are many struggles that comes with being a man. Particularly there is the struggle of purity. With our ever raging hormones, there are times in our life that sexual purity becomes an issue. But God who is greater than ourselves is able to help us overcome every obstacle to pleasing Him.

Stumbling in sexual purity generally occurs, when we allow ourselves to become idle-minded. If we are choosing not to be sober minded, we can easily be influenced to walk down bad paths.

The initial confrontation of the root is the most critical part of this journey.

Let’s be honest. Chad is not an exception. Our churches have long been filled with people who claim to be Christ followers but who live like pagans. Our lives have not been all that different when it comes to things such as divorce, sexual purity, forgiving those who wrong us, loving our enemies, slander, gossip, and the harder things of discipleship.

Without purity of spirit, if you're still in the middle of lust and greed, and other wanting, you're like children playing at sexual intercourse. They wrestle, and rub together, but its not sex! The same with fightings of mankind. Its a squabble with play swords. No purpose, totally futile.

Salette, France (1846) The next apparition at La Salette happened four years later, in 1846. High up in the French Alps, Mary appeared to two children—Maximin, eleven; and Mélanie, fourteen—as they tended sheep. What they saw when they came upon her was unique among apparitions; she sat as a lady sobbing, her hands covering her face in grief. Indeed, looking at the turmoil in France and beyond, Mary had much to grieve over. France’s anti-Catholic streak had even reached the small village of La Salette, where Mass and the sacraments were neglected as fewer and fewer people valued the faith of their fathers. Cursing was preferred to prayer, sexual license erased purity, and greed and self-indulgence superseded piety and sacrifice. Even the children to whom Mary appeared had little faith or formation. They rarely went to Mass and were barely able to muddle through the Our Father or Hail Mary. The messages from La Salette are significant because of their length and detail.

In the late nineteenth century women lodgers, alone in the city, epitomized the purity of endangered woman-hood; in the early twentieth century the same women were among the first "respectable" women broadcast as happy sexual objects.

The application of their rules routinely produces immense amounts of suffering and even threatens to breakdown solid marriages as well.[96]  Their sense of compassion and mercy, however, is severely limited by their presuppositions.  To maintain their absolute certainties, they have to tell themselves that they have chosen the “narrow path” upholding God’s sexual purity codes.  As they follow in Christ’s footsteps, the thistles and thorns on both sides of the path cut into their flesh.  They are content not to be happy in this world; their eyes are on the prize in the world to come.  Being disposed to relish pain more than joy, they naturally listen to the suffering of their victims with the same disposition that they give to their own suffering. 

evangelicalism instills a “fix-it” attitude into theories about marriage, about sex lives, about everything involving sexual identity. We need to remove ourselves from this mindset—people are not things to be fixed. Similarly,

Nothing has stolen more dreams, dashed more hopes, broken up more families, and messed up more people psychologically than our propensity to disregard God’s commands regarding sexual purity. Most of the major social ills in America are caused by, or fueled by, the misuse of our sexuality.

Purity culture often functions by shaming us for seeking knowledge about our own bodies. Studying even the scientific elements of sexual intercourse can feel like a rebellion. Knowing yourself, even just medically or scientifically, is a step away from the ignorance that purity teachings often instill. Knowledge is power, especially here—knowing how your body and your partner’s work together can help you both be confident. One of the best ways to develop a healthy sexual ethic for yourself is to know your anatomy, to know how different kinds of sex work, and to be prepared to enter sexual encounters safely. Having this information can help you to be confident, both in saying yes and in saying no. The

Regardless of your sexual state, you are a human being, you are a created person of God, and you are whole. Instead of talking about waiting for marriage, we need to talk about waiting until we’re ready. Instead of shaming sexually active young people, we need to be equipping them with the knowledge to have sex safely. Instead of categorizing all premarital sexual activity as bad, we need to have conversations about consent, and pleasure, and peer pressure. What

Free people can handle liberty because they have developed character through exercising the restraint dictated by their virtues. They are not the slaves of their physical desires; rather, they train their bodies to behave in order to fulfill the higher desires created by their own virtues.

Let’s hope that churches lose the right things: an addiction to cultural power and authority, a self-righteous clamp on the idol of sexual purity, an attachment to secrecy and silence as effective means of control.

So I said, “I’ve kept that page all these years because the article is about my life, in a way. A long time ago I was the victim of a crime.” “Rapist-robber? Oh, Mom”—your face twisted up—“you mean you weren’t a virgin when you married Dad! Poor you!” It was a shock to realize that your understanding of sexual violence was being filtered through the language of sexual purity. I felt that I had failed you. The church had failed you. Women are not merely virgins or victims. There’s more to living in a woman’s skin than staying a virgin. So you and I had more conversations after that.

But no matter how much we strive for purity in our minds, bodies, spirits, or ideologies, purity is not the same as holiness. It’s just easier to define what is pure than what is holy, so we pretend they are interchangeable.

Growing up, I heard a lot of talk about how evangelical Christians were better people than secular or other religious people (funnily enough, I now hear the exact same self-congratulatory messages from secular liberal people). But the truth was, I couldn't always tell the difference between a Christian and a non-Christian. I saw both lie, both steal, but love, and both unselfishly give to others. But one tangible thing we could point to as evangelicals was that we didn't have sex before marriage. There was that. There was always that. Which is why, I believe, the threat of losing that so-called sexual purity seemed so grave. Were we to have sex outside of marriage, could we even call ourselves Christian anymore? What if we made out? Kissed? Held hands? Had a crush? How close to sex could be come before we were no longer Christians?

Here is the sole effort we must make: we must give grace as much access to our lives as possible. First, in some quiet pocket of our day, let’s immerse ourselves in the true and surprising story of God. Let’s wear out the bindings of our Bibles, irreverently spill coffee on their pages, and ask God to drive his words straight through the bone and marrow of our thinking and intending and desiring. Let’s turn to God with all the prayerful hope that his grace is sufficient to meet us in our wondering and wandering. With God’s help, let’s then put on new habits of being: honesty, sexual purity, generosity, courage, patience. Let’s take up the ancient disciplines of solitude and silence, prayer and fasting, worship and study, fellowship and confession, never thinking that God’s business is information but transformation. As there is failure, let us confess; as there is renewed intention, let us seek accountability and help. (We’re damned to think that a godly life is a solitary one.) Let’s join the great company of sinners and saints in a local congregation and commit together to put one foot in front of another every day for the glory of God. Here is the sole effort we must make: we must give grace as much access to our lives as possible. God is a speaking God—and we are meant to be his responsive people. All of it is grace.

If a guy pressures you to compromise sexually, he is not showing you Christlike, agape love. He's not encouraging you toward purity and holiness. He's not striving to honor God in that area of the relationship. He's focusing on his wants and is sadly using you to satisfy them. He's being selfish and putting his desires above all else.

God provides us with the only way to protect our moral purity (1 Corinthians 7:1–2), protect our bodies physically (1 Corinthians 6:18), honor our spouse faithfully (Exodus 20:14), and keep our sexual experiences glorifying to Him (1 Corinthians 6:19). He is not limiting our enjoyment but protecting it . . . and us.

Second, you must remember Scripture. Scripture memory is not just a pious spiritual discipline for people who are more holy or mature than you are. Scripture memory is a powerful weapon that can give you victory in your battle against porn. The psalmist says to God, “I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you” (Psalm 119:11). The Bible—internalized as a treasure in your heart—is available as a powerful ally against temptation. You have access to an entire Bible full of passages you can hide in your heart to help you in temptation. You can memorize Psalm 119:11; Matthew 5:27–30; or any other Bible verse in this book. The passages you select do not even need to address sexual purity. A diverse stockpile of biblical truth is needed to combat the lies of temptation when they come.

I nearly killed a woman tonight.” He confessed it harshly, his dark eyes wounded. “You told me God made us for a purpose, that we were created by him. I am more beast than man, Edgar, and I cannot continue to delude myself. I would seek eternal rest, but even that is denied me. Assassins stalk my people. I have no right to leave them until I know they are protected. Now my woman is in danger, not only from me but from my enemies.” Edgar puffed at his pipe calmly. “You said ‘my woman.’ You love this woman?” Mikhail waved a dismissing hand. “She is mine.” It was a statement, a decree. How could he say “love”? It was an insipid word for what he felt. She was purity. Goodness. Compassion. The other half of his soul. Light to his darkness. Everything that he was not. Edgar nodded. “My friend, you’re in love with her.” Mikhail scowled darkly. “I need. I hunger. I want. That is my life.” He said it in torment, as if he could make it true. “Then why do you feel such pain, Mikhail? You wanted her, maybe you needed her. I presume you took her. You hungered, I presume you fed. Why should you feel pain?” “You know it is wrong to take the blood of women for whom we feel other appetites.” “You have said you have not felt sexual need in centuries--that you cannot feel at all,” Edgar reminded him softly. “I feel for her,” Mikhail confessed, his dark eyes alive with pain. “I want her every moment of the day. I need her. God, I have to have her. Not only her body, but also her blood. I am addicted to the taste of her. I crave her, all of her, yet it is forbidden.” “But you took her blood and body anyway, knowing it was wrong?” “I almost killed her.” Mikhail brushed his hand over his face, as if he could wipe out the things he’d done. “But you didn’t kill her. She still lives. She cannot be the first time you fed too deeply. Did the others cause you pain?” Mikhail turned away. “You do not understand. It was the way it happened, what I did afterward. I feared it from the moment I first heard her voice.” “If it had never happened before, why did you fear it?” Mikhail hung his head, his fingers curling into fists. “Because I wanted her, I could not bear to give her up. I wanted her to know me, know the worst. See all of me. I wanted to bind her to me so she could never leave my side.

believing

But when we choose to pursue purity and postpone intimacy, Jesus’s sacrifice looks costly, like our most expensive and prized possession. When we do not push boundaries, we announce the priceless weight of every one of his wounds. When we keep our clothes on and our hands from wandering, we celebrate the immeasurable mercy he carried on a back destroyed with lashes. When we wait in dating, we declare again that he really is risen from the dead and reigning in heaven. Our sexual purity will either make the cross look real and valuable, or it won’t. With our eyes happily fixed on Jesus, the once-for-all sacrifice for our sins, he will increasingly be honored in our bodies, whether in singleness or marriage.

True accountability also requires someone who possesses the biblical knowledge and practical wisdom to guide you toward purity. This does not require years of experience or advanced degrees. It can be any growing Christian who is walking in sexual purity and is willing to read this book along with you.

Jesus follows this with a serious strategy for fighting sexual sin. If you are tempted to violate the standard and commit sexual sin, then Jesus says you must gouge out your eye or cut off your hand. You must not only remove these parts of your body; you must also throw them away. Jesus won’t allow you to retain these sinning body parts in hopes of using them later. He commands that you cast them away and abandon any future prospect of using them again for sinful purposes.

Finally, Jesus discusses the serious stakes of disobedience. Why does Jesus urge such radical measures? Because of the life-and-death nature of the consequences. Employing radical measures is the path to life, while indulging sin is the path to hell. God does not forbid sexual immorality because he wants you to be miserable; God forbids it because sexual immorality leads to brokenness, sadness, emptiness, death, and hell. Righteousness, on the other hand, leads to fullness, joy, peace, and life. According to Jesus, sin is not complicated. There are two simple choices and two guaranteed consequences—the easy path of sexual immorality, which will kill you, and the hard path of radical warfare against it, which will lead you to the fullness of life.

First, Jesus provides a serious standard. If a person wants purity, it is not enough to avoid having a physical, sexual relationship with someone who is not his or her spouse. If they want purity, Jesus says, they must not want sex with someone who is not their spouse. Jesus raises the standard of purity from physical acts of fornication to lustful intentions of the heart and lustful looks of the eyes.

Purity most often leads to pride or to despair, not to holiness. Because holiness is about union with, and purity is about separation from.

Enraged enslavers viewed the American Anti-Slavery Society’s postal campaign as an act of war. Raging to defend “our sister states” against abolitionists, White male thugs roamed northern Black neighborhoods in the summer and fall of 1835, looting and destroying homes, schools, and churches. They shouted about their mission to protect White women from the hypersexual Black-faced animals that, if freed, would ravage the exemplars of human purity and beauty. In fact, after 1830, young, single, and White working-class women earning wages outside the home were growing less dependent on men financially and becoming more sexually free. White male gang rapes of White women began to appear around the same time as the gang assaults by White men on Black people. Both were desperate attempts to maintain White male supremacy.

The purity discourse that emerged from Southern white evangelicalism is not separable from the racialized discourse of sexuality and purity that these same Christians have shaped for the whole of American history. The regulation of sexuality by white Christians in the United States has always been about the propagation of a socially acceptable and pristine nuclear family worthy of having the American dream, a family that was heterosexual, middle class, and white.

Since the nineteenth century, white feminists have had a critique of the ways white men have attempted to sexually regulate their bodies. They have decried the demands for sexual chastity, purity, and monogamy that American culture has presumed to be white women’s civic duty. But often the critique stops there. White women never make the leap toward solidarity. That solidarity would be rooted in the fact that the terms and limits of Black women’s and white women’s sexual agency (while certainly not equal in the scope of terror and violence) are both bound up with the project of white supremacy. Far too frequently, white women’s notions of antiracist solidarity is defined solely by their willingness to date Black men. I’m coming back to that momentarily.

But the conversations that I have been having over the past twelve years make it clear that the influence of the consistent shaming embedded into the religious purity message, particularly during stages of extreme neural plasticity such as adolescence is for sexual development, can be extreme for many.

The cornerstone of the purity myth is the expectation that girls and women, in particular, will be utterly and absolutely nonsexual until the day they marry a man, at which point they will naturally and easily become his sexual satisfier, ensuring the couple will have children and never divorce: one man, one woman, in marriage, forever.

Generally speaking, purity culture excuses male sexuality and amplifies female sexuality, and it shames consensual sexual activity and silences nonconsensual sexual activity.

Within the evangelical Christian subculture, the purity industry gave many adolescents the impression that sexual abstinence before marriage was the way for them to live out their faith.

The foundational behavior which will make or break you when judgment falls upon the nation and the whole world is the purity of your sexual state.

Summing Up • Because Paul speaks of same-sex eroticism as “impurity” in Romans 1: 24-27, an exploration of the moral logic underpinning these verses must grapple with the notions of purity and impurity. • The Old Testament defines purity in three broad ways: conforming to the structures of the original created order; safeguarding the processes by which life is stewarded; and emphasizing Israel’s distinctness from the surrounding nations. • In the New Testament we see three movements with respect to the Old Testament purity laws: ° away from defining purity externally toward defining purity in terms of the motives and dispositions of the heart and will; ° away from defensiveness and separation toward confidence and mission, empowered by the Holy Spirit; ° away from the attempt to replicate the original creation, to a forward-looking expectation of a new creation that fulfills but also transforms the old creation in surprising ways. • These movements clarify that, for Paul, the core form of moral logic underlying his characterization of sexual misconduct as “impurity” focuses on internal attitudes and dispositions, particularly lust (excessive desire) and licentiousness (lack of restraint). • Because Paul characterizes the same-sex eroticism of Romans 1: 24-27 as “impurity,” and therefore understands it as characterized by excessive passion and a lack of restraint, it raises the question concerning whether committed gay and lesbian unions, which seek to discipline passion and desire by means of lifelong commitment, should still be characterized as “impurity.

Sex isn’t medicine, and it isn’t therapy. It’s best (and safest) to have your head and heart on straight before entering into sexual relationships, rather than assuming everything will get better, easier, or healthier by getting laid.

Summing Up One must read biblical commands and prohibitions in terms of their underlying forms of moral logic. The moral logic underpinning the negative portrayal of same-sex eroticism in Scripture does not directly address committed, loving, consecrated same-sex relationships today. Although Scripture does not teach a normative form of gender complementarity, the experience of complementarity itself may be helpful and important in both heterosexual and same-sex relationships, even if complementarity is not construed along hard-wired gender lines. The stories of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 19) and the Levite’s concubine (Judg. 19) focus on the horror of rape and the ancient abhorrence of the violation of male honor in rape. As such, they help to explain Scripture’s negative stance toward the types of same-sex eroticism the Bible addresses, but they do not directly address the case of committed and loving same-sex relationships. The prohibitions in Leviticus against “lying with a male as with a woman” (18: 22; 20: 13) make sense in an ancient context, where there were concerns about purity, pagan cults, the distinctiveness of Israel as a nation, violations of male honor, and anxieties concerning procreative processes. However, these prohibitions do not speak directly to committed and consecrated same-sex relationships. Nor are they based on a form of moral logic grounded in biology-based gender complementarity. The references to same-sex eroticism found in two New Testament vice lists (1 Cor. 6: 9 and 1 Tim. 1: 10) focus attention on the ancient practice of pederasty—the use of boy prostitutes in male-male sex. As such, they also do not address committed and mutual same-sex relationships today. There are many more questions to be explored, but this book has attempted to focus on core issues involving the interpretation of Scripture, as the church continues to wrestle with a multitude of questions that arise outside the heterosexual mainstream.

Upon the proper use and conservation of sexual force the progress of civilization itself depends. All history shows that just in proportion as the sex instinct is kept sacred, pure, and the life essence properly used and converted into creative, productive power, does a nation reach a high state of civilization. Wherever this instinct becomes generally perverted, as it did in ancient Rome, people become devitalized, lose their physical and mental stamina, and rapidly deteriorate. Where it is protected by virtue and purity of life, the nation rises in the scale of civilization; where it is abused, perverted, the nation sinks to the level of low-flying ideals.

Reputation will rise and fall according to how closely we track or depart from the ideals of our society – and these tend to be pegged to financial success, sexual propriety, decorum, marriage, sobriety, the sanctity of family and the purity of children. The more of these ideals one flouts, the harsher will be the penalties.

The virginity movement's notions regarding obscenity and pornography have little to do with the actual issues in porn that affect women, such as hypermasculinity, humiliation, or violence against them. Gay sex or masturbation isn't what's harming women through porn--a hyped-up patriarchy is. After all, there's nothing "alternative" about calling women "whores" or presenting violence against women as sexual. That's good-old fashioned misogyny, and it's been around and systematically supported for a long time.

The thing is, naked women aren't the problem--a woman believing her only value is sexual is what's dangerous. It's not only women's sexuality that we have to watch out for, it's the way men construct it.

So where does this come from, this dirty double standard? Pathologizing women's bodies and sexuality is certainly nothing new; from "hysteria"* to fears about menstruation, women have been considered the "dirtier" sex for a long time *The word "hysteria" actually comes from the antiquated idea that women's emotional problems were derived from the uterus

But when articles about the sexual infection rates of African American women are one column over from an article about young white women's spring break, a disturbing cultural narrative is reinforced--that "innocent" white girls are being lured into an oversexualized culture, while young black women are already part of it.

Dating their daughters? Isn't it possible to encourage fathers to spend more time with their daughters without using language usually reserved for romantic relationships? Neutral, family-based rhetoric would probably be just as effective and would certainly be less, well, creepy. But calling daddy/daughter quality time "dates" speaks volumes about how young women are valued in the virginity movement--for their sexuality

But the myth of sexual purity still reigns supreme, and it grossly affects the way American society thinks about violence toward women. So long as women are supposed to be "pure," and so long as our morality is defined by our sexuality, sexualized violence against us will continue to be both accepted and expected.

The idea is that women are supposed to do all they can to limit men's access to female sexuality (and women themselves, really), and men are meant to do all they can to convince women otherwise. This sets up a sexual dynamic that assumes women don't want to have sex and therefore need to be convinced to do so--and that this "convincing" is a natural paer of seduction. But too often, underlying this model, what is called "seduction" is actually coercion.

When your heart is tainted by the love of this world and the pursuit of all its goodies, whether you are sexually immoral or not, you are living an impure life.

A unified Iran is constituted not only politically but also affectively. Liberty and constitutional rule bring "Affection among us." The affective sentiment- that of bonding among differing brothers-produces political bonds of national unity and was associatively linked with other desires. Perhaps foremost was the desire to care for and defend the mother, in particular her bodily integrity. The same words were commonly used to discuss territory and the female body. Laura Mulvey calls these words keys "that could turn either way between the psychoanalytic and the social" (1980, 180). They are not "just words" that open up to either domain; they mediate between these domains, taking power of desire from one to the other. More appropriately, they should be considered cultural nodes of psyhosocial condensation. Tajavuz, literally meaning transgression, expresses both rape and the invasion of territory. Another effective expression, as already noted, was Khak-i pak-i vatan, the pure soil of the homeland. The word used for "pure," pak, is saturated with connotations of sexual purity. Linked to the idea of the purity of a female vatan was the metaphoric notion of the "skirt of chastity" (daman-i 'iffat) and its purity-whether it was stained or not. It was the duty of Iranian men to protect that skirt. The weak and sometimes dying figure of motherland pleaded t her dishonorable sons to arise and cut the hands of foreigners from her skirt. Expressing hope for the success of the new constitutional regime by recalling and wishing away the horrors of previous years, an article in Sur-o Israfil addressed Iran in the following terms: "O Iran! O our Mother! You who have given us milk from the blood of your veins for many long years, and who have fed us with the tissues of your own body! Will we ever live to see your unworthy children entrust your skirt of chastity to the hands of foreigners? Will our eyes ever see foreigners tear away the veil of your chastity?

The truth is that Jesus didn’t come to rescue us from our humanity; He entered into our humanity to rescue us from our sinfulness. He didn’t come to save us from being sexual creatures; He became one of us to save us from the reign of sin and lust, which ruins our sexuality. That

Wherever religious ideas are taught, there are higher levels of sex abuse, child abuse, divorce and spouse abuse. If we wish to address the problems associated with sexual crime, abuse and harassment, the place to start is in solid, non-religious, sexual education of children and adolescents. This means that religious ideas about homosexuality, masturbation, male superiority, female purity, etc., must be directly challenged.

In short, the religious, purity, procreative, and honor-shame contexts that form the underlying moral logic of the Levitical prohibitions, understandable and coherent as they may be in their own context, simply do not apply to contemporary committed Christian gay and lesbian relationships.

A commitment to sexual purity was a commitment to cooperation between the sexes. Ideal manhood and womanhood increased the social stability of marriage and family life. The quality of domestic life, according to purity reformers who witnessed firsthand living and working conditions plagued by sexual impurity, hinged on the development of proper habits of male self-restraint.38

When We Seek Protection from Sexual Immorality Flee sexual immorality. Every sin that a man does is outside the body, but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body. 1 CORINTHIANS 6:18 SEXUAL SIN IS WORSE than other sins because it has consequences in our own body. Being that our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, that means sexual sin of any kind—even in the mind—causes great conflict within us, for how can dark live alongside light? One of the ways to avoid sexual temptation is to stay close to God and His Word. The other is not to neglect the sexual needs of your spouse. Sexual intimacy is an important way to bring unity into your marriage. Joining your hearts, minds, and bodies breaks down any stronghold of separation between you and reaffirms your oneness. Your husband most likely is out working in the world where a spirit of lust is everywhere. He needs your prayers for protection and the strength to resist it when it presents itself. The same is true for you too. It is dangerous to think that sexual failure cannot happen to you or your husband in a moment of weakness or vulnerability—even if it is only in the mind. Thoughts have consequences, and that’s why God tells us to take every thought captive. We have to take charge of our mind in order to stay undeceived. There is no safe place where infidelity, or the idea of it, cannot reveal itself as an option. If infidelity has already happened to one of you, ask God for His healing and restoring power to work a miracle of deliverance, forgiveness, and restoration in both of you. And get help. This is too big an issue to go through alone. Ask God to enable you and your husband to see to it that this important area of your life is not polluted by neglect, selfishness, busyness, or the inability to keep your eyes from evil. Seek God for the strength to flee sexual sin—even if you think this can never happen to you. That story is way too familiar. My Prayer to God LORD, I pray You will help my husband and me to resist sexual temptation of any kind, even in the mind. Strengthen us so we will not surrender to the lust of the world that strives to keep us dissatisfied with what we have. Protect us from being lured to look and wonder, or to succumb and wander. Help us to flee at the first sign of any possibility of sexual sin and run immediately to You. Give us eyes to see what is truly happening even before it happens so that we can avoid the deception of immorality. Teach us how to maintain control over our own body, mind, and soul so that we are ever mindful of the purity You want us to live in (1 Thessalonians 4:3-5). Where either of us has fallen into sexual immorality in the past—even if only in the mind—I pray You would set us completely free from the severe bondage of that. Work a miracle of restoring trust and forgiveness between us. Only You have the power to free us from the debilitating sense of betrayal and can restore us to a new beginning. Keep us both strong in faith, in self-control, in Your Word, and in Your presence so that sexual sin is never a part of our future. In Jesus’ name I pray.

Further, religions often teach that women are responsible for children’s moral development. Not taking their children to church is a sign of moral neglect. The guilt messages are so strong that even non-religious mothers have been known to take their children to church or send them. In the church, children are exposed to abstinence-only messages, purity rings, and most of all, messages about female responsibility in most sexual matters.

From the smoothness of their skin, the length of their hemlines, the banality of their song lyrics and sitcom plots, these young stars embody an ideal of teenage innocence that adults are grateful to embrace. For as many seasons as the illusion can be maintained they remain, at least on screen, uncomplicated, untroubled good girls on the verge of, but never actually awakening to, their sexuality. There is a lot of money to be made and a lot of parental anxiety to be tapped by walking that line. There is also a lot of fury unleashed at those who step across it. When young stars pose semi-nude or get caught drinking they threaten the notion that our own daughter's coming of age could be effortless. Suddenly the role models, who perpetuated that myth, become the vector of our fears. The betrayal feels personal and cuts deep.

Although Christians were more interested in martyrdom than sexual purity between the second and fourth centuries, all began to change when Christianity received approval by Constantine I in 313, and became the official religion of the Roman Empire in 391. In 320 Roman legal provisions against celibacy were lifted and in 325 the Council of Nicaea ordered clerics to abstain from sex, marriage and keeping concubines. By the fourth and early fifth centuries Christians were looking for a new badge of heroism, and found it in sexual renunciation. The Christian quest for distinctiveness turned from death to sex.

no matter how intense or long-standing the struggle, it is the work of Jesus Christ to set people free from such sin. Listen to the words of the apostle Paul: Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. 1 Corinthians 6:9–11, emphasis added

Paul moves from condemnation to confidence. First, sin is powerfully condemned. The words are clear: if you are sexually immoral you will not inherit the kingdom of God. All those who look at pornography have only a fearful expectation of condemnation. Thankfully, Paul does not end there. He moves toward confidence in our Redeemer, Jesus. Jesus cleanses sinners. Jesus loves to cleanse those who love to look at pornography, and he loves to give them power to change. Our sinfulness does not get the final word. Instead, Jesus justifies, washes, and sanctifies us. Our only hope is in a risen Savior who has the power to bring us out of the pit of pornography.

Among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people. Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving” (Ephesians 5:3–4).

Worldly sorrow is legitimate sorrow. There is actual sadness, brokenness, and tears when a person experiences this kind of sorrow. The issue is not whether a person is sad; instead, it is what they are sad about. The focus of worldly sorrow is the world. People experiencing worldly sorrow are distressed because they are losing (or fear losing) things the world has to offer. The loss could be a reputation, job, money, family, sexual fulfillment, or even access to pornography—anything that brings security, comfort, or pleasure. Some of these things are good, and some of these things are sinful, but they are all things. A sad person consumed with worldly sorrow is concerned about losing stuff—no matter how honorable or dishonorable that stuff is. This kind of worldly sorrow leads to death. It is lethal because it flows from the same kind of heart that wanted to look at pornography in the first place.

According to Shweder and his colleagues (1997), purity norms can govern a range of issues, including what foods can be eaten, who is fit and unfit to prepare them, and how foods must be cleaned or treated before they can be eaten. Purity norms also address the specifics of which sexual activities are permissible and what is forbidden, deviant, or “dirty”; allowable and inappropriate sleeping arrangements involving the members of nuclear and extended families; what sorts of clothes can and cannot be worn at different times or in specific places and settings, especially in temples and other sacred locations, or during religious rituals; how a range of organic matter, such as corpses, blood, feces, and so on, should properly be dealt with to avoid the risk of pollution; and which other social groups one can interact with, as well as how and when it is permissible to interact with them, and how to avoid becoming tainted by members of “lower” groups. The subject matter of the issues governed by such norms shows a fairly clear affinity with the subject matter regulated by disgust, and the defining contrast between purity, on the one hand, and dirt and contamination, on the other, further implicates the emotion. The Co-opt thesis holds that disgust will provide the motivation for individuals to comply with purity norms that they have acquired, and that disgust also shapes the punitive motivations that are directed at violators. Initial experimental evidence has begun to flesh out this picture in more detail (Rozin et al. 1999).

Both parties can consent to one-sided sex, but that should not be the bar set for a healthy relationship. Just because it's not rape doesn't mean it isn't dehumanizing.

Why is the superficial, legalistic approach of purity culture often so ineffective in curbing toxic masculinity in Christian men? Because it deals in a truncated, false gospel. Rules and regulations for sexual behavior don't make men new. Rather, the renewal of our minds and bodies by the Holy Spirit is the solution to the broken masculinity that plagues our culture and churches.