Something the Sexvangelicals said about purity culture and men struck a chord.
Here’s the thing about growing up with purity culture, as a man: you internalize a lot of ugly messages about men and sex. According to the purity paradigm, men are rapacious sex-craved deviants by default. It’s only the fear of hell, the love of Jesus, the elimination of temptation (i.e. policing women), and application of rigid self-control that keeps us from assaulting women left and right.
[Note: I’m going to frame this piece primarily in terms of cis-heterosexual men leaving purity culture in the form of evangelical Christianity. That choice reflects the audience I’m writing for, it’s not intended to exclude others healing from purity culture.]
Here’s the thing about growing out of purity culture, as a man: you can take the man out of the culture, but taking the culture out of the man is a lot harder. Especially because purity culture has infected Western feminist thought to an under-appreciated degree.
A lot of things that people say with feminist intent could be taken straight out of a Church purity-retreat handbook. At a superficial level there’s a lot of overlap: “men are pigs and their sexual urges are a source of great harm”.
For most feminists this kind of verbiage is [completely justified] venting about the daily experience of women under misogynous patriarchy. And I want to be clear that this post is not about “being less mean to men”. It’s about how easy it is as a man transitioning to feminism to leave old stereotypes of masculinity un-interrogated and unreconstructed.
It’s easy, as a man leaving evangelical purity culture and reading up on feminism, to think:
Ah, everything the Church told me about men is essentially true: we are filthy-minded monsters. But as a progressive man I can’t keep expecting women to “guard my thoughts”, I just have to white-knuckle my way through life. Hating myself every time I have an impure thought and constantly worrying that I’m the problem.
This can go a few directions:
- Man rejects feminism because it sounds a little too miserably familiar to what he grew up with.
- Man struggles in anxiety, loneliness and self-hatred
- Man remains just as much of a rigid judgmental moralist as he was in purity culture
- Man constantly seeks not-all-men “cookies” from women to validate that he’s one of the good ones.
Real masculine feminism is not about simply re-wrapping purity culture in new terms. Speaking personally, after a lot of deconstruction and reconstruction, I can tell you that feminist men aren’t out here punching ourselves in the dick every five seconds. You can be a happy, horny, self-accepting, sexually and intimately satisfied feminist man without shame.
Here follow a few observations that I hope help you with your journey to fully deconstructing the messages that purity culture has left you with.
It’s not about restraint
Jesus and Paul were wrong. The secret to having healthy, respectful relationships with people you find attractive is not about rigidly controlling your innermost thoughts. It’s certainly not about “plucking out your eye”. It’s about separating thought from action, and from words.
Self restraint on words and actions is necessary as a feminist… hell, as a grownup. But it’s just the first step; a band-aid over old habits and old narratives. There’s a space beyond it where you don’t have to think about restraint much anymore, because you are no longer living in a world where intimacy is a scarce commodity.
It’s not about becoming sexless
People are hot! OMG people are hot. If your orientation is like mine, women and femmes in particular are hot 🥵 They have boobs and butts and necks and omigosh. It’s OK to be attracted to them.
No one owes you anything for the fact that you are attracted to them. They don’t even owe you acknowledgement or enjoyment of the fact that you’re attracted. But you still get to enjoy your attraction! You’re not a monster for having a libido.
Research shows that the more we try to avoid certain topics, the more we obsess over them. Give yourself grace to be a horny human. Watch porn (and pay for it if you can, sex work is work). Enjoy the unbelievable wealth of content hot people give us for free on platforms like TikTok and Twitter and Instagram.
You’re probably starving
Purity culture ties the satisfaction of your deeply mammalian need for touch to the acquisition of an “owned” monogamous sexual partner. It’s a hell of a scam. Try to remember that you need touch, it’s OK to need touch, it’s OK to be going slightly bonkers if you lack touch. If and when you rebuild your life to have more touch and tenderness of all kinds, not just sexual, you will probably find the urgency to get laid dramatically reduced!
It’s not about differences in sex drive
One of the narratives that purity culture and unreconstructed feminism have in common is that “men are horndogs and women more or less just… put up with sex”. This is a misogynist lie.
Women are horny too! So, so very horny. I mean, despite all the horrible things that happen to them under patriarchy they are still out here banging absolute trashbags out of eternal optimism. Respect them for this. Celebrate their right to be horny without shame. We all get free together or not at all, and you know what happens when we get free? We fuuuuuuuck.
In fact, women who have liberated themselves from misogynist narratives, are living confidently in their bodies, and are surrounded by other people who respect them as whole persons aren’t just horny. They are, how to put this… filthy. By which I of course mean boisterously unrestrained, because “sex=dirty” is purity culture talking. Women who own their sexuality are free to incorporate all kinds of play into it… even play that would be considered “degrading” in other contexts.
Why do I bring this up? Because one of the things that purity culture hammers into you as a man is that men are disgusting perverts. Unreconstructed, this idea can follow you into feminism and make you feel like damaged goods. Or like you’re not a “good feminist” because of your porn search history. Or like you’ll never have the sex you really crave.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Body-positivity isn’t just for women
Here’s the part we really don’t talk about: the number that patriarchy and purity culture does on men’s self-perception. We learn that to have value, we’re supposed to be useful human appliances. Not smokin’ hotties. We aren’t inherently desirable; we are desirers who must attract lovers with our wealth or our power or our strength or competence.
As we move into feminism, this preconception doesn’t just vanish. We transmute it into hoping that we will be wanted for how virtuous, how supportive, how good an ally we are. One thing nobody teaches us is how to look in a mirror and say: goddamn I am a smoke show and whoever gets to touch me is lucky.
Feminism has made great strides in allowing women to explore, love, and rejoice in their own bodies. To get over the resentment that purity culture has instilled in you, you need to do the same. Get out that selfie-cam, strip for yourself in the mirror, buy some shorts that flatter your ass. Stop demanding women give you your confidence, and gift it to yourself instead in the form of self-love and self-appreciation.
Mind you, this is not about going down the red-pill hit-the-gym-and-become-an-ubermensch path. That path leads straight back to miserable resentful misogyny. This is about learning to love yourself as a sexual being right now, as you are.
End the shame
If you want proof that male sexuality is actually demonized under purity culture and unreconstructed-purity-culture-posing-as-feminism, consider how we view sex toys for women vs. sex toys for men. A woman with a hitachi is a bad bitch owning her own sexuality. A man with a masturbation sleeve is a punch line in a standup set. And let’s be honest: the sniggering jokes about fleshlights don’t end when you walk out of the patriarchal edifice.
What does this say? It says that a woman can be sexual in and of herself, but a man must earn a woman’s help to be proudly sexual. It says that a man pleasuring himself is sad and gross and incomplete.
Fight back. Reclaim your sexuality, own it proudly, make love to yourself without shame. Joyous self-love can remove a lot of the underlying psychological drivers of problematic male sexuality.
Conclusion
Nobody gets over purity culture overnight. Even many years into deconstructing the ways I was raised, I still find myself craving validation from women that I’m not “that guy”. To some degree this is OK; valuing other people’s perspectives is essential for growth. But more and more I realize that some of my early “progressive” perspectives were really purity culture with a thin veneer of feminist terminology.
Ultimately the path I’m on is one away from colonial, Puritan, cartesian dualist conceptions of humanity. We are glorious mammals whose ideas, feelings, and desires are inextricable from our bodies. We are our bodies, and that includes our full, unashamed, exuberant sensuality and sexuality.
I’m a feminist, a slut, and I’m hot as fuck. You can be too.