Mild at Heart: Love, Sex, and Masculinity After Purity Culture: Ep 6
Brad shifts to the theme of love and explains the toxicity of the soulmate myth in purity culture.
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What's up, y'all?
Welcome to Mild at Heart, our series on love, sex, and masculinity after period culture here at Straight White JC.
My name is Brad Onishi, and today I want to shift to talking about love.
We've discussed masculinity, we've discussed sex, and I want to just bring in the theme of love and talk about how Purity culture does a good job of ruining it and how it also plays into notions of masculinity and relates to men.
So purity culture treads in a pretty familiar terrain when it comes to the idea of love in American society, in European societies, and so on.
And that is the myth of the soulmate, right?
And so many of you out there I mean, I would gander all of you have heard some version of the soulmate recently, right?
Hearing anybody ask, is he or she, is they, are they, the one, is an iteration of the soulmate myth.
A soulmate myth is the idea that we all have one person for whom we are destined when it comes to love.
And that person is our other half, our supposed Life partner, the person for whom we are destined, all of that stuff.
Now, the first mention of the word soulmate was actually from the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Coleridge used it in his writing going back to 1822.
It was in a letter where he says, to be happy in married life, you must have a soulmate.
Now, this was a departure at the time from the idea of marriage as a sort of institution that is about, you know, joining two families for economic or political or other gain and other strategic purposes.
The idea of marriage as a kind of functional institution rather than a romantic one.
However, some of you listening will know, and you're already thinking about this, that the idea of a soulmate as your other half goes back all the way, way back before 1822 to Plato, right?
So Plato wrote in the Symposium, the very famous or infamous Treatise on Love, through the mouth of the character Aristophanes, that love is about finding your other half.
And so if you've ever read the Symposium, You get this very clear articulation of what many of us know to be the myth of the One.
We are all searching for our missing half, and we are destined for one person.
We might meet others along the way, but those people will not complete us, they will not make us happy, and they will not fulfill us.
And so, it's not until we meet the One, the person for whom we are destined, that we will be complete.
That our destiny will be on course and that we will live happily ever after.
Anytime you've seen a Disney film or a romantic comedy that is based on the idea of happily ever after, you're seeing a reiteration of the soulmate myth that came down through Plato.
Now, one of the things that always gets me about Plato's Symposium is that Aristophanes, the character who talks about this soulmate myth, is a comic poet, is somebody who is known for his absurdity.
And so when he's reiterating this, it always strikes me that he's joking in some very wry way, and yet we've inherited the myth in our romantic comedies, in our Disney fairy tales, and in so many other ways, To take it very seriously as the model for love.
Now, you might be thinking, okay, Plato, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, come on.
What does this have to do with purity culture?
Well, purity culture has, you know, a very Christian version of this.
It says that, right, anyone you date, anyone even you talk to who is of the opposite sex, you should be wondering, are they the one?
I mean, you know, if you experience purity culture, you know that you're taught from age 14, 15, 16.
To wonder if anybody you might be talking to of the opposite sex is the person you're going to marry.
Are they your future spouse, right?
And there's memes about this, there's ways that some of us who've deconstructed joke about it, but that is ingrained in you because there's the notion that love is about finding your other half.
And people will quote Genesis chapter 1, you know, they'll leave their families and become one flesh as the kind of basis, right, for this Christian version of the soulmate myth.
Uh, the idea is, is once you meet the one for whom you're destined, then, you know, again, just like in the Plato version, you will be complete.
You will be on track to fulfill your destiny.
You will live happily ever after, and you, you will live the life that God wants for you.
Now, the reason I want to bring it up today is that this version of the soulmate myth in purity culture obviously is not traced back to Plato.
You know, your youth pastor is not going to be up there giving lessons on Plato's Symposium.
But something that we never really consider, and I think is really fascinating, is I think the soulmate myth goes back before Plato, and I think it actually goes back to Christian and Jewish sources.
My argument, and I've written about this, I've written articles about this and other things, is that the monotheisms that we see in Judaism and Christianity are forms of monogamy.
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