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Why is high-control conservative Christianity so obsessed with the idea of virginity? What “counts as” virginity? How is it “lost” or “given away”? Why are discussions and admonitions concerning virginity so focused on women? How does the concept of virginity serve the interests of high-control religion in policing women’s bodies, their sexuality, and their desires? Check out this week’s episode to hear what Dan has to say.
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It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus, My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Excited, as always, to be with you.
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DanielMillerSwaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
You can also find me in the Straight White American Jesus Discord if you have access to that.
Welcome insights, comments, thoughts, feedback.
Those of you who are subscribers who listen to the supplemental episodes know that I address some of the things that come from listeners in those supplemental episodes.
Also still interested in listener comments about sort of anti-apologetics.
What kinds of arguments did you ever hear where people said, you know, God has to exist because of this and this and this?
Going to look at some material related to that in the future.
So if you want to reach out, just put in the header apologetics or something like that.
And also working on some future stuff of questions you weren't allowed to ask in church.
And if you want to put that in the header.
So interested in that.
Interested in just general topics.
Anything that's on your mind.
Anything that you find.
The best stuff that I have here comes from listeners and feedback and comments.
So please, keep all that coming.
We'd love to hear from you.
Diving into today's episode, we continue in the series We've Got to Talk About the Sex Stuff, looking at...
The sex and gender ideology of high-control American Christianity.
The same caveat that I've had for most of this series, once again, is there'll be some frank discussion in this episode, so if you've got potentially young listeners in the car, this may not be the time.
I want to look at a really central component of this sex-gender ideology today, and it's a component that really cuts through virtually everything we've been discussing.
All the episodes that we've had, You know, could tie into this.
And it also ties in, for example, with the fundamentally different male versus female sexuality, strictures on sex and marriage, all of those kinds of things.
And what I'm talking about is the concept of virginity.
And specifically, female virginity.
Okay?
Now...
Just for those who may not remember or haven't been listening for a long time or maybe are just sort of newer to exploring the kind of subcultural issues related to high-control religion, the six-gender notions that we've been talking about often fit very broadly construed under the idea of what's called purity culture.
That's the overall theme of this entire sex and gender ideology is sexual purity.
And the idea of remaining, quote-unquote, sexually pure...
Right?
Involves, among other things, and this is, when people talk about the purity movement, this is really the core idea, remaining abstinent, remaining a virgin until marriage.
Again, the only context in which one can legitimately express their gendered sexuality, right, is within the confines of the monogamous, heterosexual, lifelong commitment of marriage and so forth.
Okay?
So, those of us who grew up...
Within this ideological subculture, those of us who, you know, I'm of an age when, like, purity culture was called purity culture.
I signed the little pledge card that said I would remain sexually pure until marriage and was part of True Love Weights, all that kind of stuff.
But there are other people who kind of come across this and they will say, as many of my clients do at the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery, many of my clients will say, I don't remember hearing the term purity culture, but...
It was there.
As I read about it, and I study about it, and I learn about it, that's what it was.
All of us who've come out of that kind of context will know just how central the category of virginity is within it.
It is a fixation.
It becomes almost a fetish within purity culture, this concept of virginity.
It is almost impossible to overstate how central this concept is.
And if conservative Christians are fixated on issues related to sex generally, and that was the first episode in this series, it's basically what I argued, it said that this conservative ideology will say that it's, for example, fighting against a hyper-sexual, secular culture and so forth, but they're the ones who are sort of talking about this stuff all the time, who can't stop talking about it and focusing on it and fixating on it.
If that's a feature of conservative high-control religion, generally...
Virginity looms as one of the specific areas of a specific focus and a specific fixation.
So within purity culture, within this ideology, in principle, people who get married would still be virgins at that time.
And this is the ultimate sign that one has been faithful in following God's design for sexuality and relationships, is that one has abstained from sexual activity until marriage.
One enters into the marriage covenant as a virgin.
Okay?
And stated this way, it seems simple enough.
I say that because if you look at the sort of the history of the concept of virginity, you find it's not very simple at all.
And I'm going to be referring this week to a book that I recommend if people are interested in this.
It's by Hannah Blank called Virgin, the Untouched History.
It's kind of a cultural history of the category of the virgin and the concept of virginity.
We find that it's actually really, really complex.
Okay?
In addition, the supposed simplicity of this, like one of the things that Blank says in her book is that there's a sense in which we all know what we mean by virgin, right?
Like everybody has some sense of what that word is, but if you sort of like delve into it or start asking questions about it or start interrogating it, we find that there's some complexity there.
But even recognize it doesn't by itself explain the intense focus on virginity.
And that's what I'm interested in.
That's what I want to decode today.
Is what that intense focus tells us about the category of virginity and what it's doing within this high-control ideology, okay?
So the first step that I want to talk about here, as I said, in principle, virginity is a concept that applies to everybody.
Once again, working within this framework, I'm going to talk about men and women.
And the reason we talk about men and women is that within this ideology, just as a reminder, those are the only two genders there are.
There are men and there are women.
There are cisgender men, cisgender women.
That's all.
There's no space for queer identity, queer gender expressions, and so forth.
So I'm not endorsing that, but I'm speaking from within this framework.
That's why I'm going to be speaking that way.
So the first issue I want to talk about is that, you know, in principle, virginity applies to men and women.
And those of us who are guys and identify as male know that at some point, or maybe now, we are virgins.
We understand that the category applies.
But as it's used within This framework, within this ideology, it is a very gendered concept, okay?
And the reason I say that is that the real fixation, the real point, the real emphasis is always on feminine virginity and the maintenance and protection of feminine virginity.
And I want to start with that point, because as I say, technically speaking, both men and women who haven't had sex, and we're going to get into that, what counts as sex?
We've talked about this before as well, and that's going to come back in here.
But men and women who haven't had sex would be virgins, but in practice, the discourse about virginity almost exclusively focused on women.
And I think there are probably lots of reasons for this, some of which I'm aware of.
I'm sure there are other reasons people could offer up, and I welcome your insights.
Other reasons people could offer up that I'm not familiar with or not thinking about.
But one of the reasons is that it just expresses the Western Christian history of the concept.
And Blank, in her book, she makes the note and says that throughout Christian history, men...
who don't have sex are not traditionally referred to as virgins.
They're referred to as celibate or continent, but not virginal, not as virgins.
And the concept of virginity, early on, long before the advent of modern articulations of high-control religion or the kinds of things we talk about in this series, long before then, it was already a sort of intentionally feminine category within Christian thought.
You also get the development of a focus on physical sort of markers of virginity, the hymen and so forth.
And in addition here, I think pregnancy matters, right?
Because women, cisgender women, can get pregnant, their sexual activity can't always be hidden.
There's a sense in which they can be physically marked as non-virginal in a way that people who can't carry children can't.
So the men, cisgender men...
I think that there's also this dimension of these fundamental differences between masculine and feminine sexuality.
I talk about that a lot because I think it's really, really important.
So just as a reminder, and again, if you're just tuning in, we've had earlier episodes in this series that have explored these things, masculine sexuality and feminine sexuality and so forth.
But just as a reminder, men are by nature driven to exercise their sexuality, which means they're sort of left to their own devices.
If they give in to their own unredeemed nature, men are not virginal.
Men are sexually voracious, excuse me.
They will exercise their sexuality.
They will not remain virginal.
Whereas women, by nature, in their essential sexuality, are virginal.
So to remain a virgin is to act in conformity with their base sexuality in a way that is not true for men.
So those are all some reasons why I think it tends to be such a gendered category.
Why the concept of virgin tends to be assigned to women.
Okay?
But I can hear people responding now.
Every week after I record, I've got certain colleagues that I talk with, and I can hear them posing this question, or I can hear, you know, emails posing this question that would say something like, okay, Dan, we get it.
Thanks for that.
That's really interesting.
We get that the concept of virginity embodies all the gender double standards we've seen, but why is it such a focus?
Like, the gender dimension doesn't by itself explain why there's this, like, obsession with virginity.
And I think that one of the reasons for this is the predatory nature of inherent male sexuality.
And this is a point that I've made.
It's a point that I'm going to keep making, that male sexuality in its unredeemed state within this ideology is essentially predatory in nature.
It's dangerous.
It's threatening.
Again, male sexuality is consuming.
And here's a key idea.
To be clear, a consuming sexuality, if it is going to be redeemed, Requires something to be consumed.
If male sexuality is about consumption, there has to be something to, as it were, feed it.
Something for it to consume.
Enter the virgin.
The virgin is essentially the man's reward for warring against his inherent predatory sexuality.
The reward, the promise for the man who redeems his sexuality.
Who fights against his inherent nature, who doesn't give in to his voracious predatory sexuality, who enters into a lifelong monogamous covenant relationship with a woman?
That is the reward, is this virginal woman.
It is what he deserves.
It is what God has promised.
And if you study purity culture, you read people like Linda K. Klein and others, you will, here's Sarah Mosliner, you will read so much, encounter so much about the promises of purity culture.
Right?
So fulfilling redeemed masculine sexuality is the purpose of female sexuality within this ideology.
That's what it's for.
And again, I've talked about that before.
I don't want to go into that too far.
But that's the first reason.
I think that this conception of male sexuality is one of the reasons why there is such a focus on virginity.
I think the second reason is, and this ties into this, it's one of the many...
Terrible understandings of sex within this ideology of what sex is.
And we've talked about this before, but we circle back around to it with this concept, right?
And this is reflected in the metaphor of sexual purity itself.
And this is interesting.
I've taught on purity movements and purity culture numerous times.
I've talked about it.
I've taught about it.
I will mention the metaphor of purity, and I always have to say, well, that's not a metaphor.
I'm like, no, it's a metaphor.
And they're like, no, it's not.
I'm like, well, there's not like literally some physical object that is rendered impure.
There's not something that, I don't know, has pollution entered into it that is no longer in a pure state.
It's not like literally you have a glass of distilled water and you put some drops of ink into it.
It is no longer pure.
It's a metaphor, but it is so deeply ingrained.
Within not just Christian culture, but popular culture, that when we use that language, it doesn't even register as a metaphor.
Okay?
But the metaphor of purity, I think, captures these ideas.
And this is how sex works within this.
And again, this can apply to men, but it applies more to women.
You're going to have so much more discussion on women.
Individuals, when they engage in sex acts, those are never just discrete sex acts with particular partners.
Rather, sex is a kind of transaction.
And so on the one hand, when two people engage in sex within this model, the acts sort of adhere to them.
It's like they stick to them or accrue to them, and they carry those acts with them moving forward.
It's like they have the residue.
There's that purity language.
The residue of those acts within them.
It's like if, I don't know, you're eating a bag of potato chips or...
Cheetos, if you're a Cheetos fan, and then you got the weird orange stuff on your fingers, it's kind of like that, right?
It sort of adheres to you, and you carry that around, which means that the next time you enter into sexual union with somebody, you're bringing that accretion from prior sex acts and so forth, and this kind of builds up and accrues over time.
And on the other hand, and this language is used a lot with women, this goes back into...
With fundamental female sexuality, the notion that they are relational by nature, that they're about feeling and emotion and love and not physicality and so forth, there's this idea that every time they enter into sexual union with somebody, they give up a piece of themselves.
And this language, again, those of you who grew up in this, you're like, yep, I heard that.
I heard that in youth group every Wednesday night, we heard that.
Those of you who have read about this, have studied this, this language is everywhere.
That they give up a piece of themselves every time they engage with a sexual partner.
And that leads to really awful sexual metaphors, both of these.
So for example, and these are really well-wrought metaphors and they're offensive and they're awful.
The notion of like a piece of gum that is chewed by one person and passed on to the next person and chews it up more and passed on to the next person and chew it up more.
The idea being that this gum becomes disgusting and carries all the germs.
And bacteria from every person that has chewed on it and so forth.
This becomes the model of the woman who has multiple sexual partners or who has had multiple sex partners in her life.
She carries this with her.
Or on the other side of that, of this giving the piece of yourself away, there's often the metaphor of like a rose or a flower that you hand around and every person you hand it to plucks off a petal.
And then they hand it to the next person.
And now they have this beautiful flower, but it has one petal less than it did.
Because that little piece was given away to the first person and so forth.
And obviously by the time you get down the line, you've got this kind of picked over, scabby looking thing that used to be a flower.
That's what happens to people who don't remain virgins until marriage.
And there are other metaphors, but these are two of the most common.
The point is, this notion that sex acts...
Accrue to a person and that a person loses a part of themselves every time they engage in sex with somebody.
And this is, again, specifically an issue aimed at women.
And in addition, and this goes to the thing about men, that the reward for a man is a virginal wife.
Virginity is presented as the ultimate possession of a woman, a gift that can only be given once.
Her value...
And I know this is super misogynistic, and I have had debates with evangelicals before who tell me that this is not true and this isn't what it means.
And friends, I'm here to tell you it does.
A woman's value is in this gift of her virginity.
It can only be given away once.
So if a woman comes to a marriage and is not a virgin, it means she has given away that gift.
She brings all of her partners into the marriage with her because all of this accrues.
She has less to give.
To her current partner, because she has given away all these pieces of herself and so forth.
Now, I want to pause and just be really clear that that's not how things work or have to work.
And I don't know, if you're dating somebody and they're like, oh, I still feel like I've got all these other people.
Like, they're not over those people.
But this is not how sex has to work.
But within purity culture, this is what it is.
This is what it means.
And when we understand that, I think it becomes really clear why, within such a patriarchal, misogynistic system, the concept of feminine virginity would be fetishized the way that it is.
But there's another overarching answer to why virginity is such a focus.
And this, of course, for me, is going to get to the real issue.
So the big overarching answer as to why virginity is such a focus within high-control religion is, wait for it, Because it's high-control religion.
The aim of this religion, to a large extent, is the control and policing of women's bodies, of women's sexuality, of women's desires.
That's an aim.
That's a fundamental, defining feature.
It is in the code of high-control American religion.
And the surest sign of this, right, if somebody says, well, show me that control is the real issue.
Let's imagine I've got the defender who says, you know, what are you going to do to show me that that's the real focus?
My way of doing that is to actually say, okay, well, let's take a deeper dive into some of these assumptions about virginity.
They don't make any sense.
They just don't work.
It's another one of these concepts that when you, like, dig into it a little bit, it doesn't cohere.
It doesn't hold together.
And then you're left with the reason why it's such a focus is not because the category makes any sense.
It's because of social control.
Okay?
I want to hit on just a couple dimensions of this here.
The first is that even within, okay, even within the overall theological framework of conservative high-control religion, this understanding of sexuality and virginity, it's bad theology.
I think it's bad theology, like, you know, sort of full stop.
But even within the world of high-control religion, this is bad theology.
Okay?
Why?
There's an idea, and this goes back to at least the time of Augustine, and I was reading Blink, and she reminded me of this, so credit to her.
There's an idea that true virginity is a spiritual rather than a physical state.
The virginity is about one's sort of spiritual condition, not one's physical condition.
And within popular purity culture, there's an echo of this, a parallel of this.
It's the idea that if someone, particularly a woman, repents of quote-unquote sexual sin, God can restore her virginity.
In other words, yes, you're supposed to remain pure, you're supposed to remain a virgin, and so forth.
But if you don't, the promise of this theology is God makes all things new.
God forgives you and restores you and so forth.
And therefore, she is forgiven and is a virgin in God's eyes.
And this is actually a part of the theology.
This whole episode in particular, I feel like, compared to some of the others, is where my time within evangelical youth group and an evangelical undergraduate college training for ministry and so forth was like this living lab for these discussions.
This notion was prevalent that God could restore somebody.
Somebody was a restored virgin, their virginity restored.
But this idea was usually swept away in the current of the views of virginity we've been discussing.
In other words, there was this theological notion that God could make all things new, but in practice, if you were a woman and you weren't a virgin, the ship had sailed.
God might forgive you and redeem you, but those around you won't.
And here's an illustration of this.
I remember discussions.
These are real discussions, debates that we would have, like, you know, guys sitting around talking at this evangelical college I was at.
And these discussions are the kind of things now that make me—the feelings I have toward them range from, like, embarrassment to just feeling really dirty and wanting to take a shower, right?
I feel bad that these are conversations I was ever part of, but I was.
And we would have these inane discussions where guys would sit around and they would debate, you know, would you marry a woman if she wasn't a virgin?
If she hadn't saved herself for marriage?
If she hadn't saved herself for you?
If she hadn't been faithful to God, would you still marry her?
And guys would really debate this.
It was just so sanctimonious.
And most guys were like, you know, some guys were just like, no, absolutely not.
Some were like, well, I really hope she would save herself, but I would try to accept her anyway or whatever.
And I, and I got a lot of stuff wrong at this time, but within this world, this is one of the things I'm glad I saw.
I used to defend that other view, and I'd be like, if God forgives and restores somebody, who the hell are we to challenge that or question that?
And people would be like, oh, so you're saying you'd marry somebody who wasn't a virgin?
Like, yes, like, I would, you know?
If we really believe our theology, we would, right?
I was a theological believer, and that was my view, but we would have these discussions, and I can tell you, I was in the minority.
And I think that that's true.
And I think that you get related discussions about, we've been talking about the use of pornography within conservative Christianity and so forth.
You love Christians who talk about people losing their salvation or facing the torments of hell because of pornography.
Again, that's bad theology from within the thought world of high-control religion.
Okay?
I say all the time, bad theology hurts people.
High-control religion has bad theology.
This is like a bad theology within the bad theology.
Okay?
So the first reason why the category or the focus doesn't make sense is that it's just bad theology.
The second dimension takes us back to some of those discussions we had looking about the meaning of sex and what sex is and about the definition of sex, the notion of, like, well, what counts as sex?
So while sexual purity is, in principle, going to rule out all sex acts, right, if somebody's being sexually pure, they shouldn't be doing anything sexual.
The primary focus is on, wait for it, penis and vagina sex.
And tell me if we've heard this before.
Virginity isn't lost unless a woman's vagina has been penetrated by a penis.
And it really hasn't definitively been lost unless the sex act has finished, which means the man reaches orgasm.
The same focus on male sexuality and male pleasure that we've talked about before.
If that doesn't happen, the virginal status of the person is ambiguous.
And penetration is the issue here.
The penetrated party is the one that really loses their virginal status.
This is part of why it accrues to women.
It's also part of why, within the homophobic tradition of the Christian religion, you had this opposition to sodomy of men being penetrated and so forth.
So...
You have this sense that there's this one normative sex act, once again, that defines what sex is, that defines what virginity is, that means that, once again, it's something that accrues to women.
And Hannah Blank highlights this really well, and she points out that this is why this concept of virginity is so tied to cis-heteronormative models.
And she points out a couple things.
First, she says, this sex act is the only one that can result in pregnancy.
Okay?
And within a thought world in which the purpose of sex is procreation, we've talked about this before, I've critiqued it, but that's part of this thought world, this becomes a defining consideration.
So that's how this sex act is tied to virginity.
Blank goes on to say this.
I'm quoting from her now.
She says, Penis and vagina intercourse is the single uniquely heterosexual act of which humans are capable.
The other common sexual permutations of which human beings are capable are essentially gender neutral.
For a penis to be inserted into a vagina, there can be only one man and one woman, and furthermore, they must be performing the single specific action that cannot be performed by a man on another man or by a woman on another woman.
What this means is that virginity, at least in the classical canonical form, is exclusively heterosexual.
End quote.
Now, I've got some bones to pick with her.
There are non-female identified people who use their penis for penetrated vaginal sex, and this is not heterosexual, so it's not tied in with that.
And I'm not going to go into super detail, but you can have more than two people involved in this, okay?
But her general point stands.
What she's saying is, this is sort of the heterosexual model of sex, and when it is made normative, right, that's what she's claiming.
Folks, I've got no problem for people who are into penis and vagina sex.
None.
Like, that's cool, right?
To be really clear about that.
To say it's normative means this is what sex is.
Everything else is something else.
Okay?
So it's tied in with this vision of sex, but as we've discussed in earlier episodes, there's just no good reason to define this as the sex act par excellence.
So the logic of virginity ties in with other elements of this overall gender-sex ideology.
And this is where we find, like, weird technicalities that come in as well.
At the popular level, and again, these are real discussions I've had.
I had so many of these.
You get the category of technical virginity.
People used to talk, and they'd be like, well, you know, she's a technical virgin.
A technical virgin was the kind of person who's sort of done everything but vaginal intercourse, which means that you had, like, I don't know how many thousands of Christian young people engaging in other sex acts in unsafe ways because they thought that they weren't sex or they didn't have consequences or whatever.
You also get weird notions about non-penetrative sex practices.
So like questions about, you know, do two women, for example, who don't carry out vaginally, of course, do they not really have sex?
What can or does virginity even mean here?
The logic is that two women, say a lesbian couple who doesn't have penetrative sex, like, what, they're just perpetual virgins?
Right?
That doesn't make any sense at all.
Okay?
So the point here isn't to be salacious.
I'm not just trying to go into detail about sex acts and so forth.
What I'm trying to show is that on conservative theological grounds and on the basis of concrete practices, this focus on virginity, it just doesn't make sense.
It's sort of out of proportion.
The category is incoherent.
It doesn't make sense.
The attention it gets is so out of whack to what it is that it demands another explanation.
And that's our clue to understand what's really going on.
The fact that this emphasis on virginity breaks down when we scrutinize it, but that it still plays the role it does, that's what highlights its role as a mechanism of control and coercion.
That's what tells us that control and coercion are the real driving force here.
It's not the coherence of the concept.
It's not protecting women from predation.
It's not, quote-unquote, purity.
It is control and coercion.
And this is something I talk about a lot on the podcast.
I spend a lot of time talking about how when we encounter conspiracism or people who hold political or religious views just sort of as a matter of faith, right, who are not acting in good faith when they debate, who are not responsive to factual arguments, you're not going to change their mind with facts.
And people will ask me all the time, well, like, Is there any point in offering those arguments?
Is there any point in debating folks?
And my answer is, and I've said this lots of times, is that this is the point.
What it highlights is that it's not about facts.
It's about something else.
It's about ideology.
It's about power.
It's about control.
That's what the focus of virginity is within this high-control articulation.
It is a focus, again, to reiterate, on policing women's bodies, on policing women's sexuality.
On policing women's desire.
We're out of time.
This episode has already gone long.
I'm going to call it a day here.
I want to thank you again for listening.
Again, welcome any insights you have.
I know that this series has provoked a lot of responses from folks.
Daniel Miller Swaj, Daniel Miller SWAJ, really look forward to hearing you.
Value any insights, further questions, clarifications you have, other things to talk about.
Again, I revisit a lot of these in the supplemental material and owe that to you.
Again, I want to thank everybody for listening.
Again, if you're not a subscriber and that's something that you would consider doing, I'd humbly ask you to do so.
