Well I guess I'm late to the party because this was released in 2017, but I gotta say I like Dua Lipa's song "New Rules."
It's a song about the rules she made for herself in order to keep herself from getting involved with a specific boy (her ex?) who doesn't love her. Here are the rules:
One: Don't pick up the phone, you know he's only calling 'cause he's drunk and alone
Two: Don't let him in, you'll have to kick him out again
Three: Don't be his friend, you know you're going to wake up in his bed in the morning.
If you're under him, you ain't getting over him.
Well I LOVE THIS because it's completely different from the purity rules I used to follow.
You can tell from Dua Lipa's song that there's history there. The character that Dua Lipa plays in this song has made mistakes and learned from them. These rules are based in facts. She knows herself, so she knows that if, for example, she answers this boy's phone call, it's likely to go in a direction that's not emotionally healthy for her. Therefore she chooses to make a rule for herself, to avoid that very realistic outcome.
This is completely different from my mindset back when I was in college and totally bought into all the Christian "sexual purity" stuff. In that ideology, there is no appreciation of making mistakes and learning from them. There is no concept of knowing yourself, your own needs, your own emotions, knowing yourself well enough to predict how certain things will affect you, and making your own choices about what's right for you. No, instead, the idea of making a mistake with regards to purity was so horrifying that we set up rules based on things we knew nothing about, in order to prevent all possible mistakes.
They told us that if you lose your "purity" then it will affect you for the rest of your life and you'll never be able to have a good marriage. Now that I'm an adult and I'm married, it's almost unbelievable how absurd that is. Like, how could anyone actually believe that? How could anyone actually believe that, oh I held a boy's hand in 2007, and now my husband is all sad about it, forever? Like, what on earth??? No, of course my husband doesn't give a crap about whether or not I liked a boy or kissed a boy or had sex with a boy, decades ago. Like why on earth would that matter?
But yeah, that's what I believed. I believed if you had sex with someone and then broke up, then part of you is missing, and any future relationships can never be fully happy. And if you kiss, well at least that's not as bad as having sex, but still, it will haunt all your future relationships. And even if you don't kiss, but you do romantic things like go on dates or say "I love you", yep, you guessed it, you're gonna regret it for the rest of your life.
So there is no "it's normal to make mistakes and learn from them" in purity culture. Making mistakes is so extremely bad, that we need to set up rules to make sure you can never get anywhere near a situation where anything sexual could happen. And therefore, no, of course you can't learn what you really want, what your desires are, what your emotions are. Of course you can't know yourself well enough to know what's healthy for you and what's not.
I remember when I dated my first boyfriend, in college. When I went to his dorm room, I made sure not to lay on his bed. Because I had heard some pastor say you should never lay on your boyfriend or girlfriend's bed, because, like, "one thing leads to another" and you might end up having sex. No, I could not imagine any actual situation where, upon laying on his bed, somehow I could be drawn into a whirlpool, out of control, and somehow sex would happen. No, that didn't feel realistic to me at all- but I'd better not take the risk. I'd better listen to what some pastor said, rather than trust that I know myself well enough to know that laying on a bed isn't going to lead to sex.
Those were the kind of rules I followed, back then. Christian leaders constantly warned about all sorts of things that supposedly could lead to sex. None of them made any sense to me- but I believed I couldn't trust my own judgment. Trusting one's own judgment leads to sex.
And yes, I now see that a big part of this is that I'm asexual. Perhaps for people who do have sexual attraction, there is more of an intuitive understanding about what sorts of things would realistically lead to them desiring sex and/or getting physically aroused. (Oh, by the way, back then I definitely did not know about arousal.) So perhaps for people who have sexual attraction, this isn't just like...
- Totally mundane thing
- ???
- SEX! Which ruins your life.
I remember when I was just starting to reject purity culture. I realized that a lot of it was based on fear of the unknown. If I am alone with a boy I like, then through some unknown mechanism that no one can explain to me, I might have sex with him, which would be life-ruiningly terrible. If I decide to date a boy, what if in the future, for reasons that are impossible for me to predict now, we break up, and therefore I won't be "emotionally pure" and so I can never have a good marriage? So many of the rules were based on these vague wisps of a hypothetical, and all the fear I had piled on top of them.
I decided I couldn't live my life that way, with rules restricting me from doing anything because someone somewhere claims that it could result in a situation where I lose "purity."
So back to Dua Lipa's rules. They're grounded in her own experience. (Or, rather, the character she plays in the song- obviously just because somebody sings something, that doesn't mean it literally is how they feel.) She knows that "if I do X, then it will lead to Y, which isn't good for me" because she's done X before, and it really did lead to Y, and she is aware and in control of her own life to know that she doesn't want Y and therefore it's a good idea to avoid X.
And I've had experiences like that before- some romantic situation or action causes me to have feelings I didn't expect, so then I choose to be more cautious about that in the future. Really that's what everyone should do- evaluate your feelings, evaluate the things that are influencing you, decide what's healthy for you and what's not.
And if you mess up, it's not the end of the world. In the song, Dua Lipa says, "Practice makes perfect, I'm still tryna learn it by heart." She's not able to follow these rules 100% of the time, but you know what? When that happens, it's not like "OH NO it's a SIN and you are a BAD PERSON and you've wronged your FUTURE HUSBAND and this will follow you for the REST OF YOUR LIFE and nothing can ever truly heal it." It's not like that. When she doesn't follow her rules, it hinders her progress in "getting over" this boy who doesn't deserve her love. That's it. It affects herself; it's not a "sin" against anyone else. And she can recognize her mistake, learn from it, and move on. No life-ruining damage like they warned us in purity culture.
Don't be so scared of everything! It's okay to try things a little bit to see how they affect you, and gradually gain more and more information about what you actually want, what's good for you and what's not.
You can trust yourself. You can trust yourself far more than you can trust some pastor who has never even met you but apparently knows how all your sexual and romantic desires work. Like, what on earth, why did I ever believe that? Why did I believe their warnings over my own asexual cluelessness? Trust yourself. You know your own needs better than anyone else.
Make your rules based on experience, not fear. But of course, in purity land, that can never work, because experience is the worst thing you can have.
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Related:
For This Asexual, Purity Culture Was All About Fear
Miss me with your "we are all sexually broken" hot takes. I'm asexual.
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