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| Bible and rose. Image source. |
[content note: it's about rape culture in the bible and in purity ideology]
Purity culture teaches that this is what the bible says about sex: In God's perfect plan for everyone's lives, each person is only supposed to ever have sex with 1 person. (Or maybe 0, if God gives you "the gift of singleness.") You aren't allowed to have sex outside of marriage, and then you get married to 1 opposite-sex partner, and have sex with them, and that's how it works. Purity culture explicitly teaches that this is what the bible says.
(Or... if you're a widow then you're allowed to get remarried and have sex again, but it's not clear how this really fits into purity culture logic.)
Now, there's not *exactly* a bible verse that says "don't have sex outside of monogamous hetero marriage." There are bible verses that say not to "commit adultery." There are bible verses about specific combinations of people who aren't allowed to have sex- for example, a man should not have sex with both a woman and her daughter. There are bible verses about how if a woman is discovered to not be a virgin on her wedding night, she should be stoned. There's "the marriage bed should be kept pure." There are plenty of verses about the sinfulness of "sexual immorality" but the bible never exactly defines what that is.
Of course, though, when I was in purity culture, it didn't bother me that there wasn't 1 specific verse that explicitly said "all sex outside of marriage is a sin" because I felt that was the overall message of the bible's teaching about sex, even though it didn't say it directly. I thought, it's obvious, right? That would be gross, to have sex outside of marriage- obviously that's God's opinion on things.
So that's what purity culture claims the bible teaches: Every person should have at most 1 sexual partner, total, over one's whole life, and this standard is the same for both men and women.
However, if you actually look at how people act in the real world, they're not applying this same standard to both men and women. Women get judged much more harshly for having unmarried sex, compared to men.
I believed that in theory it should be the same rules for both men and women, and it was wrong (and didn't make sense mathematically) for men and women to be judged differently. Like... if we're only talking about straight people, it's 1 man and 1 woman sinning together. How can you possibly judge the woman's actions as being more "dirty"/"sinful" than the man's? If it's so terrible that the woman is doing this bad thing, shouldn't the man be held equally responsible for participating in her doing this bad thing? I always thought, the math just doesn't work, so it makes no sense to judge women worse than men for having unmarried sex- so I tried not to pay too much attention to the double standard. Since it was so obviously nonsensical. I was sure that the rules from the bible applied equally to men and women.
Recently, because I read "Womanist Midrash" and "The Red Tent," I had a whole new realization about, umm, how to make the math work, so to speak. "Womanist Midrash" closely examines the lives of women from the bible, from a womanist (black feminist) perspective, and "The Red Tent" is a bible fanfic novel about the 4 wives of Jacob- showing what the women's side of the story of Jacob's family might have been like. These books have a lot to say about women's experience of sex, and how it would have been viewed.
Basically, it goes like this: A girl who's in a good family, with a father who can protect her and have high standards about whom she's going to marry- she is a pure girl. On the other hand, there are plenty of girls and women whom anyone can have sex with, and nobody cares. Slaves, sex workers, girls who don't have their father protecting them, prisoners of war, etc.
So don't think of sex as being "1 man + 1 woman." It's either "1 man + 1 pure woman" or "1 man + 1 impure woman."
If she's an impure woman, well, whatever, a man can have sex with as many impure woman as he wants, and why should anyone judge him for that? (Some people would say it's good and normal for a man to be sexually experienced in this way.) Even if he's married, he can still have sex with slaves and sex workers, whatever.
But if she's a pure woman, oh gosh, well a man might actually get in trouble for that- watch out for her father. That would actually be a serious thing, to have unmarried sex with a pure woman. But, still you can't judge the man as harshly as the woman because maybe it's just an honest mistake and he didn't know which kind she was.
In the ancient world portrayed in "Womanist Midrash" and "The Red Tent," women were treated better if they were in the "pure" group rather than the "impure" group, but most of the time they didn't have much control over that. Try as hard as you can to stay as one of the "pure" ones, because we all know it's totally fine for men to rape the "impure" ones, that's just the way it is.
This isn't something that either of those books explicitly spelled out; I'm just kind of trying to summarize the overall ideology that serves as the foundation for the way women are treated in those books.
Here, let's think about these 2 different ideologies and see which one seems to match better with what we see in the bible. Is it "everyone is supposed to have only 1 sexual partner, and stay pure until marriage, and these rules are the same for both men and women"? Or is it "there are pure women and there are impure women, and it's fine for men to have sex with impure women as much as the men want- try to not be an impure woman"?
Hmm.
Why are there laws in the bible about executing a woman who's not a virgin on her wedding night, but no equivalent laws about men? Why do lots of male bible heroes have multiple wives, and the bible doesn't necessarily portray that as a bad thing* (sometimes it's even described like it's a sign of God's favor)? Why is there a list of specific relatives that a man is not allowed to have sex with, rather than one simple rule "only have sex in a monogamous marriage"?
Huh. Well that's... not great.
I really had always assumed that of course God meant that the rules for men and women were the same. Of course it would be bad for a man to not be a virgin on his wedding night, just like it would be for a woman. Right? The bible just happened to not mention that part, but of course we all know it's true, right? Right? But now I've come up with this alternative framework that fits so much better, and is also horrific and terrible.
(You could argue that the bible is "progressive" on this, in the sense that the rules given in the bible require men to treat women a little bit better than what was typical for societies at that time. Sure, you could make that argument. I personally am not interested in going down that path. I don't think we should let the bible off the hook so easily. Frankly I don't think it's meaningful that the bible is slightly less misogynist than the average stone-age person, and we shouldn't act like it is.)
Okay at this point you are probably saying, "Umm, Perfect Number, you are not the first person to come up with this 'there are 2 types of women' concept, this is called the 'virgin/whore dichotomy', ie, 'every woman is either a virgin or a whore.' How have you not heard of this?"
Well yeah of course I have heard of that, but I guess I never really *got* it? I don't know. I don't think I've ever seen anyone specifically making the connection between the "virgin/whore dichotomy" and the "double standards for men and women about having lots of sex"- how you really need both of these godawful concepts to hold each other up, or else the math clearly just doesn't work. See, it's not *really* about the actual act of having sex. It's about whether the patriarchy judges you to be "pure" and worthy of men's protection, or "impure" and deserving of whatever men do to you.
And the thing is, even though I was taught in purity culture that the rules should be the same for both men and women, there were some purity culture teachings where this ugly "virgin/whore dichotomy" sort of started to show itself. Where the purity teachings were less about "here is God's plan for how everyone can have a perfect marriage and sex life" and more about "it's okay for men to disrespect (and maybe even rape) impure women- make sure you're not one of them." Less about "here is how men and women are supposed to treat each other, how we are supposed to act, we all follow these rules and everything is great" and more about "we protect the women in our in-group, who follow our rules, while the women in the out-group are sluts who are at risk of being raped, what did they expect?"
When they talk about modesty, for example. In purity culture, here is how they talk about modesty: Women, you should respect and value your body instead of flaunting your body. If you don't respect yourself, obviously men won't respect you. D. Anderson had a very good post in 2013 about the way boys in purity culture are taught to view "immodest" women- containing quotes from these good godly teenage boys about how disgusted they are. I basically was taught that if a woman is dressed "immodestly", men are literally incapable of respecting her, unless they wear a blindfold or something I guess. There was a chapter of "The Great Sex Rescue" that did a great job arguing against this ideology.
People who are really into patriarchy like to talk about how "the way it should be" is that men protect women, and feminism is the reason that you hear more about sexual assault nowadays- but what they actually mean is, patriarchy is about protecting the women who follow men's rules. And any women who find themselves in the "impure" group, well they deserve whatever men do to them. Try to not be those women. From that perspective, feminists are the ones to blame, for making women think it's okay to be in the "impure" group, and thereby causing women to lose men's protection.
Anyway...
So what do we do with the bible, then?
Well, first of all, the bible does NOT teach that it is a sin for men to have sex outside of marriage, in the general case. There are plenty of rules in the bible about specific categories of women that men are not allowed to have sex with (and also, rules against men having sex with men), ie, "do not covet your neighbor's wife", and I always viewed this as being part of an overarching "sex is only for monogamous marriage" ideology- but no, it's more like "it's okay for men to have sex outside of marriage, but not with women who, like, actually matter."
And, it's not exactly a sin for women to have sex outside of marriage- the issue is if a woman has sex outside of marriage and then dishonestly tries to present herself like she's one of the "pure" ones.
(One caveat here, I'm focusing on the Old Testament in this post, because I'm thinking about this in terms of an evangelical mindset where the bible supposedly presents one clear and consistent message regarding "God's plan for sex and marriage." But it's possible the New Testament writers weren't coming from quite the same perspective. "Womanist Midrash" and "The Red Tent" focus on the Old Testament, specifically the Torah.)
I'm not sure I would say the bible teaches this view of sex- it's more like, that was the way sex was viewed by the people who wrote the bible. These are the assumptions they brought to it, when they wrote down rules for people to follow. None of this is explicitly spelled out anywhere in the bible- look at me, I used to be evangelical, I read the whole bible multiple times and never noticed this. The writers of the bible were not trying to say "there SHOULD be this double standard between men and women, and feminism is wrong," because they wouldn't have even been able to imagine an alternative. Just like how I was taught by purity culture that all sex outside of marriage is dirty, so I believed that the bible taught that too, and I wasn't able to imagine an alternative.
But anyway, now we know better.
I'm not going to be subtle about this; let me come right out and say it: The bible should not be the authority over our moral beliefs. Instead, we bring our own moral beliefs to the bible, and then we judge which rules in the bible are good ("love your neighbor as yourself", etc) and which ones are horrible.
Evangelicals believe that if you just have the right technique for how to interpret the bible and parse it into rules for us to live by, this process will lead to a set of rules which we would recognize as good and moral- and if they don't seem good and moral, either our understanding of morality is wrong, or we're misinterpreting the bible. So then you have to keep tweaking things until you can get an interpretation of the bible which you can accept as moral. This strikes me as terribly inefficient. How about we just use our own understanding of morality right from the start, and reject anything from the bible that is obviously terrible?
Then you might ask "well what's the point of even bringing the bible into it, then?" Well, yeah, good point. I like the bible for cultural reasons, but if other people aren't interested in the bible, that's fine. No real reason to bring the bible into it if you don't want to.
Suppose you're a modern-day advocate of purity culture, and you want to combine the bible's emphasis on virginity with modern ideas about how men and women should be treated equally, and so you come up with "nobody can have sex outside of [monogamous hetero] marriage, and the rules are the same for men and women" (ie, this is what purity culture teaches, in my experience). Sure, you can believe that. But don't frame it like you got it directly from the bible. Like you're simply reading the bible and reporting what it says. Like you're not adding your own spin on it.
I was always so sure that the purity-culture view of sex- that sex outside of marriage is disgusting and nobody should be involved in that- was just self-evidently true, was obviously God's opinion on the matter, and the biblical writers too. I didn't have a specific verse that said it, just a lot of verses about "sexual immorality" and the claim that "well, the readers of the bible would have understood 'sexual immorality' to mean having sex outside of marriage." But now I've found this other explanation... the idea that there are 2 kinds of women, and it's fine for men to have sex with "impure" women- and it's horrible but it fits so much better with what we see in the Old Testament.
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* I might need to write a whole 'nother post about polygamy in the bible, because the standard apologetics answer is "yes, there's polygamy in the bible, but it's always portrayed as a bad thing, the bible shows that it leads to a lot of problems, so you see, the bible doesn't *really* condone it" and I disagree with that.
Update: Here it is, The Bible and Polygamy
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Posts about the book "Womanist Midrash" by Wilda C. Gafney:
Womanist Midrash
The Slavery We Ignore in the Book of Exodus
The Second-Worst Bible Story
Michal wasn't here for David's worship, and now neither am I
Why did I think David was the good guy in the story of Abigail?
David's Womanizing
The Bible and "Purity"
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Related:
"God has one perfect guy for you!" Yeah, that's not biblical.
