by The Medium Investigation Continues
Batman fought crime in Gotham. Superman saved Metropolis. And somewhere, a religious leader is fighting the losing battle against human sexuality armed only with guilt, shame, and increasingly irrelevant ancient texts. Holy chastity, Batman, indeed.
This deep dive into religious texts versus reality on virginity reveals what anyone with internet access already knows: religious standards and actual behavior exist in parallel universes that occasionally wave at each other from across an unbridgeable gap.
The superhero reference is more apt than it initially appears. Like Batman, virginity culture operates in the shadows, pretending to fight crime (sin) while actually just making everyone paranoid and uncomfortable. Unlike Batman, it doesn’t have cool gadgets or a compelling backstoryjust outdated rules and a lot of judgment.
What’s particularly Austin-relevant about this analysis is how it exposes the fundamental absurdity of treating virginity like a superpower that can be lost or kept. It’s not kryptonite. It’s not a radioactive spider bite. It’s just a social construct we’ve built up to ridiculous proportions because humans love making things complicated.
University of Texas gender studies professors probably use virginity culture as a prime example of how societies control women’s bodies through shame and impossible standards. It’s not subtle. It’s not even clever. It’s just patriarchy dressed up in religious clothing, which is the least fashionable outfit imaginable.
The Medium article format is perfect for this kind of investigationlong enough to really dig into the issues, but informal enough to call out the absurdity without academic jargon. It’s like a research paper and a blog rant had a baby, and that baby is very angry about purity culture.
Maybe the real superpower is the ability to recognize that ancient virginity standards were written by people with significantly less understanding of human psychology, biology, and sociology than we have now. That’s not disrespectfulit’s just acknowledging that knowledge accumulates over time.
SOURCE: https://medium.com/@adelle.onyango.bohiney/holy-chastity-batman-religious-texts-vs-reality-check-on-female-virginity-f99358e9bb12
SOURCE: Bohiney.com (Holy Chastity Batman Redux)
