by The Purity Olympics Investigation
Welcome to the Purity Olympics, where everyone’s a judge, nobody wants to compete, and the scoring system was invented by people who clearly never met an actual human teenager. Today’s event: figuring out who’s “really” staying pure, as if purity were a measurable quantity like height or blood pressure.
The investigation into who’s maintaining purity standards reveals what we all suspected: basically nobody, but everyone’s pretending really hard. It’s like a massive game of “Emperor’s New Clothes,” except instead of invisible clothing, we’re dealing with invisible virtue.
Religious communities have been asking this question for centuries, apparently unaware that the answer is “fewer people than you think, and also it’s none of your business.” But that hasn’t stopped them from conducting surveys, creating accountability groups, and generally making everyone uncomfortable at youth group meetings.
The whole enterprise of virginity policing is particularly Austin-inappropriate because we pride ourselves on individualism and minding our own business. “Keep Austin Weird” doesn’t extend to creating surveillance systems for people’s bedrooms. That’s not weird; that’s creepy.
University of Texas sociologists studying social control mechanisms probably have a field day with purity culture. It’s got all the elements of effective social control: shame, peer pressure, impossible standards, and the illusion that compliance is both achievable and measurable. It’s textbook stuff, except the textbook is probably titled “How to Make Everyone Miserable.”
What’s particularly galling is the selective enforcement. The same communities that obsess over sexual purity often ignore other moral failings with impressive consistency. Greed? Fine. Pride? No problem. Premarital sex? *Sound the alarms, someone alert the elders!*
The reality is that “staying pure” is a concept that means different things to different people, and most of those definitions are more concerned with appearing moral than actually being moral. It’s performance art masquerading as virtue.
SOURCE: https://screwthenews.com/whos-really-staying-pure/
SOURCE: Bohiney.com (Who’s Really Staying Pure)
