Purity Culture Played a Prominent Role in the Atlanta Spa Shootings

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Last week a white, Christian man walked into three Atlanta spas and killed seven women and one man, most of whom were Asian Americans. It was a crime at the intersection of so many chasms in America. Gun violence and racism and sexism.

I have spent the past few days spiraling over the layers of complexities and issues regarding these shootings, and I believe at the center of it all lies purity culture.

The shooter, who claimed to be a sex addict, named his motivation for the killings as a need to “eliminate temptation,” language that is pervasive in evangelical culture that foists sexual responsibility on the shoulders of women.

Purity culture is a toxic and pervasive symptom of evangelicalism that puts the onus of “sexual purity” on girls and women and makes excuses for men. Women are supposed to police men’s sexual desires by ensuring we were never alone with them. We have to audit our wardrobe in the context of what men might find lustful (no spaghetti straps or shorts that are shorter than two finger-lengths above the knee). We are never, ever, EVER supposed to admit we enjoy or find great pleasure in sex.

I understand purity culture because I lived it for 35 years. I grew up in a Christian denomination that took it to the extreme. Guys and girls couldn’t swim together at church camp — at any age. We couldn’t dance. Our dress code was closely monitored. In college — that same one that won its first game in March Madness — my boyfriend and I were placed on conduct probation because I was in his on-campus apartment after 1 a.m. As Natalie Collins said, “In conservative Christian culture, men are supposed to be in charge of everything except their sexual urges.”

My friend Koda said, “I wonder who taught him it was his temptation’s fault he was tempted? It certainly wasn’t Jesus, who told his disciples to pluck their eyes out and cut off their own hands if they found themselves lusting. Where could he have possibly learned to blame women for his lust?”

Blaming women for men’s own unchecked sexual desires is peak purity culture. And yet I don’t know a single person — male or female — who benefitted from it. It establishes a sexual ethos that teaches girls that sex is dirty and impure and in order to be moral we had to do everything in our power to prevent it because boys can’t. It teaches boys that they have no control over their basest instincts, likening them to animals and diminishing their will and intelligence, while simultaneously teaching them to be ashamed of their sexuality.

And then, BAM!, a date on the calendar arrives, a wedding happens, and a woman is supposed to suddenly be the sexual vixen her partner was promised, while a man is supposed to be allowed to ravage his wife whenever he wants.

It doesn’t work that way. There is no sexual alignment under this system. I have friends who only had sex a handful of times in their first years of marriage. Others pursued therapy or marriage counseling to resolve the conflicting messages they received about sex throughout their lifetimes. Still others experienced even more painful outcomes. Vaginismus is a condition involving a muscle spasm on the pelvic floor muscles that makes it painful, difficult, or impossible to have sexual intercourse. Many of the triggers are emotional: fear, shame, or guilt are all linked with vaginismus.

Not to mention how counterintuitive purity culture is. For a community that was so anxious and threatened by premarital sex, it seemed wholly preoccupied with talking about it. I was warned about sex — how to prevent it, specifically — at church camp starting at the age of 9, long before my public school offered sex education. We were taught to fear sex before we were taught what it was.

And let me be clear: I am not likening my experience with purity culture to the women who died in those spas. I had choices they did not have. My whiteness gives me access to privileges that shielded me from the violence they faced.

How do we stop this?

We search for a cure for the epidemic of gun violence.

And we correct and heal racism.

And we put an end to the sexism and misogyny that leads to a man having a bad day walking into a place where women work and shooting them.

But even if we resolve all of those issues but we stop short of examining what church culture is teaching young people about sexuality and ownership, we miss an opportunity to create a more honest, better balanced, and less repressed sexual ethic that leads to the violence we saw in the Atlanta spa shootings.