I am sometimes dismayed by the term Purity Culture. I realize that it is a reasonable label, but I struggle to apply it to my life as a young Catholic girl growing up in a rural Midwest community. Sure I was told the usual Catholic doctrine of saving myself for marriage and it was wrong to use birth control. But my life seemed so far from pure. Saturdays were spent with the entire family drinking beer and watching college football. Drinking beer on the golf course. Having a beer at a family reunion. I grew up with 5 brothers who were as anti-purity culture as one could be.

I was a good girl, with occasion dirty thoughts who loved making out, enjoyed the occasional hickey, but was saving myself for the one. I was attending, in my mid-Teens, the keggers that would be held by older kids on their farms. A couple of hundred kids sharing a few kegs of beer. I sometimes was tapped to be the one to sneak vodka from home to bring to a slumber party. And did I mention I loved making out with boys?

I was far from Pure. So I understand the term, but I cannot relate. Did I save myself for marriage in the end? No, but I was close. I married my boyfriend who took my virginity. After all I was going to marry him, so why wait. In the end though, that marriage was a disaster on par with the Chernobyl reactor meltdown. Could I blame the Catholic culture for this? Yes quite easily because had I not succumbed to the temptation I would not have married him. Once I did, I had to reconcile my behavior by going ahead with a marriage that had all of the handwriting on the wall of being a train wreak. But through all of this, being Pure did not seem to be part of the rhetoric.

So this morning I set off to find out what coocoo bird came up with Purity Culture. This led me to the coocoo-bird, Ellice Hopkins who primarily advocated moral purity in terms of addressing the double standards for sexual conduct [between men and women]. And of course, she promoted the temperance movement, which if not having been stamped out, would have ruined my beer driven existence as a teenager. But come to find out, she wasn't so coocoo after all, she was remembered in my opinion for the wrong thing. She founded an organization that promoted to men, the "chivalrous respect for womanhood". This is what is sorely missing from our society to this day.

So let's promote that and not the purity culture. Kisses! TMW