“They gave us a rose and we passed it around the group. Each person touched a petal, pulled it off, touched it and pulled it off. By the time you get around, there’s nothing left. It’s not a beautiful rose anymore,” Dr. Misty Smith said in an interview with Reckon media, explaining the physical demonstration her church used to portray virginity.
Currently, Smith is a sex therapist in Alabama. She grew up in Walker County, Alabama in a rigid, Christian family, as part of a conservative Universal Pentecostal church.
Demonstrations like the one Smith described—using a plethora of different ornaments to depict the physical sanctity of women’s bodies—are common across the United States. Typically, they commence with the shredding of paper or the removal of the petals from a flower to symbolize the eradication of a woman’s virginity.
Generally, participation in mainstream organized religion has declined—the number of people who report subscribing to any form of religion has dropped 26 percent from 1990 according to Pew Research Center. However, purity culture, which holds strong convictions of abstinence and zero-tolerance for birth control, still defines the framework for sexual education in both private and public education.
Rutgers University Public Health Professor Leslie Kantor specialized in sex education advocacy in the 1990s. During that era, she witnessed the impact of conservative religious groups on public education’s approach toward sex.
“[In the 90s, there was] a lot [of] organization by conservative groups trying to get existing health education programs shifted in favor of newly developed abstinence-until-marriage programs,” Kantor said in an interview with National Public Radio.
Many of these conservative groups received grant money from the government, especially under the Bush administration, to further their agendas. Unfortunately, more than 80 percent of the programs that were endorsed were deemed to contain “false, misleading or distorted information about reproductive health,” according to a congressional report. Moreover, many of their programs, once in effect, were scrutinized for being heavily homophobic and sexist.
Currently, 17 states in the U.S. require abstinence-only sexual education, with no mention of modern birth control or sexually transmitted diseases—which, combined with hepatitis and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), killed roughly 2.5 million people in 2022 worldwide. Also according to Sex Ed for Social Change, a nonprofit that has been campaigning for proper sexual education since the ‘60s, 30 states require abstinence to be the central component of sexual education.
Another 12 states don’t require sexual education to have any medical, factual or ethical basis. Only five states in the U.S. require sexual education to be comprehensive—only four of which explicitly condemn sexual education that is discriminatory towards LGBTQ people.
As more and more people believe organized Christianity to be a thing of the past, many disregard purity culture as a relic of the ideology, unaware that it is fundamentally woven into public school sexual education.
The effects of this sexual education model can be seen in research analyzing the long-term effects of abstinence-only approach. In 2016, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst published a study reporting that teenage girls who took a pledge of virginity were more frequently taught that condoms and birth control were physiologically ineffective and equated pre-marital sex with moral failure.
Additionally, they were more likely to contract human papillomavirus (HPV), have pregnancies outside of marriage and were generally less prepared for the physical risks of sexual intercourse.
Researchers Anthony Paik, Kenneth Sanchagrin and Karen Heimer further concluded that abstinence-only education and virginity pledging correlate to negative outcomes in female sexual health.
“Our research indicates that abstinence pledging can have unintended negative consequences by increasing the likelihood of HPV and non-marital pregnancies, the majority of which are unintended,” Paik said in a statement with the Atlantic. “Abstinence-only sex education policy is widespread at the state and local levels and may return at the federal level. This policy approach may be contributing to the decreased sexual and reproductive health of girls and young women,” Paik said.
The intrinsic purpose of education is to equip individuals with knowledge that will enhance their well-being or awareness of the world. Ironically, abstinence-only sexual education is defined by ignorance. For the U.S., the sixth most medically advanced nation in the world, it’s pitiful that our sexual education is based on an anachronistic ideology that prioritizes propagating sexual shame above informing youth on how to avoid deadly diseases.
If you want to learn more about sexual health and reproductive care or speak to someone about any of the topics this article broached, you can contact Planned Parenthood at (415) 459-4907, UCSF Health Alliance Project at (415) 476-3902 or visit our Wellness center in room 103.
