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Dr. Sara Moslener on The New Purity Revolution - Coggle Diagram
Dr. Sara Moslener on The New Purity Revolution
Those that abstain from sex as an oppressed minority
"the movement positions sexual purity, and the adolescents who embody it, as an embattled sexual minority poised to save America from the repercussions of its own moral turpitude"
Abstinence education received strong gov't funding, and were therefore empowered in the US, not oppressed
"thirty-three groups received $20 million in federal grand monies"
Staging abstinent teenagers as oppressed is dangerously misleading, as purity culture is used to enforce racial and gender social hierarchy
Charles Murray "argued that rates of illegitimacy among white women were escalating to such a degree that the white middle class in danger of falling to the same economic level as the black underclass"
Purity culture teaches gender essentialism that positions women as responsible for sexual purity in both themselves and the men around them
If sexual sin is responsible for the downfall of the nation,
women
are responsible for the downfall of the nation
"contemporary purity advocates sought transformation through the body, believing that the transformed bodies of sexually pure adolescents held promise of a similarly transformed society"
Abstinence Organizations
True Love Waits (TLW)
"These teens were the first to take the pledge, a publicly spoken commitment regarding sexual abstinence until marriage"
"to stand as exemplars of social renewal in a nation whose future was threatened by the legacy of the sexual revolution"
"young people who boldly and publicly declared their virginity and saw their sexual status as a witness to the transformative power of Jesus Christ"
Silver Ring Thing (SRT)
"the promotion of sexual abstinence was a ministry and, as such, held no substance without reference to religious belief"
"SRT receiving total federal funding the in the amount of $1,400,000"
"encouraged churchgoing youth to adopt abstinence until marriage as a tenet central to their Christian faith commitment"
"With the resurgence of Christian fundamentalism, young evangelicals found a politicized evangelical culture that was both appealing and accessible"
Framing Abstinence as Revolutionary
"The use of countercultural rhetoric allowed them...to assert a traditional sexual identity as the avant-garde of the sexual revolution"
"Downplaying their commitment as a form of religious obedience, numerous young people portrayed themselves as defiant, independently minded individuals seeking personal fulfillment and the right to self-expression"
Tension between revolutionary framing and the roots of abstinence education groups' philosopy
Monica Schoenthaler's "call to sexual and personal empowerment did not prioritize any particular...moral belief, but relied solely upon the values of individualism, self-fulfillment, and personal development"
Abstinence as an identity
"As members of a religious subculture that situates itself on the margins of a perceived inhospitable mainstream, evangelical adolescents understand their pledge not as a choice but as the expression of sexual identity"
"David Medrod proclaimed his virginity to the New York Times as a 'coming out'"
"Like queerness, sexual purity is transgressive in the sense that it defies cultural and social norms"
With the key differences being that 1)sexual purists aren't attacked like members of the queer community and 2) those that abstain from sex are making the
choice
to do so.
"like queer identities, purity is transformative--even prophetic...in that is is a sexual orientation that witnesses to a new way of being that has the ability to transform the world"
"the purity activists of TLW had successfully outlined the latest chapter of the sexual revolution and reframed the entire 1960's counterculture according to the moral parameters of evangelical Christianity"
Evangelical "concern for connecting sexual abstinence with a form of self-empowerment reminiscent of feminist assertions of women's autonomy"