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Sexular (recognizing how much feminist theory arguments rely on resistance…

- - - - In this system, individual bodies only make sense in relation to the social order. Douglas argues, “The physical body can have universal meaning only as a system which responds to the social system, expressing it as a system.” As physical bodies respond to the social system, they are shaped by that social system. The body is, therefore, understood as a container. Douglas makes this point in her interpretation of Leviticus: “In short, the idea of holiness was given an external, physical expression in the wholeness of the body seen as a perfect container. Wholeness is also extended to signify completeness in a social context.” According to Douglas, the physical body and the social body are “two bodies” that must be understood in relation to one another (MM 5).
  - - - relates to ignoring connections to what is supposedly secular and supposedly religious
        
        In wider debates about sexual violence, evangelical purity culture is often understood as a strange and very different manifestation of rape culture that is distinct from manifestations of rape culture that are supposed to be irreligious or secular. This framing is a problem because the distinction between evangelical purity and supposedly secular rape culture makes Christian influence on rape culture invisible. In order to understand rape culture in the United States, we need to reexamine its relationship to Christianity (MM 4).
        
        From evangelical purity rings to commonplace white wedding dresses, the desire for sexual purity manifests both within and outside of particular religious communities. Even where an overt desire for sexual purity seems outdated, nostalgia for purity often remains. While we may or may not recognize these systems of purity and pollution as religious, systems of purity and pollution transcend the divide between spaces understood to be religious and spaces understood to be secular (MM 7).
        
        The connection between evangelical understandings of the family and official governmental policy on education suggests that we need to pay more, not less, attention to the role of Christianity in shaping the supposedly secular U.S. state. Continuing to act as if religion in general and Christianity in particular is something associated with individuals makes the public role of Christianity in the United States invisible and, ultimately, more powerful. Revealing Christianity’s public influence, on the other hand, makes it possible to see the connection between the attempt to individualize religion and sex. In both cases, this move associates religion and sex with the acts of individuals and creates the assumption that our social order is neutral. Yes, as the analysis of Moselener, Gerber, and others suggest, our social order is not neutral and continues to be shaped by Christian assumptions about religion and sex (MM 15).
      - Second, this definition, this definition suggests that rape culture legitimates violence. In rape culture, violence is used as a tool to police norms, particularly norms around gender but not limited to norms around sexuality and gender. The definition intentionally avoids modifying violence with sexual because rape culture legitimates forms of violence we might not readily recognize as sexual but which have as their goal an attempt to police people into socially accepted patterns, patterns that include gender and sexual norms (MM 2).
    - - Violence in theological production
        
        Demands for purity or what might be more broadly described as a purity culture makes rape culture appear normal. These demands for purity operate as a kind of pedagogy, complete with learning outcomes and assignments that control daily, bodily movements (MM)
        
        While many might limit purity culture to a specifically evangelical Christian phenomenon, pervasive in evangelical youth groups and camps, this overlooks the ways in which purity culture functions outside of evangelical circles. Limiting the scope of purity culture to these evangelical groups fails to perceive the extensiveness of expectations around purity both within and outside of religious communities. When people, especially gender, sexual, and/or racial minorities, fail to be sexually normative (pure), their failure becomes an excuse for rape. Jessica Valenti describes one piece of this in her connection between feminine purity and violence: “But the myth of sexual purity still reigns supreme, and it grossly affects the way American society thinks about violence toward women. So long as women are supposed to be ‘pure,’ and so long as our morality is defined by our sexuality, sexualized violence against us will continue to be both accepted and expected.” According to Valenti, the unachievable standards set by purity culture become an excuse for violence. As McEwan’s example suggests, rape culture deems anyone found not following the rules of purity culture deserving of sexual violence and/or rapeable. Thus, purity culture and rape culture are not opposing concepts, but rather, interlocking ideas that support one another. Purity culture provides the logic that gives life to the myths surrounding rape culture (MM 4).
        
        Identifying academic separatism with purity culture makes it possible to question academic separatism and, in this questioning, reframes the academy as an object of study. In this light, academic institutions not only become the place where study occurs but also an object to be studied. If academic institutions fail to create the unbiased forms of knowledge they purport to produce because their cultures impact the kinds of knowledge they construct, then we can explore how academic productions perpetuate symptoms of rape culture including a purity culture dependent on sexism, homophobia, racism, and ableism (MM 21).
- - - - The phrase “purity culture” makes explicit reference to the cultural level at which purity operates. This understanding, first, helps clarify what is at stake for people promoting sexual purity. In response to the idea that sex has any public meaning, critics of purity culture may suggest that we need to privatize sex. This approach appears to untangle sex from social consequences, thus fixing the problems with purity culture by making sex a thing individuals make decisions about on their own, apart from public input and apart from public consequences. While this response understands the connection between sexual purity and the social order, such a response to purify culture fails to understand Douglas’s point that a physical body cannot be untangled from a social order (MM 7).
      - Because physical bodies are related to social orders, we cannot respond to the crisis of sexual violence by treating sex as if it is something that happens individually, only in private. As much as frustration with social attempts to control sex might lead us to attempt to privatize sex, we cannot deal with sex or purity at an individual level. Responses to sexual violence that attempt to privatize sex, rather than solving the cultural problem, are limited in the failure to understand the relationship between the physical and the social. The shift from individualized understandings of purity and sex to purity culture becomes particularly significant when we turn to consider sexuality on the college campus. In particular, Douglas’s attention not only to sexual and bodily purity but also to the relationship between bodily purity and social purity reveals the spectrum of demands for purity and how these demands determine social contexts including, as I discuss at the end of this chapter, the social context of the academy (MM 7).
      - The religious expectations for sexual purity through which the nation is constructed depend on racial and ableist assumptions. Once again, purity culture’s attempts to privatize obscure how supposedly private things including religion, sex, race, and disability intersect in the private sphere and shape public discourse and decision-making. On the one hand, purity culture in the United States maintains a distinction between private and public. On the other hand, purity culture in the United States requires private, physical purity as a means to obtaining public, social order. In this sense, purity culture works to maintain the boundary between Douglas’s two bodies--the physical body and the social body in order to suggest that the social order depends on physical purity. In sum, by distinguishing between the social and physical body and using the threat of social order to control the physical body, purity culture has it both ways (MM 19).