A gentle, bloomed white rose is passed from young girl to girl inside the walls of my 6th grade classroom. We each take a moment to rub a petal between our thumb and index finger before passing it along to the girl next to us.

By the time it makes it around the room, it returns to the teacher brown and wilted. “This is your virginity,” she tells us. “Would you give this depleted and used rose to your future husband?” she asks. Mrs. Falconer explains that each time a man touches us, we too, become wilted like that rose.

The sixth grade boys are playing heads up seven up in the next room after a short 10 minute discussion about finding an untouched woman to marry.

A decade later and I still cannot shake the idea of a woman being placed into one of two categories: pure or used.

I am not alone.

In thousands of schools and households across the country, this behavioral training still occurs. A woman’s worth is nothing more than a man’s sexual fantasy of her purity.

Purity culture is a term that defines sexual abstinence before marriage. It is widely taught and preached in Catholic, Christian, Orthodox Judaic, and other religious communities–but can also reflect the teachings of many cultures. It is the belief that penetrative sex allows room for emotional bonding and sexual deviance which can only be relieved within the sanctity of marriage.

While it can be taught to students of all genders, there is an emphasis on the woman’s experience with the idea that her virginity is what makes her suitable and desirable to future spouses.

Haylee Langton

When Haylee Langton grew up in the suburbs of Seattle, she did not attend a religious private institution nor did her family go to church on Sundays like mine did–but that didn’t matter when it came to sex education at her public high school. They didn’t teach the girls about safe sex or consent; they taught them about abstinence. “There was no ‘this is how you should have sex like’, or ‘this is how you can have sex’ or ‘this is what consent is.’ I didn't learn about consent until college,” Langton said.

As with 36 other states, Washington’s sexual education curriculum includes and “must stress abstinence,” according to SIECUS, an organization that advocates for more comprehensive sex ed. Nineteen states teach abstinence-only, which excludes students from learning about safe, consensual sex and instead places an emphasis on waiting until marriage to engage in sex with a partner.

As seen in the graphics above, states that have abstinence-only education have a strong connection to developing preventable sexual diseases and unwanted pregnancies

Many years later, Langton who identifies as queer still feels the effects of secular purity culture.

“I’m still not super comfortable with my body whatsoever,” Langston said.

Now 22, she blames abstinence education for making her body and sex feel “gross” and “uncomfortable” and believes it has led to multiple manipulative relationships. She wasn’t taught about female pleasure, birth control, or queer sex–just to avoid intercourse.

Ila Avinash

Click for a short audio story from Avinash

Ila Avinash, a graduate student at the University of Southern California and a first generation Indian-American woman, was led to believe that sex outside of marriage was not just an irreparable sin but unacceptable to her future spouse.

“In Hindu culture, if it’s not an accomplishment, it’s completely unacceptable,” she said. She grew up being taught that sex was not only disgusting but not to be talked about in any capacity. “If you don’t meet a certain standard, then you’re viewed as kind of tainted.”

Like Langton, Avinash grew up ashamed of her body and spent many years of young adulthood certain that her pleasure was unimportant and a sinful desire to have.

John Santelli

According to John Santelli, a professor of population and family health at Mailman Columbia University’s school of Public Health, less than half of all schools in the U.S. are required to teach comprehensive sexuality, sexual education and HIV prevention courses. This is the result of a decline in comprehensive sex education starting in 2002.

In Santelli’s published piece for Columbia University, “Abstinence-Only Education is a Failure,” he said, “While abstinence-only programs are widely rejected by health professionals who care for young people, including the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine, Congress has spent over $2 billion on domestic abstinence-only programs between 1982 and 2017; current funding totals $85 million per year.”

The repercussions of purity culture go much deeper than being uncomfortable in one’s body; it can have dire consequences on one’s mental and physical health.

In some conservative states with abstinence-only education, the teen pregnancy rate is significantly increased in comparison to states with comprehensive sex education. States such as Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana have the highest rate of teen pregnancies amongst all other states. Mississippi and Louisiana also rank highest in sexually transmitted disease (STD) rates according to US News and World Report.

While STDs and unwanted pregnancies are often used to lure teens away from premarital sex, vaginismus is a long term physical side effect of mental scrutiny surrounding one’s sexuality. Vaginismus is a serious disorder caused by psychological trauma. It causes involuntary physical tightening of the vaginal canal, causing penetrative sex and/or inserting a tampon extremely painful and sometimes dangerous. It can be caused by extreme anxiety around one’s own genitalia.

Another pelvic disorder is dyspareunia which causes intense pain during sexual intercourse from guilt and suppressed sexual desires.

Many women who have come out of purity culture, develop this disorder after years of being taught that their genitals are not meant to experience external sensations. Dr. Marlene Winell, a psychologist in San Francisco, was the first expert to dub these symptoms as part of Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS).

Similar to that of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), RTS “involves the trauma of breaking away from a controlling environment, lifestyle, or religious figure,” according to Dr. Alisha Powell of Amethyst Counseling and Consulting.

It is not necessarily tied to a single religion but rather to parental beliefs and cultural narratives.

While the repercussions might be frustrating, they are not without treatments from women who wish to change the stigma surrounding female sex.

Camden Morgante

When Camden Morgante was a young girl, she grew up in a Christian household where her own virginity was placed on a pedestal, which led to years of confusion about her own body. Now, Morgante is a psychologist who helps women overcome the mental and physical roadblocks caused by RTS.

“Purity culture seemed to directly contribute to religious trauma or "deconstruction" of religious beliefs because many of us (including myself) saw that the promises of purity culture did not come true,” Morgante said. “This led to disillusionment in my faith and confusion about the real reason for traditional Christian sexual values. I had to find a deeper reason for adhering to my sexual ethic and heal the harm that purity culture had caused in my beliefs.”

Dr. Morgante uses her past experiences to help victims of purity culture through therapy, speaking engagements and podcasting. She even developed a quiz to assist young women in figuring out which myths about sex they were made to believe in an attempt to keep them pure.

None of this is to say that saving sex for marriage is in any way dangerous or bad, in the same way that premarital sex isn’t. What is dangerous is the obsession placed on what a woman decides to do or not do with her body and purity culture is a cornerstone in that conversation.

In Mississippi, where they teach abstinence-only sex education and have the highest rating of teen-pregnancy and STDs, abortion is illegal. Therefore, if a woman has unsafe sex because of lack of education and falls unexpectedly pregnant, she must carry the child to nine months–even though the state is the one who failed her from the very beginning.

Willingly withholding information on condoms, birth control, queer sex, abortions and consent is a cycle of keeping communities uneducated; and uneducated communities lose out on opportunities to cast informed votes that directly affect them.

Ila Avinash cannot help but wonder how many experiences she could've avoided had her body not been commidified at such a young age and sex wasn't a dirty word

“It took me several years to kind of navigate this path on my own which I feel would have been definitely expedited by having some sort of baseline or foundation of knowledge ”