Why Purity Culture & Hookup Culture Are Equally Damaging To Women
Photo by Velizar Ivanov on Unsplash
Upon first glance, purity culture and hookup culture couldn’t seem further apart from one another. But in reality, they’re both just as detrimental as the other.
Millennials and Gen Zers specifically have seen a dramatic shift in our dating culture—the rise of dating apps and casual relationships, and the decline of marriage are all symptoms of our infatuation with hookup culture, a far cry from the days of purity culture, the Victorian era-inspired process of courting that we saw less than one hundred years ago. Today, the letters we exchange are over text, months-long courting a thing of the past.
It would seem that hookup culture and purity culture wouldn’t have a single quality in common; while one encourages young women to engage in as many meaningless relationships as desired, the other attempts to inspire in young women an almost fearful reverence for intimacy. So what do they have in common?
They’re both marketed as empowering.
It’s not difficult to understand the immediate appeal of hookup culture—we fancy the notion of being in the driver’s seat of our life. Young women are taught that they must fight for empowerment. A cursory glance at the TV shows, magazines, and contemporary books that are marketed to women makes their intention very clear: they seek to empower women by owning their independence through short-lived, desire-based trysts. A woman who embraces this is thought to be in charge of her life, no longer second-fiddle to a man.
But purity culture doesn’t describe itself as stifling, oppressive, or dreary; instead, it sees itself as the only true way for a woman to respect herself, to save herself from the dreaded titles of easy or loose—or even worse ones we won’t list off. By instilling in young women the belief that her purity is a most prized possession, that true love waits, purity culture seeks to raise young women who understand their value and demand not just a few free drinks, but lifelong commitment, before she’ll allow things to progress further.
Both hookup and purity culture attempt to offer answers to our very human desire to understand the meaning and purpose of intimacy, and just how women’s empowerment, value, and freedom are intertwined with it.
Hooking up isn’t all fun & games.
From the exhilaration of setting up a dating app profile, to the thrill of meeting up for dinner with a cute guy who had good enough conversational skills, to the excitement of being desired for the night, our human reaction to so much adventure is to dive in head-first, to act and react based on what feels good in a single moment.
But despite the surface appeal of hookup culture, it’s not all fun and games—it actually cheapens the design of intimacy and places both unhealthy and unrealistic expectations on women, their bodies, and their emotions. Despite the notion that casual encounters will empower us, women are hardwired to release bonding hormones like oxytocin during intimacy, a clear indication that our bodies, no matter what our minds tell them to think, interpret such moments as far more than casual.
Even wildly popular movies like Friends with Benefits acknowledge the reality that physical intimacy and emotional intimacy are closely linked when their main characters fall for each other after agreeing to a no-strings-attached relationship.
That alone should be enough to make us think twice about the purpose of intimacy, but on top of that, hookup culture encourages women to lower their romantic standards, and objectify themselves by treating themselves as a man’s plaything, never once challenging him to see her as a human being with hopes and fears, a human being with complexities that would take a lifetime to understand. Instead, we give men the green light to see us as nothing more than a body to gain pleasure from.
The pressure to be perfectly pure.
On the other end of the spectrum is the dueling philosophy of purity culture, standing in direct opposition to hookup culture; by waiting until after her wedding, purity culture asserts, she is guaranteed a blissful marriage, a life free of hurt and trauma, and a healthy respect for herself and her body.
Although purity culture’s end goals are far better for women than that of hookup culture’s, we can’t ignore the approach with which purity culture attempts to achieve these goals: an attitude that condemns women’s desires and bodies as something to be hidden and ashamed of, a reverence for purity at the cost of instilling in young women a sense of self-worth that disappears if she makes a mistake, a demeanor that, in the end, is no less objectifying than hookup culture.
While touting the belief that a woman’s body is sacred grounds, purity culture sees our inherent value as something that can be lost—boiling women’s very meaning in life down to what her body has and hasn’t experienced, to the sanctity of her goods, and whether or not her future husband will be the first and only to engage in intimate acts with her. This only reinforces the notion that the female body is of higher value than our minds, hearts, and souls, just as hookup culture does.
The truth is somewhere in the middle.
So, if both hookup culture and purity culture are misguided in their treatment of women, where do we look for guidance? How can women empower themselves, have a healthy view of intimacy, and treat their bodies and emotions with care and respect? Ultimately, this answer is found somewhere in the middle, far away from any extremes.
We can teach our girls that their bodies are incredibly beautiful, intricate, and unique to them, the only one of its kind—and so to know it is a privilege, not a given. We can instill in them a healthy reverence for intimacy, an understanding of the deep bond it’s meant to create, and the beauty of such a bond forming between two people in committed love. We can help them understand the emotional pain and reality of allowing someone to treat their bodies like a shiny toy to be discarded as soon as the novelty wears off. We can present these truths, however, without insinuating that their value as a human being, or a woman, is dependent on perfection.
A woman’s value is inherent. It is steeped in her heart, soul, and mind, in her very being—and her body is an extension, an expression, of her undeniable worth. It cannot be stamped out, but it can absolutely become buried beneath an onslaught of lies that tell her the contrary, that she is just a body to be enjoyed, or that her body is only of value if she follows the rules.
It’s by entrenching ourselves in both careless and rigid attitudes that we lead women to question their value and purpose, and down ultimately harmful paths. If we truly seek to be pro-woman, we must recognize just how equally damaging hookup culture and purity culture are to young women and seek to strike a healthy balance in the middle.