Promiscuity Culture

and what it is like to grow up on the opposite end of purity

I recall learning about “purity culture” soon after I began my christian walk, which would have put me at around twenty-six years old. So this wasn’t something I grew up with at all. Some might even say I was spared the pain and misery that is being brought up under purity culture, and maybe I was, I am not sure. This article isn’t a commentary on purity culture, as I feel I do not know or understand the arguments of those who argue against it, or for it, well enough. This article is instead about what I do know — and that is promiscuity culture.

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I never used social media as a liberal or an atheist. I didn’t make posts or become some hater over on what used to be called Twitter back in my day. I only really entered the social media world a few years after I became a Christian, left feminism, and decided to speak about my journey. When that happened, I would often talk about my moral upbringing, about how I was never told to guard myself, or told that sex was for marriage, or even that casual sex was actually harmful, and so every single time I spoke about it, there was always that one Christian who came running at the speed of light, tripping over himself to tell me to my face that I was obviously stupid and should have just known these things, because apparently everyone just knows this… duhhhh, and that at its core I just wanted to be a whore, and I was using my upbringing as an excuse.

But I do not find this to be true at all. Maybe in America, where the culture is still heavily shaped by conservative values and Christianity, so kids who are raised like that really do grow up knowing these things. But I was not. I was raised under very different assumptions.

So I would like to offer the perspective of someone who was raised on the exact opposite end of purity culture.

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Detail of Alexandre-Jean Dubois-Drahonet: Female Nude, Back View

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I grew up in a home where nudity was acceptable, we are family after all my mother would say, so I grew up being very comfortable with nudity. I was introduced to sex by accident at a young age when my mother gave me a book about the human body that included a page of two shadow people, one pink and one blue, laying down showing exactly where their bodies came together, and I was frankly, traumatized. I swore on that day that no man alive would ever do that to me, and I was appalled that any human person would engage in such nonsense, it seems that even at that tender age I knew deep down sex meant something serious, private and very adult, but I would grow up to be told all of the opposite.

The overall message in my home as I grew was that sex was something you had with a person you liked… whatever that meant. It was supposed to be fun, pleasurable. Masturbation was treated as something everyone did and even encouraged; my own mother introduced me to it. Teenagers, we were told, should have free access to birth control. I was put on it at fifteen, with condoms available in the house whenever I wanted, and even carried one in my wallet at my mother’s recommendation, just in case. It’s strange to look back and realize I had a condom in my wallet long before I ever had sex, or even had a boyfriend. Sex, to me, was simply what people did. It was normal, casual, fun. It wasn’t about making babies or marriage. It was just something you did whenever you felt like it.

In essence, my home was a very “sex-positive” one. Homosexuality, promiscuity, and everything in between were all treated as good and affirming. Sex, much like our personalities, was something to be explored and discovered, nothing was off limits.

This wasn’t something abnormal to just my own home; my friends had similar thoughts and experiences. Many, many of my dearest, closest friends were having sex before they even had the ability to end their own ages in —teen. Many of them with boys old enough to drive, which in Europe is eighteen, so these were men having sex with underage girls. I remember having friends whose boyfriends were old enough to pick them up in their cars outside the school. I thought it was crazy then, and now as an adult I find it appalling and objectively criminal.

I remember sleep overs where a friend would tell me about all the things she had done with this or that other boy. The first time I ever saw pornography was at a sleepover, where a friend showed me and our other friends a video of her sister having sex with some man. We all laughed and cringed, and I vividly remember it because I had never seen anything like it before.

My own mother and grandmother, despite both waiting until marriage and remaining married to the same men to this day, told me to do the exact opposite. My mother told me virginity was no big deal, and when I asked how I would know when and with whom, she said I would just know. And of course, I thought I knew, with the first boy I loved. With no real safeguards or boundaries, it became a complete disaster for me, both emotionally and physically. My grandmother had a similar philosophy. She would say, “vaginas don’t count miles”, a carte blanche to do whatever I wanted, to follow whatever I felt was right. The message was constant and clear: sex was fun, casual, and something to be given freely. Virginity wasn’t for marriage, it wasn’t something meaningful, it was treated as a kind of burden, something shameful, something that only got in the way.

In school and in our friend groups, being a virgin was embarrassing. No boy would want to get with you if he knew you were a virgin, because he knew the chances were slim to none of getting any intimacy. I still remember getting texts from boys, and there was always the dreaded question: “Are you a virgin?” I was embarrassed that I had no experience; I was embarrassed that I didn’t know how to do any of those things.

I had all the wrong understandings of sex.

This obviously led me nowhere good, but by some miracle I didn’t lose my virginity until much later compared to all my friends, I was the last one in the group.

Even the friends I had who called themselves Christians, Catholic girls from Catholic homes, all of them that I can think of right now were having sex with much older boys, out in their cars, out in the middle of nowhere, just like it was a normal thing that kids and teens should be doing.

I grew up in an atheistic home. My mother was into all the New Age, liberation, liberalism, and acceptance-of-everything mindset, and my dad was an atheist who hated Christianity and thought it was just a bunch of sheep who needed to be told what to do. But oddly enough, they held to some tradition, because as an infant I was baptized. All of this to say that from both sides, the atheist and the Christian, all I had seen and been exposed to was the modern belief that sex is just casual. I do not recall having a single friend or knowing of one single person who was waiting until marriage. I grew up around many circles and went to schools in different cities, not once did I hear about it. I knew it was a thing because, as an atheist, I vividly remember sitting with my best friend mocking the hypocrisy of our Catholic friends who claimed to be Catholic while doing all the anti-Catholic things. All of this just reinforced what I had already been told: Christianity is false, and saving sex for marriage is for losers.

And so on I went, a “liberated” woman who didn’t need to wait for marriage. The world was my oyster, they said, so I pried it open with eager hands, expecting something shiny, something wonderful, but there was no pearl inside. Only something sour, and something that turned on me the moment I swallowed it.

Long before I ever had sex, I was fifteen years old and ended up involved with a man who was twenty, I used to think this was stupid when my friends did it when I was twelve, but by the time I actually hit puberty and looked like a woman, well unfortunately I loved getting all the attention my father did’t give me, luckily for me it ended soon after wihout much happening.

Eventually I found my first love a few years later, I fell head over heels over this boy, I had feelings and emotions I had never experienced before, and if it had been up to me I would have probably stayed with him forever — that is the power of the first love. People love to talk about the special first love, like its some magical thing that only happens once, not understanding that it happens like this for an exact reason. This was the boy I gave my last bit of innocence to, and this was also the boy who broke up with me the very next day.

I had never felt grief like that ever in my life,

I was beyond devastated… a part of me had broken

And because I had no understanding of the actual true nature of sex, I had no idea why I felt the way I did, I had no way to cope with what had happened, and I had no one around to help either. I was told to get over it, “he’s just a loser”, “you’ll find someone better”, “just move on”… I was utterly heartbroken and alone, I could not move on, he had taken a part of me that I had no idea was so special and fragile, I could not move on, I wasn’t the same, a part of me was left with that boy, and he has it even still to this day. I can never take it back.

That is what no one tells you when they are busy mocking virginity and calling innocence childish. They speak as though nothing is lost because they have been told to ignore it, not to look at it, but I lost something. I felt the terrible stillness after, the strange emptiness, the sense that I had crossed some invisible threshold and that a door had shut behind me. It is a terrible thing to discover, in the worst possible way, that something everyone told you was meaningless was in fact very much the opposite.

Misuse and misunderstanding of sex destroyed something in me

On I went, but I never was the same emotionally, I spent years following the prescribed rules, dating and having sex, using and being used, always hoping that I would find something meaningful and long lasting, but if I am honest, what I was really looking for was not just modern love. I was looking to be restored, I was looking for someone who could somehow undo what had been done, someone who could make me feel untouched by what had already touched me so deeply.

Promiscuity culture made promises to women it could never keep, and it never will keep them. On the road to liberation we have only found the exact opposite.

So yes, it might seem absolutely moronic that anyone could ever grow up, live a life, and make decisions without understanding the seriousness of sex, but yet here we are, here I am. There are millions of children, of girls being raised with these same false assumptions I was raised on, who are getting hurt, dealing with feelings and emotions they cannot possibly begin to comprehend.

And this is exactly why simply calling these women stupid, used up, disgusting, or whores will never work. It will fail, because you are not speaking to people who share your assumptions. You are speaking across an abyss. On one side are those who were raised to believe sex is sacred, dangerous, weighty, something to be guarded because it means something. On the other side are those of us who were raised to believe the exact opposite, that sex is casual, normal, recreational, almost morally neutral, and that any pain it causes is not proof that something is wrong with the act itself, but proof that you are weak, immature, or too attached.

These are not small differences. This is an entirely different moral universe.

The real tragedy is that people on both sides often cannot see each other clearly. Those raised in Christian truth often have no idea what kind of chaos, vulgarity, confusion, and utter moral abandonment many of us were raised in. They cannot imagine a home where no one tells you to protect yourself, where virginity is treated as an obstacle, where sexual openness is treated as virtue, and where every adult around you hands you the same wrong map and then acts surprised when you end up lost. Those raised like me do not understand the other side either. We do not hear their warnings as good advice. We hear them as silly oppression, as old age moralism, as some silly religious panic, because that is how it was framed to us from the very beginning. We were taught to roll our eyes before we ever even heard anything.

So if you want to reach women raised like me, you have to first understand what world we were raised in. You have to understand that many of us did not rebel against the truth. We were simply never given it. So no, the answer is not to flatter women, excuse, or pretend there is no sin, no guilt, no foolishness, no responsibility, but neither is the answer to stand above someone else in some moral high, and spit on the wounded.

The answer is to tell the truth, to say that sex is not casual, that the body is not separate from the soul, that women are not freed by being taught to betray their own nature, and that what this culture calls liberation has left many of us lonely, confused and used.

There are girls growing up right now exactly as I did. Girls being handed condoms before wisdom, or any understanding of sex, girls being told how to protect themselves from pregnancy, but never from heartbreak, from being used or from immoral men, girls being taught everything except the one thing they most need to know: that sex means something, and because it means something, they do too.

Innocence was never meant to be placed anywhere and everywhere. It belongs in a place of safety, where it can be received, not consumed, and when it’s given instead into something casual, something that does not protect it, it doesn’t just pass through you, it takes root, and those roots have a way of staying.

This is the real tragedy, that you eventually learn that it does matter, it does carry great cost, it does impact you, it is not casual, but by the time you learn it, the cost has been paid in places you cannot easily reach back into, and that is why we must teach young girls before they pay the kind price me, and women just like me, have had to pay.

Before they give away something they can never get back

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May God bless you,

With love

Elisabeth