What, exactly, is purity culture? We have been throwing that word around for decades, and yet I talk to many who are still unsure about the term.

This month we are going to spend time talking about purity culture. What it is, how it impacts your sex life and what to do about it. If you remember, last week we talked about one of the most famous purity culture marketing campaigns. If you missed it, you can catch it here, "The Drunk History of True Love Waits," sense of humor required.

We are going to take it more serious this week to help you place some language and context around purity culture and how it differs from comprehensive sex education. A quick history reveals a movement toward abstinence (specifically not having penile/ vaginal penetration until marriage) messaging in the decades after the free love movement of the 1960's. Many of our parents or grandparents grew up in a culture that was embracing casual sex, drug and alcohol use. As a counter to this era, the late 1980's and early 1990's brought the evangelical Christian message of "purity." Those same free-loving spirits were now having to raise their own kids and wanted to do it differently. But instead of creating sexual educational systems that empowered their children to make healthy sexual choices, they swung the pendulum in the far opposite direction of "free love" and landed on "control and shame."

Out of this need for control over sex grew "purity culture," or the idea that one could be "pure" in the eyes of God by refraining from sexual thought or action until the wedding night. After marriage sex would not be a sin, but in fact would be blessed. Although I see the pain and trauma that has been caused by purity culture, I do believe that many of its supporters (like many of our parents) were trying to act out of love and protection for their children. If we can dig into empathy we can see they had probably not been given any sex education either, and so just talking about sex to us, their children, was a great deal more than they were ever given. Unfortunately, the message that was given to us was not just ineffective, it was harmful.

For more clarity, let's compare purity culture messaging with comprehensive sex education messaging. Research indicates that comprehensive sex education helps young people make better, healthier decisions in sex. And those who have abstinence only until marriage messaging have comparably similar rates of sexual engagement before marriage, but comparably higher rates of sexually transmitted infections, because the education on how to protect from infections is missing.

Here are just a few of the regular types of messages that I come across in my practice. Every single one of these purity culture messages has been told to me by a client. Read through the purity culture message and then read the responding comprehensive sex education message. What comes up for you? What does this clarify for you and what further questions does this chart create for you? I'm looking forward to coming back to this next week, when we will discuss how these messages impact your sex life as an adult.