Purity culture, Does it still exist?

Although not a new phenomenon, the purity culture movement took off in the late 1980s and 1990s as a reaction to the AIDS crisis and the sexual revolution of the 1960s-’80s. On a deeper level, however, it stemmed from a widespread concern within the evangelical community that the traditional family was in crisis.
As women, it is said it is also our job to ensure that we don’t ‘inspire’ sexual thoughts or feelings in men by the way that we walk, talk or dress. In other words, girls grow up with the message that not only do we need to be pure, but it is also our responsibility to ensure that the whole community is pure. That’s a lot of pressure for a girl.
Basically “purity culture” encompasses the emphasis on virginity before marriage and on maintaining emotional purity that pervades fundamentalism and evangelicalism, made visible in purity balls, purity rings, purity pledges, and modesty teachings. These teachings are not limited to fundamentalism and evangelicalism, and can be seen in the culture at large with the slut/virgin dichotomy and the prevalence of abstinence only sex education in public schools. In its most extreme, the purity culture involves giving up dating for a return to parent-guided courtship, and even arranged marriages.
One of the most destructive aspects of purity culture is how it equates a person’s worth and intimacy with God to how well they resist sexual temptation. And in the way the Church frames the purity conversation, it hits women — especially young women — the hardest.
While a man’s fight against lust is depicted as a valiant struggle against his nature (usually accompanied with warfare allusions and Braveheart quotes), women with similar struggles are treated as outliers or anomalies to the norm.
And because a man’s struggle with lust is framed as a battle, losses and setbacks are acceptable. But the language we use to reinforce female virginity is not as forgiving.

Does purity culture still exist?! I wonder, well may be from you our reader is this practised in the environs that you reside in?

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