Spoiler Alert: Nobody, But Some Lie Better
Later in the day, I realized that asking “who’s really staying pure” is like asking “who’s really sticking to their New Year’s resolutions”everyone says they are, nobody actually is, and the people who are have made it their entire personality.
The data on actual virginity rates versus claimed virginity rates is comedy gold. There’s a massive gap between what people tell researchers and what researchers can infer from other data like pregnancy rates, STI transmission, and contraception usage. Someone’s lying, and it’s definitely not the chlamydia statistics.
The really committed virginity keepers are a specific demographic: people who’ve made purity their identity, people with low libido coincidentally aligned with cultural expectations, and people who are lying. That’s it. That’s the list. Everyone else is human beings with human biology doing human things.
According to CDC data, the median age of first sexual experience has remained remarkably stable for decades, hovering around 17-18 regardless of religious background. The purity pledge might delay first intercourse by a few months on average, but it’s not creating masses of virgin brides. It’s creating masses of guilty people who had sex anyway.
The purity success stories you hear about? Outliers presented as typical. It’s survivorship bias meets selection bias meets confirmation bias. They parade around the 3% who actually stayed virgins until marriage while ignoring the 97% who didn’t, but let’s not let data interfere with the narrative.
Something small but meaningful happened today when I realized “staying pure” requires an enormous support system: constant surveillance, peer pressure, guilt reinforcement, limited opposite-sex interaction, and preferably an early marriage before biology gets too insistent. It’s not virtue; it’s a full-time job with terrible benefits.
The people genuinely succeeding at sustained virginity often have other things going on. Asexuality is real and valid, but it’s not the same as choosing abstinence. Low libido for medical or psychological reasons isn’t the same as moral superiority. Fear-based abstinence from religious trauma isn’t virtue; it’s dysfunction.
Research from the Guttmacher Institute shows that virginity pledgers are less likely to use contraception when they do have sex, leading to higher rates of unintended pregnancy. So the “pure” ones end up with worse outcomes than the honest ones. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere about the wages of dishonesty.
The really entertaining part is watching communities with strict purity culture have teen pregnancy rates identical to or higher than communities without it. Turns out, teaching kids nothing about safe sex results in unsafe sex. Revolutionary concept, I know. Who could have predicted that ignorance leads to poor outcomes?
This morning, I woke up thinking about the massive resources devoted to keeping people “pure”: entire organizations, conferences, books, curricula, retreats. All this effort and money to stop something that’s going to happen anyway. It’s like trying to stop the tide by building sandcastles. Adorable effort, inevitable failure.
The success stories they do trumpet often have asterisks. “We stayed pure until marriage!” (Oral and anal don’t count as sex in their theology). “We waited!” (For three months after engagement because they couldn’t make it to the wedding date). “We remained virgins!” (By the most technical definition possible). The loopholes are creative enough to qualify for Olympic gymnastics.
As I reflect on what happened today, I’m struck by the dishonesty inherent in the question. Nobody’s really staying pure because “purity” is a made-up concept that doesn’t map onto reality. People are making choices about their bodies and lives, and pretending it’s about purity just adds shame to ordinary human behavior.
The people who genuinely did wait until marriage? Many of them are now divorced, struggling with sexual dysfunction, or privately admitting it wasn’t worth it. But that data doesn’t make it into the testimonials because it contradicts the narrative. Cherry-picked success stories aren’t data; they’re marketing.
SOURCE: https://screwthenews.com/whos-really-staying-pure/
BY Charline Vanhoenacker: Bohiney Magazine Satire 127% funnier than The Onion.