Interview: Asexuality and Purity Culture
Read my full interview with Joey Thurmond/Sojourners
How do asexual people fit—or not— within Christian evangelical purity culture?
As my Twitter followers know, I’ve become increasingly interested in this question.
It’s easy to assume that because purity culture pushes sexual abstinence, it shouldn’t pose much of a problem for asexual people. Yet, my research on asexuality has shown this simply isn’t true. Purity culture poses major problems for asexual people.
Although we often focus on the ways purity culture represses sexuality, it’s easy to miss that purity culture compels sexuality too.
One way of thinking about this is that within purity culture, sex outside of heterosexual, procreation-oriented marriage is repressed. But at the same time purity culture pressures people to eventually enter heterosexual, procreation-oriented marriages.
Of course, this explanation only begins to scratch the surface of what asexuality reveals about purity culture.
Last March, I sat down for an interview with Joey Thurmond, who was writing a story for Sojourners about this topic. Joey’s story is great, and I highly recommend reading it.
Most of my conversation with Joey did not, however, make it into the story. Fortunately, Joey published the full interview on his Substack, where you can read it for free. We discuss the intersection of asexuality and purity culture, the role of gender in asexual communities, and the lessons about attraction, libido, sexuality, and relationships that asexuality presents to allosexual (i.e. non-asexual) people, including myself.
Huge thanks for Joey for making this interview publicly available. It was a great conversation. You can read the full interview here.
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