…Many purity advocates teach that women aren’t very sexual, and so don’t need a way to vent their repressed sexual energy in their single years. But that’s not what I usually hear. “Dating Jesus” was just one of many work-arounds I heard about from women who wanted to remain pure but couldn’t deaden their sexual, romantic, and relational impulses. One woman went on a yearlong “fast” during which she starved herself of romantic and sexual thoughts the way one might starve oneself of food during a traditional fast…
…Katie was tripping over the purity culture stumbling block that tells girls they are to blame for their inability to meet a set of nearly unattainable standards, not the standards themselves. Katie even questioned whether she had been sexually abused or inappropriately exposed to sexual content as a child and had repressed the memory, as she couldn’t think of any other reason why her sexual feelings wouldn’t go away, as the purity movement demanded they must…
https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/a22800075/pure-book-excerpt-author-linda-kay-klein/