The Sacred and the Sensual: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis of Evangelical Purity Culture's Influence on Women's Relationship with Their Body and Sexuality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This auto-ethnographic study explores the impacts of evangelical purity culture (EPC) on women’s relationship with their body, gender identity, sexuality, and sexual experiences, and the underlying mechanisms that drive these impacts. This work aims to bridge the significant gap in academic literature on women’s lived experiences in EPC. It encourages a thoughtful examination of this culture while emphasizing the importance of its serious consideration and the need for future research. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten cisgender women between the ages of 24-32 who were raised in EPC in Western Canada and the Southern United States and identify living with positive or negative physical, sexual, psychological, emotional, or spiritual impacts from the teachings they received during their childhood and active participation in evangelicalism.The research is underpinned by a feminist epistemology and constructionist paradigm, embracing a relativist ontology. The findings highlight how EPC operates through various mechanisms, including shame, objectification of the female body, rigid gender roles, insufficient sex education, and essentialist teachings privileging heterosexuality, all of which are argued to be God’s design, based on scripture. These mechanisms, coupled with surveillance and control systems such as peer and self-monitoring, contributed to the internalization of shame and self-objectification. As a result, the participants experienced profound disconnection from their bodies, femininity, and sexuality, which led to the development of eating disorders, religious trauma, unsafe sexual situations, suppression of sexual desires, cognitive dissonance, suicidal ideation, and other detrimental effects on their well-being.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".