Pure White

This episode examines how the True Love Waits and the Southern Baptist church influenced Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform bill with an amendment that created funding for abstinence-only education. This pairing demonstrates how myths about sexual purity deeply impact how the system uses the assumption of sexual purity as a normative experience to reinforce poverty, racism, and misogyny.

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This episode focuses on the organization True Love Waits and its founding as a highly ambitious campaign to transform the diversity of sexual cultures, expressions, and ethics in the US into a singular ethic based on Christian principles. While doing so, the campaign also contributed to the culture of abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention by sacralizing the practice of victim blaming.

For anyone experiencing sexual or gender-bas...

Emmett Till. Lionel Richie. The Atlanta Massacre.

This episode looks at how the legacy of lynching remains active in the promotion of myths of sexual danger which even today promote white women’s sexual purity and racial innocence. 

It examines several cases over 7 decades that demonstrate how this myth remains an active part of the white racial imagination. Includes discussion of Caroline Bryant, the Lionel Ritchie urban myth, the ...

This episode is named after an especially violent time in US history immediately following Reconstruction in the US South.  Frequent racial-terror lynchings were justified by what journalist Ida B. Wells called the lynching myth. The myth was rooted in two racialized stereotypes: sexually violent black men and sexually pure white women. When Wells publicized her analysis, she found herself in conflict with white women such as...

First coined by US gender historian Barbara Welter, the cult of true womanhood is a concept that describes Victorian gender ideologies of the 19th century cultural elite. An analysis of these ideals reveals efforts by white Protestants to create a seemingly providential connection between sexual purity and white womanhood. This episode will draw on primary sources (including popular magazines, sermons, articles and speeches b...

What can an enslaved woman's memoir teach us about the history of purity culture and White supremacy?

The history of sexual purity is deeply intertwined with the history of race in the US. Specifically, it tells us a great deal about how the racial categories of white and black were formed through the control and abuse of women’s bodies. To understand this we need to begin with the institution of slavery in the Antebellum South.

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What happens when you link national renewal to the sexual lives of teenagers? This is exactly what evangelical purity culture did in the 1990s. In this first episode, host Dr. Sara Moslener recounts the history and details of purity culture's advent, leaving us with an important question: If sexual purity is the way to restore the nation - what does "purity" mean when we go beyond individual sexual decisions to a vision...