Let’s Talk about Purity Culture, Baby! Song of Songs and Female Desire

If you grew up in the evangelical church, I guarantee purity culture has poisoned your view of sex in one way or another. As a woman, I am exhausted and saddened by the air of shame that surrounds so many of us when it comes to sex. I recently got married (and surprise, have had sex!) and for the first time had a really candid conversation about sex with one of my best friends. We both spoke about how much guilt and shame we carry around with us and regretted that we hadn’t talked about sex with each other sooner. 

This is because purity culture makes us feel ashamed, embarrassed, and dirty about sex and sexuality. We imbibe these feelings so intensely that we cannot muster the words to talk about it honestly. Women’s bodies are pulled apart and remade into various objects with one thing in common: tarnishable. Purity culture rhetoric disturbingly relies on the image of women as fragile, physical things: When a precious crystal vase smashes on the ground, it can never be restored. Likewise, a woman’s so-called purity must be carefully guarded lest pre-marital sex makes her broken and impure. No wonder we feel so ashamed and fearful: listen to the language!

Sexuality is grossly distorted and misgendered, characterising men as sexual pursuers and women as passive bodies. In other words, men want it and women don’t. Abstinence-only sex education, particular in Christian schools, perpetuates a view of sexuality, Louisa Allen writes, as “a problem to be managed rather than a positive part of … identity.” There is a “missing discourse of desire” in sex education, particularly in the case of female sexuality where desire is altogether lost. 

On the other hand, women’s bodies are also blamed for causing “Christian brothers to stumble.” In churches, women are often expected to dress modestly, to not be a “stumbling block,” that is, a tempting object or thing which men can trip over. The body is viewed as something dangerous and women are held responsible for the sexual desires of others, to the point where, as one interviewee in a study conducted by feminist theologian Katie Cross confessed, “I felt like my body was a crime.”

The blame targeted at women, and the trauma we experience, is termed by Cross as “body theodicy” which traps theologies of suffering within the body, resulting in an “internal process of blame and condemnation of the self.” Even after marriage, women retain these traumatic narrations of sex, which infect their minds and bodies. Another interviewee in Cross’s study comments on having sex with her husband, “[I] felt so dirty, awful, overwhelmed with guilt—I didn’t want to do it.” It should not shock anyone to find out that a lifetime of trauma cannot be magically undone on the wedding night.

Purity culture, and all of its destructive language and images, is a caricature of Christian sexual ethics. In it we do not find wisdom, but devastation. We do not in fact find purity, only shame.

The Biblical Wise Life: Sexual Desire and Practice in the Song of Songs

Allegory or Literal?

The Song of Songs is a book rarely read in churches, in no small part due to the suppressive rhetoric of purity culture. For much of Christian history, the Song of Songs was interpreted as an allegory for the relationship between God and the church. This developed from Christian theologians influenced by Platonism and other Greek worldviews. These worldviews held that the body must be subjugated and eventually destroyed in order to free the soul. Such an interpretation of the body as a prison from which the soul must escape is not rooted in Scripture which, instead teaches that God’s creation, and the place of sexuality within that creation, is good. The redemption of broken sexualities will not involve escape from createdness, but rather the restored physical goodness of all creation.

“Purity culture rhetoric disturbingly relies on the image of women as fragile, physical things.”

Since the nineteenth century, interpretations of the Song among biblical scholars have overwhelmingly shifted from allegorical to literal. When read literally, the Song depicts a loving human relationship in which a woman and man fully give themselves to each other, emotionally and physically without shame or reservation. Indeed, the Song is explicitly erotic. 

As the reader ponders the lovers’ secretive language to each other, we are invited to explore in that space between the literal and figurative. As womanist biblical scholar Renita Weems writes, “What in this ‘garden’ might he be eating and drinking that tastes of myrrh and spice, honeycomb and honey, wine and milk? We can only guess and blush” (Song 5:1). Nevertheless, if the book as a whole is interpreted literally as an image of sexual intimacy between two lovers rather than God and the church, what is there to discover about the theme of female sexuality and desire within the Song?

Sexy Examples of Female Desire in the Song

When we turn our senses toward the Song, we find many sexy images of female desire. Here are some examples that can help us to read the Song as an empowering text for female sexuality.

1:2-4

The voice of the woman opens the Song with a burst of desire for her lover’s touch, “Let him kiss me” (1:2). Here, J. Cheryl Exum writes, we sense an air of urgency as “a love affair unfolds before us.” The two occurrences of “to kiss” (nšq) makes the woman’s desire for her lover the emphasis in this verse. The images of wine and vineyards bring to mind sweet and dizzying liquids—the woman is intoxicated by her strong and urgent desire for her lover. In v. 3 her lover arouses more of her senses, first taste, and now the fragrant scent of perfume.

4:16

In this verse, the woman calls upon the winds to “awake” and blow on her garden. This verb (‘wr) recalls the woman’s warning to the women of Jerusalem not to awaken, or rouse, love until it wishes (2:7; 3:5; 8:4). Elsewhere in the Song, when the garden metaphor is used, it typically conveys that the garden belongs to the man—“his garden” when the woman speaks (6:2) and “my garden” when the woman speaks (5:1). Here, however, the woman uses “my garden” to refer to herself and her sexuality which is hers to freely open to her lover. In the next breath, she offers herself to her lover by referring to herself as “his garden.”

8:2-4

In v. 2 the woman’s desire for her lover continues as she fantasises about a sexual encounter with him. The opening two verbs indicate that the woman is the initiator of this sexual rendezvous. The imagery of choice fruits, including pomegranates, is used elsewhere in the Song to depict the woman’s body as well as a place of lovemaking. Wine is used to describe the intoxication of desire and lovemaking. 

What I find particularly beautiful here is that the woman’s mother seems to be the one who has taught her about sex. In the ancient world, girls would grow up with a much more intimate awareness of their mothers’ sexual lives than in today’s world. There is a moving familiarity here; the world of desire and sex is not something “alien or abhorrent,” as Duane Garrett and Paul House write, but rather “she is emulating what she has seen and heard all of her life in the woman who has raised her and been the closest to her.” 

Practising Wisdom: Embracing Female Bodies and Desire

In the Song, we find a healthy and beautiful sexual relationship between two devoted lovers. Female sexuality and desire is rightfully brought to the forefront. The Song does not require female silence or passivity when it comes to sexual desire, but, as Weems notes, offers “the only unmediated female voice in all of Scripture” in which the woman is “assertive, uninhibited, and unabashed about her sexual desires.”

When Christian leaders are unwilling to consider literal interpretations of the Song, young female Christians have nowhere else to look in terms of biblical examples of rightly ordered female sexuality and desire. Exum again observes, 

“Without the Song, we could be tempted to conclude from the rest of the Bible that desire in Israel was constructed as male, and as dangerous, something to be repressed or controlled … Because we possess the Song of Songs, we know that a romantic vision of love was available in ancient Israel, a vision that recognized both desire and sexual pleasure as mutual and that viewed positively a woman actively seeking to gratify her desire.”

Purity culture perpetuates the caricature of women’s bodies as objects that can be broken and irredeemable in the eyes of God and fellow believers. This so-called wisdom has caused irreversible trauma to women in the church, resulting in destructive constructions of sex, desire, and their own bodies, both in and outside of marriage. In the Song of Songs, we find a restorative new story to offer women, where female sexuality, desire, and bodies are celebrated as beautiful and good. As it should be.

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Stephanie Chan 陳雪瑩 is a theology graduate and regular contributor at Metanoia.