The Magpie No. 1: Inventing Purity Culture

I have been granted the great privilege by my editor of “writing whatever you want but please be yourself.” Paired with the request that “if you are going to request all of these books to review perhaps we should make a column out of it,” and that “I think you are the only mean holding all of these odd books together”; perhaps the column might be as eclectic, as odd, even as curious as I myself can be. So today I present to you my new books column: The Magpie.

A few words about the column’s title. I considered another option: “The Overcaffeinated Theologian” had the advantage of being accurate, the disadvantage of being too-on-the nose. I am, indeed, quite caffeinated, but I think my curiosity runs deeper than caffeine. The second, “The Magpie”, had the advantage of being not the first, and also the only other title I came up with.

Magpies are the rascals of the avian world. They gather shiny things they find beautiful and potentially useful. Such behavior is derided by intellectuals under the category of curiositas, a vice of the classical world. I do understand the preference for sustained, careful critique over flitting-about from one thing to the next. But perhaps a thoughtful-enough magpie might herself be the center around which such wild and interesting curiosities might cohere. Perhaps such a dismissive critique of the magpie has more than a bit of anti-feminine about it—gathering beautiful things might be a good in itself. And perhaps such a creature herself may be the center that grants these curiosities a form. Perhaps. Time will tell.

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Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2016), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014), and The Story of the Lost Child (2015).

I was standing in a store at the mall, shopping for a homecoming dress with my daughter, when I invented purity culture for the second time.

Purity culture—the much-maligned attempt of evangelicals from the 1990s and early 2000s to keep Christian teenagers from sexual activity before marriage—was a product of its day. True to form, it relied on conceptual overreach, equating promiscuous teenagers with chewed-up and spit-out gum and promising those who abstained married sex lives that reached erotic heights.

The rhetoric was overstated but the gravest critique of purity culture, from my view, is that married sex is no promise of endless bliss and pleasure. It is saddled with a lot of other things, like hormones and children and illness and fatigue and kitchens that need to be cleaned up, just downstairs. Promising gullible, inexperienced teenagers the height of sexual fulfillment, if only they’d just wait, feels a little like promising your kid a pony if they’ll only stop asking. Unless their marriages were different than they seemed, our parents should have known better than to promise us sexual futures that reality could not provide.

But the thread that was cut between purity culture and sex was that of pleasure. Pleasure was the birthright of the married Christian, but now it had been severed from marriage. What the purity culture critique usually takes up is the rigid formula that if you don’t wait, you will suffer, but if you do wait, you’ll be rewarded. Pleasure was promised as the birthright of the obedient young Christian.

The sexual rewards of today’s young adults prioritize pleasure without accompanying contractual agreements like marriage. But based on the iconography of sex and lust available at any store in the mall, the sex dangled in front of them doesn’t look all that grand, either. Gone are the blushing girls in peek-a-boo lingerie. Today’s homecoming styles are smaller than the bridal negligees of yesterday. The sex that is pictured in advertisements, on Spotify covers, and most of all on social media is oddly solo. The women are depicting a persona—available but powerful, in charge and experienced. It is a largely female-driven view of sex, endowed with all of the power that that entails. The men are oddly absent—unless they are dragons.

The prevalence of make-your-own pornography like OnlyFans has made every young girl a potential porn star. Sex is whatever she wants it to be, if it suits her and he pays. Women are the protagonists of today’s sexual fantasies.

I thought of all of this—the sexual availability of today’s young women, the prevalence of rough and violent sex, the promise of pleasure that looks a lot like pain—as I read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. Truth be told, I am not sure I have ever read sex and desire written in such a feminine way. Elena Ferrante—a pseudonym—wrote four novels that follow the life of Elena Greco and her best friend, Lila Cerullo, from childhood through married midlife. The books are written in the first person, from the perspective of Elena. She writes with a stark immediacy. 

There is one central conflict in the novels that takes two forms. It is the conflict between the “old neighborhood” of Naples and progress in the more modern world outside it. This conflict is played out repeatedly in the lives of the two women. Lila is married off young, at fifteen, to a man from the neighborhood. The recounting of the marriage is horrifying. She seems as if she has almost dissociated as the time arrives, and she continues to function as if with a split personality through the wedding and immediately after. She refuses intercourse with her husband and is beaten, horribly, for her refusal. 

By Elena’s recounting, this is not the beginning of the dissociation. Lila has porous boundaries. From an early age she is compelling—Elena finds herself obsessed with her friend. Lila shows significant intellectual prowess and has a masterful imagination. With both come the ability to manipulate others as it suits her. She is unafraid of the neighborhood bullies, even when they are full grown men. So it is all the more surprising when it is Lila who is married young, to a man with economic value but little personal merit.

Lila’s early marriage encapsulates the challenges of women in her day. Her marriage is a profitable arrangement for her family. It further promotes the Caracci family by uniting them with Lila’s husband, Stefano Carracci, a family of loan sharks, shop owners, and black-market associations. Strong, manipulative, willful Lila submits to this arrangement—we are not ever told why—but emerges from it not unscathed, but even more herself. Though she refuses her husband as a sexual partner, throughout the novels she finds many enthusiastic lovers. She works menial jobs and eventually rises to own a business, returning to the neighborhood with a much more modern technological line of work (I am trying to avoid too many spoilers throughout). She never gets a divorce but is partnered several times to men who both please and fail her.

Elena is the foil to Lila’s intellect and beauty. She is smart only because she works hard, and while she is pretty in the right light, she is no natural beauty. Perhaps for this reason she avoids some of Lila’s wild mistakes. She marries a sensible intellectual from an esteemed family, also choosing for herself a marriage that will improve her lot. But the marriage is without passion, and she takes a lover from the old neighborhood. She leaves everything for him—her husband, the stability of his family and her family life, the upward mobility it promises. He is in the end a philanderer, a scumbag, exactly like his father in all the ways that matter. The neighborhood in all of its dark carnality looms over the tale, reminding the reader that the past is not ever really past. Elena and Lila struggle when the demands of family and tradition cut up against their own desire for pleasure. But pleasure always fails them; the sex is violent or adulterous, the men philander, the women become pregnant and are left to care for children alone. Pleasure remains the beating heart beneath both women, but its pursuit crashes them on a rocky shore, over and over again.

Feminism shows up in the book mostly as a failed experiment. In ways that are almost too on the nose, Elena finds herself a feminist reading group right as she is struggling with the challenge of raising young children and being a writer.

This challenge—raising children and writing—is another main conflict in the novel, a second form of the chief conflict between the old ways of the neighborhood and the progress that is offered outside it. Though Elena does not always enjoy being a mother, she adores her children. That she is a writer, however, is a prior and more deeply felt identity. Mothering she does; writer she is. She adores her three daughters but cannot give up the work that she, throughout the novels, seeks to do in fits and starts. Her first novel is a wild success. For years she struggles with the second (until her editor shows up and threatens to cancel it if she does not deliver—a scene far too close to home for comfort). Elena finds the feminist reading group early in her motherhood, but the solutions suggested are too vague, too theoretical for the lived challenges she faces. 

Indeed, much of the advice given to women about improving their lot is too theoretical. It lacks the teeth and the embodied reality of maternal care—of the warmth that Elena feels when she cares for her children, the deep satisfaction of being available to them and providing a comfortable home for them. This conflict between the peace of being present to her children and her home, and the drive to think—a drive that necessarily removes Elena from totality of the caregiving—recurs throughout the novel. She is a woman with passions, with desires, and with children whom she also passionately desires. Failure marks both sets of longings.

Men, too, are satisfying to Elena mostly in theory. About her new lover (whose identity I am keeping secret, to avoid a spoiler), Elena writes:

“He had a curiosity about the world of women that was genuine. But—this I knew very well by now—he didn’t in the last resemble the men who in those years made a show of giving up at least a few of their privileges. I thought not only of professors, architects, artists who came to our house and displayed a sort of feminization of behaviors, feelings, opinions; but also of Carmen’s husband, Roberto, who was really helpful, and Enzo, who with no hesitation would have sacrificed all his time to Lila’s needs. [X] was sincerely interested in how women found themselves. There was no dinner at which he did not repeat that to think along with them was now the only way to a true thought. But he held tight to his spaces and to his numerous activities, he put first of all, always and only, himself. He didn’t give up an instance of his time.”

Elena’s lover, for whom she has sacrificed much, remains a man who loves women mostly in theory.

In From a Broken Web (1988), Catherine Keller theorized the situation of female selfhood. Women, she wrote, have experienced “soluble selves,” identities that are dissolvable and dependent on the “separative” heroic male. Lila’s “dissolving boundaries” reflect her ability to use her uniquely feminine powers of intellect, acumen, and manipulation—but also to hide them beneath a variant self that is largely defined by beauty, domesticity, and sexual submissiveness. That she can be both these things is begging for Keller’s feminist critique—or even better, that of Helen Cixous and Luce Irigaray.

I don’t buy the claims of these feminist thinkers anymore. I have found them to be, ironically, too essentialist in their thinking about women and their lives. But standing in the mall, shopping for homecoming dresses, I was reminded of them and of the way they spoke of women as always making themselves available, making themselves dissolvable, rendering themselves able to disappear in order to serve the desires of men. Female pleasure, for all of its current prominence in our culture, now threatens to violate the most basic boundaries of female subjectivity, demanding more subjugation, more assimilation to OnlyFans inspired norms of sexual behavior, until women and their desires do not exist at all.

Progress for women has often been perceived to come in the form of prioritizing their choices and their pleasure. This is evident when women have more career options, but also when they have more sexual options. The culture around women’s sexuality has shifted significantly in the last quarter-century, and not in ways that are all bad. But one doesn’t need to be in the market for a vibrator to be advertised one—female pleasure is everywhere. And insofar as the emphasis on female pleasure has been unmoored from traditional concerns about family, stability, and fertility, I have watched this emphasis on pleasure slide in more traditionally masculine directions—toward autonomy, toward polygamy, and frequently, toward violence.

And this is why I thought of all these things at that store in the mall, the store that was attempting to sell my daughter a dress the size of a nightie. For how often women pursue pleasure and receive instead pain, how often sex is the wheel around which the two turn. It made me think of Elena, and Lila, and made me long for my own carnal Naples—for the restrictions of purity culture that I came from, which at least in the end left me with my own boundaries intact.