– Jennifer Carr

I heard something online the other day that really bothered me. The young woman said:

“True feminists aren’t pushing purity culture or trying to slut-shame women. We understand that sexual liberation and sexual empowerment are essential for women’s health and safety. A society that teaches abstinence breeds violence against women. When we view sex as dirty, unnatural, or wrong, we breed violent behavior in men. Abstinence promotes rape culture. Purity culture is rape culture.”

It sounds compelling at first glance. It names real harm. It calls out real hypocrisy. It identifies real wounds that many women carry from teachings that confused modesty with silence, chastity with shame, and “no” with condemnation.

But here’s where the argument collapses: the opposite of shame isn’t indulgence—it’s healing. The opposite of repression isn’t rebellion—it’s restoration.

We glamorize hookup culture as liberation, but what we’ve actually done is trade one form of bondage for another.

From Oppression to Overcorrection

Purity culture, as many of us knew it, often did weaponize Scripture in ways that left women fearful of their bodies and men confused about desire. It preached control without compassion. It offered slogans without discipleship.

But our response as a culture has not been reform—it’s been reversal.

In rejecting purity culture, we’ve often rejected holiness itself. We’ve swung from one lie—“sex is shameful”—to another—“sex is sacred only when it’s on my terms.”

Hookup culture promises freedom, but it’s often fueled by the same forces purity culture was: fear, insecurity, and control. Fear of rejection. Insecurity about worth. Control over vulnerability. One covered it in modesty pledges; the other covers it in empowerment slogans. But both are built on self-protection, not the kind of self-giving love that Jesus modeled—a love that serves rather than uses, that surrenders rather than controls.

How “Liberation” Still Dehumanizes

When we tell women that empowerment means detachment, we teach them to use their bodies as currency instead of covenant.
When we tell men that sex is just mutual consent and chemistry, we train them to see women as experiences, not image-bearers.
And when we strip sex of covenant and consequence, we normalize the very violence we claim to oppose.

Because detachment breeds dehumanization.
And dehumanization—historically, statistically, spiritually—is always the seedbed of abuse.

The truth is, hookup culture doesn’t prevent violence. It numbs us to it. It makes exploitation easy to rebrand as freedom.

When Freedom Becomes Violence

Advocates of sexual liberation often argue that abstinence culture breeds violence—that repression turns men into predators and women into victims. And yes, purity culture’s silence and shame have done real damage. But the opposite extreme—treating sex as leisure, entitlement, or self-expression—hasn’t healed that damage. It’s multiplied it.

Because when we view sex as a right instead of a responsibility, we breed the same violence under a different name. When we tell a generation that sex is casual, emotionless, and purely recreational, we train them to expect access without accountability. And entitlement, not repression, is what fuels abuse.

Hookup culture tells us sex can be stripped of meaning and still be safe. But look around—the anxiety, loneliness, and disconnection that permeates society all tell a different story.

Sexual violence hasn’t vanished with sexual freedom—it’s evolved with it. Exploitation has gone digital. Consent has become confused with availability. And the same culture that claims to protect women from harm often profits from their exposure.

A world that divorces sex from covenant doesn’t become kinder—it becomes crueler.

God’s Design Is the True Liberation

A biblical vision of sexuality isn’t prudish or patriarchal—it’s profoundly protective.
God’s design for sex inside covenant marriage isn’t about control; it’s about communion. It’s the only context strong enough to hold the weight of vulnerability, intimacy, and trust that sex was meant to carry.

Covenant isn’t the enemy of freedom—it’s the condition that makes freedom flourish.

When we untether sex from commitment, we don’t become freer—we become fractured.
We multiply broken hearts, broken boundaries, and broken trust, and then call it “experience.”

But when sex is rooted in covenant, it becomes not an act of consumption but of communion—an embodied reminder of a God who loves with permanence and purity.

Both Purity Culture and Hookup Culture Get Sex Wrong

One made sex a threat.
The other made it a toy.
Neither treated it as sacred.

Purity culture reduced sex to moral performance—something to manage until marriage.
Hookup culture reduces sex to personal fulfillment—something to manage until it no longer satisfies.

Both begin with self.
The Gospel begins with surrender.

The Better Story

We don’t need to resurrect purity pledges. We need to recover purpose.
We don’t need more rules; we need better roots.
We need to remember that God doesn’t call us to purity because He’s afraid of our desire—He calls us to purity because He designed desire to point us back to Him.

Sex was never meant to be the prize for good behavior or the proof of empowerment. It was meant to be a reflection of covenant love—a shadow of something eternal, not a substitute for it.

The Real Feminism: Wholeness, Not Wildness

True feminism doesn’t mean rejecting God’s design. It means reclaiming it from distortion.
It means saying women are not objects of purity or liberation, but image-bearers worthy of both protection and purpose.

A world that tells women to give their bodies away to prove their worth is no less oppressive than the one that told them to cover up to prove their virtue. Both erase what makes them whole.

The world doesn’t need more “liberated” women. It needs whole ones. Women who know that holiness isn’t about suppression—it’s about integration. It’s about being fully alive in body, mind, and spirit under the love of a God who made both boundaries and beauty for our good.

What We Teach Our Daughters (and Sons) About Love, Power, and Purpose

What we model and normalize is what they’ll learn to desire.
If we teach them that love is about control, they’ll either dominate or disappear.
If we teach them that love is about indulgence, they’ll confuse freedom with self-destruction.
But if we teach them that real love protects, honors, and endures, they’ll begin to see intimacy as something to be treasured, not traded.

We cannot keep outsourcing discipleship to TikTok, Netflix, or pop lyrics and then wonder why our kids struggle to connect holiness with happiness. The culture is already teaching them what to value: attention over affection, validation over virtue, chemistry over covenant. And if we don’t give them a better story, they’ll believe the one they’re already singing along to.

That means we must start by reclaiming our own theology of the body. We have to unlearn the lies we’ve inherited—that desire is dangerous, or that restraint is repressive—and replace them with truth: that our bodies are temples, that our longings can be holy, that self-control is not self-hatred but Spirit-led strength.

For our daughters, that means showing them that beauty and boundaries are not enemies. That their worth is not determined by how many eyes notice them, but by the God who knows them. That the goal is not to be desired by everyone, but to be devoted to Someone who already gave everything for them.

For our sons, it means teaching that manhood is not conquest. That strength looks like self-restraint. That love is not measured by passion but by patience. That true power is the ability to protect rather than to possess.

And for all of us—it means learning to view sexuality not as a problem to solve or an appetite to indulge, but as a sacred gift to steward.

Because when we treat sex as sacred, we start to treat people as sacred too.

The Call to Rebuild

We live in a world that mocks restraint and monetizes desire. That’s why this kind of discipleship must begin at home, in daily conversations and quiet prayers. It happens when parents turn off a show that mocks God’s design, when churches talk about sex with honesty and holiness, when mentors remind young adults that God’s boundaries are not burdens—they’re blessings.

We rebuild by replacing slogans with Scripture.
We rebuild by choosing intimacy over image.
We rebuild by teaching our children that God’s design isn’t the enemy of their joy—it’s the foundation of it.

Because if purity culture taught us to fear our humanity, and hookup culture taught us to worship it, Jesus invites us to redeem it.

He came not to shame our desires or sanctify our indulgence—but to restore our design. To make us whole.

Final Thoughts

So no—purity culture isn’t rape culture. But neither is hookup culture liberation.
Both are distortions of something good that only grace can restore.

We don’t need to teach our children to repress their longings or to indulge them. We need to teach them to redeem them—to trace them back to the God who placed those longings there to point us home. Because in the end, the story we live is the story we believe.
And the story that begins with God’s love will always end in wholeness.