Your articles are hitting me with the worst nostalgia lately, lol. I feel like we grew up with similar backgrounds around a similar time. A while back, I wrote about something similar and the role it played in my choice to be childfree. I wasn’t familiar with the term “purity culture” but it 100% describes my childhood in the Catholic church.

The reproductive objectification in purity culture grosses me out so much, even when I was too young to know exactly why it made me so upset. I saw so many sexually repressed old people making creepy jokes and comments that seemed to serve no purpose other than reminding the pregnant newlyweds at our church about how they must have had sex at some point in the past 9 months. I was only 8 and made up my mind that I would never ever have kids.